3. Reflect on what this object means to you. Does it hold memories for you? Do these arouse particular feelings? Allow yourself to explore the imagery, memories and feelings that are held for you in this object. Write these down.

There is not an end or a goal to achieve in doing this exercise. Rather it is a process of discovery, of care and wonder, of being alive to the moment and the experience.

‘Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.' Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie (Beacon Press, 1992)

Exercise 2
Here is a famous self portrait by Rembrandt (1606 – 1669).

1. Using the approach in Exercise 1, explore this image in the same way that you explored your object. Take your time and then write down your responses. Allow your writing to be free, don’t hold back.

2. Look at the image of Rembrandt again. Rembrandt painted between sixty and eighty self-portraits during his life. This work was painted in 1669, the final year of his life.

In this painting Rembrandt sits as though he is waiting for something, his life full of successes and failures both personal and professional. We can almost feel him, as if he were sitting in front of us now. We can almost feel the sensation of the knobbly skin on his face, his round beery nose. It is as though we have walked into a room and come upon him, sitting quietly, with his hands humbly clasped. There is an almost eerie quietness to the painting.

3. As an artist Rembrandt spent his life looking, really looking, at the world around him and in him. His was a lifetime of noticing and absorbing what he saw. When you looked at the painting what did you see? What did you notice? What were you reminded of? What connections did it evoke in you?

You can see other paintings by Rembrandt at The National Gallery in Related Links.

Exercise 3
For this exercise you need to listen to a piece of music called the Goldberg Variations by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 -1750).

This piece is a set of thirty variations on a theme originally composed for harpsichord but now played mainly on the piano. The theme, or Aria (melody), is the first thing you will hear. It is one of the most sublime pieces of music ever written.

1. Using the same process of exploration and reflection that we used in Exercise 1, listen to the Aria. It lasts less than four minutes.

2. Now allow yourself the time to listen to the thirty variations, before the Aria’s return at the end.

The great pianist András Schiff, who has recorded the Goldberg Variations twice, has this warning for those of us beguiled by the Aria’s tune. He says, ‘(think) of Bach as an architect rather than a painter. Beware of the tunes. Concentrate instead on the ground bass, which is the solid foundation of everything else. Where I live now in Florence, we have this most beautiful cathedral with its dome and cupola by Brunelleschi. But it would not be there without the foundations to hold it up. Similarly in music there is a tendency to follow the top line. I think always in music we should start with the bass.’ Source: Martin Kettle, Bach at his Best, The Guardian, 2003.

3. Here is an image by Vincent Van Gogh called Wheatfield with Crows. It shows a landscape of a cornfield with birds flying out of it.

4. Now listen to the Goldberg Variations again.

5. Now look at the painting by Van Gogh again. It is the last picture that Van Gogh painted before he took his own life.

This exercise is taken from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing(BBC/Penguin, 1972). As Berger says, ‘It is hard to define exactly how the words have changed the image…but undoubtedly they have. The image now illustrates the sentence’.

6. After listening to the Goldberg Variations again, did Schiff’s words of advice help? Compare this experience to looking at Wheatfield with Crows before and after you knew it was most likely the last painting Van Gogh made.

Andras Schiff asks us to listen to the content of the Goldberg Variations without any reference to the man who composed it. The biographical information about Van Gogh certainly influences how we interpret the painting. Be aware of how the two pieces of information we were given have quite different effects on us.

Naturally we are fascinated by the lives of artists. We love to see recreations of painters’ studios such as the Eduardo Paolozzi studio at the Dean Gallery in Edinburgh and the Francis Bacon studio at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. When we look at these studios we can almost smell the artist’s creativity.

We are fascinated by Beethoven’s deafness, Mozart’s precocity and Brahms’ unrequited love. In some ways we want to know about these artists lives in order to help define our own, perhaps thinking we will see something of ourselves in their experiences and their work.

However, while works of art are often presented with many words, interpretations and information around them, we must be careful not to get too carried away with these. Often in art galleries we can spend more time reading the interpretation boards next to a painting than looking at the painting itself. When listening to music we sometimes want to know biographical information about the composer before we listen to the sound he has created. It is almost as though we are afraid to trust our own responses and understanding.

Developing our own paths of enquiry in exploring a work of art is as important as are contextualising the known facts. We have to give time to art. Getting to know a new piece of music, or any work of art, is like a new relationship. It can take time to get to know each other. The potential for meaning lives in the transaction between the viewer or listener and the work of art itself. We need to go inwards, imagine ourselves inside the work, travel to the intimate places where it takes us and begin there if we are to take the most from what art has to offer. The rewards can be many and rich.

‘Great music is never too long. It is certain listeners’ patience that is too short.’ Andras Schiff, Goldberg Variations J.S. Bach, A guided Tour (ECM, 2003).

Consider the metaphor of walking into a dark room and feeling around to see what treasures, what surprises, are there for us to experience. Will we touch with our bare hands the knobbly skin of a Rembrandt-like face? Will we come upon the utopian world that Bach tries to reveal in his most humble and beautiful music? By attaching yourself to every note you hear, by seeing the most you can see, you discover that the possibilities held in a work of art are many and often very personal.

To engage the children we teach in music or any art-form, we must first of all find out about our own relationship to art. It is then that we can begin to share our own passion and belief, our insights and questions, our individuality and our commonality.

Others things to try
If you enjoyed doing these exercises, try some more. Below are some further suggestions to explore, including two pivotal works in the development of modern music and visual art.

1. The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky (1882 – 1971) was written in 1913. Listen here to this short extract before you know anything that has been written about it. After listening to the piece, write down any ideas and/or feelings that it evoked in you. Write down if you think the music is trying to convey anything to you.

The Rite of Spring is one of the most famous pieces of music ever written, and at the time of its premiere, one of the most controversial. Nobody had heard anything like it before and they ran from the concert hall in horror. It is, however, one of the most powerful, exciting, dramatic and hair-raising pieces of music ever written, rising from the depths of the earth with an immense power and energy. It was written to represent an ancient pagan rite, a primitive Slavonic tribe celebrating the arrival of Spring and ensuring the fertility of the land by the making of a human sacrifice.

Extract from Stravinsky's Rite of Spring with kind permission of Deutsche Grammophon GmbH, Hamburg.

2.Click here to see a painting by Pablo Picasso. Write down what strikes you about the painting, what you notice about it.

Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) is 100 years old. It was at the forefront of the birth of modernism in art. The late work of the great painter Paul Cezanne anticipates what might come next, but this painting was unprecedented. It came a year after Cezanne’s death.

It takes an enormous leap of imagination to compare and contrast the sound and visual world of Johann Sebastian Bach and Rembrandt, with the sound and visual world of Igor Stravinsky and Pablo Picasso; to consider how the world of the individual, and the individual within society, changed between the world of baroque to the birth of modernism in the early part of the 20th century. But Stravinsky and Picasso would not have been able to do what they did, without knowing what Bach and Rembrandt did before them. For an article on Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon, Pablo’s Punks, by Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones, 2007, look at The Guardian in Related Links.

For more information and to view Picasso’s painting look at MoMA (Museum of Modern Art, New York) in Related Links. You can also see images of some of the preparatory sketches he made prior to making the actual painting.

3. Music is like an ice-berg. Just as only one-seventh to one-tenth of the iceberg's total mass is above water, so we have to go beneath the surface and experience the music to access its many layers and depths. Go back and listen again to the Goldberg Variations.

‘The long-recognized special powers of music to explore, embody and illuminate the depths and breadths of human feeling are now being recognised as central to human knowledge and understanding…The values of music stem from its contribution of special meanings to human life. These meanings are unavailable except through the unified experiences of mind, body, and feeling that music affords.’ Bennett Reimer, John W. Beattie Professor of Music Emeritus at Northwestern University, Illinois, Why do Humans Value Music?

Read Reimer’s full paper at the National Association for Music Education in Related Links.

Maxine Greene, philosopher-in-residence at Lincoln Centre Institute says, ‘Understanding a work of art takes place in the continuous interaction between the viewer and the artwork, and neither in the work itself nor solely in the perceiver.’ ~Variations on a Blue Guitar - The Lincoln Center Lectures on Aesthetic Education~ (Teachers College Press, 2001). For further information on Maxine Greene and her writings on the arts in education look at the Maxine Greene Foundation in Related Links.

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