The Sound of Images. Musical Resonances Between Story and Illustration

Abstract

There are illustrated texts that manage to generate music; sometimes, they do so through direct and precise references to composers and pieces, other times through an impressionistic hybridization that conveys fleeting atmospheres those same atmospheres that, ever since Goethe’s Theory of Colours and his aphorisms On Music, we have understood to be infused with multifaceted synesthetic reverberations. This beautiful fusion ‒ capable of transcending an imaginary too often constrained by rigid artistic boundaries ‒ is explored here through three distinct forms of “musical representation through images”: The Dam, by David Almond and Levi Pinfold, follows the thread of musical evocation to portray the passage of time and generational change. Pinfold’s delicate pencil lends things, places, nature, and people a sense of continuity with the created world, one that unfolds through an armonia mundi whose musical dimension is indispensable. Summer, by Suzy Lee, directly inspired by one of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons (and the accompanying poetic sonnet), dares to enact an artistic transposition from the emotional field evoked by music centuries old to the chromatic immediacy of everyday, youthful, current, and vividly suggestive imagery, to borrow the words of Calvin Brown and Rino Maione. Finally, For Hand, by Sante Bandirali and Gloria Tundo, recounts with words and masterful illustrations the life of Paul Wittgenstein, who lost his right hand after being sent to the front during the Great War. A story of exemplary resilience, the book intersects music history, aesthetics, and educational and ethical perspectives.