Between Rooms, Between Worlds Marina Baranova on Music, Collaboration, and Curiosity

 by Fanny Po Sim Head  January 25th, 2026

Pianist and composer Marina Baranova grew up in Ukraine in a household where music was constant and diverse. Both of her parents were pianists and teachers. Her mother taught classical piano, while her father specialised in jazz and improvisation. Their small apartment contained several pianos, often played at the same time.

“As a child, I loved moving from room to room,” Baranova says. One space was dominated by classical repertoire, where she listened to her mother and her students work through pieces. “That music always turned into a kind of film in my head, full of depth and emotional intensity.” Classical music, she explains, shaped her early understanding of musical structure, storytelling, and emotional expression.

Marina Baranova

In another room, her father was immersed in jazz. “It expressed freedom, rebellion, and creativity without borders,” Baranova recalls. Jazz was forbidden in the Soviet Union, and her father’s involvement with it carried personal and political significance. “The fact that my father played it was, in itself, an act of resistance. You could feel that defiance directly in the sound.”

Growing up with these contrasting musical languages shaped Baranova’s view of genre. “Music has many faces, yet everything can exist under the same roof,” she says. “I like to think of musical genres as different rooms in one house. Each has its own atmosphere, but there is always a door connecting them.”

Maurice Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte, M. 19  

Baranova’s recent recording projects reflect her interest in connection and contrast. Last year, she released Salon de Ravel and The Star of Mendelssohn, two albums with distinctly different conceptual frameworks. “They may appear very different at first glance,” she notes, “yet both come from my musical curiosity.”

Marina Baranova’s Prélude a la manière de Ravel   

Salon de Ravel was inspired by an imagined artistic environment in Paris around 1900. “I pictured Ravel surrounded by musicians, painters, and poets, sharing ideas and new works,” Baranova explains. The album reflects her interest in artistic exchange and influence, particularly the composers Ravel admired, including Borodin, Chabrier, Debussy, and Fauré.

The Star of Mendelssohn, by contrast, has a more personal foundation. The album intertwines Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words with traditional Christmas carols. “It was conceived as a bridge between worlds,” Baranova says, drawing on her experience of growing up with a Jewish background and later embracing Christian holiday traditions. She also sees parallels in Mendelssohn’s own life. “It mirrors the dualities shaped by multiple traditions.”

That idea of openness and exchange also defines her collaboration with her husband, composer and visual artist Damian Marhulets. The two met when they were twenty and have shared an ongoing artistic dialogue ever since. “We’ve never stopped talking about what it means to be an artist,” Baranova says, describing conversations that range from aesthetics to creative process.

Felix Mendelssohn/Marina Baranova’s Drinking Song, Op. 75 No. 3  

She often plays new piano works for Marhulets, using their discussions as a way to test and refine ideas. “Those conversations are incredibly inspiring and often open doors I didn’t even know were there.” After a recording is completed, Marhulets frequently creates visual artwork in response to the music. “He approaches the music from a different angle, and his visual interpretation uncovers layers I hadn’t seen before,” she says.

Marina Baranova’s The Sense of Cohesion  

In recent years, Baranova has expanded her role beyond performing and recording by curating her own music salon at Villa Seligmann in Hannover, a center dedicated to Jewish music and culture. After renting a studio in the building, she began organising intimate concerts for small audiences. “From the very beginning, I dreamed of creating a music salon,” she says.

The project quickly grew into the ImproVision Festival, developed in collaboration with Villa Seligmann. The festival brings together international musicians to improvise, perform repertoire, and present original works. One highlight was an improvised twelve-hands performance on two pianos shaped by audience suggestions. “It was full of spontaneity and connection,” Baranova recalls.

When Baranova sits at the piano today, she describes the creative impulse as constantly changing. “Each time, the approach feels different,” she says. Sometimes she begins with improvisation, while at other times a connection emerges through sight-reading. “It can feel like a dialogue across time.”

Music also serves a personal function. “Sometimes music feels like a kind of embrace,” she says. “I often feel that new music already exists somewhere, waiting to be given sound.” Honesty, she emphasises, is central to her work. “I only create when the impulse comes from the deepest place within me. I cannot lie in front of music.”

Currently, her piano showcases her diverse interests. Beethoven scores sit next to handwritten sketches for a reworking of Sweeney Todd, originally by Stephen Sondheim. As she says, it’s “a very unlikely house share: Beethoven on one side, Sondheim on the other.” To learn more about Marina Baranova, visit her website at www.marinabaranova.com.

Why Can’t Classical Music Look Ahead

 by Doug Thomas  October 1st, 2025

There is no genre of music which puts so much emphasis on the past as much as Western classical music. In fact, there are very few artistic mediums which focus so much on the past than music. Perhaps painting. In the visual arts, though, we have created environments for the new and environments for the old. And together, they coexist. In London, for instance, Tate Modern coexists with Tate Britain. In Paris, Pompidou with Orsay. In music, it is different. Even the most contemporary musical centres still promote the old over the new. And somehow, it is also always the same repertoire. Why is it that classical music cannot seem to be able to look ahead then?

BBC Proms

In the United Kingdom only, a quick skim through current musical programmes allows one to assess that most of the music performed in concert halls focuses on past composers. Surely, the amount of living composers has never been greater. Especially in the United Kingdom. Yet, all major events, such as the BBC Proms, focus on the past. The old sells. The last night of the Proms in 2025 will see Mussorgsky, Hummel, Gounod, Dukas and of course Britten and Elgar, and many others.

But it is not just in the United Kingdom, opera houses around the world often focus their seasons on a composer of choice, focusing on the catalogue and looking at less famous works. These are still the works of past composers. In 2025, it is Puccini and Handel who will take the frontline at the Paris Opéra.

© opera-diary.com

Out of all the currently living composers, very few are allowed the entrance to concert halls pre-mortem, it seems. They are, for most of them, only allowed in the smaller venues. And when they get the keys to the major houses, it is only after years of battling for a place with their ancestors.

However, this has not always been the case historically. Just like popular music today, classical music used to be focused on the new, on composers working towards getting commissions and progressing, on music that was being created in the moment.

Composers were not expected to live off the same material forever, but rather to come up with new and exciting music. The competition was tough too — each composer wanted to work for the finest patron, crown or church. The most important names, Bach, Handel, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and so on, all performed like that.

As Western classical music grew out of Christianity, it was intended to accompany religious services, and coming up with new dedicated material was the daily expectation of the appointed composers. The repetition of the old was not advised either. Music was dedicated to God and a testament of dedication and discipline.

Hans Zimmer

But then music, over the centuries and just like many things, became an industry… and entered the world of Hollywood. So much so that today some of the most successful composers are in fact film composers, such as Zimmer. The irony of it all is that now film music has entered the concert hall, and rather than taking up space in cinemas, it takes life in music venues. It is quite common to see listings of soundtracks being performed in their entirety, to the projected film, or not. What a three-hundred and sixty surprising twist; music for images, without the images.

Bach was not brought to the forefront before Mendelssohn exposed him again to the world, and most composers after their death would fall into oblivion. It was all about the new, until somehow, it shifted towards the old. Somehow, a fascination for the past, rather than the present, developed. But the promotion of old music in disfavour of new music is not a consequence of a lack of quality from existing composers. In fact, there are a plethora of immensely talented composers all over the world. Inventive, creative and curious musicians who perhaps deserve a better place in concert halls…

6 of the Most Romantic Symphonies in Classical Music History

 by Emily E. Hogstad  February 14th, 2026

What makes a symphony romantic?

For one, a symphony can be stylistically of the Romantic Era – Romantic-with-a-capital-R, full of sweeping melodies, warm orchestral colour, and heart-tugging harmonies.

But a symphony can also be romantic in a more personal sense: when it springs from a composer’s love for someone – or even somewhere.

Today, we’re looking at six symphonies that are Romantic in both senses of the word: stylistically of the era, and emotionally rooted in a love story.

All six of these works remain among the most popular romantic symphonies in the classical repertoire.

Berlioz – Symphonie fantastique (1830)

The Love Story

This symphony’s autobiographical program was directly inspired by Berlioz’s own tumultuous love life and romantic fixations.

In 1827, after seeing Irish actress Harriet Smithson perform the role of Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Berlioz became obsessively infatuated with her.

Although the production was in English, Smithson’s performance was so gripping that it electrified Parisian audiences.

Hector Berlioz in 1832

One audience member in particular was electrified: Hector Berlioz.

He fell in love not with Smithson as a person – he wouldn’t get to know her for quite some time – but rather with her talent and appearance, as well as the many Romantic Era ideals she represented.

While in the throes of this fixation, Berlioz channeled his infatuation into a symphony.   

The music is programmatic and, in Berlioz’s own words, follows a “young artist of morbidly sensitive temperament” (a not-so-subtle stand-in for himself) as he plunges from ardent passion into the depths of delusion.

The beloved’s tender theme (idée fixe) is first heard in the symphony’s opening movement, but it later curdles into a vulgar fiddle tune in the witches’ sabbath, symbolising how his idealised love has turned into a nightmare.

The orchestration here is noteworthy, featuring an expanded percussion section, new instruments like the English horn, and striking effects like col legno bowing, where string players tap the wood of their bows on the strings to create spooky sounds.

Harriet Smithson

Berlioz kept trying to get Smithson’s attention. He sent her numerous letters and even went so far as to stalk her lodgings, to no avail. In fact, she didn’t even attend the symphony’s 1830 premiere.

However, two years later, she finally heard a performance. She was astonished that she had inspired such a work, and they soon began dating.

They married in 1833. The marriage collapsed within a matter of years. But this symphony, the spark of inspiration that signaled the start of their relationship, remains a revolutionary Romantic Era statement that out-survived their love – and them.

Mendelssohn – Symphony No. 4, “Italian” (1833)

The Love Story

Horace Vernet: Felix Mendelssohn, 1831

Felix Mendelssohn was not undergoing a tortured love affair while writing the Italian Symphony.

In fact, this work is more influenced by a place he loved than a person: the “romance” here is between the composer and Italy itself.

Mendelssohn’s letters from his 1830–31 Italian journey are ecstatic in their admiration.

“This is Italy! … the supreme joy in life. And I am loving it,” he wrote to his family.   

Each movement of the symphony takes on a different aspect of the life he observed in Italy. The joyful first movement is followed by a slow movement reflecting a religious procession he saw in Naples. The dance of the third movement is a standard minuet and trio, and the final movement incorporates two different Italian dances, the quick Roman saltarello (a jumping dance), and the Neapolitan tarantella.

Its joy makes it one of the most “Romantic” – if not overtly romantic – symphonies of the era. Read more about Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4.

Schumann – Symphony No. 1 “Spring” (1841)

The Love Story

Robert and Clara Schumann

The “Spring” Symphony emerged from the happiest period of Robert Schumann’s life: his first year of marriage to pianist Clara Wieck.

After years of struggling to win the approval of Clara’s father, the star-crossed lovers were finally able to marry in September 1840.

This personal triumph sparked an extraordinary burst of creativity. 1840 had been Robert’s “Year of Song,” when he poured his love into over a hundred love songs.

But by 1841, with Clara’s encouragement, he had turned to the symphony.

She wrote in her diary:

“It would be best if he composed for orchestra; his imagination cannot find sufficient scope on the piano… His compositions are all orchestral in feeling… My highest wish is that he should compose for orchestra – that is his field! May I succeed in bringing him to it!”

As for his part, Robert later said that the work was inspired not just by spring’s external imagery but by his own “spring of love” (“Liebesfrühling”).   

Astonishingly, Schumann sketched this symphony out over just four days in January 1841. It exudes all of the exuberance you might expect from such an energetic start.

Schumann wanted the opening trumpet fanfare “to sound as if it came from on high, like a summons to awakening,” heralding spring’s (and love’s) arrival. This motto theme, bold and hopeful, recurs as a unifying idea.

He crafted music that somehow sounds like spring, featuring buoyant rhythms, anticipatory tremolo passages in the strings, and woodwind passages that resemble birdsong.

Throughout, the symphony’s tone is one of youthful hope, excitement, and, importantly, satisfaction. It’s very much in line with Romantic Era ideas and idealism about the rejuvenating power of both love and nature.

Tchaikovsky – Symphony No. 4 (1877)

The Love Story

Tchaikovsky with his wife Antonina Milykova

Few symphonies are as closely tied to a composer’s personal emotional life as Tchaikovsky’s Fourth.

Written in 1877, it coincided with a period of acute turmoil in Tchaikovsky’s romantic and emotional life.

That year, against his better judgment, Tchaikovsky entered into a hasty marriage with a young conservatory student, Antonina Miliukova – a marriage that proved disastrous and lasted only weeks before he fled her forever.

Tchaikovsky may have hoped marriage might quell rumours about his homosexuality, but the reality drove him to a nervous breakdown.   

During the aftermath of this catastrophic marriage, Tchaikovsky poured his inner despair and conflict into his fourth symphony.

He described the opening fanfare as the “Fate” that hangs over a person’s life: a concept that colored the entire symphony.

In a candid letter to his patroness and confidante, Nadezhda von Meck, Tchaikovsky admitted: “I was very depressed last winter when writing the symphony, and it is a faithful echo of what I was experiencing.”

Madame von Meck, who became Tchaikovsky’s benefactor in 1877, actually played a critical role in the symphony’s creation and the composer’s life at that particular time.

She provided financial support so he could quit teaching, along with an emotionally intimate – if strictly epistolary – friendship.

Nadezhda von Meck

The dedication of the fourth symphony even reads “To my best friend”: Tchaikovsky’s tribute to von Meck, and a thank-you for helping to usher him through an especially trying time in his life.

It’s ironic that one of the most infamous marital breakdowns in classical music history inspired one of the standout symphonies of the Romantic Era.

Mahler – Symphony No. 5 (1901–02)

The Love Story

Alma Schindler, 1902

The years 1901–1902, when Mahler composed his Fifth Symphony, were momentous in his personal life, especially in terms of romantic love.

In November 1901, Gustav Mahler met Alma Schindler, a young composer and socialite from Vienna.

Their whirlwind courtship was intense; by March 1902, they were married. (Alma was pregnant at their wedding.)

This intense new love had a profound impact on Mahler, and we see its reflection most clearly in the symphony’s Adagietto.   

According to Alma’s testimony, the Fifth’s Adagietto (which starts at the 46:15 mark in the video above) was Mahler’s love song to her.

Historians have noted that Alma’s picturesque storytelling isn’t always strictly accurate, but the following story remains persuasive. Apparently, he left her a small poem with the Adagietto’s manuscript, saying: “How much I love you, my sun, I cannot tell you in words – only my longing and my love and my bliss.”

Today, the Adagietto is regarded as the wordless love letter from Mahler to his new wife, communicating in music what he felt he was unable to say in words.

It provides a transcendent counterbalance to the earthiness of the rest of the symphony, enhanced by its orchestration for strings and harp alone.

Rachmaninoff – Symphony No. 2 (1907)

The Love Story

Sergei Rachmaninoff and Natalia Satina

The creation of his Symphony No. 2 marked a particularly redemptive chapter in Rachmaninoff’s professional life: one shaped by the support and love he found in his marriage.

A decade earlier, in 1897, Rachmaninoff’s first symphony had premiered to disastrous reviews (one critic likened it to “a program symphony about the Ten Plagues of Egypt”).

The fiasco of that premiere sent the young composer into a deep depression and a creative block. He recovered only with the help of therapy and through composing his successful Second Piano Concerto (1901).

During that same period, he fell in love with and became engaged to Natalia Satina, his cousin and childhood sweetheart.

After overcoming significant obstacles (including family disapproval and Orthodox Church restrictions on cousin marriage), Sergei and Natalia married in 1902 on a rainy spring day.

By the time he was writing the second symphony in 1906, Rachmaninoff had been happily married for a few years and was a father. His first daughter, Irina, was born in 1903, and his second, Tatiana, was born in 1907.

Enjoying such a stable, loving home life provided Rachmaninoff with a foundation of emotional security that was crucial to his productivity after the turmoil of his earlier years.  

In late 1906, he and Natalia moved to Dresden specifically to escape the pressures of Moscow so that he could focus on composition in peace.

There, with his wife and daughter by his side, he worked on the symphony – though not without bouts of self-doubt.

At one point, he nearly abandoned the score, calling it “boring and repulsive” in a typical burst of self-criticism, before eventually returning to it.

It’s easy to imagine that the heartfelt outpouring of the symphony – especially its incandescent Adagio – was nurtured by the contentment and warmth of Rachmaninoff’s married life.

The triumphant premiere of the symphony in early 1908 in St. Petersburg was a vindication; the public and critics hailed it, and it earned Rachmaninoff a prestigious Glinka Award.

Today it remains one of the symphonic highlights of the late Romantic Era, beloved for its lush string writing and deeply felt, warmly expressed emotion.

Conclusion

Romanticism in symphonic music wasn’t just an artistic movement; it was also a way for composers to transform their private longing, devotion, and emotional crisis into publicly performed art.

From Berlioz’s hallucinatory passion in the Symphonie fantastique to Rachmaninoff’s newfound confidence in his Second, these six works reveal how love – fulfilled, frustrated, or otherwise – shaped some of the most powerful music of the Romantic Era.

Taken together, they show just how deeply composers’ love stories shaped their compositions, and why these pieces remain so easy to love even today.

Mendelssohn: The Hebrides Overture Premiered Today in 1833

 by Georg Predota  January 10th, 2019

Exterior of Fingal’s Cave

Described as one of the natural wonders of Scotland, Fingal’s Cave is located on the uninhabited island of Staffa, in the Inner Hebrides. Formed from hexagonally jointed basalt columns it became known as “Fingal’s Cave” after the hero of an epic poem by the Scottish historian James Macpherson. It was part of his highly influential Ossian cycle of poems supposedly based on old Scottish Gaelic verse.

Fingal’s Cave

And when the novelist Sir Walter Scott visited the cave, he wrote, “it is one of the most extraordinary places I ever held. It exceeded in my mind, every description I had heard of it…. as high as the roof of a cathedral, and running deep into the rock, eternally swept by a deep and swelling sea”. Other famous visitors to the cave included the author Jules Verne, poets Wordsworth, Keats and Tennyson, the painter J.M.W. Turner and Queen Victoria. And then there was Felix Mendelssohn, who visited the cave in 1829 during his tour of Scotland.

Mendelssohn’s sketch of Scottish Landscape

In July and August 1829, Mendelssohn and his poet friend Karl Klingemann visited Edinburgh and Abbotsford. He began to draft the opening of his Symphony No. 3—eventually to be subtitled “Scottish”—and he wrote to his sister Fanny. “In order to have you understand how extraordinarily the Hebrides affect me, the following came to my mind.” And that postcard contained the opening phrase of what would eventually become his Hebrides Overture. It is been suggested that the echoes Mendelssohn experienced in the cave inspired this particular theme, although there is no definitive proof that Mendelssohn ever got close enough. The first complete draft of the work was completed on 16 December 1830 and entitled “The Lonely Island.” Not entirely satisfied with the work, Mendelssohn embarked on a series of revisions. The final version, now titled “Hebrides Overture,” was completed on 20 June 1832, and it premiered on 10 January 1833 in Berlin with the composer conducting. Richard Wagner subsequently called the work “one of the most beautiful pieces we possess.”

5 Composers Who Were Also Accomplished Visual Artists

 by Emily E. Hogstad  December 28th, 2025

While they’re known primarily for their music, several iconic classical music composers also expressed their creativity through visual art.

From Felix Mendelssohn and his Romantic era landscapes to John Cage and his chance-driven ink washes, these five composers created drawings, sketches, and paintings that help illuminate their artistic inner worlds.

Today, we’re looking at the lesser-known art by five great composers.

Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847)

Felix Mendelssohn

Mendelssohn was not just a celebrated composer; he was also a prolific visual artist.

He began taking drawing and painting lessons at an early age. Over the course of his lifetime, he produced hundreds of pieces of art in pen-and-ink, watercolour, and oils.

It’s no surprise that this child of the early Romantic era favoured subjects like dramatic natural landscapes and historic architecture.

Mendelssohn’s landscape painting

During one family tour of Switzerland in 1822, the 15-year-old Mendelssohn drew over forty ink-and-pencil landscape sketches of the Alps.

Later trips to Scotland (in 1829) and Italy (in 1831) likewise inspired numerous scenic drawings and watercolours of breathtaking locales.

He would also create memorable musical portraits of those countries, most famously with his Hebrides Overture and his Fourth Symphony, nicknamed the “Italian.”

Mendelssohn wrote in 1838 that while vacationing in Switzerland, “I composed not even a bit of music, but rather drew entire days, until my fingers and eyes ached.”

The beloved hobby allowed him to remain creative even when he was struggling with finding musical inspiration.     

Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951)

Composer Arnold Schoenberg is remembered best today as a composer and pioneer of atonality, but he was also a gifted Expressionist painter.

He began painting around 1907 and started focusing on the hobby in earnest months later during a particularly tumultuous period in his life.

Arnold Schoenberg

That year, his wife, Mathilde, left him for several months to have an affair with painter Richard Gerstl. After she returned to Schoenberg that November, Gerstl died by suicide.

While dealing with the emotional fallout, Schoenberg created a series of intense portraits characterised by stark colours, exaggerated features, and haunted gazes.

These paintings – which Schoenberg often titled “Gaze” or “Looking” – were meant to express something profound about his interior emotional state at the time of their creation.   

He ended up aligning with the loose Vienna-based group of artists known as Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), named after Wassily Kandinsky’s 1903 painting of the same name.

In fact, Schoenberg showed paintings at the Heller Gallery in Vienna (1910) and in the Der Blaue Reiter exhibition in Munich (1911) at Kandinsky’s invitation.

Schoenberg painted around 60–70 paintings, mostly between 1908 and 1912. After 1912, his output dipped, and he returned to focusing on music.

Arnold Schoenberg’s self portrait, “The Red Gaze”

He later mused about the connections between the two arts in an interview:

I planned to tell you what painting meant to me. In fact, it was to me the same as making music. It was to me a way of expressing myself, of presenting emotions, ideas, and other feelings.

And this is perhaps the way to understand these paintings, or not to understand them. They would probably have suffered the same fate as I have suffered; they would have been attacked. The same would happen to them that happened to my music.

I was never very capable of expressing my feelings or emotions in words. I don’t know whether this is why I did it in music, and also why I did it in painting.

George Gershwin (1898–1937)

George Gershwin is famed as a composer of jazz-influenced classics, but he was also an avid painter: he created over 100 works during his lifetime.

He took up painting in 1927, encouraged by his younger brother Ira and their cousin, the artist Henry Botkin.

He worked primarily in oil painting and charcoal or pencil sketches, focusing on portraits and figure studies of the people in his world. He was especially fond of impromptu, casual portraiture.

George Gershwin, self-portrait, 1936

Among Gershwin’s best-known paintings is his portrait of his Hollywood tennis partner, fellow painter-composer Arnold Schoenberg (c. 1934–36). Today, that painting hangs in the U.S. Library of Congress.

George Gershwin painting Arnold Schoenberg

One friend, Merle Armitage, noted that Gershwin “was in love with colour and his palette in paint closely resembled the colour of his music. Juxtaposition of greens, blues, sanguines, chromes, and greys fascinated him.” Appropriate favourites for the composer of Rhapsody in Blue!   

It should also be noted that Gershwin was an art collector as well as artist, owning works by Picasso, Chagall, Modigliani, Kandinsky, and others.

He even kept Mark Chagall’s painting, The Rabbi, over his piano, where he would see it every day he went to work.

It’s tantalising to think about how the aesthetics of these artists might have affected his own music.

As he once told a friend, “Painting and music spring from the same elements, one emerging as sight, the other as sound.”

Paul Hindemith (1895–1963)

Paul Hindemith, 1923

In addition to his compositions and viola-playing, German composer Paul Hindemith was known for his whimsical drawings.

Although he never formally trained as a visual artist, he drew prolifically from childhood until the end of his life.

He would regularly seize any scrap of paper at hand – menus, napkins, concert programs – and fill them with impromptu sketches and cartoons.

Hindemith’s doodles

His subjects were numerous and tended toward the bizarre: he’d portray whimsical, fantastic subjects in a cartoonish style, such as tubas with legs, cats who played musical instruments, or even dancing elephants.   

Hindemith always treated his drawing as a casual, fun outlet. He never catalogued his visual art in any systematic way, or treated them as anything but throwaway doodles.

The only meticulously dated collection of Hindemith’s visual art is his series of Christmas cards, which he drew and sent out to friends, family, students, and colleagues every year. He kept up the tradition for decades, until his final Christmas in 1963.

John Cage (1912–1992)  

John Cage, avant-garde composer of 4’33” fame, created a significant body of visual art during the last twenty years of his life.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Cage turned to printmaking, drawing, and watercolour as extensions of his experimental philosophy. By the time of his death, he had produced a large and distinctive oeuvre of works on paper.

Cage’s visual art is notable for applying the same principles of chance and indeterminacy that he used in music. While making his watercolours and prints, Cage would let random operations guide the creation of the works.

John Cage’s painting

As a result, Cage’s art has a uniquely serene yet unpredictable quality – splashes of colour or delicate pencil lines appear according to coin flips and computer-generated randomness, not by his own subjective aesthetic judgment.

Cage’s largest sustained visual art project was done in collaboration with the Mountain Lake Workshop in Virginia. Between 1983 and 1990, he spent several week-long residencies there, creating a total of 125 unique watercolours. All of them were later published in the compendium The Sight of Silence: John Cage’s Complete Watercolors.

Conclusion

The visual artworks these composers left behind are compelling in their own right, but they’re also fascinating for what they say about their creative spirit and vision.

Whether it was Mendelssohn sketching alpine peaks in Switzerland, Schoenberg confronting his inner turmoil on canvas, or Cage embracing indeterminacy with brush and ink, each of these composers used visual media to explore ideas that sound alone didn’t allow them to.

Appreciating their artwork gives us an invaluable lens for hearing – and better understanding – their remarkable music.