Avison’s Analogies between Music and Painting

Part I, section II of Charles Avison’s Essay on Musical Expression (London: Lockyer Davis, 1775) treats of “the Analogies between Music and Painting.” The principles of painting are more widely understood than those of musical composition; so analogies with the former can provide a way into the latter (pp. 18–9).

1

“They are both founded in geometry, and have proportion for their subject.” “[V]ibrations of musical strings […] are as capable of mensuration, as any of those visible objects about which painting is conversant” (p. 19). Both the represented object of painting and the rendered structure of music are formal, i.e. mathematisable. Both are abstract, and variously realisable.

2

The “excellence” of a painting: “design, colouring, and expression” (ibid.). A lot has been made of the first two categories over the years: witness the disegno–colorito controversy in Renaissance painting. Avison seems to mean the represented form and the pigments used to represent it. One could generalise these to the divisions of the surface, and all the qualities of the divided—hue, intensity and value (light–dark and warm–cold).

The “excellence” of a composition: “melody, harmony, and expression” (ibid.). A stronger analogy than melody would be all those mathematisable, structural aspects—pitch and duration (relative and absolute: rhythm and tempo). Harmony cannot be a new category: it arises from the combination of melody, and is no less mathematisably structural. The true analogy with “colour” would be timbre and dynamics. (The latter is mathematisable, but differently: supplemental, not integral to melodic–harmonic structure.)

Melody and design are both “inventions” (ibid.). Better still, both are abstractions made concrete, or forms expressed. Harmony strengthens melody as colour enlivens design (pp. 19–20). Colour and tone-colour render spatial and musical form more or less vividly. In both cases, expression is the judicious marriage of the former two elements (p. 20).

3

“[J]udicious mixture of concords and discords” is analogous to chiaroscuro. The eye “is soon tired and disgusted with a level glare of light; so discords are necessary to relieve the ear” (pp. 20–1). Where does this fit into the above schema? Chiaroscuro is a kind of value, part of the extended sense of “colour.” The play of light and shade across the surface is structured according to the form: either the represented object, or the composition of the canvas. Is this analogous to the tension and release of discord? Well, discord is a structural property; a discord is an uncomfortably close interval (or rather unstable ratios: semitones and minor ninths; major sevenths; diminished fifths…): it’s mathematisably abstractable. (The analogy would be unproblematic if we could accept Avison’s equation of harmony with colour!)

But something similar can be said in the case of painting. In a good composition, a field over-crowded with figures is relieved by another less dense. In both cases, quality at one level (compositional density, discord…) emerges from formal properties at a lower level. A. W. Dow puts it beautifully in Composition (New York: Doubleday, 1913): “Line melts into Tone through the clustering of many lines” (p. 59).

4

Bass corresponds to foreground, tenor (or alto) to middleground, and soprano to background (Avison, pp. 21–2). I don’t see that this exact correspondence matters much. In mediaeval music, where the tenor held the tune (teneō, “I hold”), perhaps that was most like the foreground. Foregrounding a tune often depends on dynamics, while relief in painting is a matter of structure (arrangement of value). The late mediaeval–Renaissance theory of cadences provides a possible structural analogue for music: the tenorizans voice might be the foreground (the point of melodic interest), the bassizans the background (the contextualising, minimally harmonising element), and the altizans, cantizans, etc., however many intermediate elements.

All that said, relief is a matter of the illusion of depth, beyond mere structure. I can think of no musical analogue.

5, 6

Analogous to the principle of subordination in painting, musical structure ought to be so arranged as to mark out primary, secondary, etc., points of interest (p. 22). As with the relief–voicing issue above, two things are liable to get confused: marking out with dynamics (comparable to marking out with intense colour, say), and the inherent, structural marking out of the tenorizans (perhaps analogous to relief…). Painting and music are fundamentally different in this way: relief is a matter of arrangement of colour (sensu lato); but the tenorizans, even at the quietest volume and in the dullest tone-colour will distinguish itself!

7

Painting is a spatial art in two senses. First, obviously, relief in figurative painting and composition: the spatial relation, actual and virtual, between the parts of the art-object). Second, the spatial relation of subject to object necessary for appreciation—the viewpoint at which the perspective appears correctly. Analogously in (ensemble) music (in particular), one must stand in a spatial relation to the loci of sound-production such that one doesn’t drown the others out, etc. (p. 24).

8

Both music and painting may express the same styles: “the grand—the terrible—the graceful—the tender—the passionate—the joyous” (pp. 24–5). And in both cases, these can pertain to the expressed object or to the means of expression. In painting: the character of the face or the nature of the depicted action on the one hand; the associated qualities of hue or value on the other. In music: the formal properties of the musical structure (discord, concord, smooth, discontinuous…) or the nature of the musical item presented (the nightingale’s song, the thunder’s roar…) on the one hand; the associations of tone-colour, dynamic, etc., on the other.

The unspoken moral of all this (but particularly 1–6) is that music is far more like sculpture than painting. I’ll address this at some point.