Art Expressed in Music

Frida's Wings – The Skeletons
November 2023
Duration: 2:40
Listen to the Playlist: soundcloud.com/bruce-klepper-1/sets/art-expressed-in-music-i
Painting: Frida Kahlo, Four Inhabitants of Mexico (cropped).  Frida pictures herself at 4, with a Judas, a pre-Columbian symbol from Nayarit, and a skeleton.
Music for Danse Etoile Ballet (www.danseetoile.org) who will be performing Frida's Wings, a ballet based on the life and works of Frida Kahlo, June 2024 in Colorado.
This piece will also be included in the upcoming “Art Expressed in Music” series.
Thanks to John-Marc Ventimiglia @john-marc-ventimiglia for creating the “rattling bones” sound library
Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for her many portraits, self portraits and works inspired by the nature and artifacts of Mexico.  Her paintings often had strong autobiographical elements and mixed realism with fantasy. She is also known for painting about her experience of chronic pain. In most of her self-portraits, she depicts her face as mask-like, but surrounded by visual cues which allow the viewer to decipher deeper meanings. Aztec mythology features heavily in Kahlo's paintings in symbols including skeletons and skulls.  In the painting, Dream of The Bed, painted in the year of 1940, Frida expressed her feeling and interception of death, which depicts a skeleton on the canopy of her bed (as she had in her real life). Her husband, Diego Rivera called the Juda, Frida's lover, but Frida said it's just an amusing reminder of people's mortality. Frida Kahlo spent much of her life in pain.  As As a teenager she suffered a horrific bus accident which left her unable to have children and meant she needed more than 30 operations on her spine. Eventually her withered leg had to be amputated and she died at 47. She said in her diary: “Feet, why do I need you, if I have wings to fly”

For guitar, accordion, trumpet, violin, double bass, sound effects and percussion.

Art Expressed in Music - Frida's Wings - The Skeletons

Art Expressed in Music – Hokusai's Immortality
November 2023
Duration: 2:40
Listen to the Playlist: soundcloud.com/bruce-klepper-1/sets/art-expressed-in-music-i
Painting: The Inume Pass in Kai Province from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji 
Katsushika Hokusa.(1760 –1849), known simply as Hokusai, was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist of the Edo period, active as a painter and printmaker. He is best known for the woodblock print series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, which includes the iconic print The Great Wave of Kanagawa,  In addition to his woodblock ukiyo-e prints, Hokusai worked in a variety of mediums including painting and book illustration. Starting as a young child, he continued working and improving his style until his death, at 88. In a long and successful career, Hokusai produced over 30,000 paintings, sketches, woodblock prints, and images for picture books in total. Innovative in his compositions and exceptional in his drawing technique, Hokusai is considered one of the greatest masters in the history of art.  At the age of seventy-five Hokusai defiantly referred to himself as ‘the old man mad about painting” as he railed against his mortality by declaring that he would live past 100 years and in so doing, achieve artistic immortality. “From the age of six I had a penchant for copying the forms of things, and from about fifty, my pictures were frequently published; but until the age of seventy, nothing that I drew was worthy of notice. At seventy-three years, I was somewhat able to fathom the growth of plants and trees, and the structure of birds, animals, insects, and fish. Thus when I reach eighty years, I hope to have made increasing progress, and at ninety to see further into the underlying principles of things, so that at one hundred years I will have achieved a divine state in my art, and at one hundred and ten, every dot and every stroke will be as though alive.” Told by Gakyo Rojin Manji (Old Man Mad About Painting). 
For strings, shakuhachi, koto, english horn, bass clarinet, piano, vibraphone, cloud chamber bowls, virtual instruments, sound effects and percussion.

Art Expressed in Music - Hokusai's Immortality

Art Expressed in Music – Bruegel's Drollery
December 2023
Duration: 2:30
Listen to the Playlist: https://soundcloud.com/bruce-klepper-1/sets/art-expressed-in-music-i
Painting: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Wedding Dance
Drollery: something whimsically amusing or funny; an oddly amusing story or jest.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525 – 1569) was one of the most significant Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painters known for his paintings and prints of landscapes and peasant scenes. He was one of the first generation of artists to grow up when religious subjects had ceased to be the dominant subject matter of painting. Bruegel was free to express the feelings and emotions of the day and his insight into human life.  The Wedding Dance reflects a degree of ambiguity. It can both be seen as a commentary on the revelers’ oversexed behavior or as an entertaining and comical composition.  In the sixteenth century, dance was subject to a strict code and regarded by the authorities and church as a social evil. In polite society, people could not swing their arms or legs or laugh too loudly.  The painting expresses the rural liberation from the stricter limits on the urban classes and the times’ expected social standards.  All of Bruegel's paintings come from a period of little more than a decade before his early death, when he was probably in his early forties, and at the height of his powers. 
For violin, viola, clarinet, flute, english horn, heckelphone, bass clarinet, bassoon, contrabassoon, sound effects and percussion.

Art Expressed in Music - Bruegel's Drollery

Art Expressed in Music – Vincent's Imagination
December 2023
Duration: 2:50
Listen to the Playlist: https://soundcloud.com/bruce-klepper-1/sets/art-expressed-in-music-i
Painting: The Starry Night (cropped)
Vincent Willem van Gogh (March 30, 1853 – July 29, 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In just over a decade he created approximately 2100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of them in the last two years of his life.  Only one of his paintings was known by name to have been sold during his lifetime.  In the aftermath of the December 23rd, 1888 breakdown that resulted in the self-mutilation of his left ear, Van Gogh voluntarily admitted himself to the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole lunatic asylum on May 8th, 1889.  During the year Van Gogh stayed at the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, the prolific output of paintings he had begun in Arles continued.  During this period, he produced some of the best-known works of his career, including the “The Starry Night”.  Van Gogh had the subject of a blue night sky dotted with yellow stars in mind for many months before he painted the picture.  Some of the elements, such as the mountains in the distance and the existence of the village are true to the view van Gogh would have seen from his window; meanwhile, many other parts, such as the church, are imagined.  Van Gogh wrote to Theo: "It would be so simple and would account so much for the terrible things in life, which now amaze and wound us so, if life had yet another hemisphere, invisible it is true, but where one lands when one dies." "Hope is in the stars," he wrote, but he was quick to point out that "earth is a planet too, and consequently a star, or celestial orb." He stated flatly that “The Starry Night” was "not a return to the romantic or to religious ideas."  On July 27th, 1890, aged 37, Van Gogh shot himself in the chest.  The shooting may have taken place in the wheat field in which he had been painting, or in a local barn. 
For stings, piano, celeste, organ, bowed chamber bowls, tubular bells, virtual instruments, sound effects and percussion

Art Expressed in Music - Vincent's Imagination

Art Expressed in Music – Monet's Evanescence Feat. Oddrun Eikli, vocals 
December 2023
Duration: 3:40
Listen to the Playlist: https://soundcloud.com/bruce-klepper-1/sets/art-expressed-in-music-i
Listen to Oddrun Eikli at: https://soundcloud.com/oddrun-eikli
Painting: Water Lillies, 1906
Evanescence: the quality of being fleeting or vanishing quickly, impermanence.
Oscar-Claude Monet (November 14th, 1840 – December 5th, 1926) was a French painter and founder of impressionist painting who is seen as a key precursor to modernism, especially in his attempts to paint nature as he perceived it. During his long career, he was the most consistent and prolific practitioner of impressionism's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to outdoor landscape painting.  In 1899, he began painting the water lilies that would occupy him continuously for the next 20 years of his life.  At his home in Giverny, Monet created the water-lily pond that served as inspiration for his water lilly paintings. Depictions of the water lilies, with alternating light and mirror-like reflections, became an integral part of his work.  By the mid-1910s Monet had achieved "a completely new, fluid, and somewhat audacious style of painting in which the water-lily pond became the point of departure for an almost abstract art.  He would ultimately make over 250 paintings of the Waterlilies.  In 1911, Monet began to develop the first signs of possible cataracts.  In the following years, his perception of color suffered; his broad strokes were broader and his paintings were increasingly darker.  He eventually underwent cataract surgery in 1923.  Now "able to see the real colors", he began to destroy canvases from his pre-operative period.  Upon receiving tinted Zeiss lenses, Monet was pleased with the results, although his left eye soon had to be entirely covered by a black lens. By 1925, his visual impairment was improved and he began to retouch some of his pre-operative works, with bluer water lilies than before.  Monet died of lung cancer on December 5th 1926 at the age of 86.  Although critical acclaim was slow in coming, Monet attracted the dedicated support of collectors throughout his career, most notably from Americans who discovered his work in the 1880s.  Monet's popularity soared in the second half of the 20th century, when his works traveled the world in museum exhibitions that attracted record-breaking crowds and marketed popular commercial items featuring imagery from his art. 
For bamboo flute, shakuhachi, bass quenacho, skiddaw stones, piano, harp, double bass, virtual instruments, sound effects and percussion.

Art Expressed in Music - Monet's Evanescence Feat. Oddrun Eikli

Art Expressed in Music – Goya's Visions
January 2024
Duration: 3:30
Listen to the Playlist: soundcloud.com/bruce-klepper-1/sets/art-expressed-in-music-i
Remix of Córdoba, by Isaac Albéniz, with original composition.
Painting: section of the Pilgrimage to the Fountain of San Isidro (completed 1821 – 1823), painted on the plaster walls of Goya's house and later transferred to canvas.
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (March 30th, 1746 – April 16th, 1828) was a Spanish romantic painter and printmaker  He is considered the most important Spanish artist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.  His paintings, drawings, and engravings reflected contemporary historical upheavals and influenced important 19th and 20th century painters. Goya became a court painter to the Spanish Crown in 1786 and this early portion of his career is marked by portraits of the Spanish aristocracy and royalty.  Although Goya's letters and writings survive, little is known about his thoughts. He had a severe and undiagnosed illness in 1793 that left him deaf, after which his work became progressively darker and pessimistic. His later easel and mural paintings, prints and drawings appear to reflect a bleak outlook on personal, social and political levels.  In 1807, Napoleon led the French army into the Peninsular War against Spain. Goya remained in Madrid during the war, which seems to have affected him deeply. Although he did not speak his thoughts in public, his feelings can be inferred from his “Disasters of War' series of prints.  Other works from his mid-period include the “Caprichos and Los Disparates” etching series, and a wide variety of paintings concerned with insanity, mental asylums, witches, and religious and political corruption.  His late period culminates with the “Black Paintings” of 1819–1823, applied on oil on the plaster walls of his house, the Quinta del Sordo (House of the Deaf Man) where, disillusioned by political and social developments in Spain, he lived in near isolation. Goya eventually abandoned Spain in 1824 to retire to the French city of Bordeaux. Following a stroke that left him paralyzed on his right side, Goya died and was buried on April 16th, 1828 at the age of 82.
For piano, guitar,oboe d'Amore, english horn, heckelphone, bassoon, virtual voices, tubular bells, timpani and percussion.

Art Expressed In Music - Goya's Visions

Art Expressed in Music – El Greco's Passion
February 2024
Duration: 3:00
Listen to the Playlist: soundcloud.com/bruce-klepper-1/sets/art-expressed-in-music-i
Painting: View of Toledo 
Domḗnikos Theotokópoulos (October 1, 1541 –  April 7, 1614) most widely known as El Greco ("The Greek”), was a Greek painter, sculptor and architect of the Spanish Renaissance.  El Greco was born in the Kingdom of Candia (modern Crete).  In 1570, he moved to Rome, where he opened a workshop and executed a series of works. During his stay in Italy, El Greco enriched his style with elements of of the Venetian Renaissanbce.  In 1577, he moved to Toledo Spain, where he lived and worked until his death. In Toledo, El Greco received several major commissions and produced his best-known paintings, such as “View of Toledo”.  At the time, Toledo was the religious capital of Spain and a populous city.  In Toledo, he was the tenant of a complex consisting of three apartments and twenty-four rooms.  It was in these apartments, which also served as his workshop, that he spent the rest of his life, painting and studying. He lived in considerable style, sometimes employing musicians to play whilst he dined.  During the course of the execution of a commission, El Greco fell seriously ill, and died on  April 7th, 1614 at the age of 73.  El Greco's dramatic and expressionistic style was met with puzzlement by his contemporaries, but finally found appreciation in the 20th century.  El Greco is regarded as a precursor of both Expressionism and Cubism; his works were a source of inspiration for painters like Picasso.  He is best known for tortuously elongated figures and often fantastic or phantasmagorical paintings.  El Greco discarded classicist criteria such as measure and proportion. He believed that grace is the supreme quest of art.  El Greco regarded color as the most important and the most ungovernable element of painting, and declared that color had primacy over form.
For strings, piano, trumpet, skiddaw stones, virtual instruments, sound effects and percussion.

Art Expressed In Music - El Greco's Passion

Art Expressed in Music – Renoir's Charm
February 2024
Duration: 3:00
Listen to the Playlist: soundcloud.com/bruce-klepper-1/sets/art-expressed-in-music-i
Painting: Luncheon of the Boating Party 
Remix of “Afternoon in Paris” by John Lewis with original composition 
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (February 25, 1841 to December 3, 1919) was a French painter originally associated with the Impressionist movement. His early works were typically Impressionist snapshots of real life, full of sparkling color and light. By the mid-1880s, however, he had broken with the movement to apply a more disciplined, formal technique to portraits and figure paintings, particularly of women. Renoir mastered the ability to convey his immediate visual impressions, and his paintings showed great vitality, emphasizing the pleasures of life despite the financial worries that troubled him. Several of his masterpieces date from this period including Luncheon of the Boating Party.  Renoir had his first attack of rheumatism in 1894, and, as the attacks became more and more frequent, he spent more and more time in southern France, where the climate was better for his health. About 1899 he sought refuge in the small village of Cagnes; in 1907 he settled there permanently, buying the estate of Les Collettes, where he spent the rest of his life. In 1910 he was no longer able to walk. Although his infirmity became more and more constraining, Renoir never ceased to paint; when his fingers were no longer supple, he continued by binding his paintbrush to his hand.  Several months before his death, Renoir was able to go to Paris, where several friends wheeled him for the last time through the Louvre to view the masterpieces that he had venerated throughout his life. Renoir died in Cagnes-sur-Mer on December 3, 1919 at the age of 78.
For strings, piano, harp, accordion, clarinet, alto flute, sound effects and percussion.

Art Expressed in Music - Renoir's Charm

Art Expressed in Music – Dali's Eccentricity, Feat. Belial Pelegrim
March 2024
Duration: 3:30
Listen to the Playlist: soundcloud.com/bruce-klepper-1/sets/art-expressed-in-music-i
Painting:  The Persistence of Memory
Bruce Klepper: music composition with melting clocks (“soft watches”) and sound effects
Belial Pelegrim: sound design
Listen to Belial's brilliant electronic music: https://soundcloud.com/belial-pelegrim
John-Marc Ventimiglia: tool to create the melting clocks (“soft watches”), gliss and panning tools, Dali sound clips Visit: https://soundcloud.com/john-marc-ventimiglia
Salvador Dalí (May 11, 1904 - January 23, 1989) was a Spanish surrealist artist renowned for his technical skill, precise draftsmanship, and the striking and bizarre images in his work. Born in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain, Dalí received his formal education in fine arts in Madrid. Influenced by Impressionism and the Renaissance masters from a young age he became increasingly attracted to Cubism and avant-garde movements. He moved closer to Surrealism in the late 1920s and joined the Surrealist group in 1929, soon becoming one of its leading exponents. His best-known work, “The Persistence of Memory” was completed in August 1931, and is one of the most famous Surrealist paintings.  “The Persistence of Memory” epitomizes Dalí's theory of "softness" and "hardness", which was central to his thinking at the time. As one art historian wrote: "The soft watches are an unconscious symbol of the relativity of space and time, a Surrealist meditation on the collapse of our notions of a fixed cosmic order". This interpretation suggests that Dalí was incorporating an understanding of the world introduced by Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.  In August 1929, Dalí met his lifelong muse and future wife Gala, who was a Russian immigrant ten years his senior.  Dalí and Gala lived in France throughout the Spanish Civil War (1936 to 1939) before leaving for the United States in 1940 where he achieved commercial success. He returned to Spain in 1948 where he developed his "nuclear mysticism" style, based on his interest in classicism, mysticism, and recent scientific developments. Dalí's artistic repertoire included painting, graphic arts, film, sculpture, design and photography, at times in collaboration with other artists. He also wrote fiction, poetry, autobiography, essays and criticism. Major themes in his work include dreams, the subconscious, sexuality, religion, science and his closest personal relationships. His eccentric and ostentatious public behavior often drew more attention than his artwork. In 1968, Dalí bought a castle in Púbol for Gala, and from 1971 she would retreat there for weeks at a time, Dalí having agreed not to visit without her written permission. His fears of abandonment and estrangement from his longtime artistic muse, Gala, contributed to depression and failing health. In 1980, at the age of 76, Dalí's health deteriorated sharply and he was treated for depression, drug addiction, and Parkinson-like symptoms, including a severe tremor in his right arm. Dali was obsessed with death. Feeling that any every moment he needed to be alive. At the end of his life, he is quoted as saying he was eccentric because he needed to show that he was alive as versus his brother who died very young and his family always referred to him as his brother. On the morning of January 23, 1989, Dalí died of cardiac arrest at the age of 84. He is buried in the crypt below the stage of his Theatre- Museum in Figueres. 
For strings, flute, trumpet, trombone, virtual instruments, sound effects and percussion.

Art Expressed In Music - Dali's Eccentricity, Feat. Belial Pelegrim

Art Expressed in Music – Picasso's Brilliance
March 2024
Duration: 3:05
Listen to the Playlist: soundcloud.com/bruce-klepper-1/sets/art-expressed-in-music-i
Painting: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon 
John-Marc Ventimiglia: jagged shards sound effects 
Visit: @john-marc-ventimiglia
Pablo Picasso (October 25, 1881 to April 8, 1973) was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most-influential artists of the 20th century.  The enormous body of Picasso’s work remains, and the legend lives on—a tribute to the vitality of the “disquieting” Spaniard with the “sombre…piercing” eyes who superstitiously believed that work would keep him alive.  Picasso's output, especially in his early career, is often periodized.  The most commonly accepted periods in his work are the Blue Period (1901–1904), the Rose Period (1904–1906), the African-influenced Period (1907–1909), Analytic Cubism (1909–1912), Synthetic Cubism (1912–1919), Neoclassicism to Surrealism (1921-1937) and Post-War Work (1937 – 1970s).  Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, from his African–influenced period, marks a radical break from traditional composition and perspective in painting. It depicts five naked women composed of flat, splintered planes whose faces were inspired by Iberian sculpture and African masks. The compressed space they inhabit appears to project forward in jagged shards.  Picasso unveiled this monumental painting, that precursors Cubism, in his Paris studio after months of revision.  Picasso said the ethnic primitivism evoked in these masks moved him to "liberate an utterly original artistic style”.  The Avignon of the work’s title is a reference to a street in Barcelona famed for its brothels.  Exceptionally prolific throughout the course of his long life, Picasso achieved universal renown and immense fortune for his revolutionary artistic accomplishments, and became one of the best-known figures in 20th-century art.  Picasso died on April 8, 1973, at the age of 91, from heart failure, reportedly while he and his wife Jacqueline were entertaining friends for dinner.  Considered radical in his work, Picasso continues to garner reverence for his technical mastery, visionary creativity; paralleling the entire development of modern art in the 20th century.
For morin khuur violin, dudek, bansuri, bamboo flute, hecklephone, bassoon, kalimba, marimba, double bass, ethnic percussion and jagged shards sound effects

Art Expressed In Music - Picasso's Brilliance

Art Expressed in Music – Leonardo's Genius	
April 2024
Duration: 3:30
Listen to the Playlist: soundcloud.com/bruce-klepper-1/sets/art-expressed-in-music-i
Painting: Mona Lisa
Leonardo da Vinci (April 15, 1452 to May 2, 1519) was an Italian painter, draftsman, sculptor, architect, and engineer.  His “Last Supper” and “Mona Lisa” are among the most widely popular and influential paintings of the Renaissance.  His notebooks reveal a spirit of scientific inquiry and a mechanical inventiveness that were centuries ahead of their time. He is renowned in the fields of civil engineering, chemistry, geology,  hydrodynamics, mathematics, mechanical engineering, optics, physics and zoology.  As an engineer, Leonardo conceived ideas vastly ahead of his own time, conceptually inventing the parachute, the helicopter, an armored fighting vehicle, and the use of concentrated solar power. The unique fame that Leonardo enjoyed in his lifetime has remained undimmed to the present day rests largely on his unlimited desire for knowledge, which guided all his thinking and behavior.  As an artist, Leonardo considered his eyes to be his main avenue to knowledge; to Leonardo, sight was man’s highest sense because it alone conveyed the facts of experience immediately, correctly, and with certainty.  He used his superb intellect, unusual powers of observation, and mastery of the art of drawing to study nature itself, a line of inquiry that allowed his dual pursuits of art and science to flourish.  In Florence between 1500 and 1506, Leonardo began work on the “Mona Lisa”.  The “Mona Lisa” set the standard for all future portraits. The painting presents a woman revealed to likely have been Lisa del Giocondo, the wife of the Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocond.  The picture presents a half-body portrait of the subject, with a distant landscape visible as a backdrop; the expressive synthesis that Leonardo achieved between sitter and landscape has placed this work in the canon of the most-popular and most-analyzed paintings of all time. The sensuous curves of the woman’s hair and clothing, are echoed in the undulating valleys and rivers behind her. The sense of overall harmony achieved in the painting—especially apparent in the sitter’s faint smile—reflects Leonardo’s idea of the link connecting humanity and nature, making this painting an enduring record of Leonardo’s vision and genius.  In 1517, a drawing by Giovanni Ambrogio Figino depicted an elderly Leonardo with his right arm wrapped in clothing. The latter, in addition to the record of an October 1517 visit by Louis d'Aragon, confirms an account of Leonardo's right hand being paralytic when he was 65, which may indicate why he left works such as the “Mona Lisa” unfinished.  He continued to work at some capacity until eventually becoming ill and bedridden for several months.  Leonardo only produced about 20 paintings in his lifetime. It is estimated that Leonardo produced between 20,000 to 28,000 pages of notes and sketches spanning across 50 different notebooks about work related to whatever topics that interested him – painting, engineering, philosophy, warfare, engineering, physiology, landscape, proportion, perspective, geography, and geology.... Unfortunately, Leonardo's interests were so broad, and he was so often compelled by new subjects, that he usually left projects unfinished.  Leonardo died at Clos Lucé on 2 May 1519 at the age of 67, possibly of a stroke.   Leonardo was described as lamenting on his deathbed, full of repentance, that "he had offended against God and men by failing to practice his art as he should have done”. 
For virtual voices, piano, marimba, tubular bells, virtual instruments, sound effects and percussion.

Art Expressed In Music - Leonardo's Genius

Mysterious, Magical, Music is Wonderful!  Thanks for visiting!  Please feel free to share my music.  Enjoy!

Bruce Klepper is a Colorado based composer with thousands of listeners worldwide. Klepper studied music composition in the 1970's and received a degree in music composition and theory.  After writing music for many years and starting a tech company based in Colorado, Klepper retired in 2014 from business so he could devote myself to his true passion, composing music. Klepper's music premiered in Carnegie Hall, September 2022.  Klepper writes music in a number of different styles, including contemporary classical music, jazz, soundscapes using field recordings, ambient music, and ballet music.  Klepper has been composing music for Danse Etoile Ballet (www.danseetoile.org) since 2016. Klepper has been collaborating with Parlando School of Musical Arts (www.parlando.org) faculty Britta De Groot and Sergei Govorov for over a year now, composing and arranging new music for the dynamic piano and saxophone duo to premier around the United States. Klepper's music can be heard on all major streaming platforms, including Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, and SoundCloud. 

NOTE: there is no compression added to the tracks in order to preserve the full range of dynamics. You may want to listen with headphones or increase the volume on some tracks for the best listening experience.

Art Expressed in Music

Bruce Klepper | Composer