Perspectives on Music, Sound and Musicology II

There are several 18th-century harpsichords produced by members of the Lisbon Antunes family. The last of these instruments is dated 1789 and shows some striking morphological and technical characteristics distinguishing it from other Portuguese harpsichords which survived from the Antunes workshops as well as from other artisans working in Portugal's capital. The restoration realized in 2019 by Geert Karman revealed unknown aspects of technical details, as well as surprising acoustic and aesthetic features.

This essay reflects the peculiar look on one of Braga’s urban landscape’s identity traces and aesthetic figures—his bells. Contemplating some Braga’s Archdiocese’s churches and their respective bell towers—including the bells of both former São Martinho’s Monastery and Bom Jesus do Monte’s Sanctuary-, this study aims to patent data about the musical iconography relating the Braga’s bells’ heritage.

The attempts to adapt the pompous court ceremonial of Versailles to the Spanish court upon Philip d’Anjou’s accession to the throne encountered challenges, particularly regarding the king’s role in receptions and public events. Philip V’s reserved demeanor clashed with the lavish ceremonies of his grandfather, Louis XIV, where the monarch was the focal point. Subsequent adaptations of court ceremonial sought to reconcile the representation of the king with his aloofness, limiting interaction beyond immediate family and essential servants. The monarch’s detachment extended to royal family diversions. The influx of singers, musicians, and composers from the transalpine region in the 1730s and 1740s saw a surge in Italian opera performances at Buen Retiro and royal sites. Despite reconstructing performance contexts from librettos and archival records, scant attention has been paid to patrons, singers, stage arrangements, and royal seating. This study analyzes performance spaces and practices in the Spanish court during the 1730s and 1740s, juxtaposing them with contemporary contexts. It prioritizes insights from iconographic sources and archival records.

José Antunes, firstborn son of Manuel Antunes, inherited the harpsichord workshop founded by his father after Manuel’s passing in 1776. He kept the family business alive, protecting trade secrets and furthering the craft’s know-how. In 1785, he built the harpsichord analyzed in this study. It is currently part of Karen Flint’s collection, and is a unique model among the small group of instruments from the Antunes family that have survived to this day. On its lid are portrayed mythological themes and figures, such as Athena, Apollo, and the Muses, ennobling the harpsichord and giving it a symbolic and allegorical dimension. This study aims to analyze the instrument beyond its role as an object that produces sound. We will focus on the harpsichord’s journey and pictorial treatment, and present an iconographic interpretation of the lid as a starting point for reflecting on the culture of the time, as well as inferring what it reveals about the characters and intellectual traits of the commissioner and later owners.

The dialogue between the European and Asian iconography has very strong marks in Portuguese art, due to the presence of the Other here, and the Portuguese presence there. On the one hand, there are several paintings by Portuguese painters in the Chinese imperial buildings. There are artists who were commissioned to paint hybrid figures, distant architectural elements or strange elements of fauna and flora in an “oriental” style: see, for instance, the musical iconography in the mural in Convento de Santa Mónica, built in Goa in 1606. But the reverse path is also visible in the eschatological subjects painted by António Leitão in Bragança, northern Portugal. On the other hand, the one we will look at more closely, there are cabinets, choir bench and musical instruments (spinets, organs or harpsichords), especially from the eighteenth century, which are exuberantly decorated with painted images of music. This iconography, called chinoiserie, is related to a type of European art dominated by Chinese or pseudo-Chinese motifs, traditionally referred to as “oriental” imagery. In Portugal, these examples are visible from north to south, including the archipelagos, and reached a peak in the eighteenth century, as we will see in detail in the chinoiserie attributed to Manuel da Silva's workshop (with sites in Arouca, Aveiro and Coimbra, among other places).

José Maurício Nunes Garcia (1767–1830) is considered one of the most important musicians in Brazil in the first half of the nineteenth century. The objects in his archive take many forms, including biographies and paintings. This study focuses on the death masks identified as being of the musician, especially the one that is part of the collection of the Museu Histórico Nacional (MHN) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The main objective is to investigate the trajectory of this object and reflect on its (dis)appearance and meaning from its creation in 1830, through its inclusion in the collections of the Museu Nacional (MN) in Rio de Janeiro in 1846, to its incorporation into the MHN in 1922.

Castelo Branco embroidery, which is closely linked to quilts, has become the “ex-libris” of the city and one of the most important aspects of its cultural identity and heritage. A rich variety of motifs are embroidered in natural silk on linen, using an established design as a guide. This article aims to analyze and characterize the motifs that suggest sound—the sounds of animals, the environment, and musical instruments.

The aim of this paper is to explore the historical significance of tapestry in Portugal, focusing in particular on the emergence of the Manufactura de Tapeçarias de Portalegre. Despite Portugal’s traditional role as a buyer in the tapestry trade, Portalegre’s establishment in 1946 marked a significant turning point. Led by Guy Fino, the company pioneered the Portalegre stitch, which revolutionised tapestry production with its intricate detail and quality. Through strategic marketing efforts and collaborations with renowned artists such as Jean Lurçat, Portalegre tapestries gained international recognition. This work also explores the intertwining of music within the Portalegre tapestries, identifying over 45 motifs with musical iconography. The study highlights the challenges of researching portable artworks and argues for further documentation to enrich our understanding of this unique cultural heritage.

Music has always attracted the attention of Chinese rulers due to a belief deeply rooted in Confucian classical doctrine in its moral and educational effect on human beings. Inheriting these principles, the government led by Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) used music to convey ideas and values they wanted to be assimilated by the masses, resorting to various mechanisms of communication to reach as many people as possible. Propaganda posters were part of this endeavour. Taking this premise as a starting point, this paper aims to analyze the importance of music and model plays in people’s daily lives during the late 1950s and the Cultural Revolution, drawing on an iconographic analysis of propaganda posters belonging to the Kwok On Collection (Fundação Oriente). I will show both the ritualizing aspect of music as an integral component of celebrations and/or commemorations of politically important dates and events and the role of the poster as an extension of music/opera content, allowing a way of visualizing and assimilating the message to be transmitted or the model to be followed.

This article considers two murals by Mário Belém that were commissioned by two local government institutions: the Municipality of Torres Novas and the Borough of Alvalade in Lisbon. The murals share musical iconography and narratives related to local history and memory where music plays a central role. The main goal is to question the importance given to the aesthetic beautification of urban spaces and instead approach public art as a gateway to its affirmation as a symbolic representation of power in local history, and examine how this power enhances the commissioner, that is, leads to political power. Music is global language and, as so, also a form of political mobilization of curious observers (local citizens, tourists, target groups such as new generations of voters) and public space is the privileged stage for such actions.

The act of composing, performing and listening to music has been understood as intertextual. Further expanding the scope of this notion, this article aims to reflect on the preservation of music theatre performances as a practice that encompasses intertextuality in terms of performance documentation. This includes the production of an ekphrastic icono/phono-text, which embraces intertextuality by means of allusion, paraphrase and quotation of different texts such as scores, musicological writings, programmes, audio-visual records, among others, all assuming equal status. The intrinsic nature of music theatre works requires a preservation approach that crosses all areas involved in this performative genre, whether it is music, theatre and dance or movement, which are in themselves scenic-visual elements. The practices of preserving scenic-visual elements transcend musical preservation practices, therefore it is necessary to reflect on them. To illustrate this theoretical assumption, the work Libera me (concert version, 1979) by Constança Capdeville will be analysed, as this work raises discussions on how intertextuality and preservation in the context of music theatre can be related through the notion of ekphrastic icono/phono-text, enabling a connection between past, present and future.

An important component of the musical process are the various modes and types of realization—the ‘forms of existence’. That is, how the idea of a work is mentally, sensorially, and tonally transformed, and thereby the non-material idea receives a material dimension, tensions and contradictions between idea and realizations are included. The category ‘form of existence’ is a real discovery, innovative and productive: It allows a new view of the transformations that the artwork undergoes during its production, distribution and reception. It is here associated with the category of the ‘work process’, especially the ‘music process’. Thus, the rigid opposition of work as object or as process, of thing-like versus process-like, can be dissolved into a multilevel, often encaptic dialectic. In the course of the music process, the work unfolds in and as diverse shapes that are nevertheless the same at their core. This relative sameness, the identical in the different, can be called the idea of the work. It is not treated as such here, according to its concrete content. The investigation is focused on its formal dimension. In this way, the work is to be “rescued”, which in modernism and even intensified in neoliberal postmodernism is particularly criticized, “deconstructed”, destroyed by avant-garde art producers as well as, and probably even more so, by ideological mouthpieces of the dominating “zeitgeist”, above all because it appears too concrete, too graspable, too significant and is therefore perceived as a danger that it makes reality easier to grasp and criticize. The negation of the work is only one of the categories, of the concept: as the fact, it continues to exist anyway. The concept of the ‘artwork’ is thereby specified as a ‘processing identity’. It is an identity against and through differences. The forms of existence are universal for all arts. But they are differently manifested depending on the species of art and also on the species of work—a musical improvisation has by definition no form of notation preceding it, and a translation form exists only in literature. With the system of forms of existence sketched here, it is not absolutely certain that the system is complete, that all types and cases are covered. And the boundaries drawn here between the forms of existence are sometimes certainly not the last word. Also the concepts for the single forms of existence are not always perfect yet.

The act of “listening to architecture” shifts the built reality towards a perceived reality, which is inserted in a temporal structure where sensibilities and corporealities converge. When architecture is affected by sound, a sonorous, an acoustic and an auditory dimension of space emerges. The connection of bodies with the sonic-spatial presence creates a phenomenal map that is accessed through the listening experience and which I call “aural architecture”. Aural architecture is an aesthetic practice that invites us to experience visible and invisible realities through listening. By auditory experience and sensory interpretation, it is possible to build imaginary architectures that emerge from our own creative perception. It is a critical reflection on the hegemony of visual culture and the disciplinary paradigm of architecture, which, regarding its design and production methods, reveals a lack of sensibility by not considering perception as a material for the construction of spatialities. This chapter is a manifesto on aural architecture, which declares the creative action as a subversive act that aims to dematerialize architecture into subjective interpretations. Aural architecture is a parallel dimension of reality that operates from a rhizomatic and transdisciplinary structure where the frontiers between artist and spectator are blurred.

This piece focuses on the somewhat neglected (at least within scholarly circles) area of location-based sound recording, drawing much-needed critical attention to the intricacies and skills involved in location sound recording within realist filmmaking—both scripted and unscripted. Through my own practice-as-research, I aim to reimagine an ontological definition of location sound recording by proposing that a reinvigoration of the ‘realist’ genre can be achieved by connecting the storytelling skills of recording for single camera with the new opportunities afforded by immersive audio technologies—ambisonics here being a vital part of that development process. I demonstrate how use of such immersive audio technologies offer new creative opportunities for realist makers and audiences, based on the unique experience of geographical place and physical event that immersive audio delivers.

Sonification as a realistic practice, both for communicative and artistic purposes, raises issues that need to be considered. In order to find a path to good sonifications, we need to address the pitfalls and look for ways to overcome them. Therefore, in this chapter, after presenting the advantages of using sonification, I will outline and discuss each problem by proposing solutions through a brief survey of selected related authors and artworks.

This article posits the creative exploration of the interconnections between image and sound, as well as the intricate interplay between aesthetics and poetics within the contemporary landscape of new digital artistic formats. To facilitate this exploration, it analyses the nuanced roles attributed to visual and sonic elements and their cognitive effect as attention grabbing mechanisms, in order to discern their mutual interferences and the consequential amplification of their artistic resonance. Moreover, it extends its purview beyond the visual and auditory domains, contemplating the ramifications for the broader spectrum of human senses. Through this analysis of aesthetic dimensions, including sensory experiences that transcend the Aristotelian realms of perception, it seeks to unravel the cognitive and communicational implications inherent in the synergistic employment of these media and the transformative potential encapsulated within the convergence of digital formats, unearthing the profound sensory, cognitive, and communicational impacts that resonate within the realms of art and human perception.

In this chapter we will discuss how music is perceived as a multisensorial phenomenon, and how complementary elements can be combined to enhance parts or a whole of a piece. These elements can vary greatly according to different sound formats, from operas to acousmatic representations, but inevitably we hear as we feel—with our body and our mind. Despite some speculations and perspectives regarding a de-dramatization of a music representation to focus on the essence of sound, we ultimately face, in every public presentation, a ritualistic configuration that inevitably involves a highly complex connection of senses, memories and emotions. When we listen, sound is a trigger for all these complex relations, that vary individually with the time and space they are experienced. We will use three pieces developed by the Sonoscopia collective to reinforce some of these ideas, each with different approaches concerning the deconstruction of the traditional conception of the term audio-visual, which is used frequently to describe a screened projection with sound. These pieces are based on a practical perspective that was implemented with different methodologies in seven distinct locations, providing some useful insights on how music can be understood as a universal and cross-cultural subject.

This chapter addresses the relationship between sound and visuals in audiovisual interactive projects and describes strategies for synchronizing sound and visuals in real time. It begins with a brief context of sound-image analogies, live visuals, and audiovisual performances. Subsequently, four different case studies are presented: two audiovisual live performances and two audiovisual installations. Their setups, software and hardware are described, as well as their different strategies for mapping sound to visuals. The analogies presented focus on cases where sound influences and shapes visuals. The paper aims to be a practical guide for live audiovisual artists to explore analogies and mappings between sound and visuals in audiovisual artworks and performances.