Symposium on the Psychology of Music and Painting: W. Gillies Whittaker, William O. Hutchinson and R. W. Pickford. The Brit. J. of Psychology, XXXIII, 1942, Part 1.

The symposium consists of four parts: the first part, Introduction, by R. W. Pickford, describes the investigative method used. It consists in the answers of two artists, Professor Whittaker, a composer, and Mr. Hutchinson, a painter, to a questionnaire centered around four problems: (1) objective conditions, (2) subjective conditions, (3) mode of inspiration and (4) technique and convention. The second part, Musical Inspiration, contains Professor Whittaker's answers, the third, Pictorial Inspiration, Mr. Hutchinson's. The fourth chapter, Conclusion, is drawn by Pickford.

The conclusions are in brief that the creative artist is influenced by his environment, that music is greatly indebted to folk songs as a source of ideas, and that the true artist cannot divorce himself from his social existence. Neither artist is able to describe his creative processes very adequately, since words are not his primary medium of expression. From this Pickford draws the conclusion that the composer is one who thinks, feels and constructs in terms of music, the artist in terms of paint or pencil and canvas or paper. Neither is able to name the source of his inspiration definitively. It seems to begin in a vague form, is emotionally exciting, and tends to expand partly through the individual's allowing himself to become saturated in it, and partly through his efforts to work out the final product in detail by successive steps. These conclusions show the necessarily poor result of a symposium based on the clumsy and macroscopic method of a questionnaire answered by artists.