DUET

A visual journey through sound.

Chan, a classically trained musician and art historian, offers an “insight into the sheer variety of ways the visual has been integral to music throughout history.” She goes back 12,000 years to Western European caves covered with paintings to discuss how people made sounds of running bulls using shells and other items, creating the first music venues. Impressionist Edgar Degas “was fascinated, throughout his life, by what it meant to depict music.” Serge Diaghliev and his Ballets Russes married art and music in ballet, transforming “what music looked and sounded like.” The painting Four Children Making Music (ca. 1565) changed “how people think about English musical culture and how music travelled.” The author nicely uses the movie Frozen to explain how music can be magically made into something we can see with our eyes, to fix sound into something tangible—which leads to a discussion of Hildegard von Bingen and Fanny Hensel Mendelssohn and their invention of new ways of writing music. Guido, a medieval Benedictine monk, may have used his hand and finger joints to “memorise pitch space—the intervals between notes.” It was music, generated by image, guiding sound. Chan revisits her past and the English choral tradition as she celebrates the importance of the hymnbook and The Whole Booke of Psalmes in particular, which “changed what music looked like and how it was fantasised, forever.” Printed sheet music—“music as a visible, visual phenomenon”—soon followed, and later still, sheet music as art itself. Next up are musical instruments as art objects, especially flutes, which Chan played, briefly. She concludes by discussing some favorite artists who rethought the way we conceptualize music, including Levina Teerlinc’s painting An Elizabethan Maundy from the 1560s to Aubrey Williams’ 1981 painting Shostakovich Symphony No. 6 and Toko Shinoda’s visualized music lithograph Duet (1955).

A perky, enthusiastic foray into the overlap of music, art, and history.