Sonic Strategies in the Library

Sonic Strategies in the Library

This exhibition and blog post were curated and written by
Joana Stillwell.
Sonic Strategies
in the Library
accompanies the newly opened exhibition
Musical Thinking: New Video Art and Sonic Strategies
at
the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Musical Thinking,
by Curator of Time-Based Media, Saisha Grayson,
focuses on video art that uses sonic strategies including scores, improvisation, and interpretation, as well as styles, structures, and lyrics that speak to American life. The works selected for this accompanying exhibition at the
American Art and Portrait Gallery Library
(AA/PG) include books from the collection as well as materials from the artist files. Nine selections ranging from the early nineteenth century to the 2010s reveal the ongoing and evolving relationship between visual art and music and sound.
Music: A Mere and Colorful Memory
Before the advent of recorded sound, music was a medium only available to a live audience, and only recollected orally, or venerated in the visual arts. Painting was considered the main art in the early twentieth century and its ability to capture the essence of music was the focus of Luna May Ennis’
Music in Art
(1904). This is embodied by the beautiful red and gold cover which centers a ribboned and stylized painter’s palette, while the border is compiled of different types of stringed instruments, pan flutes, and white flowers. The book is organized among themes of myth and enchantment, youth and love, worship and are punctuated by illustrations by Donatello, Raphael, Rubens, and more. The book reads as art historical analysis but through the perspective of a viewer trying to relive “the sound [that has died] with
the vibration of the strings [and] with the breath of the singer becom[ing] a mere memory.”
Analogous Scale of Sounds and Colours from George Field’s Chromatics
George Field’s
Chromatics, or, an essay on the analogy and harmony of colours
(1817) contains rich hand-colored wood-engravings with letterpress captions. Field was known as a chemist and for being especially skilled with pigments but fell short on being a color theorist after ignoring Isaac Newton’s ideas regarding color and light. Regardless, this book reveals his artistic sensibilities while expressing his theories on the relationship between the spectrum of colors and the scale of musical tones.
The Potentiality of Scores
By the twentieth century, music and sound recordings were readily available, which heightened the exceptionality and spectacle of the event or live performance. John Cage, a seminal influence on music, sound art, performance art, and more, was fascinated by the ability of music to make the listener more aware of their present. Cage argued any vibration of a particular moment could be considered music. While living in Europe as an art student he “noticed [on a street in Seville] the multiplicity of simultaneous visual and audible events all going together in one’s experien…