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Jakob van Domselaer: Proeven van Stijlkunst, IV (1915)
From the album Jakob van Domselaer: Piano Music
Jakob van Domselaer (1890-1960), fairly or not, is best known for his association with the Dutch modernist painter Piet Mondrian. The two met in Paris in 1912 and briefly lived together in 1915 in the Dutch town of Laren. Around this time (from 1913 to 1917), Van Domselaer wrote his Proeven van Stijlkunst (Experiments in Style), a nine-part cycle of piano works that is his best-known and most forward-looking composition.
The Proeven van Stijlkunst were directly influenced by van Domselaer’s encounter with Mondrian, who at the time was developing his rigorously abstract aesthetic program known as “Neoplasticism.” In turn, Domselaer influenced Mondrian’s thinking on music, which was eventually expressed in a series of articles on “neoplastic music” published in the early 1920s. Among the diverse sources Mondrian mentions are J. S. Bach, American jazz-band music, the noisemakers of the Italian futurists, and the work of the otherwise unknown Domselaer.
In the early 1920s, Domselaer’s Proeven van Stijlkunst were performed by Nelly van Moorsel to accompany lectures by her partner, the painter Theo van Doesburg, as well as slide shows of works by artists belonging to the Dutch modernist movement known as De Stijl (The Style), of which Mondrian and van Doesburg were the most prominent members.
Piet Mondrian: Composition No. II: Composition in Line and Color (1913)
Played 81 time(s).
January 28, 2011, 9:36am
