It's no secret that M.C. Escher loved music. Here's a passage he wrote to a friend about his experience:
"Sometimes, when the organist is playing one of Bach’s fugues, for instance, the world slips away, people cease to exist, the church has crumbled, and there is nothing left but sound."
https://www.escherinhetpaleis.
In 1936, Escher even created an alternative way to represent music he called "Graphic Representation of Music in Two Dimensions," where he plotted notes on a spiral using lines whose lengths correspond with the wavelength of the note. You could flip the pages rapidly and get an animation of the music that also represents the physics of the sound waves.
(https://vimeo.com/169687919)
But what if he didn't stop there?
Escher once suggested the following:
"If it were possible to visually illustrate music in a more complete way, then its accessibility would generally be enhanced and the receptiveness of those experiencing it would increase."
First, some history:
In 1739, mathematician Leonhard Euler described an alternative way to represent music using a simple grid of triangles, called a tonnetz, or "tone network". The corners between the triangles each represent 1 of the 12 musical notes, and each triangle represents a major or minor triad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
How is this related? About 200 years later in 1948 Escher finished his piece Sun and Moon, and seven years after that he finished Liberation. If you look at each part carefully, you'll notice that one is like a distorted mirror of the other; many birds seem to have a counterpart in the other piece.
You could imagine in these pictures that each bird is like a triangle. In a tonnetz, each triangle is a chord. So, by overlapping these two ideas, you could imagine each bird as a chord. I like to think of Sun and Moon as a guide for the minor tonality, and Liberation as a guide for the major tonality. It's like an extension to the idea of emotion-based roman numeral analysis, i.e.: iii is sad in a major key.
(Click to enlarge!)
Sun and Moon:
Liberation:
Escher wrote this about Liberation to his son Arthur:
"You can hardly call it a "commission" -- if I accept it, the only decent thing to do would be to do it free of charge. My question is if this whole shebang isn’t gonna take too much time, because I simply can’t work that fast. There might be an enormous number printed -- with free distribution to schoolchildren, for example; so I must certainly watch my step and not "knock up" a print, just like that. I have a month to think it over, so I can still back out, but I am afraid that I shall have to do it."
So, which one of these birds acts like our "home chord"?
When you look at a crescent moon, even though you can only see a little bit of it, you still know that the whole moon is there, right? In Sun and Moon, at the center is a crescent moon and a shining sun. At the center of the blue bird in the bottom right is a smaller crescent moon. It reminds me of how by seeing just a sliver, you become aware of the whole moon: by treating this bird like the "minor i" chord, you'll know that the rest of it is actually an emotion based chord guide.
Looking at Liberation this time, it seems like the two kissing birds are a focal point. The one with the wriggled neck seems surprised, like he is the receiver of a "first" kiss. Since it seems like the kiss was initiated by the peace dove, and considering that it's the "mirror" of the bird containing the crescent moon from Sun and Moon, maybe we could treat this as home.
In fact, if you draw a vertical mirror (or axis if you prefer) right between the home chord, and draw a horizontal mirror through the kiss, by flipping birds over both of these mirrors we get the negative harmony, and the mirror counterpart of that bird. For example, if you negative harmonize the V in Liberation, you get the iv in Sun and Moon. Also, if you look all the way at the bottom row of triangles, it creates the major scale.
Just a side note here, up and down are swapped in each one, i.e.: In Sun and Moon, going up ascends in half tones, and in Liberation going up descends in half tones. This makes me think of how when you start with locrian, to alter the scale you raise scale degrees. Or vice versa, when you start with lydian, you lower scale degrees for a darker result. It also makes me think of how a major chord is just a minor chord upside down. Going right ascends by fifths in both pictures, left descends by fifths. I'll further justify this craziness with another M.C. Escher quote:
"Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible. I think it's in my basement... let me go upstairs and check."
So let's dive in and explore a few examples. I feel like a lot of these descriptions don't really do the pictures justice, and I left some of the chords out because I wasn't entirely sure what to say. You see though how someone could use this kind of framework to become more familiar with the emotions that they experience with chord changes, and how they could continue to build on it? They could even do something like draw how the change makes them feel, or give them names (I did this to help me remember which ones are which). In the wise words of Bob Ross:
"There's a happy little bush. He lives right there. You knew he was there, didn't you? And he's got a little friend named Clyde. He lives right over here, there he is. So you can give all these things names, personalities, it's okay."
Major tonality (Liberation):
I: The peace dove, at rest
bII: shocked, startled (just a side note: this has a super similar wriggled neck bird shape that V has, maybe because it's the tritone sub of V)
II: drifty, dreamy
ii: sort of a searching feeling
bIII: epic, bursting
biii: threatening, belligerent
iii: sad, pensive
III: Soaring, but kinda melancholy
IV: neutral, kinda like taking off or landing back down
iv: sweet when preceded by IV chord (it nuzzles IV in the picture, aw), kinda sad by itself
bV: vast
V: When followed by I, it's sweet, like a kiss, but unresolved it leaves tension. It reminds me of when you walk by a goose and they get all antsy and wriggle up.
I want to talk about the submediant and chromatic submediants in Liberation for a moment. It seems like these chords form the spine in a way. Because toward the home chord at the bottom, when you travel past the edges you end up at one of these chords. In order to get the the top of the picture, you have to use these chords (which are the only ones that hadn't appeared yet), and each one appears in the "next row up", starting at VI, forming a center spine. These chromatic mediants really soar in this picture.
bVII: dancy
bvii: the "exochord", or "tonnetz pole"
This chord has the highest number of tonnetz transformations to be able to get to it. This makes me laugh because it looks like the home chord but it's been toppled over, like "this parrot is no more, it's expired, gone to see its maker, this is a late parrot".
Minor tonality (Sun and Moon):
i: peace dove, at rest, a bit half asleep, hazy
bII: charming, enchanting
bii: trapped, longing
II: kinda goofy
ii: angsty, icy
bIII: heroic, bright
biii: moody, mopey
III: dopey
iii: starry, glittering
IV: transcendent, magnificent
iv: day dreamy, entrancing
bv: spooky
V: Comin in hot, whoa! (Hahaha)
v: kinda neutral
bVI: strong, resolute
VI: pumped, frenzied
vi: ultra tragic, defeated
bvii: detached, crotchety
VII: dramatic
vii: infuriated, wrathful (this is one mean boy)
I think maybe he was thinking about mythology when he picked the peace dove as the home chord. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, which predates Christianity, Utnapishtim is tasked to build a boat before a flood comes that will wipe out all of the animals that aren't on the ship. Anyway, he's floating around, and he releases two birds to find land, a dove and a raven. He releases the dove, and it just circles around and comes back. He releases the raven, it doesn't come back, and he concludes that the raven has found land. It's similar in the tale of Noah's Arc. Noah releases a dove, and it comes back with an olive branch, a sign of life on the land. There seems to be a common theme here. Like the home chord, the dove usually comes back.
"It seems to me that feeling and analysis are not incompatible."
“My work is a game, a very serious game.”
"I discovered that technical mastery was no longer my sole aim, for I became gripped by another desire, the existence of which I had never suspected. Ideas came into my mind quite unrelated to graphic art, notions which so fascinated me that I longed to communicate them to other people. This could not be achieved through words, for these thoughts were not literary ones, but mental images of a kind that can only be made comprehensible to others by presenting them as visual images."
- M.C. Escher
Thanks for reading. I hope that this resonates in some way. I would love to hear any thoughts or questions.
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