Mikhail Piotrovsky: “You can always imagine music through pictures”

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Museums play an enormous, if not the primary, role in our life. Museums are the most democratic cultural institutions because we have things that we can tell about to people of all levels of education. Museums preserve memory and thrust it upon us: the memory of the nation, of humanity (it is what sets humans apart from the animals, apart from the plants) and turn that memory into a sort of dialogue of cultures, although memory can also be the grounds for hatred of one another, as is often the case.

Museums educate and cultivate visitors. Museums need visitors, but that is only a part of what museums exist for. Museums are not there to entertain. Museums are there to teach. But to do that they have to collect, study, dissect, to create the product that then nurtures the humanity in people.

Museums have a distinctive feature: we speak in very many tongues. Broadly speaking, a museum is a have of the muses, a temple of the muses. There are many muses and from time to time museums suddenly welcome them all. There are times like that. We are in one right now. All the muses are our guests.

Music is present with us in great quantities because music and art flow one into another. A composer’s might look as beautiful, while one can appreciate a painting by imagining the music that might be heard. You can always imagine music through pictures. There are very many different means of using music in an almost utilitarian way to gain greater pleasure from contact with art, not to speak of the fact that music is a part of the artistic world in which we live and which should always exist above the everyday world, which is not always beautiful. The world of art is always beautiful.

The museum communicates with various media: television and radio, including music radio. Together with Radio Orfei we make a special programme that specifically tries (in my opinion successfully) to transform artistic images through the word into music, through music into the word. It sees to me that this is very up-to-date: radio, sound broadcasting, the translation of art objects into the language of music. In each era that language is completely different. In his time Mussorgsky translated his Pictures at an Exhibition; today there are very different exhibitions, different pictures and different music.