I
ICONOGRAPHY OF MUSIC
. A subdiscipline of musicology that can be practised in two fundamentally different
ways. One can view an artwork as no more than a source of evidence for some question
of music history, or one can seek first to understand the work on its own terms and look
upon any evidentiary finding as a fragile by-product. The former approach was widely
employed at an earlier stage, particularly in pursuit of information on the history of
medieval and Renaissance musical instruments and instrumental usage. It resulted
frequently in naive error due to an insufficient knowledge of artistic style and
iconographic convention. The second approach has gained the ascendancy in recent years
as music historians have become more sophisticated in the methodology of art-historical
iconography. They remain interested in some of the earlier questions and continue to
pursue them in a more cautious manner, but more often they show interest in matters of
cultural and intellectual history with a musical dimension. Some of the best examples of
musical iconography take a single artwork with musical subject matter and seek simply to
explore its meaning in the fullest possible sense. The methodology is that of the art
historian, but the music historian adds to this the special insights and knowledge of the
second discipline.
In addition to the work of individual musicologists, the development of musical
iconography owes much to the organization Répertoire International d’Iconographie
Musicale (founded in 1971 by a group of scholars led by Barry S.Brook), particularly for
the numerous national and international conferences it has sponsored. Mention should be
made also of the highly respected journal of musical iconography, Imago Musicae, edited
by Tilman Seebass since its founding in 1984.
James McKinnon
[See also: MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS; MUSICAL PERFORMANCE PRACTICE]
Brown, Howard, and Joan Lascelle. Musical Iconography. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1972.
McKinnon, James. “Iconography.” In Musicology in the 1980’s, ed. Dallas Kern Holoman and
Claude V.Palisca. New York: Da Capo, 1982, pp. 79–93.
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