I love a lot of music and architecture, but why is it that the works in each art form that stand out to me so much do just that? Mustn’t there be a connection, some quality which attracts me in each of these, a unifying element and an underlying one in different art forms? This post is my thoughts on what that might be.
There are really many similarities between music and architecture. Both are three dimensional art forms; one with spatial experience and the other audio/spatial. Both are informed by intervals, harmony of detail elements, rhythms, and patterns, and both move us–sometimes music even urges us to move through space in dance, or often at least sway just slightly or tap our toes. So what is it about the ways in which some architectural design and music uses these forms that gives them a similarity, specifically in the way in which they seem to draw me most?
I think it is in the way that both are first and foremost true to the structure of the art form. Now, Mozart is not the only example of this at all in music, but his music does epitomize this for me. Some call Mozart’s music lighthearted, carefree, etc.; but this is not at all true. Yes, it does not have the same kind of expressive emotionality as later Romantic works, but it has a kind all it’s own which I believe (at least which I personally find) to be even more intense. In Romantic works, the emotions take the foreground. I am not nearly as affected emotionally however by the grandly emotional works of Brahms for instance as I am by the subtle, nuanced emotionality in Mozart’s works.
The profound quality of Mozart’s works, the deep beauty, comes in contrast to later works because it is an effect of a pure and exquisite structural form of the music. The emotions are not forced. There are not always easily identifiable passages of sadness or longing or so on as is more often the case in later works. There is a very delicate line between dark and light at many times too.
Similarly in architectural form, I have the most wonderful experiences from those works which prioritize the structural form–and not plainly, but by paying the closest attention to that structure and the purpose it serves and refining it to an exquisitely beautiful end. Carlo Scarpa’s work is one of the best examples of this in my opinion, this attention to the details and the form and purpose always first. The good effects of the architecture, like the emotional effects from music, naturally then follow.