Duet
An Artful History of Music
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
A lush new history of music that transcends eras, borders, personalities, and genres by revealing how music is something seen, as well as heard.
Classically trained musician and art historian, Eleanor Chan, takes us deep into the visual and material manifestations of music, transforming our understanding of the story of art and music. Plunging the reader into the body of a performer and the eyes of an art historian, this wonderful book explores the history of music through a series of objects, both everyday and unusual, revealing how music has always been something that we visualize. From the sumptuously illuminated manuscripts of Ethiopia and Safavid Iran to the decorated porcelain flutes of China, from Brazilian opera houses to the jazz-inspired abstract paintings by artists throughout the world, Chan opens windows onto the ways that art has been heard, and music has been seen, throughout time.
From France, India, Brazil, Guyana, Iraq, Italy, Turkey, Ethiopia, Egypt and Armenia, to Greece, China, Japan, Korea, Russia, Iran, the Netherlands, Germany, Wales, Nigeria, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States, Duet: An Artful History of Music reveals just how many connections and cross-pollinations there have been between art and music-making cultures over the centuries and across the globe. Music is interwoven into the fabric of our lives. We listen to it, some of us play it, but throughout history we have also attempted to capture it visually: from the musical images of Ancient Sumer to Frozen's Elsa standing on the side of a mountain, her voice making crystals in the air. In this harmonious tale of music and art, the reader embarks on visual journey through sound.
With the same wonder as Katherine Rundell’s Vanishing Creatures and the paradigm-shifting power of The Story of Art Without Men by Katy Hessell, this deep and winding exploration of music’s visual and material manifestations transforms our understanding of its story - to one built by communities and the every (wo)man, not just by the artists, performers, composers whose flame shines brightest.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With erudition and elegance, classically trained musician and art historian Chan (Syrene Sounds) explores how music is viscerally linked to visual art. She begins by observing how music, in its deep history, is inextricable from the material world, noting that the first identifiable musical instrument, a 43,000-year-old flute, is made from the femur of a bear, and that caves with paleolithic paintings in them have been found to have the acoustic properties of "Gothic cathedrals and modern symphony halls." Indeed, Chan writes, one of the major developments in music's history is its visual representation—today's standard musical scale having been achieved through a circuitous route across many centuries and locations, likely beginning with a Benedictine monk in 11th-century Tuscany. Chan also profiles artists who experimented with ways to tie music to the visual and material world, such as Victorian painter Alexander Wallace Rimington, who mapped the color spectrum onto musical pitch for his "color organ" (when a key was pressed, the corresponding color would be projected onto a screen) and midcentury sculptor Barbara Hepworth, who translated "lines of sheet music into copper, bronze and stone." Contemporary examples range from the animated film Frozen (Elsa's crystals are "a visualization of her song") to Beyoncé, whose success stems from "her recognition that image and sound are indivisible." This illuminating and impassioned deep dive holds many treasures.
