A Code for Representing the Occidental Musical Notation in Pictorial Art

Leonardo, Vol. 9, pp. 140-141. Perganion Press 1976. Printed in Great Britain A CODE FOR REPRESENTING THE OCCIDENTAL MUSICAL NOTATION IN PICTORIAL ART S. V. Vadnerkar* Standard notation 1 . Pictorial art, sculpture and architecture have served to interpret and record aspects of human activities over thousands of years. Over a much shorter period, musicians have prepared scores in notation according to which their music can be performed and depictions of scorescan be found in somepictorial art, for example, in Indian Ragmala paintings (1600-1900). There has been considerable interest among Occidental artists during past decades to find relationships between painting and music [l-51 and composers have used visual art as a source of inspiration, for example, there is the piano suite ‘Pictures from an Exhibition’ by Mussorgsky. Possible correlations and relationships between music and visual artistic presentations have been of particular concern to those working with kinetic art [6]. As an architect and artist I have been attracted to textures of materials used decoratively in non-figurative murals for buildings. While such murals may visually please viewers, I find that many of them convey little, if any, meaning to them. It, therefore, occurred to me that such murals might be used to present musical scores in a special code based on the standard Occidental notation that viewers might learn to interpret more easily and to enjoy. I came to this idea because 1 sing, play the sitar and can reproduce a tune on a piano. I am interested in the classical Indian raga and in other types of Oriental music. My experience of Occidental music is rather limited. Code symbols 2. There have been many attempts to provide notations for Indian music [ 7 ] . Moula Bux of Baroda devised a notation system for recording Hindustani music in 1890. Even before, there were attempts to develop notations for recording music in southern India. In northern India in the 1920’s, V. N. Bhatkhande organised musical instruction and proposed a notation. Wishing to introduce the rich domain of Indian music to the Occident, Howard Boatwright attempted to adapt Occidental musical notation to it 181. In what follows I shall use the Occidental chromatic scale and notation for scoring compositions. In Fig. 1 on the left, a portion of the tones of a piano keyboard is shown together with a colour code representing the tones in an octave. The colours may be chosen arbitrarily to suit an artist’s taste or a single colour may be used for all tones. * Architect and artist, CH.I19/5, Sector No. 22, Gandhinagar , India. (Received 12 February 1975.) At the bottom of Fig. 1 is the score of a part of the Raga ‘Charukeshi (Vilambit Gat)’ by Ravishankar in 414 time. A grid of squares is drawn so that each row corresponds to a tone and each column to a quarter note. The measures are indicated by solid vertical lines and an octave by double dashed lines. The duration of tones is indicated by the code symbols (in colour) for notes as shown in Fig. 2. The same symbols are Fig. 1. Sclieine for tlre depictiori of the Occidental strrrrdard riirrsical notatiori. O 1 Whole note I Half note l a Quarter note Sixteenth note I The duration of rests or silences ore indicated by t h e same symbols, with the squares and rectangles in white. Fig. 2. Code for iridicatiiig the drrratiori of notes atrd rests in the Occidental standard riiirsical notation. 140 A Codefor Representing the Occidental Musical Notation in Pictorial Art 141 In Fig. 3 is reproduced the song ‘Kleine Weisse Friedenstaube’ (‘Little White Dove of Freedom’) by Erika Mertke. In Fig. 4 is shown a presentation of the score in my code in the form of a model for a mural. The two lines of the score in Fig. 3 are coded one after another in the model. One might well ask what is the advantage of replacing the code of the Occidental musical notation by my partial code for it in a work of visual art. Evidently, to be used for rests or silences, except that they are to be in white. (In Indian terminology a quarter note is...