Images of Music Long Past

I suppose I’ll get the my moans about the National Gallery’s exhibition centred on the depiction of music in 17^th century Dutch art out of the way up front.  Although Vermeer’s name figures in the official title, there are only five actual Vermeers in the show; clearly his name and reputation are being used to pull the marginal punter through the doors.   The said punter might also feel a bit done down at paying almost full blockbuster price for an exhibition which (with the exception of a couple of the Vermeers) is drawn entirely from the Gallery’s own collections.  None of the paintings on display have come from outside the UK; the borrowings from further afield are limited to a number of musical instruments of the period.   Admittedly these are fascinating and sometimes beautiful in their own right -there is a particularly lovely English-made bass viol )a piece of functional wood sculpture whose sensuous lines help to make the viol’s status as a metaphor for femininity in Dutch art comprehensible) but they aren’t perhaps quite what the average gallery-goer would regard as star items in a show primarily about painting.   Even after scouring the Gallery reserves for every Dutch painting from the right period with a musical instrument in it, the curators clearly struggled to fill the exhibition space, padding things out with a section on Vermeer’s technique (he used an unusual amount of very expensive lapis lazuli in his colours, which helps to explain the richness of his blues…).

On the positive side (if you happen to be in the gallery at the right times) there are a series of short concerts given by an early music duet which highlight music from the same period as the paintings.  This is genuinely intriguing stuff as few 17^th century Dutch composers bar the keyboard specialist Sweelinck are at all well known even to early music enthusiasts like myself and it appears the folk doing the concerts have had to undertake quite a bit of archive research to assemble a repertoire for the event (sadly not included in the tie-in CD being marketed by the Gallery).

Moans apart, the exhibition picks up on an interesting theme.   Music was deeply embedded in 17^th century Dutch culture (as indeed it was in all West European cultures of that era) and paintings depicting the making of music clearly found a ready market amongst the picture-buying public.   There were even more direct linkages between the worlds of painting and music too; it was common practice for virginals and other keyboard instruments to be sold “plain”, with the purchaser commissioning an artist to decorate them-as with the instrument depicted by Vermeer at the top of this piece. Indeed Vermeer himself is thought to have done work in this field, though no instrument whose decoration can be securely attributed to his hand appears to survive Artists often owned musical instruments; it’s a source of some surprise that none appear in the inventory taken after Vermeer’s death.   On the other hand, the social profiles of the two arts varied a bit.  Musical participation was much more widespread- there would certainly have been vastly more people around who would have been capable of picking out a tune on a lute or a keyboard than could ever have hoped to draw or paint in a competent manner (in that respect not much changes- music in one form or another must surely still be the most common participant art form in the modern world).    Social elites who would never have dreamed of dabbling in the manual labour involved in painting were happy enough to perform music to (admittedly intimate and socially selective) audiences-though there was always a tension between music as the necessary accomplishment of an educated individual and music as a trade undertaken by low status professionals.    

Musical performance thrived further down the social scale too, in the Dutch equivalent of pubs and dance halls- not to mention brothels.  According to the catalogue for the exhibition there were drinking establishments which specialised in music to such an extent that they had musical instruments hung up on the walls for use by the clientele and even a fines policy under which any visitor who was capable of playing a musical instrument but refused to do so was expected to treat all those present to a drink (how did they check the musical abilities of people who weren’t regulars?...).   It is, incidentally, an interesting comment on the collecting priorities of an earlier generation of British enthusiasts for Dutch art that the exhibition contained hardly any paintings of music making at the more plebeian and raucous end of the spectrum- not a chaotic and ribald Jan Steen drinking den in sight, for instance.   While not all the music on display is necessary as decorous as it looks at first sight, one dimension of lived musical experience of the Dutch Golden Age is a bit marginalised.

This experience was a little bit different from that elsewhere in Europe.  The United Provinces of the Netherlands was a rather unusual polity in 17^th century terms.   A republic (or rather a federation of autonomous provinces each run on more or less republican lines), it possessed an on-and-off quasi-monarchy vested in the House of Orange.   Though the Orange family ran a permanent court at the Hague and retained princely status even in the periods when its head wasn’t also de facto head of state, it didn’t provide anything like the focus for music making that the French or British courts did- no Dutch court music tradition equivalent to Charles I’s court masques or Louis XIV’s ballets ever established itself.   Italian opera didn’t get into the Netherlands until well after the period covered by the exhibition.   The state church was Calvinist in theology, which limited liturgical music to congregational singing of psalms.  Dutch churches did however have organs (unusually for the Calvinist world- organs didn’t become mainstream in the Church of Scotland until well into the 19^th century and the more conservative splinter churches in the Highlands and Islands rely on precenting to this day).  These however played before and after service and were used for concerts (laid on in the probably vain hope that they’d draw the masses away from the pubs).

On the other hand there was a large, well-off mercantile elite- natural purchasers of musical instruments and tuition on how to use them (or how to sing along to them).  In addition to a lively world of home music making, they were also potential patrons of and participants in local and regional music societies.   This was a world open to both genders (it’s interesting that Vermeer’s “music” paintings invariably show women playing instruments, usually keyboards, though the lady below is being rather innovative and daring in trying out a guitar, a rarity in the Netherlands at that date).  

Judging by the paintings in the show, music also created an environment for legitimate interaction between young people of different genders, not to mention flirtation - a bit like tennis in the late 19^th century, perhaps- the Metsu example below is just one of many examples of that form of social interaction on display. 

Less well filled purses still had access to song books- a staple of certain Dutch printing houses- and you didn’t need to be able to read music in order to participate.   A lot of music was probably learned by ear and song books were frequently printed on a “words only” basis with an indication that they should be taken to a well-known tune of the day- the wonders of common metre…..

The sheer omnipresence of music in daily life meant that it could be taken as a metaphor for all manner of different, sometimes contradictory, things in painting.   It made a very obvious visual correlative for hearing in paintings which allegorised the five senses which are often set in musical dinners.  The ephemeral nature of all performances in a world before sound recording made a nod to music common in so-called “Vanitas” paintings which made a disabused commentary on the basic vanity of human ambition and worldly glory, all come to dust.   A musical instrument or a piece of sheet music joins swords and skulls and learned tomes and fading flowers to drive home the moral (one of the examples of this genre in the exhibition provides an interesting variant by including a Japanese samurai sword- a symbol of trading empire as much as military glory).

Perhaps the most obvious “meaning” of music was as a way of symbolising harmony at all levels in society.  This was a virtue which perhaps needed more stress in the Dutch Republic than elsewhere due to the enormously complex, multi-layered, federal structures which governed it.   This was a country run by committees and boards and chartered companies at every level, from parish poor relief to conquering and managing a substantial overseas empire.   Serious factional disputes could make the whole system seize up very quickly- and serious disputes were not in short supply in the 17^th century.   There were major divisions over the role of the House of Orange, pushed out of its dominant role and restored again twice in the course of the century.  There were divisions over the theology of the established church which led to schism and rioting in the streets.  Arguments between the provinces over the dominant role of Holland (just one out of seven) and, within Holland, the dominance of Amsterdam interests bubbled just below the surface.   Harmony was often in short supply- which was perhaps why it was so valued.  There aren’t many paintings in the show which overtly address harmony at the macro level, though one cheery domestic musical party is overlooked by a portrait of Prince Maurice of Nassau, military hero and sometime head of the House of Orange- which may suggest a political subtext, if itself arguably a partisan one.

It’s easier to see references to harmony at the micro, household, level in this art- full of references to what appears to be family music making as it is.  This of course could easily shade into the flirtations mentioned above- and in turn shade into a rather more equivocal view of music.   As I noted earlier, the most raucous and disruptive associations with plebeian misrule don’t get many outings in the exhibition.   Sexual innuendo of one kind or another is however very much on the agenda.  Take the music party painted by Jan Olis below.   The room is suspiciously bare and the rather louche looking collection of men relatively drably dressed (I wonder if they’re meant to be soldiers off duty).  By contrast the only female present is a blaze of brilliant colours as she saws away at the bass viol.  This would have been regarded as highly indecorous and unladylike- it was not an instrument which ladies generally played.  The obvious inference is that she’s no lady and this isn’t a cosy domestic dinner party…..

As also noted above the bass viol appears to have been viewed as a standing metaphor for femininity and, by extension, sexual innuendo, as was the lute (especially the large version, the archlute or theorbo.   Even when they’re not being played, bass viols pop up suggestively among the props in many of the paintings.   One of the Jan Steens which does make it in shows a young lady practicing on the clavichord under the watchful (lustful?) eye of a young man; in the background a servant approaches carrying a theorbo.   One can guess what’s going to follow, and it probably goes beyond getting the bass lines right for the next family concert.    I did sometimes suspect however that this sexualised reading was getting a bit overdone- surely there must be paintings in which a bass viol is just a bass viol….

The Vermeers in the show have their share of bass viols among the scenery but their tone is rather different.   Only one of them, the so-called “Music Lesson” below, contains more than one figure- it’s assumed that the young man is singing because he has his mouth open.   Young ladies practice their music in what are clearly the houses of wealthy members of the civic elites- even their instruments are top quality (the virginals look like top range Ruckers products, for instance).    Presumably they’re daughters of the house, well dressed and nice looking.  They’re probably primarily self-accompanied singers rather than keyboard (or guitar) virtuosi- the type of virginal in use is a “muselar”, a model purely produced in the Low Countries and used almost entirely to accompany singing (depending on who you read, it had a particularly mellow tone or sounded like the grunting of young pigs…).   As with so much of Vermeer’s mature art, we may be invited into their space but we’re also kept rather at a distance.   The guitar player seems more interested in someone out of shot to our left, the couple are more taken up with their own interactions than with anybody else; even the young ladies who appear to make eye contact with us are still busy with their practice and likely to turn away again any moment.   There’s a sense that the viewer is a distraction- who may or may not be a welcome one.   It’s a distinctly cooler and more reserved world than that portrayed by most of the other artists represented in the show.   I can’t imagine any of Vermeer’s subjects in a noisy Jan Steen tavern- or even having a riotous concert at home full of booze and flirtation.   I also have a faint sense that that might have been their loss……