Iacobus Leodiensis [Iacobus de Montibus, Iacobus de Oudenaerde]

II. Sources

Any document that visualizes music either concretely or abstractly is an artist's reflection on music and hence an object for iconography. The material ranges from photographs to figurative and abstract art; it can be an illustration of a text, or an image stemming from an orally transmitted story, or it may lack any textual base. One step further removed are decorations of musical instruments and the musical instrument as an image; stage decorations for musical theatre; the design of places and buildings where music is performed; the photo of a composer's studio and so on. A special case are pictures inspiring musicians to programmatic compositions. Finally, the study of synaesthetical concepts governing both music and the visual arts are also sometimes considered as belonging to the field of musical iconography.

Every culture provides us with sources of various types. The individual mix depends very much on the place the two arts have in a particular cultural system: their role in religion, their social importance and their relationship to a literate, semi-literate or non-literate tradition.

1. Manuscript and book illustration.

2. Pictures with no direct textual base.

3. The single picture.

4. Instruments.

5. Stage decorations, record jackets.

6. Contextual sources: performance sites.

7. Music after pictures.

Iconography, §II: Sources

1. Manuscript and book illustration.

The typical procedure for producing an illustrated text begins with decisions about the overall design and the placement of text, musical notation (where given) and picture (Seebass, B1987). When the scribe has written his part, he hands the manuscript to the music scribe, and finally the illustrator takes over. It would be wrong to assume that the illustrator always fully understands the text. Often he is guided by any surrounding music, but if the music mentioned in the text has no equivalent in the painter's everyday world, he may cling to the text at the expense of visual coherence or feasibility, or may take his picture, partly or entirely, from another visual source – a model book or a woodcut, either by tracing through from an earlier manuscript or free copying.

A fascinating example is the illustration of Virdung's Musica getutscht, the product of a collaboration between the author (Sebastian Virdung), the publisher (Michael Furter, who decided how much decoration he could afford, hired typesetters and woodcutters and was responsible for the lay-out) and the main illustrator (Urs Graf, artist and mercenary). Virdung furnished some pictures of instruments from other books (such as the Dance of Death cycle) and sketches. Graf made only two sketches, a lutenist and two hands pulling strings, both technically challenging. The main work rested with the woodcutter who transformed these and other models into drawings and transferred them to the woodblock. With the typesetter, he arranged them together with the borders, which Furter had in stock in his print shop. The illustrations are thus a fairly heterogeneous compilation, while the text is laid out straightforwardly.

For a classification of such sources the nature of the text provides a natural criterion, distinguishing illustrations for treatises in music theory from illustrations of narratives that mention music-making.

(i) Theoretical texts.

The woodcuts in Virdung's treatise remind the reader of what he has seen and heard on various musical occasions; they are not very lucid for anyone with more detailed knowledge. But illustrators can go much further as far as details are concerned if the purpose is not merely to serve as an aide mémoire but to explain construction (even indicating scales, as in Praetorius's organography) and acoustical aspects: they may complement the text and enable the reader to build the instrument or better understand sound production.

Of another kind are illustrations that embody symbolical or numerological meanings of musical scales and instruments. They integrate concepts of their sister arts, arithmetics, geometry and astronomy, and transform schemes into figurae, visual symbols with spiritual power and emblematic quality (Seebass, B1987; van Deusen, 1989). The most prominent examples are the illustrations of the Carolingian treatise ‘Cogor, ut te, Dardane’ (Hammerstein, F1959) copied for over 500 years, and the illustrations of Isidore of Seville's treatise on musical instruments (I-Tn R 454, olim D III 19 ff.33v–34v).

(ii) Narrative and synthesis.

Byzantinists describing, identifying and classifying illustrated manuscripts differentiate significantly between continuous illustrations that are action-orientated (a practice in monastic redactions of Byzantine psalters) and illustrations that condense events, represent and interpret them in a christological and teleological fashion (aristocratic redaction in Constantinople). While the former are close to the text, with the miniatures typically placed in the margin, the latter interrupt the text across the columns or are placed on an extra page.

This differentiation also applies to manuscript illustration elsewhere, and is important to musical iconography in particular. Pictures of the synthesizing type may be complex constructions produced by multiple exegesis. Compiling various meanings into one image, artists apply two or more of the four doctrines of scriptural meaning, sensus literalis, sensus allegoricus, sensus tropologicus and sensus anagogicus. For example, in the literal sense, the figure of David is the musician in his various roles according to the story (shepherd, court musician, composer-performer of psalms, founder of the liturgy in the Temple). In the allegorical sense, he is the precursor of Christ and the founder of Christian liturgy, accompanied by his four liturgists (Asaph, Eman, Ethan and Idithun) as precursors of the four evangelists. In the tropological sense, he is the model musician, knowledgeable in music theory and modality (musicus) and the perfect singer (cantor). In the anagogical sense he is the leader for singing the celestial Alleluia. An example is the famous drawing at the beginning of the Cambridge Psalter (GB-Cjc B 18, f.1, early 12th century; Seebass, Musikdarstellung, E1973, pl.111) or the miniature illustrating Psalm cl in the Stuttgart Psalter (D-Slv bibl. f.23, f.163v, c830; Seebass, Musikdarstellung, E1973, pl.93).

The smallest version of the second type of illustration are figurative initials for the different sections of a text. One degree higher are larger images covering the content of chapters, and a further degree higher are illustrated title pages and frontispieces (the verso of the leaf preceding the title (‘looking at the title’). Here the content and meaning of the images extend to the most relevant aspects of the succeeding chapter or to the significance of the book as a whole. A famous example of a full-page miniature carrying meaning beyond the textual content of the following pages is the frontispiece of a manuscript of Notre Dame polyphony (I-Fl plut.XIX.27), organized according to music-theoretical principles with figurative initials in which little scenes illustrate the song texts. The miniature is unrelated to them: instead it displays the Boethian threefold system of cosmic, terrestrial, and acoustical harmony, suggesting that the manuscripts should be understood as a symbol of human effort to emulate and prove concepts of divine harmony.

The idea of a marginal narrative illustration can also be seen at work in narrative frescoes and tapestries, while the synthetical illustration has a parallel in autonomous panel painting. Finally, the semantic richness of an illustrated manuscript or book may also include the decorative element in the form of geometrical or ornamental designs and the drôlerie in the margin.

Iconography, §II: Sources

2. Pictures with no direct textual base.

This category embraces figurative friezes, frescoes and tapestries. Once the textual ‘support’ is absent, the pictorial genre will change: the context is not textual in the literal sense and the reader is replaced by the onlooker. Tapestries, friezes on vase paintings and frescoes on the walls of temples and churches are not meant only for literati and require a different technique of conveying content. Some of these frescoes do in fact tell stories, either already known to the onlooker or to be explained by an expert guide. They presuppose a text (sometimes providing hints by inserted short inscriptions or bands with texts) and in this respect can be analysed almost like illustrations. Some of them are narrative in character, for example some of the music scenes on Greek vase paintings of the classical period telling us about myths and rituals; others are more programmatic, such as the tympana of Romanesque and Gothic churches with the 24 Elders of the Apocalypse praising the Lord with their instruments, or the Buddhist paradise where musicians and dancers perform before the Buddha (cave paintings of Dunhuang in west China or reliefs at the upper level of the temple of Borobudur, Central Java). The group of viewers for which a picture is created has a decisive influence on the mode of depiction. Equally important is the homiletic essence of the theme. At Borobudur, the reliefs at the lower level tell stories taking place in the sinful world and represent music scenes involving the local Javanese population; the reliefs at the higher level represent music in a paradise modelled after South Asian court fashion.

A rare case of a narrative fresco is the Beethovenfries painted by Gustav Klimt in the Secession building in Vienna. It illustrates and interprets a musical text – Beethoven's Ninth Symphony – requiring the spectator to recall the structual layout and content of the movements in succession while walking along the frieze. When the visitor turns to the last wall, Max Klinger's statue of Beethoven, in the centre of the adjacent room, comes into view, remaining in sight until he or she reaches the end of the frieze and the final chorus of the finale.

Iconography, §II: Sources

3. The single picture.

The most widely spread category of sources is the single picture, including paintings, sculptures and photographs. Occasionally it is extracted, with little change from a series of pictures and can be identified and analysed accordingly. But by far the most frequent case is the autonomous image. It must be analysed with the cultural context and pictorial tradition in mind, but on its own terms. If its content is related to music, it requires in addition an understanding of the musical culture at the time of its making, particularly of aesthetics, since these will shape the artist's horizon as much as the visible side of musical performance. With a subject matter as invisible as sound the process of its transformation into an image is complex. How this transformation is achieved depends on the theme and the medium. A devotional oil painting of St Cecilia would be on the abstract side, and so would a woodcut of an emblem. By contrast, a banquet scene with musical entertainment on a silk screen is to be understood in real terms (see also §§III–IV below).

Iconography, §II: Sources

4. Instruments.

For most cultures, musical instruments are not just tools that increase human ability to produce sound; they also possess an animistic component. Curt Sachs (J1929) was the first to point out that they were icons or musical spirits given concrete form. To emphasize this link they are often endowed with anthropomorphic elements, such as body outlines, facial features, sex organs. Where they belong to animal cults they may take on zoomorphic elements. Four examples may serve as illustration. First, there exist bowed instruments that show visual and terminological links to North Asian horse cults (Tsuge, J1976). Secondly, certain Latin American Indians wear zoomorphic clay whistles as charms and play them to evoke the spirit of the protecting animal (Olsen, J1986). Thirdly, a Beneventan double flute from the early 20th century, made from a single piece of wood but simulating two flutes bound together (fig.1), has an anthropomorphic appearance with the two air holes at the wedges suggesting the eyes, and the lowest part of the pipes (separated from each other) the feet. The flute is used as a wedding gift and the decorative carving in the central band shows a couple, man and woman, standing for the left and right pipes which are tuned a 3rd apart and called male and female; below, a larger hermaphrodite is shown between the two pipes. Thus the instrument both by its shape and by its decoration incorporates the idea of unification of male and female, also realized by the dyophonic playing (Guizzi, B1990). Lastly, a phallic slit drum, belonging to a village chief in Lombok (Indonesia), was positioned vertically and had the shape of a fish with its head bearing hermaphroditic elements; when it was played at a fertility ritual, the act symbolized the fruitful marriage between the chief and the village (Meyer, J1939).

In many cultures instrument makers do not stop at the level of functionality when they build instruments but invest additional labour and cost in decorating them with pictures, thus increasing their value. Sometimes the decoration has no figurative content and simply beautifies the object, such as the prospect of an organ, the burnt-in decorations of a Balinese suling or an East African mbira, or the intarsia of a music table. Sometimes the decoration has ritual or magic purposes and supports the ceremony performed with the instrument. Examples include Van Eyck's painted organ shutters (Ghent, St Bavo), Lucca della Robbia's balcony for the cantoria (Florence, Museo del'Opera de Duomo), with the reliefs illustrating music-making according to Psalm cl, or the cosmos painted on the shaman's drum showing the upper, central and nether worlds through which the shaman travels during his performance in search of spirits (Emsheimer, J1988). Sometimes the purpose is to heighten the prestige of the owner or to add visual pleasures to the aural ones during the performance, as is the case with painted harpsichord lids. The subject matter of such pictures reaches from concrete musical scenes to social or spiritual symbolism.

Iconography, §II: Sources

5. Stage decorations, record jackets.

One step removed from direct reference are the decorations and costumes for dance drama and musical theatre. Sometimes it is impossible to distinguish them from the stage decoration for theatre plays. But there is a difference between the texts of regular plays and opera librettos: libretto texts do not exhaust the subject but rather provide a dramatic and lyric frame for the composer. With the content of opera thus depending on both text and music, the visual component will also derive its purpose, style and subject matter from the music.

The character of stage decorations cannot be defined for the entire history of musical theatre. Sometimes it is a work of art in its own right; sometimes it has an auxiliary function like applied art for providing no more than a backdrop or platform for the dramatic action. Sometimes it is closely wedded to music and text, as in Richard Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk. Sometimes it may add a further dimension to the content of music and text, as in the stage decorations that Schoenberg designed for his works and in the collaborative productions in Paris among Satie, Cocteau and Picasso (Parade, 1917) or Stravinsky's ballets.

Conceptually, the art of jackets for recordings belong to the same category. Here the thematic possibilities are innumerable and reach from historied pictures of performances and musicians' portraits to visual emulations of the structural, emotional, social or political content of the music.

Iconography, §II: Sources

6. Contextual sources: performance sites.

Places of ritual activity are not chosen by chance; ritual music is embedded in the visual and spiritual ambience of the site. Of course, in principle the spatial requirements of the ritual take precedence over musical ones. But, as long as the performance requirements are not in conflict with more important considerations, they will be observed so as to make the acoustical conditions, the space for dancing and the placement of musicians as favourable as possible. The more the purpose of the event shifts from the sacred towards the secular, the more music and dance will be the primary aspect of the event and will dictate the setting. Concert halls, opera houses, ballrooms, and music pavilions provide the opportunity for architects and engineers to combine functional criteria with aesthetic ones; they are among the most neglected objects of music-iconographical research. (For harmonic proportions in the other arts, see below, §III, 5.)

As to the interior decorations of rooms in which music is performed, the most prominent instance of a music room in Western culture with completely integrated decoration is the studiolo of the Italian Renaissance. Musical instruments and music books are represented in intarsia technique together with bookcases and other symbols of learning and the sophisticated use of leisure. A visual element in every music room is the musical instrument itself, be it the upright piano in the 19th-century bourgeois household or the qin suspended on the wall of a Chinese scholar's study.

A very popular type of book is the illustrated biography of a composer that displays a hotch-potch of visualia with rarely any discrimination, let alone any iconographical commentary. Nevertheless, in as far as the visual environment of a musician shapes his or her personality, and as far as it influences the users of the book, it is relevant for a psychogram of the musician and for reception history.

Iconography, §II: Sources

7. Music after pictures.

The increasing interest of 19th-century European artists in synaesthetic experiences led to the search for inspiration from outside the original medium. In music the result is the cultivation of programme music with literary themes as the main source and paintings an additional one (see Programme music, §2). Liszt used both media as an inspiration for his compositions.

His Totentanz (for piano and orchestra, 1839–65) drew from the dance of death cycles and the 14th-century painting Triumph of Death in the Camposanto of Pisa. His Hunnenschlacht for two pianos was inspired by the painting of that title by Wilhelm von Kaulbach (1856–7). Together with Dionys Brucker he played it in front of the picture.

The popularity of musical ideas derived from the visual arts decreased early in the 20th century – just at the time when a new artistic medium, film, made its appearance. The successor of music after paintings was film music, which in turn was replaced by composition for the sound track of films (see Film music).

Iconography