Word-painting (Ger.

Wortmalerei)
 Tim Carter
 https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.30568
 Published in print: 20 January 2001
 Published online: 2001


The use of musical gesture(s) in a work with an actual or implied text to reflect,
often pictorially, the literal or figurative meaning of a word or phrase. A
common example is a falling line for ‘descendit de caelis’ (‘He came down from
heaven’). The term is more usually applied to vocal music, although a
programmatic instrumental piece might in some sense exploit the technique.
Word-painting is often distinguished from mood- or tone-painting (the
German Tonmalerei), which is concerned with the musical representation of a
work's broader emotional or other worlds, although the categories are not
always clear: a Bach aria or a Schubert song, for example, can take a melodic or
accompanimental motif generated by word-painting and base the entire musical
material on it so as to express the dominant affection or image of the text
(grief, joy, stream, spinning-wheel). It is one class of figures (Hypotyposis) in
musical rhetoric (seeRhetoric and music, §I, 3) – the falling line for ‘descendit’ is an
example of Catabasis – and also concerns musical expression (see Expression, §I).
Word-painting is associated in particular with music of the Renaissance and
Baroque periods, although in any period music that seeks somehow to
represent rather than just present a text will probably include it to some
degree, if not always in ways we may now appreciate (Machaut is an intriguing
case in point).
Word-painting presumes the possibility of a meaningful relationship between
word and music. Thus it developed as a characteristic feature of the
Renaissance, when this relationship was carefully (re)constructed by musical
humanists on the precedent of classical antiquity. Given the emerging
sensitivity to music's responsibilities towards the content and delivery of the
text, increasingly subtle forms of word-painting contributed to musical
expression: Josquin, for example, was able to give musical life to his texts by a
wide range of melodic, harmonic or textural word-painting devices that could
themselves take the music in new directions.

Word-painting was discussed by numerous Renaissance theorists in their

search for a new poetics (rather than science) of music. Thus musical art might
be considered to imitate nature and also enter the Trivium alongside rhetoric.
Nicola Vicentino (L'antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica, 1555) argued in a
chapter devoted to ‘the manner of pronouncing the long and short syllables
beneath the notes, and how one should imitate the nature of the words’ (book
iv, chap. 29) that ‘music is written for words for no other purpose than to
express the idea [concetto], the passions [passioni] and the affections [effetti] of
these words by means of harmony’. German theorists in particular sought to
determine a taxonomy of musical poetics: according to Joachim Thuringus
(Opusculum bipartitum, 1624) there are three categories of words that may be
‘expressed and painted’ by means of music, including ‘words of affection’
(‘weep’, ‘laugh’, ‘pity’), ‘words of motion and places’ (‘leap’, ‘cast down’) and
‘words of time and number’ (‘quickly’, ‘twice’).
The technique was standard, even conventional, in the 16th-century chanson
and madrigal, often for witty effect – it became closely associated with the term
‘madrigalism’ – but sacred music was not excluded. Word-painting devices
range from onomatopoeia (for example, the imitation of the sounds of battle,
birdsong or chattering washerwomen by Janequin) through figurative or
pictorial melodic or contrapuntal gestures (Catabasis or its ascending
opposite, Anabasis; Circulatio; Fugaetc.) and scoring (a single voice for ‘all alone’;
three for the Trinity) to more abstruse effects associated with musica
reservata (see Musica reservata). Not all can be perceived aurally: some are visual,
such as the so-called Eye music found in the 16th-century madrigal and later
(black notes for ‘night’; two semibreves for ‘eyes’), or musical symbols
depending on some technical pun, as with Bach's use of notes marked with a
sharp sign (Kreuz) in works whose text refers to the Cross.
The more obvious techniques of word-painting have often been decried as
childish and naive by theorists seeking a deeper relationship between text and
music: Vincenzo Galilei was one of the first to pour scorn on such devices
(Dialogo della musica antica et della moderna, 1581) and it is generally (if wrongly)
assumed that the seconda praticamadrigal of Monteverdi and his contemporaries
avoided such literalism in favour of a more holistic and oratorical approach to
text-setting. It is true that in the Baroque period the relationship of signifier to
signified extended beyond pictorial figures based on resemblance to more
iconic notions of representation, as with the descending (chromatic) tetrachord
as an ‘emblem of lament’. Yet Handel was not averse to ‘painting’ musical
images (see, for example, ‘Ev'ry valley’ from Messiah at the words ‘exalted’,
‘crooked’ and ‘plain’), and the stock association of a musical gesture with a
given word or concept was one way in which instrumental music of the Baroque
period and later could generate its own semiotic. Similarly, opera composers
almost always resort to pictorialism – witness Donizetti's birdsong or Berg's
snoring – while Wagner's leitmotifs usually have their origin in some kind of
word-painting.
Word-painting is often a matter of musical play, to be enjoyed by one or more
of the composer, performer and listener. It is also a question of tradition, as
countless settings of ‘descendit de caelis’ from the Credo of the Mass reveal.
And given the strikingly consistent association of specific types of gesture with
specific meanings across very different styles and periods, it may reflect
something culturally embedded within the language of Western music (or if we
believe J.-J. Rousseau, in the origins of language itself), and how that musical
language is constructed in semantic and spatial terms. There are also more
fundamental aesthetic issues at stake concerning music's ability and power
both to represent something outside itself and to communicate that something
to others.
 Bibliography
 EinsteinIM
 Grove6 (C. Warren)
 C. van den Borren: ‘Le madrigalisme avant le madrigal’, Studien zur
Musikgeschichte: Festschrift für Guido Adler (Vienna, 1930), 78–83
 D. Cooke: The Language of Music (London, 1959)
 E. Rosand: ‘The Descending Tetrachord: an Emblem of Lament’, MQ, 55 (1979),
346–59
 D. Harrán: Word-Tone Relations in Musical Thought from Antiquity to the Seventeenth
Century, MSD, 40 (Rome, 1986)