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Part I
STARTING POINTS
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SEEING MUSIC
Richard Leppert
Precisely because musical sound is abstract, intangible, and etherealâlost as soon as it is gainedâthe visual experience of its production is crucial to both musicians and audience alike for locating and communicating the place of music within society and culture. That is, the slippage between the physical activity to produce musical sound and the abstract nature of that which is produced creates a semiotic uncertainty that is ultimately âresolvedâ to a significant degree via the agency of human sight; in brief, music's visual-performative aspect is central to its meanings. All of this is obvious enough when witnessing live performance, and no matter the music: classical (orchestral, chamber, solo instrumental, lieder, opera), jazz ensemble, rock and pop bands, etc. It's equally obvious when the performance is shunted to the video screens at arena concerts or the product of a music video. The point is this: performers gesture; they do so, of course, simply in order to make musical sound. But musicians likewise gesture in order to make meaning, to visually inflect the sounds they produce. That is, musicians' gestures commonly exceed the physical movements necessary to produce the wanted sounds.
Take singing, and again no particular matter the sort: art-variety or popular. Singers gesture: facial expression, to be sure, but also more general body language involving hands, arms, legs, and torso. Performers act out music somatically, and they do so as a critical supplement to sonority. The visual aspect of music making is constitutive of the more general enactment of what we more commonly consider performance. The visual component of performance helps to render music expressive; as such, it is part and parcel of the multiple forms of knowledge that music offers its auditors. Music, in short, is not simply made, it is simultaneously acted. (Historical efforts to hide performers from sight are the exceptions that underscore the rule. And to be sure, the separation of sound from sight with the advent of the gramophone alters the equationâjust as the âinventionâ of the music video, in fact long antedating MTV, constitutes a kind of pushback against the separation.)
The visual performance code functions through the human body in its efforts to produce and receive music. When people hear a musical performance they see it as an embodied activity. What they hear they also witness: how the performers look, of course, but also how they are costumed, how they interact with their instruments and with one another, how they regard the audience, etc. Listeners also see themselves in relation to other listeners as well as to the performersâand in this regard the musical event is realized as a rampantly socialized activity.
Musicology seeks to make sense of music in time and place, and it does so first and foremost by paying close heed to music itself, that is, to what sounds. Musicology also and necessarily takes near equal interest in the relationships between musical activity and the extra-musical contexts of which music is at once an agent and a product.
If we want to understand, say, Beethoven, first and appropriately foremost we have his notated musical survivals: sketches, manuscripts, published scores. We have biographical details, those that come from him and others. We have records of performances, the stuff that makes up reception history. And so on. And we have visual survivals in the formâprior to the invention of photographyâof paintings, drawings, engravings, doodles, what have you. Some are formal and studied and self-reflexively flattering. Others might be off-hand; some are satirical. Some are aesthetically accomplished, others distinctly not. And so on. In the end, as regards Beethoven, we have a very great deal. In what sorts of ways does the visual record of Beethoven matter to the writing of Beethoven history? What can that record tell us about (his) music? What are the potentialities of visual-cultural survivals for the writing of history, and in relation to what sorts of caveats? Caveats first.
In the early decades of interest in iconography as a source for music history, a great deal of attention was commonly paid to two subjects, and often nearly to the exclusion of anything else. The first: what could the visual record tell us about organology, the design of musical instruments, especially those that have not survived or that survive only in very small numbers; and the second: what can the visual record tell us about past performance practice? While research of this sort can, and indeed has, paid considerable dividends, the simple or perhaps sad fact is that the record on both scores is at best mixed. The early researches of Emanuel Winternitz in particular make clear the sorts of problems endemic at once to visual source material and to how it is (mis)used:
[There has been a tendency] often [to] take pictures at face value, without critical discrimination between real and imaginary objects; without sufficient regard for successive styles, technical peculiarities, and mannerisms of pictorial representations; without an awareness of the artist's lack of freedom, in certain periods, in choosing his topic and often even in delineating his objects; without sufficient familiarity with the theological or political doctrines which controlled allegorical representation and therefore detracted from faithful adherence to the actual appearance of the object. Furthermore [some scholars] frequently take a pitiful handful of depictions as adequate evidence, ignorant of the possibility that these may be atypical or that rarity or profusion of certain pictorial representations may not at all correspond to actual historical distribution of instruments and ensembles, or to actual performing practices.1
To summarize Winternitz's point: a picture is sometimes worth a good deal less than a thousand words, and especially when regarded as the unproblematic and objective record of the past available just for the looking. An image of Beethoven will indeed tell us something about Beethoven, and quite possibly something not available in any other kind of source. But like any other kind of evidence, it must be responsibly interpreted with regard to the conventions of the discursive practices through which it is realized.
The potentialities of visual culture to musicology, aside from what it can provide to organology and performance practice research, center especially on the relationship between music (and musicians) and society. In this regard, in 1968, Pierre Francastel articulated a critical point about the entwined histories of music and art:
Music itself is never present [in art]: what the painters set down is the place that it occupiesânot as music but as a regulated activityâin the social intercourse of men [sic] at a certain time in history and in a certain environment which views painting and music itself as an exterior manifestation less of a personal culture than of a fact of belonging to a certain group of initiates.2
Visual representation in effect summarizes by encapsulation musical function, not as a disinterested record of events but as a coherent and discursive, commonly dialectical vision of the varied relations within the context of which sound occurs and, hence, sound means. Visual evidence (whether aesthetically accomplished, second rate, technically clumsy, or worse) obviously cannot replicate sound, but it can provide an invaluableâand often pointedly hortatoryâaccount of how and why a given people experienced music. Visual representations, except perhaps those that include decipherable musical inscriptions, tell us nothing specific about particular pieces of music; instead they suggest the range of semiotic possibilities for specific compositions performed under conditions similar to those represented.
The visual record of musical activity translates the three-dimensional and sonoric world into a two-dimensional and silent argument for and about the worldâthough this is not to deny the role that language plays in processing imagery. Reference to music occurs in visual art not because musical sound exists but because musical sound has meaning. As a topos in visual art, music itself is silenced, existing only as a remembrance of things past: all that remains of music in the image is its trace as a socialized activity. The question arising from visual representation is hence one of music's socio-cultural function. This in turn leads directly back from the abstract realm of ideas and their history to a grounding in social practice. As regards visual art, only certain kinds of musical activity typically get represented, and this is particularly the case with art of the more official sort. Portraiture, for example, typically restricts representation to those musical activities that constitute recognizable signs of socio-culturally sanctioned modes of behavior and thought (of greater significance than music itself), which it is a function of the image not only to attest but also to assert. Put differently, the point of visual representation, art-sort or other, was hardly to render a neutral record of a real or imagined event; representation is inevitably interested. It's hardly an accident, for example, that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century genre paintings of European peasantry represent them enjoying their peasant lives, drinking, dancing, making love, making music: happy one and all. It's precisely on account of the ubiquity of such images that the more rare sort representing the miseries of the poor can to this day engender shock (in Low Countries painting, for example, the work of Adrian Brouwer or David Vinckboons).
Music's effects and meanings, which in performance are produced both aurally and visually, in paintings or other forms of visual representation must be rendered visually only. The way of seeing hence incorporates the way of hearing: the artist must produce images in such a way that their meanings will be congruent with those produced by sight and sound together in the lived experience of the original and intended viewer, and commonly if hardly always reflecting the point of view of whomever has ordered up the image or will otherwise be a likely buyer. To render visually meaningful the acoustic phenomenon of music, the artist engages semiotic codes that operate as a sight when music is actually made. The artist doesn't invent a visual code entirely divorced from life-practice, for the simple reason that there is no point in doing so. If artists failed in their endeavor, if their envisioning confused viewers, it is inconceivable that musical subjects could have been produced in the West for many centuries with such abundance as survives. Again, this is not to suggest that artists were unproblematically bound to reproduce in paint what âisâ in life; there exists a mutually mediating relation between life-practice and external pressures to flatter taste and ideological fixation. The rich array of caricatures relating to music, performance, and audience reception abundantly demonstrates this point, often with high degrees of trenchant social irony, commonly tinged with biting sarcasm.
Representation is necessarily highly selective. Whatever is visualized is intended not only as the mirror of that which is, but as the indicator of that which is and is to be. That is, visual representation is the product of an act whose conscious or unconscious purpose is to perpetuate (or critique) a particular way of life: by definition, the image re-presents the past (for time stops in art), but is about the future. And once again, when music plays its part in representation it does so precisely by providing a visual means of registering the correctness (or incorrectness) of the present-past and, hence, the correctness (or incorrectness) of the future toward which this present-past directs the viewer. Thus the image of music, re-presented as a social practice, is always already by definition political, to the extent that the future necessarily must be shaped, in effect caused and produced. As such, the future is a dimension of social contestation.
Music history's interest in visual art lies in equal measure with the adjective (visual) and the noun it modifies (art). What's essential about visual art is that it is first and foremost art (i.e., artifice). The importance of vision to visual art is not the physiological phenomenon of seeing (animals see; they do not make art) but perceiving, which of course is governed by the eyes in conjunction with the brain and, indeed, with the entire human organism in its relation to external reality. That is, musicological interest is invested in...
