We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
Visible Music 253 kce may cultivate a certain luxur- nce of social soul. But the radio irrents will have to enable those : the ends of the "wires" to see, ;fore social culture will be com- ete. It is no disparagement to the ear i call attention to the fact that it mnot see. People wish to see. he movie is a mighty, an irre- placeable, an irreducible social force. It harbors no jealousy of the infant radio brother. He is heartily welcomed to the family o£ cultural agencies. There is indeed promise that he will vastly stretch the screen, and enlarge the theatre, as well as the auditorium, to take in all the vast community of cul- ture-seekers. Visible Music: The Birth of a New Art' By George Vail rHE discovery of linear perspective freed painting from its enslavement to I flat surfaces of medieval art and ush- ed in the glorious era of space-composi- sn. Only through the creation of depth, : three-dimensional illusion, were the :hievements of the great masters made >ssible. Are we about to behold the iwn of another emancipation of line and >lor—from the eternally static to the eely flowing, from the perpetually frozen i the infinitely mobile? Those who have illy grasped the significance of Thomas Alfred's Clavilux will not hesitate in ieir reply. We are on the threshold of :velopments in the aesthetic treatment of le, of color, and of mass that literally agger the imagination. Here for the first time we see these ree factors in unrestricted combination, eated as ends in themselves, blended ith the deliberate purpose of producing sible music, just as rhythm, pitch, and •lie-color are utilized in the creation of idible harmonies. Music has long been msidered the purest of the arts, the only le able to dispense with outside assist- lce and speak directly to the soul of an. In poetry and prose, in painting and sculpture, the artist, in order to at- tain self-expression, must delineate or re- produce something external of his art. The universal message which he is striv- ing to utter—and this is all that he really cares about—can only be written, as it were, between the lines of that rep- resentation of reality to which he is fet- tered. Music alone, in its purest form, is unhampered by limitations other than those inherent in itself. Is its monopoly of the Absolute, so eloquently proclaimed by Schopenhauer, to become a thing of the past? After witnessing a perform- ance on the Clavilux, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that here we may have a new art form—that of mobile color—as pure and unconditioned, as limitless in its possibilities, as the medium of Bach and Beethoven. What is the Clavilux and what does it do? Persons who have seen it in action, who have been thrilled and enraptured by the magic feast spread for their hungry eyes, laughingly admit an utter inability to express in words the impressions they have received. For this new art the old pat phrases and stereotyped analogies, so convenient when audible music is be- *Reprinted from The Nation for August 2, 1922, by permission.