In Music
Whistler and particularly this painting had a profound effect on Claude Debussy, a contemporary French composer. In 1894, he wrote to violinist Eugène Ysaÿe describing his Nocturnes as "an experiment in the different combinations that can be obtained from one color - what a study in grey would be in painting." Although there is speculation on what he meant by musical 'color', be it orchestration or harmonic, one can observe 'shades' of a particular sound quality in his music.
Read more about this topic: Whistler's Mother
Famous quotes containing the word music:
“In benevolent natures the impulse to pity is so sudden, that like instruments of music which obey the touch ... you would think the will was scarce concerned, and that the mind was altogether passive in the sympathy which her own goodness has excited. The truth is,the soul is [so] ... wholly engrossed by the object of pity, that she does not ... take leisure to examine the principles upon which she acts.”
—Laurence Sterne (17131768)
“We often love to think now of the life of men on beaches,at least in midsummer, when the weather is serene; their sunny lives on the sand, amid the beach-grass and bayberries, their companion a cow, their wealth a jag of driftwood or a few beach plums, and their music the surf and the peep of the beech-bird.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)