Duet: An Artful History of Music

With erudition and elegance, classically trained musician and art historian Chan (Syrene Sounds) explores how music is viscerally linked to visual art. She begins by observing how music, in its deep history, is inextricable from the material world, noting that the first identifiable musical instrument, a 43,000-year-old flute, is made from the femur of a bear, and that caves with paleolithic paintings in them have been found to have the acoustic properties of “Gothic cathedrals and modern symphony halls.” Indeed, Chan writes, one of the major developments in music’s history is its visual representation—today’s standard musical scale having been achieved through a circuitous route across many centuries and locations, likely beginning with a Benedictine monk in 11th-century Tuscany. Chan also profiles artists who experimented with ways to tie music to the visual and material world, such as Victorian painter Alexander Wallace Rimington, who mapped the color spectrum onto musical pitch for his “color organ” (when a key was pressed, the corresponding color would be projected onto a screen) and midcentury sculptor Barbara Hepworth, who translated “lines of sheet music into copper, bronze and stone.” Contemporary examples range from the animated film Frozen (Elsa’s crystals are “a visualization of her song”) to Beyoncé, whose success stems from “her recognition that image and sound are indivisible.” This illuminating and impassioned deep dive holds many treasures. (Jan.)