Music and Movement in Barbara Hepworth

1 © Helena Bonett, 2013 Music and Movement in Barbara Hepworth Invited public lecture delivered in support of the Tate St Ives exhibition Summer 2013, Porthmeor Studios, St Ives, 6 August 2013. Introduction I’m going to be talking today about the importance of music and movement to Barbara Hepworth, the impact these had on her work, the collaborations she had with composers, and finally how contemporary artists have responded to her sculpture through dance. I would just briefly like to thank Janet Axten, Sophie Bowness and Rachel Smith for their help with sourcing images, and also acknowledge my indebtedness to Sophie’s research into Hepworth’s musical relationships. During this talk I will play some music clips and will also show some short and longer film clips, which I hope will give you a more rounded picture of the relationship of music and movement to Hepworth and her work. The talk will last around 45 minutes, so we should have time for 15 minutes of discussion at the end, in which I hope we can all share our responses to these ideas. Early years I’ll begin at the beginning: Barbara Hepworth was born in 1903 in Wakefield in Yorkshire. She later wrote that the industrial landscape of her youth ‘was pierced, in my earliest memory, by the incredible magic of a musical box owned by the people next door’.1 Music was clearly important to her: she played the piano as a child, winning prizes, and even a music scholarship when she was twelve.2 Her first husband, the sculptor John Skeaping, whom she married in 1925, came from a musical family, and we can see the two of them posing with instruments in this press photo from 1930 (Skeaping with an accordion and Hepworth with a domra, a Russian folk instrument). Hepworth’s second husband, Ben Nicholson, was not musical, but frequently incorporated instruments into his works, as we can see in this example here. (As an aside, Porthmeor Studios, where we are now, was used by Nicholson – we can see a photo here.) Much of Nicholson’s work was completely white, as was Hepworth’s at this time, and this extended to the decoration of their home, Mall Studio in Hampstead; the story goes that Nicholson was responsible for painting Hepworth’s grand piano white, which rendered it unplayable. She never had a piano again.3 In the 1920s Hepworth had made sculptures with musical themes, such as Dancing Figure (1920–23), Flute Player (1929, destroyed) and Musician (1929–30, private collection), which we can see here. But at this time her style, as we can see, was showing the influence of Egyptian carving – with its static qualities that emphasise 2 © Helena Bonett, 2013 the shape of the block of stone from which the work has been carved – rather than a more overt sense of rhythm or movement. Importance of rhythm But, over the subsequent decades, rhythm, which Hepworth felt was intrinsic to carving and sculpting as a practice, became an abiding part of her thinking on sculpture. I’d like to show a two-minute film clip now so that we can hear Hepworth’s own words on the subject. This is from a half-hour documentary by John Read from 1961 (which is freely available to watch on the BBC archive website). [Play 2-minute clip, 9.34–11.25] (As an aside, there we saw Hepworth in one of the studios that has been preserved at the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden, just round the corner from here, which I hope, if you haven’t visited yet, you will do while you’re in St Ives. Hepworth is sitting in what is now the preserved plaster studio, which you can look into through a window from the outside yard area.) Importance of movement As we could see from that clip, it is not just the rhythm of sculpting that is important to Hepworth, but also how rhythm connects with movement. But how can movement be embodied in a static sculpture? Unlike one of her contemporaries, the American sculptor Alexander Calder, who invented the mobile, which is an actual moving sculpture as we can see here, Hepworth’s works don’t move. However, we might consider Hepworth’s sculptures as incorporating movement in three different ways: firstly, when it is being made; secondly, how it is viewed by audiences; and thirdly, the sense of movement that is intrinsic to the piece, despite it being static. I’ll go into a bit more detail now to illustrate these points. So firstly, the movement that occurs as the sculpture is being made. We might think of this movement in terms of the changing shape of the sculpture as it is being made, and how the sculptor’s body navigates round the form, or moves the form on a turntable, as we just saw in the clip. Turntables became of increasing interest to Hepworth, as this quote demonstrates: I am not scientifically minded; but the forces between the ever-changing position of the sun and moon, and the effects upon sea and tide, and cloud and wind, which change the depths of shadow on forms have governed my life for a long time. I began to get more and more turntables and to try to assess my own changing movements in relation to the sun.4 It is interesting that on one occasion she actually displayed a work on a motorised turntable; this was Turning Forms shown at the 1951 Festival of Britain on London’s South Bank. 3 © Helena Bonett, 2013 Hepworth did not just think of her own body moving round the sculpture, but was always concerned with how other people interacted with her work, changing their physical relationship with the piece through viewing it from different perspectives. Here is a quote by Hepworth on this subject: You can’t make a sculpture, in my opinion, without involving your body. You move and you feel and you breathe and you touch. The spectator is the same. His body is involved too. If it’s a sculpture he has to first of all sense gravity. He’s got two feet. Then he must walk and move and use his eyes and this is a great involvement. […] One is physically involved and this is sculpture.5 When viewing a Hepworth sculpture the form changes radically as one walks round the piece, a sense of undulation and movement being inherent to the viewer’s experience. Then we come to the sense of movement in the sculptures themselves. We can think about this in terms of their organic qualities. Sculptures such as Wave (1943–44, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh), Tides (1946, Tate) and Sea Form (Porthmeor) (1958, Tate) evoke the movement of the sea, reflecting Hepworth’s abiding interest in the coast after she moved to Cornwall in 1939. We might also consider the use of birds and flight as inspiration for such works as Stringed Figure (Curlew) (1956, Tate) and Winged Figure (1961, John Lewis, London). The art critic Herbert Read reflected upon this sense of organic living movement in Hepworth’s sculpture, particularly in opposition to her drawings. He described this drawing as being ‘geometric’ while its corresponding sculpture,6 ‘though still geometric, seems to have a vital function, as though a perfect geometrical spiral has been transformed into an organic shell’.7 Hepworth also had another studio in St Ives from 1961 in a former dance hall, the Palais de Danse. She said that the noise of drums from the Palais used to keep her awake, and then it closed down, and she realised it could be used for making her large works. She described it as a quiet studio;8 it is interesting to think about how Hepworth arranged her sculptures in the former dance hall, on wheeled plinths, with the sculptures seeming to perform as the people who once danced there.9 So, as we can see, Hepworth felt rhythm and movement to be intrinsic to the sculptor’s art, fundamental to the processes of carving and making. And these qualities can also be found in the sculptures themselves, not only in their subject matter but also in their organic form, and are reinforced by us, as spectators, as we weave our way in and around the sculpture. Collaboration with Priaulx Rainier We’ve thought more generally about rhythm and movement in Hepworth’s work, but it was particularly in the 1950s that she began to use music and dance more 4 © Helena Bonett, 2013 overtly as references in her work. In 1952 Hepworth wrote of the things that make up her ‘usual working day’ and which were ‘immensely important’ to her: My home and my children; listening to music, and thinking about its relation to the life of forms; the need for dancing as a recreation, and where dancing links with the actual physical rhythm of carving; the intense pleasure derived from tools and craftsmanship – all these things are daily expressions of the whole.10 In 1949 she had become friends with the South African composer Priaulx Rainier, who had seen one of Hepworth’s exhibitions in London and wrote to her saying that: I cannot think of other modern sculpture which contains an essence usually associated only with music of the highest abstract quality. […] You have already achieved the world towards which one struggles so hard in music.11 Equally, Hepworth was moved by Rainier’s work and saw her as her musical counterpart. As a result of their friendship, Rainier, who taught at the Royal Academy of Music in London, chose to spend her time between St Ives and the capital. Hepworth had said that ‘The sound of a mallet or hammer is music to my ears, when either is used rhythmically’.12 When Hepworth was working in 1950 on a large-scale commission for the Festival of Britain, Rainier composed some fragments, called Rhythms of the Stones, inspired by the sound of Hepworth and her assistants carving.13 In turn, Hepworth gave her two-part sculpture a musical name, Contrapuntal Forms (Motet): in musical terms ‘contrapuntal motion’, more commonly called counterpoint, means the movement of two or more relatively independent melodic lines in relation to one another; ‘motet’ is the term for a choral piece – often incorporating religious texts – which is polyphonic, meaning that there are two or more voices, singing in counterpoint, or in contrapuntal motion. At this time Hepworth and Rainier were listening to motets by the sixteenth-century English composer, Thomas Tallis, and Rainier had given Hepworth a recording and the score for Tallis’s Spem in Alium,14 which I’ll play a clip from now. So why would Hepworth give this work such a specific musical name? What is musical about it? If we consider the two parts of this sculpture as working in counterpoint to one another, we can see that it is the space between the parts – and the tension created by this polyphonic counterpoint – which gives it its dynamism, or contrapuntal motion. If music is inherently vertical – in that notes range from low to high – then we could see the two parts of this sculpture as providing two melodies that work in counterpoint to one another. But, equally, if we turn the sculpture on its side, the counterpoint is made even clearer: the two horizontal forms become separate lines of music, rising and falling, working independently but also interrelated. 5 © Helena Bonett, 2013 Hepworth later made works with the subtitle ‘Fugue’: Wood and Strings (Fugue) (1956, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) and Stone Sculpture (Fugue II) (1956, Tate). The word ‘fugue’ comes from the Latin meaning ‘flight’ and is, again, a polyphonic musical composition with separate parts that work in counterpoint, but which gradually builds up into a complex form with a climactic ending. The use of taut strings in works such as Wood and Strings (Fugue) also evokes stringed instruments, and Hepworth herself wrote of music by the German baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach, who is famous for his fugues, that: in Bach the visual sense is always delighted because every movement made by the orchestra is beautiful / all the bows … making lovely rhythmic movement … What a lovely vision – so complete – perfect construction & understanding. If you knew just a little more about the construction you would see the likeness to Picasso – in fact no difference at all hardly.15 Hepworth and Rainier also collaborated on the first film about Hepworth’s work, Figures in a Landscape: Cornwall and the Sculpture of Barbara Hepworth, a 1953 film directed by Dudley Shaw Ashton, with a score composed by Rainier, and with narration written by the archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes and spoken by the poet Cecil Day Lewis. I’m going to play a five-minute clip from the film now. As well as thinking about the music, and how it complements the carving, sanding and rubbing we will see, we can also think about how the camera lends movement to the sculptures and how the setting of the sculptures in Hepworth’s garden and in the landscape encourages a rhythmic play of light, shadow, wind and water over them. [Play clip – 5 minutes] Rainier’s score provides a syncopated, percussive soundtrack that evokes the sounds of Hepworth’s studio practice, but translates this tactile language of sculpture into poetic musical intonation. Using pans, tilts and zooms, the mobility of the camera expresses the dynamic relationship between the sculptor, her work and the setting. The rhythm and pace of the editing brings different sculptures into proximity with one another. The narration is not didactic; rather, it attempts to approximate the poetic qualities of Hepworth’s work and practice. The narration is intermittent rather than continuous, and Hepworth does not speak herself. Instead, the sculptural processes she undertakes – from filing and sanding to painting and carving – and the finished sculpture on display speak for her. St Ives Festival Through Hepworth’s and Rainier’s friendship, Hepworth forged other musical relationships, including with the composers Michael Tippett and Benjamin Britten and the tenor Peter Piers. Hepworth collaborated with Tippett and Rainier in organising the St Ives Festival in 1953, which was intended to celebrate the two Elizabethan ages in the coronation year of Elizabeth II. Consequently, music by contemporary composers, such as Tippett, Britten and Stravinsky, was played alongside that of the Tudor period, such 6 © Helena Bonett, 2013 as by Thomas Tallis. Not only musical, the programme also included drama and the visual arts, and Hepworth opened her studio for the public to visit and also contributed to a Coronation Exhibition at the Penwith Society of Arts.16 As part of the programme, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century court dances called Pavanes and Galliards were performed, composed by John Downland, and William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons. These dances were often paired – the pavane being a stately, slow dance and the galliard being faster and livelier. Hepworth later made a group of sculptures with the titles Pavan and Galliard, including Forms in Movement (Galliard) (1956, Wairarapa Museum of Art, Aratoi, New Zealand) and Forms in Movement (Pavan) (1956–9, cast 1967, Tate). As we can see, the forms of the sculptures are very similar, and we might imagine them tracing the shapes the dancers create in their movements. It is particularly in the materials that we might find the differences between the two dances: the spritely Galliard is made of thin, reflective copper; while the slower Pavan is made from plaster over a metal armature, cast into bronze, making it thicker and denser.17 Collaboration with Michael Tippett In 1954 Tippett asked Hepworth to collaborate on another project: designing the sets, props and costumes for his first full-scale opera, The Midsummer Marriage, which opened on 27 January 1955 at the Royal Opera House in London. Tippett wrote to Hepworth that their collaboration would make the opera ‘a unity of eye & ear which is so rare in England as to be almost non-existent’.18 The Midsummer Marriage is an opera in three acts, set on a midsummer’s day in a clearing on a wooded hilltop, with a Greek temple above and a cave below. The story focuses on a pair of couples living in two worlds; Tippett described it as ‘a collective imaginative experience, dealing with the interaction of two worlds, the natural and the supernatural’.19 Having attended the premiere, Hepworth felt that ‘the colour and light of the sets truly blended with the splendid music’.20 I’ll play some of the music now, and flick though slides so that you can see some of Hepworth’s designs.21 She created stringed constructions for the tree-spirits to carry, which particularly feature in a section called the Ritual Dances, choreographed by John Cranko. Tippett later wrote of these constructions that they ‘could be lit in many ways from inside, their colours signifying the passage of the seasons’.22 Hepworth had often been drawn to mythological and ancient themes, including the god of music and poetry, Apollo (1951, Tate), or the Delphic Oracle, Curved Form (Delphi) (1955, The Ulster Museum, Belfast), where the taut strings could be seen as representing the Oracle’s words, connecting the earth with the heavens. Following the creation of the stringed constructions for The Midsummer Marriage, Hepworth created more works with similar use of stringing over a spiral-shaped armature. This work evokes the Ancient Greek musician Orpheus, who, through the power of his music, almost rescued his lover Eurydice from the underworld. The shape of the sculpture evokes the lyre, for which Orpheus was most famous. Hepworth and Rainier had seen the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky conduct his score for the 7 © Helena Bonett, 2013 1947 ballet, Orpheus, at the Royal Festival Hall in 1954, which also might have inspired the use of this mythological character; both Hepworth and Rainier were also very interested in the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus from 1923, which Rainier was working on putting to music.23 With the similarities Hepworth’s Orpheus has with Stringed Figure (Curlew) and Forms in Movement (Galliard), both made in the same year, we can see how music, organic movement and dance all intertwine in Hepworth’s thinking. Contemporary responses Now I’m going to turn to two very recent responses to Hepworth’s sculpture, which have been made in the form of dance, before returning to draw some conclusions about Hepworth, dance and music at the end. The two contemporary works I am going to concentrate on were made for two very different commissions. The first dance I will talk about was made in response to the theft of one of Hepworth’s sculptures, Two Forms (Divided Circle), from Dulwich Park in London in 2011, which had been in situ since 1970. I’ll play the film of the dance now, which is five minutes long in total. The dance is called The Empty Shoes referring to the two empty spaces left where the bronze was cut from its plinth. [Play 5-minute film] My initial response to this dance is that it performs as a eulogy to the lost work, with slow, mournful music. The two-part sculpture is reconstituted in the dance, with the dancers’ bodies standing in for the lost bronze. The ephemerality of a dance, of a performance, which is always unique, also strikes a resonance with the lost bronze: something that seemed so permanent and durable, but yet would have changed in its patination, its colouring, over the forty years it was in the park, is now changed irreparably through being melted down for scrap metal. And yet, we might think, through filming this dance the singularity of the performance is given a legacy, and so perhaps something of the sculpture lives on through these movements. Now I’m going to turn to the second commission, which responds to Hepworth again through dance, but in a very different way. This is a ballet by the artist Linder Sterling, called The Ultimate Form, which was commissioned by The Hepworth Wakefield. Linder collaborated with Northern Ballet for the dance, Stuart McCallum for the score, and Pam Hogg for the costumes. We’re very lucky that a film of this dance piece is currently being shown at Tate St Ives, so if you haven’t seen it already, you can watch the full thing there. Linder has also curated a selection of Hepworth’s sculptures to be shown in dialogue with her collages at Tate St Ives, so you can also see those. Linder’s ballet particularly responds to Hepworth’s nine-part sculpture The Family of Man (1970). Hepworth labelled the different parts of this piece the Young Girl and the Youth, the Bride and the Bridegroom, Parent I and II, Ancestor I and II, and a presiding deity, called The Ultimate Form. 8 © Helena Bonett, 2013 I’ll play a five-minute Tate Shots film now where Linder talks about the work she has made, with contributions from her collaborators, that also shows parts of the dance, to give you more of an idea of the piece. [Play 5-minute film] So, for Linder, dance is used as a means of emphasising the physicality and sensuality of Hepworth’s sculpture. The music provides a rhythmic, pulsing beat for the dancers’ movements and the pliable textiles of the costumes emphasise the softness of the bodies beneath, in a way reminiscent of Hepworth’s words on sculpture: Sculpture communicates an immediate sense of life – you can feel the pulse of it. It is perceived, above all, by the sense of touch which is our earliest sensation; and touch gives us a sense of living contact and security.24 Linder also highlighted the importance of the pierced form in Hepworth’s sculpture. Hepworth herself reflected on this: Piercings through forms became dominant. Could I climb through and in what direction? Could I rest, lie or stand within the forms? Could I, at one and the same time, be the outside as well as the form within?25 This embodied encounter is all-encompassing: the bodies of the sculptor and of the sculpture come into a symbiotic arrangement in which the pierced hole receives the body of the sculptor, the body weaving in and out of the sculptural form, resting in it, lying in it, standing in it. Conclusion I’m going to wrap up now with some final observations, thinking about how we might understand the themes of music and movement in Hepworth’s work. The embodied encounter with sculpture, Hepworth felt, is a multisensory experience, in which sound and movement are key components. The often dense physicality of sculpture might seem on first impressions to be the antithesis of the ephemeral immateriality of sound, or the fleeting gestures of organic forms in movement. But I hope I have gone some way towards presenting how these qualities can be found in Hepworth’s sculpture and are, in fact, abiding themes. The Barbara Hepworth Museum and Tate St Ives are open until 6.20pm today, so you can and consider some of these ideas while experiencing the sculptures yourselves. Thank you for coming; if you’re able to stick around for a bit longer, we can have some time for discussion. Notes 1 Barbara Hepworth, ‘The Excitement of Discovering the Nature of Carving, 1903– 1930’, in Barbara Hepworth, Barbara Hepworth: Carvings and Drawings, London 1952, unpaginated. 9 © Helena Bonett, 2013 2 Sophie Bowness, ‘“Rhythms of the Stones”: Hepworth and Music’, in Chris Stephens (ed.), Barbara Hepworth: Centenary, London 2003, p.25. 3 Ibid. 4 Barbara Hepworth, A Pictorial Autobiography (1970), London 1985, p.81. 5 Barbara Hepworth, interview by Cindy Nemser, Art Talk: Conversations with 15 Women Artists (1975), New York 1995, p.21. 6 Oval Form (1942, gouache and pencil) and Sculpture with Colour (Pale Blue and Red) (1943, wood), reproduced in Hepworth 1952, pls.66a and 66b. 7 Herbert Read, ‘Introduction’, in Hepworth 1952, p.x. 8 Hepworth 1985, p.88. 9 My thanks to Anna Gruetzner Robins for suggesting this to me. 10 Barbara Hepworth, ‘Artist in Society, 1949–1952’, in Hepworth 1952, unpaginated. 11 Priaulx Rainier, letter to Barbara Hepworth, February 1950, Tate Archive, quoted in Bowness 2003, p.23. 12 Hepworth 1985, p.49. 13 Bowness 2003, p.24. 14 Ibid. 15 Barbara Hepworth, letter to Ben Nicholson, undated [8 September 1932], Tate Archive TGA 8717/1/1/97, quoted in Bowness 2003, p.25. 16 Bowness 2003, p.26. 17 Matthew Gale, ‘Dame Barbara Hepworth, Forms in Movement (Pavan) 1956–9, cast 1967’, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hepworth-forms-in-movementpavan-t03136/text-catalogue-entry, accessed August 2013. 18 Michael Tippett, letter to Barbara Hepworth, postmarked 1 December 1954, Tate Archive, quoted in Bowness 2003, p.27. 19 Michael Tippett, quoted in the accompanying booklet of the CD, The Midsummer Marriage: Opera in Three Acts, Lyrita 1995, p.13. 20 Quoted in A.M. Hammacher, Barbara Hepworth, London 1968, p.124, quoted in Bowness 2003, p.27. 21 Five reproductions related to The Midsummer Marriage can be found in Hepworth 1985, pp.68–9. 22 Michael Tippett, Those Twentieth Century Blues: An Autobiography, London 1991, p.218, quoted in Bowness 2003, p.27. 23 Bowness 2003, pp.26, 25. 24 Barbara Hepworth, interview by J.P. Hodin, ‘The Ethos of Sculpture’, 28 August 1959, Barbara Hepworth, London 1961, p.23. 25 Hepworth 1985, p.81. Citation Helena Bonett, ‘Music and Movement in Barbara Hepworth’, lecture delivered in support of the Tate St Ives exhibition Summer 2013, Porthmeor Studios, St Ives, 6 August 2013. © Helena Bonett, 2013