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14 Winter 2023 • sai-national.org Image 3. Album cover Image 3. Album cover featuring Joan Miró, featuring Joan Miró, Calculation Calculation, 1925 , 1925 Image 4. Georges Seurat, Image 4. Georges Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884-6 1884-6 (Wikimedia Commons) (Wikimedia Commons) SAI Natial Cvention N ot only classical composers have been inspired by art; SAI National Arts Associate Dave Brubeck's 1961 album, Time Further Out: Miró Reflections, is a jazz interpretation of Catalonian artist Joan Miró's Calculation (1925), which is featured on the cover of the album (Image 3). Brubeck writes in his program notes, "I feel that in Miró's painting he has expressed in visual terms my own approach to music — that is, a search for something new within old forms, an unexpected perspective, a surprising order and inner balance that belies the spontaneity of composition." Brubeck's compositional strategy employs a unique approach in its response to the art. He did not seek to recreate the mood or events depicted in the work, but used one particular feature of it as a framework for his music; specifically, he used the numbers in the upper right of the painting as time signatures for the different pieces in the album. He uses time signatures such as 5/4, 7/4, and 9/8 to extend the whimsy and curiosity the painting provokes. M usical theater also does not lack examples of art's influence. Stephen Sondheim built a whole musical, Sunday in the Park with George (1984), around one famous painting, Georges Seurat's A Sunday Aernoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (Image 4). Seurat, a painter of the Pointillist style (in which images are composed of small dots), used his signature technique in this work showing stylish Parisians relaxing along the River Seine. Sondheim's music imitates Pointillism by frequently using staccato and repetition in his fictionalized account of the painting's creation. MUSIC INSPIRED BY ART MUSIC INSPIRED BY ART

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