David Hockney Road Trip with Audio

 

“Pacific Coast Highway and Santa Monica” (1990), from a series of paintings replicating vistas from the Malibu drives.

Alex Ross writes about a cool project David Hockney project (maybe an "artwork," Ross considers) in the New Yorker.   This project involves making a soundtrack (mostly Wagner) that is cued to a precise driving route through foothills and mountains and timed to start to watch the sun set over the ocean from a specific place.

On a crisp afternoon in December, a friend and I sat in an idling car at the corner of Las Flores Canyon Road and the Pacific Coast Highway, in Malibu, preparing to witness a performance of “Wagner Drive,” a large-scale audiovisual work by the artist David Hockney. We were the sole audience for the piece, and also its executants. My friend drove; I operated the stereo. When the clock read 4:09 p.m.—forty minutes before sunset—I hit Play on the sequence of recordings that Hockney has specified for the event.

There are actually three Wagner drives: the Malibu Canyon route; a more extended traversal of the Santa Monica Mountains, which involves going up Kanan Dume Road; and an excursion in the San Gabriel Mountains, well to the east, which is closer to Hockney’s principal Los Angeles home, in the Hollywood Hills. Until recently, the capacity to perform “Wagner Drive” rested exclusively with Hockney, but in 2016 the art historian Arthur Kolat completed a master’s thesis on the subject, in the course of which he interviewed Hockney and codified directions and musical cues for the drives. Kolat passed them on to me, and this past summer I started trying them out. These adventures had the virtue of adhering to even the strictest pandemic-era restrictions: I could attend performances without leaving my car.

What a great project -- whether it was officially "artwork" or not.   It reminds me of road trips I've taken when then landscape that goes by just seems to be aligned to the music.

Here are the directions from Alex Ross's blog:

Below are directions for the first of David Hockney's Wagner Drives, the Malibu Canyon version. The Adrian Boult recordings that Hockney used are not easily available, but substitutes with similar timings are suggested below.

1. Begin at the corner of Las Flores Canyon Road and Pacific Coast Highway. Play "America" from West Side Story. Repeat if necessary until step 2.

2. Turn right onto Malibu Canyon Road. Play "The Entrance of the Gods into Valhalla" from Das Rheingold, duration 8:49. Suggested recording: Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Simón Bolivar Symphony Orchestra (DG).

3. Turn right onto Piuma Road; after 6.4 miles, continue briefly onto Rambla Pacifico. Play the Prelude to Act I of Parsifal, duration 12:45. Suggested recording: Georg Solti conducting the Vienna Philharmonic (Decca).

4. Turn left onto Las Flores Canyon Road and return to the PCH. Siegfried's Funeral Music from Götterdämmerung, duration 8:14, should be beginning at about this time. Suggested recording: Gustavo Dudamel / Simón Bolivar (DG).

The Kanan Dume drive is more difficult to replicate, but I've traced the route on Google Maps. The playlist is: "America," "Blue Danube" Waltz, Entrance of the Gods (at the turn onto Kanan Dume), Parsifal Act I Prelude, Parsifal Act I Transformation music, Parsifal Good Friday music, Siegfried's Funeral Music, Parsifal Act I Prelude.

Directions for the San Gabriel drive are here. The playlist is: three Sousa marches (Hands Across the Sea, The Thunderer, The Belle of Chicago), Entrance of the Gods, first movement of Schumann's "Rhenish" Symphony, Parsifal Act I Prelude, second movement of the "Rhenish," Sousa's Liberty Bell march.

Much thanks to Arthur Kolat for making these expeditions possible. His excellent thesis Twilight of the Roads can be found at Academia.edu.