Category Archives: Visual art

Le ballet de la nuit

Le ballet de la nuit, a major ballet de cour, was organized by Louis Cauchon d’Hesselin and first performed in the Louvre’s Salle du Petit Bourbon in 1653. The event was notable for many reasons—not least, for the involvement of the young Louis XIV, who danced in five roles, including his most famous role as the Sun King, accompanied by chosen courtiers and professional dancers, singers, and acrobats.

Edited by Michael Burden and Jennifer Thorp, Ballet de la nuit: Rothschild B1.16.6 (Hillsdale: Pendragon Press, 2009) focuses on the exquisitely produced volume presented to d’Hesselin (who also performed in the work), which passed into the hands of the Rothschild family at Waddesdon Manor and is now in the ownership of the National Trust.

The book presents a full facsimile of the Waddesdon source along with the printed vers pour les personages, lists of performers, cues for special effects, the running order of the entrées, and essays by Burden, Thorp,  Catherine Massip, and David Parrott that discuss cultural patronage at the Court of Louis XIV, the musical context, dances and dancers, and the costumes and scenography of this unique and extraordinary ballet. Also included is a modern edition of the surviving music prepared by Lionel Sawkins.

Above, an illustration from the book (click to enlarge); below, Lully’s overture.

Related article: Le Carrousel du Roi

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Filed under Baroque era, Dance, New editions, Visual art

Sophy and Mendelssohn

In 1833 Sophy Horsley, a well-heeled British teenager, wrote to her aunt “Mendelssohn took my album with him the night of our glee-party, but you have no idea how many names he has got me.” Over the following years Horsley and Mendelssohn Bartholdy, who was a family friend, collected musical works, illustrations, and autographs in a 144-page album measuring 1⅞ by 1¼ inches.

Composers who contributed works or snippets included Mendelssohn Bartholdy himself along with Bellini, Brahms, Chopin, Liszt, Paganini, and Clara Schumann. Drawings and paintings were contributed by Edwin Landseer, Franz Xaver Winterhalter, and Julius Hübner; inscriptions include contributions by Charles Dickens, Jacob Grimm, and Jenny Lind.

This according to “Sophy’s album” by Anne C. Bromer and Julian I. Edison, an article included in Miniature books: 4,000 years of tiny treasures (New York: Abrams, 2007); the book was published in conjunction with an exhibition at The Grolier Club, New York City, from 15 May through 28 July 2007. Many thanks to James Melo for bringing it to our attention!

Below, Rahmaninov plays his transcription of Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s “Scherzo” from his incidental music for A midsummer night’s dream, written when the composer was a teenager himself.

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Filed under Curiosities, Romantic era, Visual art

John Abbott, jazz photographer

Throughout his career, John Abbott’s award-winning images of jazz have been featured on over 250 album and magazine covers; he has been the primary cover photographer for JazzTimes magazine since 2002.

On 7 September 2010, the 80th birthday of the jazz legend Sonny Rollins, Abbott’s Saxophone Colossus: A Portrait of Sonny Rollins was published by Abrams. As Rollins’s photographer of choice for the past 20 years, Abbott captured images of him at home and at work; essays by the jazz critic Bob Blumenthal are included.

Below, Abbott and Blumenthal discuss the making of the book.

Related article: The Jazz Baron

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Filed under Iconography, Jazz and blues

Ken Butler’s anxious objects

 

With his background as a professional jazz guitarist and his MFA in painting, Ken Butler had a long-standing interest in combining his two passions, but he couldn’t find the right connection. Then one night an axe in his basement caught his eye.

In about an hour and a half he had added a bridge, strings, and a contact microphone to the axe. As he describes it, “Suddenly the world opened up to me in terms of “That’s a cello. That’s a violin.’”

Since that night Butler has built hundreds of hybrid instruments, which he describes as “anxious objects”. While all of them can be played, he considers most of them to be primarily collage sculptures; but some of them sound good enough that he considers them real instruments, and performs on them. His raw materials have included a toy Uzi, a motorcycle manifold, and parts of discarded mannequins (inset).

This according to “Ken Butler & the anxious objects: Turning unmusical things into instruments” by W. Kim Heron (Metro Times, 28 January 2004).  Below, Butler demonstrates several of his creations.

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Filed under 20th- and 21st-century music, Instruments, Visual art

Baroque birdsong

Along with its wide-ranging discussions of theoretical topics, the 1650 treatise Musurgia universalis by the German Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) includes what may be the first transcriptions of bird songs.

The illustration gives the nightingale’s song followed by those of the chicken, the cuckoo, the quail, and the parrot; the latter says χαίρε (“hello”). Vox cuculi is notated as the familiar falling minor third heard in cuckoo clocks (see below).

A facsimile edition of the treatise has been issued by Georg Olms (Hildesheim, 1970; reprinted 2006).

Related article: Athanasias Kircher’s global reach

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Filed under Animals, Baroque era, Musicologists, Nature, Notation, Science, Visual art

Nonsense neumes

Built at the behest of Richard Beauchamp, 13th Earl of Warwick (1382–1439), the Beauchamp Chapel at the Collegiate Church of St Mary, Warwick, is a remarkable survival of fifteenth-century architecture, sculpture, and—above all—stained glass. These windows are well known to organologists for their depictions of instruments and performance practice; they also provide useful information about chant and polyphony in fifteenth-century England by preserving fragments of neumatic notation.

Over the centuries craftspeople have restored damaged windows, and, lacking the requisite musical training, they often left replacement staves blank; but in two cases nonsense neumes were devised, supplying consistent-looking décor that most observers would never suspect was counterfeit.

This according to Alexandra Buckle’s “Fit for a king: Music and iconography in Richard Beauchamp’s chantry chapel” (Early music XXXVIII/1 (2010), pp. 3–20).

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Filed under Architecture, Curiosities, Middle Ages, Notation, Visual art

Seebüller Hefte

In 2009 the Nolde Stiftung Seebüll in Neukirchen, Germany, inaugurated the series Seebüller Hefte with Volker Scherliess’s Erdmann und Nolde, which documents the friendship between the artist Emil Nolde and the pianist Eduard Erdmann (1896–1958). The foundation’s museum occupies the house that Nolde designed for himself in 1927; it is now devoted to exhibitions of his works.

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Filed under New series, Visual art

Libretto illustrations

Illustrated libretti for eighteenth-century opera performances comprise a specific and unusual type of visual art. Since these engravings were made before the performances, they cannot be interpreted as objective documentation—indeed, clear evidence points to discrepancies between these representations and what the audiences actually saw. Rather, they must be seen as conveying the intention of these occasions, in surprisingly subtle ways.

Christine Fischer demonstrates this way of reading libretto illustrations in “Engravings of opera stage settings as festival books: Thoughts on a new perspective of well-known sources” (Music in art XXXIV/1–2 [2009], pp. 73–88). In the above engraving by Johann Benjamin Müller of the final scene in Maria Antonia Walpurgis’s Talestri, regina delle amazzoni (1760), Fischer notes that the wide gap between the female Amazons and the male Scythians—their leaders both with drawn swords—demonstrates their opposition, but the bridge in the background indicates their impending reconciliation. The message below the surface involves reassurance that the composer’s ongoing consolidation of her political power in Dresden will be beneficial to all, and that her rule will be based on a deep knowledge of state affairs and peaceful collaboration with powerful men.

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Filed under Classic era, Dramatic arts, Literature, Opera, Politics, Reception, Visual art

Patent applications

Patent applications for new instruments—or for improvements to already existing ones—usually involve one or more technical drawings. These can be of historical interest for several reasons; for example, the article Piano wars: The legal machinations of London pianoforte makers, 1795–1806 by George S. Bozarth and Margaret Debenham (RMA research chronicle XLII, 45–108) makes use of original drawings and descriptions for patents by William Southwell (1794) and his son, William junior (1837), to reconstruct the issues and outcomes of legal actions involving many of England’s top piano manufacturers in the early nineteenth century.

Reproduced above is a page from Brian Hayden’s 1984 patent application for a new way of arranging the buttons on a concertina.

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Filed under Iconography, Instruments, Publication types

Cartoons

Cartoonists have always recognized music as a rich source for humor. The mere inclusion of an accordion or a banjo can make a situation comical, as Gary Larson’s The far side has repeatedly demonstrated, and caricatures of musicians have long been a staple of popular journalism.

The self-taught French cartoonist Jean-Jacques Sempé (b.1932) has been drawn to musical subjects throughout his career; The musicians, a collection of his characteristically nuanced and captionless music-themed drawings, was published by Workman in 1980, and Phaidon Press issued a similar collection of postcards in 2006. Sempé’s cartoons, many with musical subjects, have graced nearly 100 covers of The New Yorker.

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Filed under Humor, Visual art