I first heard the name Frank Lloyd Wright from a Simon and Garfunkel song. Embarassing, but true. Actually, I don't know that it's really all that embarassing. I'm a musician and an unapologetic lover of pop music as a valid art form, so it really makes sense. In any event, I had no idea who FLW was while listening to Art Garfunkel's male alto singing, "So long, Frank Lloyd Wright. All of the nights we harmonized till dawn." The chorus was particularly baffling: "Architects may come and architects may go and never change your point of view." I'm of the "get it on, bang a gong" school of pop songwriting and while I certainly believe a great song can change the world, it would probably never occur to me to write a song about an architect. I mean, unless she were a really hot architect, and even then, her work in that field would be secondary to verses about her legs or whatever.
I actually am quite embarassed to say that I matriculated for a full seven years within an hour's drive of Fallingwater, Wright's iconic masterwork, without ever having seen it. I started not to mention that, but it really does get to the essence of what I'm thinking as I write. Or maybe it's what I've not thought about very deeply over the years.
The arts philosopher Suzanne Langer wrote a wonderful (though rather difficult) book entitled Feeling and Form. She tackles the issue of the essence of each of the disciplines and I remember being quite impressed by her treatment of music when I was an undergraduate. Langer wrote that the essence of music is time, that it is, in some way, time made audible. Nietzche and Frank Zappa have said much the same thing in their own ways. As a musician, I love that. Langer argues that music is the most abstract of the arts and I think she's right. A C major chord is a set of pitches. It has no specific meaning beyond those sounds and it's actually quite a task for a composer to make those sounds have a direct analog in the "real" world. Now, if I write a song (i.e., I put words to the music), suddenly my piece is about white Christmases or doggies in windows or walking like Egyptians or whatever. It is the words telling you what the song is about though. The other arts may be abstract, but abstraction is music's default mode. It's difficult for music not to be abstract.
In many ways, architecture is the opposite of music, so much so, in fact, that some do not readily recognize it as an art form. After all, the architect is designing rooms for people to peel potatoes or use the toilet. And all of us live and work in these spaces, many of them the antithesis of beauty, elegance or affective expression.
The one thing I have always remembered about Frank Lloyd Wright from my art appreciation class was his emphasis on functionality in architecture. "Form follows function" was the dictum Wright followed, a phrase coined by his mentor Louis Sullivan. It is the one thing that has left an impression on me as I think about the arts generally, and even music specifically. It is so easy for musicians to fall into formalist traps, following a prescribed template, whether rondo form or thirty-two bar Tin Pan Alley song structures. The result is usually something inorganic (a term Wright would have undoubtedly approved), something that does not seem even authentic in itself. When you hear music where the form is an outgrowth of the expressive elements, whether Beethoven first movements with extended codas or Muddy Waters' 11- and 13-bar blues, it resonates as something that occurs almost naturally. There is something organic in these forms, the same way there is in Wright's irregular hexagons.
So today, at the inviation of our friends Rachel and Robert, my wife and I had the opportunity to tour Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright's winter home in Scottsdale, Arizona. It was truly remarkable and left me in awe of the man. This "winter camp" was established by Wright when he was 71-years-old. He moved there largely for health reasons, but established a school of architecture that split sessions between this "campus" and the other Taliesin, in Wisconsin. He spent the first two years in a tent, literally, while his students built his home. There was no running water and no electricity for years. The facility makes use almost exclusively of natural light that comes in through canvas roofs. Bedrooms were largely open to the elements and every building is constructed with materials found mostly on the desert floor where the campus sits.
Yet the beauty of the place is truly remarkable. The way the buildings seems to rise out of mountains and incoporate the forms of the saguaro cacti and other natural elements is striking. It's not just the archiecture that adds to the beauty. Collected Asian art works, three theatres that host the performing arts, and three grand pianos (left from the nine that Wright furnished during his lifetime) give the impression that this is a place to create.
Create he did. And not alone. The school was really the brain child of Wright's wife, Olgivanna, something of an Eastern European mystic and dancer. She was Wright's third wife and thirty years his junior. They established a small community (some might say "cult") of about 70 individuals, including 30 or so apprentices, who lived and worked at Taliesin. Such was their devotion to the place, and to the man, that today 98-year-old Cornelia Brierly, one of the original members of the Taliesin Fellowship, still lives and works there. And she's not the only one of Wright's former students who has stayed on. They put on concerts and plays, cooked together and entertained guests, and visited Wright in his bedroom to borrow books and learn from his wisdom.
By the time Wright moved to Taliesin West, he had already completed one career. He was America's most prolific architect and revolutionized the form many times over with ideas great and small: Prarie Houses, car ports, "Usonian" housing, floor lighting and more. He lived in Japan for six years and designed the Imperial Hotel. He designed the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Johnson Wax building. He was controversial, abandoning one family and later living openly with his mistress. She was murdered, along with six others, by an axe-weilding servant who burned the original Taliesin to the ground. He bought ninety cars during his lifetime, opining, "Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves." He wore a suit and tie to his desert office everday, not knowing when clients might stop in. He was opinionated and perhaps arrogant. He played the piano from memory, including entire Beethoven sonatas. He reportedly told friends that had he been a musician, he would have changed music much the same way Beethoven had; he couldn't even read music. Our tour guide told us that he rejected the title "America's Greatest Architect." He preferred "The World's Greatest Architect."
I find myself tonight with two books on Frank Lloyd Wright. I'm hoping to harmonize with him, too.
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