The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture by Leonard Anne Shephard Tim

Author:Leonard, Anne,Shephard, Tim
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781135956530
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Example 22.1 Debussy, opening melody of Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune.

meandering motion, accentuated here by the arabesque's failure to initiate a sense of meter, allows time to literally stand still as the listener is slowly drawn into the Faun's dream through the otherworldly allure of his captivating music.

The types of visual—musical correspondences that Debussy was keen to explore suggest how he might have taken his inspiration from such artists as Maurice Denis or Pierre Bonnard, even though his aims were markedly different. It is true that Debussy empowered the arabesque so that it came to assume a structural as well as expressive role, but while most painters conceived of the arabesque as generating motion, Debussy relied on this figure to convey the very opposite: that is, his arabesques tended toward suspending time through a non-teleological development and irregular transitions between long and short durations, as heard within a nonmetered background. An example such as this serves to show that the simultaneous preoccupation with a single principle didn't necessarily lead composers and artists toward pursuing the same goals. This is especially true for inter-media relationships at the turn of the century, when interest to manipulate an audience's perception of art or music depended on the approximation of qualities that were antithetical to that medium. In the case of the arabesque, the evocation of motion in art, or stasis in music, demonstrated technical novelty, while touting a tendency for avant-garde subversion (as I have explored elsewhere).

The example of Debussy's Faun melody enacts a process of substitution as an undulating, intricate melodic phrase comes to stand in for an equivalent visual figure. Given the culture of reciprocity that held sway during the nineteenth century, it is perhaps no surprise that artists also sought varied ways for music to feature in their work. The topic of music entered the spatial arena through many ways, some of them concerned with the act of teaching (George Goodwin Kilburne, The Music Lesson), or the art of practicing an instrument (Paolo Bedini, Girl Playing the Violin); others showcased a formal performance (Edgar Degas, L'orchestre de l'Opéra, 1870), or a single listener deep in contemplation (Fernand Khnopff, Listening to Schumann, 1883). Examples such as these require us to re-create the music of these paintings in our minds. Others, such as Bonnard's colorful lithographs for a piano textbook, Le Petit Solfège Illustré (1893), were more literal in their presentation of music, as seen in his preoccupation with notation.

Commissioned by his brother-in-law, the composer Claude Terrasse, Bonnard's playful illustrations for this piano primer were designed to enliven a child's first encounter with music theory. Terrasse's somewhat dry explanation of the rudiments of music theory—how to read notation, understanding the formation of scales, learning rhythmic subdivision—is considerably offset by Bonnard's charming and entertaining visual commentary. While manipulating the signs of notation, Bonnard conveys the illusion of tone as wavy arabesques are transformed from abstract lines into anthropomorphized note-heads, note stems, the open mouths of singers, and outlines of musical instruments. Bonnard's equation

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.