Graphic Notation and Musical Graphics

1 Precursors

Figural notations, precursors of graphic notation, were produced as early as around 1400. The lines are arranged in the shape of a heart, a circle, or a cross, and in addition to their decorative character, they often have the form of a puzzle canon.

Graphics on music paper, such as Moritz von Schwind’s (1804–1871) Die Katzensymphonie (The Cat Symphony, 1868),^[1] were prevalent in the nineteenth century.^[2] At this point in time, the score had already become autonomous as text and was available independent of the performance of the piece as an autonomous, time-independent foundation of the ideal form.

There were various attempts in the 1920s to overcome the boundaries between the art genres. At the same time, visual artists used music as a model for abstract art. In addition to Paul Klee’s graphic representation of a piece by Bach (Fugue in Red, 1921/22), in 1923, Wassily Kandinsky developed a graphic representation of music by translating the beginning of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony into dots.^[3] Bauhaus student Karl Peter Röhl drew abstract graphics on music paper as early as 1926.^[4]

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2 Graphic Notations and Musical Graphics after 1950

1
Moritz von Schwind (1804–1871), Die Katzensymphonie (Le Chat Noir), 1868, Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe; ill.: http://www.onlinekunst.de/januar/21_01_2_Schwind.htm; in Vom Klang der Bilder: Die Musik in der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Karin von Maur (Munich: Prestel, 1985), 49, cat. no. 37.  
2
See also Grandville, Ronde, Tarantelle, 1840 [a circular notation system with dancing stick figures], in Le Magasin pittoresque 8, no. 31 (1840): 245.  
3
Wassily Kandinsky, Punkt und Linie zu Fläche: Beitrag zur Analyse der malerischen Elemente, Bauhaus-Bücher, vol. 9, ed. Walter Gropius and Ladislaus [sic] Maholy-Nagy (Munich: Albert Langen, 1926; Bern: Benteli, 1955), 44ff.  
4
Karl Peter Röhl, 1926, Abstrakte Folge, in Karl Peter Röhl: Aquarelle, Zeichnungen, Druckgraphik 1916–1961, ed. Jens Christian Jensen, exh. cat. Kunsthalle zu Kiel and the Schleswig-Holsteinischer Kunstverein (Kiel, 1979); von Maur, Vom Klang der Bilder, 24 and 207, cat. nos. 334, 335.  