On 13 Nov 2008 at 17:02, Kim Patrick Clow wrote: > A friend has let me borrow a book called "Musical Ensembles in Festival > Books: 1500 - 1800." by Edmund A. Bowles. It must have hundreds of woodcuts > and drawings from original sources, that I've never seen before-- and I've > read a lot of music history books. It's really impressive. I was told the > study of musical iconography is an area of study, primarily in Germany, > where many similiar type of books are printed in four color ink (they must > be *very* expensive). Would anyone on the list know about specific titles? I > would love to find more information.
Music iconography is an area rife will all sorts of bad scholarship. Many people try to take the images literally, when they were never created that way. For instance, just because two people are depicted together in an image doesn't mean they ever met, or that they were ever in the same place at the same time. It doesn't even mean that even one of them was ever at the depicted place/event. Likewise with musical instruments and playing technique. Many artists were quite indifferent to getting the details right, and even for artists who tried to be accurate in their depictions, some would use conventionalized renderings of instruments/playing positions because they weren't so much depicting what was represented as they were creating an instance in a long line of representations of a certain subject. These two problems were endemic to much of the early iconographic scholarship (before 20-30 years ago). I don't know if things are vastly improved now, but at least most of the work in the field that I've seen is no longer the amateurish work that was emblematic of the field not long ago. Also, CUNY many years ago under the direction of Barry Brook tried to create an music iconography reference (a RISM of images), but the project was so huge it was never finished. I expect the images that were collected are available for perusal at CUNY, but probably only with special permission. I have no real contacts there, but you could start here: http://web.gc.cuny.edu/rcmi/ I don't know if the materials they have are cataloged in a way that makes it possible to just walk in and use their collection, or if it's more of an ad hoc thing. But it's certainly a place to start serious research in iconography if you're in the area (as you are, Kim). -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
