Poetry News

Music to look at vs. music to be listened to

By Harriet Staff

Harriet occasionally posts about concrete and visual poetry, or other work that highlights the visual aspect of reading and composition. Similarly, we came across this blog post by Bibliodyssey, which presents the the “visual context of music.” The post consists mainly of scanned pages of graphic musical scores, which evade standard notation and opt instead for the image’s more or less abstract relationship to sound. The scores got range: from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, composers have been experimenting with the visual field. How does this relate to poetry? Well, we’re not 100% sure, but it seems intuitively as if current discussions surrounding hybridity and typography could be put in proximity with music’s continued struggle with the form of its own notation. What could this proximity produce? That’s not up to us!

Posted in Poetry News on Monday, January 17th, 2011 by Harriet Staff.