Ladda ner (PDF) - Statens musikverk

The RIdIM-catalogue is a card catalogue based on a card compiled
by the international RIdIM-committee. 2 The upper part of the card
contains facts about the painting and the lower part is for analyzing
the musical content. The card also has room for a small photo of the
painting. The catalogue is filed by artist but allows also for subject
search.
Categories of pictures
There are in all 180 pictures with music notation out of a total of ca
6000. 3 The biggest group is portraits of persons, normally belonging to
the upper class of society and dating from the days before the photography
when it was really costly to have one’s portrait painted.
We also find many group portraits and they often also depict the
interiors. These types form the lion´s share of pictures with music
notation, 140 of 180 pictures are portraits.
Other categories are silhouettes (4), caricatures (7), church art
(7), ceilings (2), allegories (7), pictures on instruments (4), special
techniques like needlepoint, intarsia etc. (7). The notation is legible
in 16 pictures in the sources studied.
Portraits
What is the role of music notation in works of art? I would simply say
that normally it is the artist’s way of representing “music”. But let us
be more specific: When we have portraits, the music becomes a way
of telling us more about the portrayed person. The music works as an
attribute. When the music is legible it helps to clearly identify the
portrayed person. The case may also be that the sheet of music can
help us to date the picture; a picture can hardly be painted before
the music was composed so to speak. Now let us have a look at some
examples.
At the following picture we can see that the artist leads our thoughts
to a specific piece of music to form a connection between the person
and the music. Such a connection can be of various kinds:
To let us know that a person has composed a certain work or that he/
she performed it. Here we have the opera singer Jenny Lind, playing
and singing Bei der Wiege by Felix Mendelssohn.
2 For further information please see www.ridim.org, 2010-09-02.
3 There is a presentation of the collections on the library’s
website on http://www.muslib.se/sma/iconog.html.
25