Eye music

As eyes Music is purely optical phenomena referred to in the notation of a composition that carry symbolic meaning.

Definition of terms

In many cases it is difficult to distinguish between eye music and word painting. Word painting can often be grasped both optically and acoustically, whereas eye music is only directly accessible to the eye. As a typical example of word painting, one can use a descending melody on the word "fall" or an ascending melody on the word "resurrection": this is something that can be heard and seen in equal measure. In contrast, a typical example of eye music would be the use of black noteheads on the words "night", "dark" or "death": something that cannot be heard, but only seen.

Eye music is more abstract and contextual than word painting. A love song is not written in a heart shape because the word "heart" appears in the text, but because in our culture the heart is a symbol for love. In contrast to this, word painting always refers to the specific words occurring in the text and is context-independent: melodic undulations on the text "the surging sea" can be understood by everyone, regardless of which culture they belong to. They just describe the concrete word with musical tones.

There are also examples of optical features in the musical text that are not to be regarded as eye music. The complex cross rhythms of the English virginalists are intended for the eye rather than the ear, but have little or no symbolic meaning. Side notes for the performer, such as those found in scores by Eric Satie , are just as little eye music as they do not use the vocabulary of musical symbols.

history

Baude Cordier : Belle, Bonne, Sage

The heart-shaped notation of a rondeau by the French composer Baude Cordier at the beginning of the 15th century is one of the first surviving examples of eye music. Since it is a love song, the heart shape has a symbolic meaning.

Eye music can also be found among the Franco-Flemish composers of the early Renaissance . The most famous composer of this age is Josquin Desprez . His lamentation on the death of the composer Ockeghem , nymphes des bois , as well as the motet absolve, quaesumus, domine , which was composed for the late composer Jacob Obrecht , and the Proch dolor , also attributed to Josquin, have come down to us exclusively in black notation. The color black refers to a reality outside the text: without the word black being included in the text, the black color is identified with the term death in the context of the Christian understanding of faith.

Similarly, for Franco-Flemish composers, the number of voices became symbolic. The number seven in the Bible often stands for Shiv'a , the seven-day period of mourning. So Joseph organizes a seven-day funeral service for his father ( Gen 50.10  EU ), the house of Israel mourns Judit for seven days ( Jdt 16.24  EU ). Seven voices as a sign of mourning can be found, for example, in the aforementioned Proch dolor Josquins and the Nänie for Kaiser Vaet by Jakob Regnart . Another example of symbolic meaning in the number of voices are the often seven-part compositions about the seven sorrows of Mary .

Eye music is found even more frequently in the Italian madrigals of the middle and late Renaissance : composers such as Adrian Willaert , Palestrina , Giaches de Wert , Giovanni Gabrieli and Marenzio used it often and with pleasure, whereas Cipriano de Rore and Orlando di Lasso were critical of it.

There are also prominent examples in the Baroque period , including those of Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Philipp Telemann .

JS Bach : I would like to carry the cross staff (excerpt from the cantata of the same name ). The sign of the cross, which Bach almost always uses stereotypically as soon as the word cross appears in the text , is an example of eye music in the Baroque era.

Finally, in the 20th and 21st centuries, many composers and artists took up the visuality of musical notation and designed it as an independent aesthetic. Examples include works by John Cage , who also published the book Notations , the complex scores of Sylvano Bussotti or the conceptual-minimalist notation graphics by Johannes Kreidler .

It is not always clear whether the notes still represent actual scores, according to which music can or should be played, or whether they are purely visual works. The punch line sometimes lies in the fact that even notes that cannot actually be performed are still “imaginary music”, as Tom Johnson called such a series.

criticism

Eye music is to be seen as a musical fringe phenomenon and mannerism . It was only widely used by the madrigalists in Italy. Vincenzo Galilei takes a critical stance on it in his dialogo della musica antica et della moderna of 1581, calling it a mere pleasure for the eyes ( ... il diletto che da essi si trae, è tutto della vista ). Alfred Einstein describes it in his work The italian Madrigal as the most exaggerated and (for our aesthetic sensibility) cruelest testimony to naturalism, the imitazione, in the Madrigal (the most extreme and (for our aestethic convictions) most horrible testimony of naturalism, of imitazione, in the madrigal). In the eye music of the 16th century he sees an early, childish state of aesthetic development.

Eye music in the madrigal of the Renaissance was intended for singers and performers, not for listeners, who could not grasp this phenomenon because they did not have the musical text. The purpose of the eyes music was thus in large part in it, the artist, the mood of the music piece to keep in mind and to support them in this way in their interpretation.

literature

• Article eye music . In: Brockhaus Riemann Musiklexikon, Schott, 3rd edition 1995.
• Thurston Dart: eye music . In: New Grove, Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Volume 8, pp. 482-483.
• Tim Carter: Word painting . In: New Grove, Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Volume 27, pp. 563-564.
• Willem Elders: sign and symbol in the old Dutch mortuary lament . In: Signs and Structure in Renaissance Music, A symposium on the occasion of the annual conference of the Society for Music Research Münster (Westphalia), 1987, pp. 27–46.
• Alfred Einstein, The italian Madrigal, translated by Alexander H. Krappe, Roger H. Sessions and Oliver Strunk, Volume 1, Princeton University Press, 1949, pp. 234–245.
• Sabine Schmidt: Hanging sounds . Essay, online .

References

1. ^ Alfred Einstein, The italian Madrigal, translated by Alexander H. Krappe, Roger H. Sessions and Oliver Strunk, Volume 1, Princeton University Press, 1949, p. 238.
2. ↑ Vincenzo Galilei, dialogo della musica antica et della moderna, Florence 1581, p. 88.
3. ^ Alfred Einstein, The italian Madrigal, translated by Alexander H. Krappe, Roger H. Sessions and Oliver Strunk, Volume 1, Princeton University Press, 1949, p. 234.
4. ^ Alfred Einstein, The italian Madrigal, translated by Alexander H. Krappe, Roger H. Sessions and Oliver Strunk, Volume 1, Princeton University Press, 1949, p. 235.
5. ^ Alfred Einstein, The italian Madrigal, translated by Alexander H. Krappe, Roger H. Sessions and Oliver Strunk, Volume 1, Princeton University Press, 1949, pp. 243f.