Music and Visual Art

Composers borrow structure from painting, stage and print, while listeners use the eye to picture sound.

Related

RomanticImpressionistTone PoemPiano

The question

Music cannot see a painting, and a painting cannot hear sound. Yet composers keep borrowing structure from painting, architecture and stage design. Between music and the visual arts, who is translating whom?

Historical arc

Renaissance court festivities put music, scenery and dance on one stage. Nineteenth-century programme music used words and pictures to guide instrumental listening, and Mussorgsky wrote Pictures at an Exhibition for a memorial show of Hartmann's drawings. Impressionist composers borrowed the vocabulary of light and colour, and Debussy wrote the flatness of Japanese prints into Estampes. Stage design, film and projection put sound and image together again in the twentieth century.

Key cases

The Promenade of Pictures moves between paintings, with the piano as guide. Schumann's Carnaval builds characters and masks from notes, like a set of sound portraits. The Pagodes of Estampes uses pentatonic figures and bells for an imagined East. Exhibition, portrait and print, one case each.

What to listen for

Hear whether the Promenade melody sounds like footsteps. Hear whether the sections of Carnaval change face without warning. Hear whether the bass of Pagodes spreads like a bell across water.

Related

Music and image cross Romantic and Impressionist. Programme music is explained under Tone Poem, and the piano under Piano.

Sources

• Simon Shaw-Miller, Visible Deeds of Music (Yale University Press) — argument checked, not quoted
• Grove Music Online, entry "Painting and music" — examples checked, not quoted

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.