Representing Music-Making

Abstract

That an image of musical performance can evoke within us a sense of the sonorous, even a sense of movement and the tactile, is a truism whose significance is both highlighted and obscured by the temptation to search for poetic metaphors. While rhetorical devices are significant in themselves as forms of expression, what is of particular interest for the purpose of this chapter is that they are deeply suggestive of the importance of images in our responses to, and engagement with, music. For the scholar, visual representations of music making offer a vast repository for researching the role of music in society, the history of performance practices, and the interconnections between music and visual culture. Representations of music making date back well into ancient history, and their study has been a major concern of the relatively recent discipline of music iconography that emerged during the twentieth century. Most often, this concern was related to researching historical performance practices, and research by significant figures such as Emanuel Winternitz still stands today as a major contribution to the field. Wintemitz's Musical Instruments and Their Symbolism in Western Art (1967) remains highly recommended reading for anyone seeking some erudite and cautionary case studies in how instruments were used in art. Richard Leppert's 1979 article published in Early Music is a landmark in scholarship into representations of music,making, and from around the early 1980s scholars such as Leppert argued for the role of musical images in understanding wider socio-cultural issues. Today, it is surely a reasonable expectation that any scholar attempting a study of musical imagery should display a sound understanding of broader social context as well as facility in visual analysis and depth of relevant musical knowledge.