(Ger. Augenmusik).
Musical notation with a symbolic meaning that is apparent to the eye but not to the ear (e.g. black notes for words such as ‘darkness’ and ‘death’). Since its effects are derived from notation it is the concern of composers and performers rather than listeners. In eye music the performer derives two simultaneous interpretations from the signs on the page, one purely musical and the other symbolic. In the light of this it is worth listing at the outset certain features that are not really examples of eye music: the use of musical signs for decorative or cryptographic purposes, since their musical significance is thereby completely destroyed; the complicated cross-rhythms of, for example, the English virginalists, designed for the eye rather than for the ear – this use of notation has little or no symbolic meaning; puzzle canons, where the musical meaning becomes apparent only after the symbolism has been unravelled; and the private asides to the player of music by, for example, Satie, for these do not use the signs of musical notation.
It is difficult to establish a precise dividing-line between Word-painting and eye music, but the former is usually audible as well as visible (as in musical depictions of words such as ‘rise’, ‘fall’, ‘step’, ‘pace’, ‘crooked’, ‘slope’, ‘scatter’, ‘wave’, ‘hover’ and so on). The most common type of eye music proper is confined almost entirely to the 16th and early 17th centuries, a period characterized on the one hand by a great deal of thought and discussion about the matching of words with suitable music and on the other by an unusually rich variety of notational signs (though the intended effects are often lost in transcription into modern notation). Most note shapes existed in two forms, black and white, the duration of a white symbol usually differing from that of a black. Thus the blackness or whiteness of a note had primarily a musical significance, but it could also have a symbolic one if words such as ‘black’, ‘shade’, ‘death’, ‘blind’, ‘colour’, ‘night’ and ‘darkness’ were associated with black notes, and words such as ‘white’, ‘day’, ‘light’, ‘pale’ and ‘open’ with white notes. A mourning song – for instance, one on the death of the Emperor Maximilian (1519) – may be written in black notation throughout, even though the other songs in the same manuscript are in white. Josquin used black notation in his lament on the death of Ockeghem, Nymphes des bois, where it appears as a visual image to support the aural one provided by the introit of the Requiem aeternam plainchant used as cantus firmus.
Other kinds of eye music may involve a variety of notational devices. The ‘Gulliver Suite’ for two violins in Telemann’s Der getreue Music-Meister includes a Lilliputian chaconne and a Brobdingnagian gigue, the one in absurdly small note values (3/32), the other in ridiculously large ones (24/1), charmingly apt to their titles and clear instances of eye music, since only the performers see the point of the joke (fig.1). The same is true of Benedetto Marcello’s cantata Stravaganze d’amore (extract in C. Parrish: A Treasury of Early Music, 1958, no.49), in which one of the ‘extravagances’ is the absurd extent to which the continuo part is notated in terms of enharmonic equivalents to the notes of the voice part. Another type of eye music involves writing out the music of a love-song on a staff bent into a heart shape (fig.2), or that of a perpetual canon on one bent into a circle. There is more than one instance of the symbolism of the Crucifixion illustrated by means of a set of notes in the form of a cross.
Eye music received the support of a theorist such as Cerone in his El melopeo y maestro (1613/R) and was endorsed by Zarlino inasmuch as he employed black notation in his motet Nigra sum sed formosa, but it was certainly not universally accepted and was opposed by, for example, Vincenzo Galilei in his Dialogo della musica antica et della moderna (1581). Eye music was a mannerism, confined above all to two kinds of composer: mystics and madrigalists, mainly Italian ones active from about 1550 to 1625, but also, to a much smaller extent, italianate English ones. In the hands of the best of them, used with restraint, it retains a spontaneous charm.
See also Cryptography, musical.
ReeseMR
A. Einstein: ‘Augenmusik im Madrigal’, ZIMG, xiv (1912–13), 8–21; partly trans. in EinsteinIM, 234ff
THURSTON DART/R