- Hi, I'm Kate Perdoni.
- And I'm Michael Gadlin.
- Welcome back to Arts District from Rocky Mountain PBS.
- A picture is worth a thousand words.
What about music?
- Like at the Denver Art Museum
where music plays a huge part in the creation of exhibits.
- Viewers learn how to listen to paintings
in more ways than one.
- That's right, the museum recently collaborated
with the Denver Philharmonic Orchestra
developing a French Impressionistic concert
to complement a very special exhibit.
- And if you haven't guessed,
it's Claude Monet.
The Truth of Nature exhibit features
over 120 of Monet's paintings.
- Many of which have never been to America.
Producer Rob Barnett takes us there.
(soft piano music)
- The arts at the time sort of
they had cross pollination.
Same time when the Impressionist movement
would happening there were Impressionistic tendency
in poetry and so in music.
So artists at the time were not in a vacuum.
And the music,
because it responds to the same sort of stylistic tendency,
we do believe that it helps our visitors immerse more
in a time and go back in time.
My name is Angelica Daneo.
I am chief curator
and curator of European Art before 1900
at the Denver Art Museum.
As we often do an exhibition
we actually include music throughout our galleries,
and we did the same this time
with our Claude Monet exhibition.
We listen to music of the time
and try to find the right rhythm for certain paintings.
(Ravel's Bolero)
You may have something that is very slow
and with a slower cadence
which doesn't go well with the scenes of Bordighera
which are an explosion of colors
and an explosion of brilliance.
So we do look at the paintings and we do listen to the music
and like any visitors,
really try to look with,
does this help me when I look at this painting?
- My name is Laurence Golan
and I'm a symphony orchestra conductor
and I'm the music director
of the Denver Philharmonic Orchestra.
We have this wonderful partnership
with the Denver Art Museum.
The partnership revolves around the Monet exhibit.
Obviously they'll be having many wonderful paintings
by the great French Impressionistic painter Claude Monet.
And we will be playing this French Impressionistic concert.
The Impressionistic movement in music
took place primarily in France
around the turn of the last century,
so around 1900.
One thing the Impressionistic composers
were very concerned with was
what is the emotion that the listener will feel?
(flowing orchestral music)
Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun
is perhaps the quintessential Impressionistic piece.
It starts out with just flute solo
by itself with no accompaniment
and even the notes that Debussy chose
for that opening solo are very chromatic
meaning it doesn't establish a key.
It doesn't establish any one note as being more prominent.
It just sort of meanders around through different notes.
(soft flute music)
That is emblematic of Impressionism both in music
and in art where we're not exactly sure
what we're looking at or what we're listening to.
It sounds very nice but what exactly is that?
With the French Impressionistic painters,
similarly they weren't trying
to be very realistic with them.
It was more like eluding to an image.
- The painting behind my back
is Boulevard des Capucines by Monet painted around 1873,
and it has all the qualities of this particular movement,
and Monet does it with great effects
of giving really the impression of a busy street.
It doesn't define every single top hat,
it doesn't define every single gown and petticoat.
So this was the criticism from the intellectuals
that were favoring the Academy.
The critic Louis Leroy, who was the one that gave the term,
the derogatory term Impressionism,
really criticized these black figures.
In fact, he called them black tongue-lickings.
This was, looked unfinished.
It looked too sketchy.
But this was not the point of the Impressionists.
They wanted to give the impression,
the feeling of that scene in that moment.
- That has translated into the music in a similar way.
You get the impression of a certain structure
or of a certain harmony,
but it's not crystal clear.
(soothing orchestra music)
- When nowadays we visit exhibitions,
we are seeing paintings that were not intended
to be shown together in an exhibition space,
and so we are mindful of creating
some sort of context.
We try to allow discretely ourselves
to immerse into a different era
that had different perspectives and different experiences.
So that will give a glimpse for a visitor into the time,
into what have been the Paris that Monet in particular
would have known.
- In Paris at this time
the musicians would read the poems of the poets,
and they would go to the art exhibits
of the painters and vice versa.
So they were very much integrated.
There's connection between art at the museum,
between music at the hall and in our entire community.
We're all connected in many ways
and in this case, specifically through the arts.
- That piece did such a fantastic job
of showing how disciplines can complement each other
for a great experience.
And I love that the curator used music
to actually help place the paintings.
- And gallery goers can hear the Denver Philharmonic
in the headset of the guided audio tour.
- You know, Denver is the only city in the country
hosting this work by Monet.
You can learn more at denverartmuseum.org.
- And the Denver Philharmonic Orchestra season
is in full swing.
You can see their schedule online.