Actually there's a strong link between Mondriaan's art work and his musical taste over the time.
Befor WWI he loved classic music, especially Beethoven, but after 1912, when he develloped his 'neoplasticisme' painting style, he tried to express the expression of real modern life, which he musically found in the new jazz music of that time, which broke with 'the old harmony'.
Interesting is also his interest in the new 'industrial' music machines, enormous mechanical installations producing 'mechanical' music.
He probably loved the radical way to find new musical principles, just like he was trying to find for his art.
But later, during the 30ties, it's the pre-war jazz which he loved most, and when he moved to New York he was flabbergasted by the new Boogywoogy music.
His paintings 'Fox-Trot B, Broadway Boogy Woogy and Victory Boogy Woogy are direct references to his musical preferences of the time.
He loved dancing on this music, and an well known anecdote tells he once said to his dancing partner 'let's sit down, I hear melody' when the band changed from a boogy woogy song to something else.
His putting rythm befor melody reflected his striving for real life expression rather than esoteric abstractism.
His art work looks 'abstract', but abstractism as such was not his aim but the
result of this pursuit for real life expression.
His often used broken black lines divided in a well balanced pattern on a two dimensional surface is actually a search for the perfect rythm in the positioning of the many elements on the painting surface.
Seen like this way 'melody' was 'bourgois', comparable with the classic configurative painting style of the past.
He hated melody at the end of his life in 1944.
So, this leaves us with the hypothetical but interesting question about what he would have thought about the post war experiments instigated by the Musique Concrète group and the later followers as so nicely presented by Ronald in the thread about electronic music pioneers.
Mondriann would have loved the radical breaking with the (any) musical conventions, but I seriously wonder if he had loved the (inherent) esoteric character of this new approach.
It is miles away from 'real life', as there's no bigger contrast between this music and dancing on hot rythms in a real life sweated bar with real people celebrating life.
This is not a try to down talk the benefits of the post WWII electronic avant garde pioneers, which benefits are clear to everyone.
I'm just trying to think over musical devellopments and their sociological dimensions.
Early jazz and later devellopments like Boogy Woogy and especially the later hotboiling Bebob, which Mondriaan alas had to have missed, explicitly were the real life dance styles of the 30ties 40ties and 50ties.
Popmusic and Rock in general brought back rythm in popular music, although quite simple and also melodically again. Jazz and free jazz develloped to more or even very esoteric styles of listening music, compared to Bebob.
Modern electronic dance music isn't really complicated in respect to rythm, but at least it breaks radically with the old conventions of pop and rock, or music in general, and melody is almost absent in quite some dance styles.
Sociologically-musically spoken, it's the 'real life' character of dance music which made it so popular, even while it's based on 'mechanical' movement patterns of pure oscillators, LFO's filters and other elementary sources of sound modulating automatisms.
I still find this amazing.
Not sure if today's Planetz is open for these kind of discussions, although the very active scene of modular adepts would suggest this
cheerZ.
