Sources of Inspiration: Tsuguharu Foujita and the Great Composers

An exhibition of works by the Japanese-French painter Tsuguharu Foujita at the Tokyo Station Gallery closed recently, and it helped me to better understand how inspiration can work not just in music, but also the visual arts.

It is a well-known fact that Foujita used photographs in place of sketches in order to record landscapes and people during his travels, taking different details and using them in his paintings.  This particular exhibition focused on some of these same photography extracts, and how they show up in his various works. Architecture, animals, and even clothing patterns were visual sources.

Below is just one notable example of this practice featuring the artist himself, first in a photograph and then in a painting:

As I learned more about this process, and how the photographs became the inspiration for so many of his works, I found myself thinking about how composers also use a similar practice of taking artistic fragments to incorporate them into their music.

Bartók, for example, traveled to Eastern Europe in order to collect the melodies of folk music.  Having heard an unfamiliar folk song from Transylvania, he would come to discover the richness and vitality of his homeland’s music, which was very different from the more traditional Gypsy music of the time. 

Liszt used the melodies of the Spanish dances La Folia and Jota Aragonesa in his “Rhapsodie Espagnole.”  The same incorporation of melodies is true of many other composers as well, whether it is Chopin and his mazurkas, or Florence Price and spirituals for her sonatas, symphonies, and many other compositions.

As you will see above, I performed the Spanish Rhapsody and Chopin's Mazurka at the Kosciuszko Foundation last June, and in the process I learned about the atmosphere of folk music, the feel of the language, and other arts of the region.

 Please listen to my performance, and let me know in the Comments if you can hear the Spanish influences in the music. Thanks so much!

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