If music be the food of love, play on...

Who is Sylvia? What is she

That all her swains commend her?

Lovely, fair and wise is she,

The heaven such grace should render

That ador-ed she might be,

That ador-ed she might be

Sylvia is not the young lady in my painting, but the girl that Shakespeare's Gentlemen of Verona waxed lyrical about and Schubert set to music. Nevertheless, my models can claim similar attributes. 

In the context of this post Sylvia takes me back to school music lessons in the 1950's. There was a problem with my class's rendition and I was the culprit. I was singing out of tune and out of time and the music teacher told me to stand silently to one side. My fledgling interest in music was quelled there and then. And it may have remained unfulfilled for the rest of my life had I not discovered jazz in my teens - a music in which key changes and timing are judged differently. 

Fortunately a teacher in my primary school days encouraged my flair for art. Rather than putting me down for not painting the subject the way the class had been instructed, she declared the result brilliant and prophesized that one day I would be an artist.

As I said in my blog post "On the spur of the moment" there are similarities between my kind of jazz and my way of painting. In his book The Making of Jazz, James Lincoln Collier has this to say on the subject of key changes and time schemes:

If it seems complicated, it is. Jazz is not a simple music. It is the necessity for reproducing the effects as the ones I have described that makes it so difficult to teach, so difficult to learn. Of the tens of thousands who have attempted to play it, not one in a hundred or so have ever done it supremely well. It is a demanding art form indeed.

Returning to Shakespeare; jazz singer Cleo Laine made an album in 1964 titled Shakespeare and all that Jazz. Here she is on the track from that LP, If Music be the Food of Love.

And music being the food of love brings me to a question recently asked by one of my daughters: which has meant most to you in life, romance or painting? My answer: They are one of the same.