Joshua S. Walden - Musical Portraits - The Composition of Identity in Contemporary and Experimental Music-Oxford University Press (2018)

i
Musical Portraits
ii
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Musical Portraits
The Composition of Identity
in Contemporary
and Experimental Music
Joshua S. Walden
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1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Walden, Joshua S., 1979– author.
Title: Musical portraits : the composition of identity in contemporary and
experimental music / Joshua S. Walden.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2018] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017020694 | ISBN 9780190653507 (hardcover : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780190653521 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Characters and characteristics in music. | Music—20th
century—History and criticism.
Classification: LCC ML197 .W36 2018 | DDC 781.5/9—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017020694
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
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To Judy Schelly, Mike Walden, and Danny Walden

vi
I drew men’s faces on my copy-books,

Scrawled them within the antiphonary’s marge,
Joined legs and arms to the long music-notes,
Found eyes and nose and chin for A’s and B’s.
—Robert Browning, “Fra Lippo Lippi,” in Charlotte Porter and
Helen A. Clarke (eds.), Poems of Robert Browning
(New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1896), 127–8.
vii
CO N T E N T S
List of Figures ix
List of Musical Examples xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: Portraiture as a Musical Genre 1

1. Musical and Literary Portraiture 22
2. Musical Portraits of Visual Artists 55
3. Listening in on Composers’ Self-Portraits 81
4. Celebrity, Music, and the Multimedia Portrait 109
Epilogue: Musical Portraiture, the Posthumous,
and the Posthuman 143
Bibliography 161
Index 177
viii
ix
L IST O F F I G UR E S
I.1 Charles Demuth, “The Figure 5 in Gold,” 1928, oil on cardboard,

35-1/2 x 30 inches. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alfred
Stieglitz Collection, 1949 (49.59.1). Image © The Metropolitan
Museum of Art. 7
I.2 Katherine Dreier, “Abstract Portrait of Marcel Duchamp,” 1918, oil
on canvas, 18 x 32 inches. Museum of Modern Art. Digital Image
© The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/
Art Resource, NY. 8
1.1 Pablo Picasso, “Gertrude Stein,” 1905–1906, oil on canvas,
39-3/8 x 32 inches. © 2016 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image copyright
© The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art
Resource, NY. 27
1.2 Buffie Johnson, “Portrait of Virgil Thomson,” 1963, oil on Masonite,
23-3/4 x 19-1/2 inches. Used by permission of the University
of Missouri-Kansas City Libraries, Dr. Kenneth J. LaBudde
Department of Special Collections. Additional permission granted
by Jenny J. Sykes. 33
2.1 Willem de Kooning, “Woman, I,” 1950–1952, oil on canvas, 6 feet
3-7/8 x 58 inches. © 2016 The Willem de Kooning Foundation/
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital Image © The
Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art
Resource, NY. 67
2.2 Chuck Close, “Phil,” 1969, acrylic on canvas, 108 x 84 inches.
© Chuck Close, courtesy Pace Gallery. 70
2.3 Chuck Close, “Phil,” 2011–2012, oil on canvas, 108-5/8 x 84 inches.
© Chuck Close, courtesy Pace Gallery. 73
3.1 Brother Rufillus, Initial R, from a Passionale from Weissenau
Abbey, c. 1170–1200, Cod. Bodmer 127, f. 244r. Fondation
Martin Bodmer, Cologny (Geneva). 82
x
( x ) List of Figures
3.2 Eugène Atget, “Coiffeur, Palais Royal,” 1927, albumen silver print

(gold-toned), 7 x 9-1/2 inches. Museum of Modern Art. Digital
Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art
Resource, NY. 83
3.3 Richard Hamilton, “A Portrait of the Artist by Francis Bacon,”
1970–1971, collotype and screenprint, 32-3/8 x 27-3/8 inches.
© R. Hamilton. All Rights Reserved, DACS and ARS 2016. Image
copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source:
Art Resource, NY. 89
3.4 Kazimir Malevich, “Suprematism: Self-Portrait in Two
Dimensions,” 1915, oil on canvas, 31-1/2 x 24-3/8 inches.
Stedelijk Museum. Art Resource, NY. 92
3.5 John Baldessari, “Beethoven’s Trumpet (With Ear) Opus # 133,”
2007, foam, resin, aluminum, cold bronze, and electronics,
84 x 120 x 84 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman
Gallery. 96
4.1 Robert Wilson and Tom Waits, “Robert Downey Jr.,” 2004, video.
Courtesy RW Work Ltd. 117
4.2 Robert Wilson and Michael Galasso, “Winona Ryder,” 2004, video.
Courtesy RW Work Ltd. 118
4.3 Robert Wilson and Philip Glass, “Knee Play 1” from Einstein on the
Beach, 2012–2014 revival production. Courtesy of BAM Hamm
Archives and the Robert Wilson Archives and the Byrd Hoffman
Water Mill Foundation. © Lucie Jansch. 132
4.4 Robert Wilson and Philip Glass, “Knee Play 5” from Einstein on the
Beach, 2012–2014 revival production. Courtesy of BAM Hamm
Archives and the Robert Wilson Archives and the Byrd Hoffman
Water Mill Foundation. © Lucie Jansch. 133
E.1 Kim Novak in Vertigo, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Paramount
Pictures, 1958. 145
E.2 Robert Wilson and Bernard Herrmann, “Princess Caroline,” 2006,
video. Courtesy RW Work Ltd. 149
xi
L IST O F M U SIC A L E X A M P L E S
1.1 Virgil Thomson, “Miss Gertrude Stein as a Young Girl,” 1928,

mm. 1–11. 31
1.2 Virgil Thomson, “Buffie Johnson: Drawing Virgil Thomson in
Charcoal,” 1981, mm. 1–6. 34
1.3 Virgil Thomson, “Buffie Johnson: Drawing Virgil Thomson in
Charcoal,” 1981, mm. 20–4. 34
2.1 Morton Feldman, “de Kooning,” first page. Copyright © 1963
by C. F. Peters Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Used by
permission. 64
4.1 Philip Glass, “Knee Play 1,” from Einstein on the Beach, premiered
1976, organ 1 part, first measure. 132
4.2 Philip Glass, “Knee Play 2,” from Einstein on the Beach, premiered
1976, solo violin part, rehearsal 3. 132
E.1 Bernard Herrmann, Carlotta’s leitmotif, from Vertigo, 1958, dir.
Alfred Hitchcock. David Cooper, Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo:
A Film Score Handbook (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
2001), 20. 146
xii
xii
AC KNOWL E DG M E N T S
I am thankful to Alessandra Aquilanti, Andrea Bohlman, Christopher Doll,

Walter Frisch, Sharon Levy, Michael Maul, Laura Protano-Biggs, Hollis
Robbins, David Smooke, and Andrew Talle for the friendship and sup-
port they offered at various stages of my work on this project. This book
received support from the Manfred Bukofzer Endowment of the American
Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the
Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. I want to acknowledge
the insightful editorship of Suzanne Ryan and to thank Andrew Maillet,
Victoria Kouznetsov, and the rest of the Oxford University Press staff who
helped with the production of this book. Peering back further, I am grateful
to the instructor who taught me the most about art and assured it would
always be a source of fascination for me, Michele Metz. Whenever I visit a
museum I still remember her lessons vividly as I come across the artworks
she discussed in her class, and I am sure those lectures played no small part
in the generation of this project. Most importantly, as always, the deepest
thanks are owed to my family. The education I have received from my par-
ents and brother in music, art, and literature has profoundly shaped the way
I think about the world, and no one can be more helpful than they are, as
interlocutors, sounding-boards, editors, and collaborators. It has been great
fun to share this project with them.
xiv
1
Introduction
Portraiture as a Musical Genre
The artist’s work is to show us ourselves as we really are. Our minds are nothing but this knowledge
of ourselves; and he who adds a jot to such knowledge creates new mind as surely as any woman
creates new men.
—George Bernard Shaw1
“A h guarda, sorella,” sings the love-struck Fiordiligi to her sister

Dorabella in the first act of Mozart and Da Ponte’s opera Così fan tutte
(1790). In a lilting, circling melody, she repeats, “Guarda, guarda”—“Look,
look.” Both sisters wear portrait miniatures of their beaux about their necks.
Fiordiligi gazes admiringly at the portrait of her beloved Guglielmo, but
convincing her sister to look will mean distracting the impulsive Dorabella
from the miniature portrait of Ferrando over which she is swooning.
Fiordiligi doubts one can find a finer mouth or nobler countenance than
those depicted in the portrait she beholds: she sees “the face of a soldier
and a lover.” This characterization comes across in the orchestral accompa-
niment as well, his strength in the dotted rhythms rising in a major arpeg-
gio, his amorousness in the suddenly languorous and melismatic singing
style that follows. For her part, Dorabella is preoccupied by the depiction
of her lover’s eyes, which seem to shoot flames and darts at her. She sees
in her portrait “a face attractive but forbidding,” characteristics conveyed
musically by the sudden change to minor and the ensuing anxious motivic
repetition, an aroused turn to the Sturm und Drang style.
Portraiture depicts aspects of our selves that are available to the senses,
but it also proposes elements of our reality that we might not otherwise
recognize so readily. It can reveal features of the human self that are hidden
2
( 2 ) Musical Portraits
beyond plain view, but it can additionally convince us of attributes of iden-

tity that are pure fabrication. If the opera had opened with this duet, we
might be persuaded that the portraits tell the truth about the subjects they
depict, or at least that these young women’s interpretations of what they see
in their miniatures can be believed. But we met the young men they describe
during the previous scene, in which, drunk and impetuous, they argued over
which of them inspired the more intense devotion in his lover, and devised
a plan to test Fiordiligi and Dorabella’s constancy by dressing as Albanians
and trying to seduce one another’s sweethearts. Can these be the strong and
reputable youths whose respective noble face and fiery eyes are depicted in
their portraits?
The young women’s duet derives its ironic depiction of loving idoliza-
tion from the friction between perception and truth, symbolized simply but
potently by the unreliability of portraits and the pitfalls of believing in the
accuracy of their representations. The sisters’ vocal lines also reveal music’s
ability to conjure aspects of character, bearing, and social status in a way
that reflects the representational power of visual art: Mozart’s text setting
and instrumental writing during this number mirror the portraits’ images
as described by the two young women, evoking the series of affects about
which they sing through the juxtaposition of musical gestures, textures,
and topics. One can almost picture in the imagination the miniatures the
women gaze at through the descriptions presented in the poetry and music.
This operatic scene demonstrates how music, in combination with lan-
guage, can be devised to fashion an impression of human identity. Like the
miniatures that hang from the necks of Fiordiligi and Dorabella, Mozart’s
musical portrayal of their lovers employs well-known sonic tropes that
serve as metaphors to depict qualities of respectability, moral strength,
and maturity that both the young men and the young women would like
to believe reflect the truth about their characters. But members of the
audience—along with the philosopher Don Alfonso and the maid Despina,
the characters who join together to put the couples’ affection through a
series of trials over the course of the narrative—know these musical and
poetic interpretations of the miniature portraits to be exaggerated and false.
To recognize the music as ironic, we have to see the conflict between the
way the men are represented in the first scene and the musical construc-
tion of their identities here. In this manner Mozart’s opera shows that the
representations of individuals that emerge from the mixture of sound and
words must always be viewed as subjective constructions rather than objec-
tive mirrors of reality.
This book is about musical portraiture, a genre of compositions that
operate as musical evocations of aspects of individual identities in the man-
ner of portraits in the visual arts and literature. Musical portraits have been
3
I n t ro d u c t i o n ( 3 )
written in a variety of forms, from the eighteenth-century keyboard mini-

ature to the twentieth-century portrait opera and beyond. With no other
definitive distinguishing features, such works require the aid of a title or
other manner of description by the composer in order to be identified as
portraits. The genre emerged in the early 1700s with works by François
Couperin (1668–1733) and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714–1788) and
has remained of interest to composers through the present day, as a means
of creating sonic depictions of patrons, family members, friends, and his-
torical figures.2
Portraiture in music has proven a more complex and even elusive enter-
prise than portraiture in painting or sculpture, for obvious reasons: in the
absence of a means of depicting physical appearance, an element of por-
traiture in the visual arts that is commonly considered essential, compos-
ers have grappled with the question of how music can convey attributes of
identity other than appearance in such a way that listeners will construe
the composition to represent an individual. The musical portrait invites
interpretation, as the listener, inspired by the composition, constructs in
the imagination an impression of the work’s human subject. Musical por-
traiture therefore evinces a particularly self-conscious, interactive form of
representation, in which a piece’s sounds and structures, in conjunction
with a title identifying it as a portrait, are assembled by the composer and
performer and heard by the listener to evoke abstract attributes of identity
such as character, personality, social status, and profession.
The second half of the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first
have brought compelling developments to the genre of visual portraiture,
as Western conceptions of identity have altered in parallel with increasing
challenges to the predominance of mimesis in artistic representation. This
book investigates the ways such recent debates over the nature of the self
inform our understanding of music’s capacity to represent human iden-
tity by considering works of musical portraiture composed since 1950.
Indeed, while composers have created musical portraits with some regu-
larity since the early development of the genre, the contemporary focus in
the arts on challenging traditional modes of representation has provoked
increasing numbers of composers to experiment with the representation of
personal identity in music and in multimedia combinations of sound, text,
and image.
The subjects of the musical portraits examined in this book are princi-
pally artists in the fields of literature, painting, composition, and perfor-
mance. By looking in particular at musical portraits of authors and artists
as well as composers’ self-portraits, the case studies in each chapter explore
the complex relationships among musical, visual, and linguistic modes
of depicting human identity. This introduction offers a brief history
4
of visual and musical portraiture and a discussion of modes of represen-

tation in music. It then examines how the musical portrait operates as a
narrative construction of an identity or self. Finally, it closes with an over-
view of the structure of this book’s exploration of contemporary musical
portraiture.
LIKENESS, IDENTIT Y, AND METAPHOR

IN PORTRAITURE
Portraiture in the visual arts typically assumes the representation of phys-

ical likeness, the fixing for posterity of a person’s appearance in a single
moment of life. Highlighting this function of the genre, the early modern
art theorist Leon Battista Alberti wrote in his 1435 treatise On Painting:
“Painting contains a divine force which not only makes absent men pres-
ent . . . but moreover makes the dead seem almost alive. . . . Thus the face
of a man who is already dead certainly lives a long life through painting.”3
The notion of the portrait as fixing a life in spite of human mortality is the
focus of the 1850 short story “The Oval Portrait” by Edgar Allan Poe, which
describes the creation of a portrait of a lively young woman that hangs on
the wall of an abandoned chateau. The woman had fallen in love with the
painter, whose devotion to his craft so distracts him that over the course of
sitting for the portrait she becomes increasingly jealous of his attentions.
After completing his last brush stroke and standing back to look at the fin-
ished portrait, the artist “grew tremulous and very pallid, and aghast, and
crying with a loud voice,” he exclaimed, “This is indeed Life itself!” He then
turns to discover, to his horror, that as he painted her portrait, his beloved
has died.4 The artist who preserves a life for posterity, in Poe’s imagination,
and in a reversal of the dynamic Alberti describes, renders that life absent
in the present.5
Artists and critics have long remarked that the representation that
captures an individual life in portraiture for eternity requires more than
simply the reproduction of physical likeness: the portrait must con-
vey a sense of a sitter’s character, understood to include such aspects as
personality, social position, and profession.6 Thus even in the ancient
world, the Greek historian Plutarch praised Lysippos—the artist of the
fourth century bce known as the “father of Hellenistic sculpture” for
his bronze representations of Alexander the Great that combined phys-
ical idealization with the depiction of their subject’s individuality—for
bronzes that “preserve [Alexander’s] manly and leonine quality” and in
so doing “brought out his real character . . . and gave form to his essential
excellence.”7
5
Identity is thus viewed as related to but not defined by the body; as

the analytic philosopher Bernard Williams puts it, “Identity of body is at
least not a sufficient condition of personal identity.”8 The successful por-
trait exceeds the mere representation of the body: it allows the viewer to
infer a broader and multidimensional conception of the invisible aspects
of the sitter’s subjectivity. As Paul Klee wrote of his portraiture in his diary
in 1901, “I am not here to reflect the surface . . . but must penetrate inside.
My mirror probes down to the heart. . . . My human faces are truer than
the real ones.”9
The use of portraiture to represent interior identity rather than simply to
mimic external appearance can be understood as a form of aesthetic real-
ism, even as it involves the development of techniques for depicting some-
thing invisible to the eye. Indeed, a portrait that fails to define the sitter’s
character is likely to be criticized as untruthful or incomplete, no matter
how precise its likeness. In her first novel, Adam Bede (1859, rev. 1861),
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) sets forth her conception of the impor-
tance of creating portraits of characters in all their complexity: she imag-
ines a hypothetical reader asking why she has represented her characters as
flawed individuals, and responds by explaining that her task is not to ide-
alize “life and character entirely after my own liking,” but “to give a faithful
account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind.”10
To describe this literary technique she raises the analogy of paintings of
the Dutch Golden Age, with their focus on the realistic depiction of the
appearance, character, and daily activities of the working classes. Though
she does not call for the wholesale rejection of “the divine beauty of form,”
she writes,
But let us love that other beauty too, which lies in no secret of proportion, but in the
secret of deep human sympathy. Paint us an angel, if you can, with a floating violet
robe, and a face paled by the celestial light . . . but do not impose on us any aesthetic
rules which shall banish from the region of Art those old women scraping carrots with
their work-worn hands, those heavy clowns taking holiday in a dingy pot-house, those
rounded backs and stupid weather-beaten faces that have bent over the spade and done
the rough work of the rough curs, and their clusters of onions. . . . It is so needful we
should remember their existence, else we may happen to leave them quite out of our
religion and philosophy, and frame lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes.
Therefore let Art always remind us of them.11
In this passage, Eliot proposes that the artist has an ethical responsibility to
represent the faces of ordinary people, and to do so in a way that favors the
truthful depiction of interior life over the idealization of external appearance.
6
Eliot makes this distinction with regard to literature and painting, but it
informs our study of portraiture in music as well, and in many of the portraits
examined in the following three chapters of this book, composers explore
ways to represent in music, without idealization, the interior lives of their
subjects.12 The fourth chapter, on the other hand, views the influence of vis-
ual idealization, as found in images of military and political leaders and in
celebrity and fashion photography, on contemporary portraiture in musical
multimedia.
Taking to its extreme this notion of portraiture as the art of depicting a
person’s internal character, a number of artists in the early twentieth cen-
tury began to experiment with the elimination of literal likeness in portrai-
ture, developing innovative methods of representing individuals without
relying on realistic visual mimesis, and thus expanding and challenging the
traditional boundaries implied by standard definitions of the genre.13 For
example, Pablo Picasso engaged the techniques of cubism to deconstruct
his sitters’ bodies, and Francis Bacon painted images of sitters with their
faces and bodies contorted, often beyond recognition. Charles Demuth’s
portrait of William Carlos Williams titled “The Figure 5 in Gold” (1928)
depicts words and images from Williams’s poetry rather than a likeness
of his face to represent his identity (Figure I.1), while Katherine Dreier’s
“Abstract Portrait of Marcel Duchamp” (1918) abandons pictorialism
altogether to offer an abstract, fragmented representation of her subject
(Figure I.2).14 In these works portraiture becomes a sort of game, in which
the viewer is invited to interpret the relationship between various sym-
bolic or abstract elements of the image and the named subject it is said to
represent.15
Such developments in portraiture in the visual arts provide a model
for describing how composers have experimented with depicting human
subjects through music. In a manner reflective of cubism and other
abstract modes of painting, composers of musical portraits have rep-
resented their sitters through musical elements such as form, rhythm,
harmony, and style. Where portrait painters rely on visual art’s stasis
to fix a moment for posterity, however, composers of musical portraits
often take advantage of the temporal aspect of their medium as well.
This allows them to create portraits that render their subjects’ character
and life experiences from various perspectives and unfolding through
time—for example by using narrative techniques to portray events in
their subjects’ biographies, or evoking a succession of affects to convey
the development of character. The musical portraits of artists known for
their work in various media that are discussed in this book also depict
the subjects identified in their titles by suggesting affinities with quali-
ties of their own works of portraiture in the visual arts, literature, and
7
Figure I.1: Charles Demuth, “The Figure 5 in Gold,” 1928, oil on cardboard, 35-1/2 x 30 inches.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949 (49.59.1). Image © The
Metropolitan Museum of Art.
music. These portraits call attention to analogies between musical and

other aesthetic means of representation, especially through metaphors
that associate what we hear with what we see.
In all artistic media, portraiture is a genre that relies inherently on met
aphor. Until the more recent era of abstraction in visual portraiture, works
in the genre, including those that idealize their sitters’ likenesses, have tra-
ditionally depended on the standard metaphor that the body is a container
for whatever one believes it is that makes an individual unique—the soul,
the self, character, personality, identity, or some other entity. As Richard
8
Figure I.2: Katherine Dreier, “Abstract Portrait of Marcel Duchamp,” 1918, oil on canvas,
18 x 32 inches. Museum of Modern Art. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by
SCALA/Art Resource, NY.
Leppert writes, “Challenged to make identity visible . . . portraits must

‘employ’ the physical body as the proving ground of the soul, since the body
is the only available terrain onto which the nonphysical can be visualized.”16
Wittgenstein suggests a similar point in his aphorism, “The human body
is the best picture of the human soul.”17 According to this understanding,
portraits represent “outer” attributes of physical appearance such as facial
expression, posture, gesture, and physical bearing as signs of invisible “inner”
aspects of identity.
The notion that the appearance of the body offers a representation of
what lies “on the inside” has been long-standing in the discourse about
portraiture. In a passage from The Memorabilia (fourth century bce),
Xenophon recounts Socrates’s lesson to a sculptor: “Must not the threat-
ening look in the eyes of fighters be accurately represented, and the trium-
phant expression on the face of conquerors be imitated? . . . It follows, then,
that the sculptor must represent in his figures the activities of the soul.”18 In
the late seventeenth century, the influential artist and art theorist Charles
le Brun, who held the title of Premier Peintre du Roi at the court of Louis
XIV, explains his view that facial expression (in the words of a 1701 transla-
tion) “is that which describes the true Characters of Things. . . . The external
Characters, are certain Signs of the Affections of the Soul; so that by the
Form of every Creature may be known its Humours and Temper.”19 In his
1753 treatise The Analysis of Beauty, William Hogarth, acknowledging his
debt to le Brun, similarly writes, “It is by the natural and unaffected move-
ments of the muscles, caused by the passions of the mind, that every man’s
character would in some measure be written in his face.”20 The visible quality
9
of facial expression, according to le Brun and Hogarth, makes apparent the

combination of passions that combine to form a person’s internal self.21
Even as notions of what constitutes the self—the passions, the humors,
character, inherent qualities, or constructed elements of identity—have
changed over the centuries, this basic premise has remained largely intact.
The metaphorical power of portraiture to dissect the body, to investigate
its external aspects to find the self that lies underneath the surface, can be a
source of self-consciousness and anxiety for the sitter. Susan Sontag writes
that in posing for photographs she experiences the distance between body
and soul, the space between her physical appearance and her interior self,
especially acutely: “Immobilized for the camera’s scrutiny, I feel the weight
of my facial mask, the jut and fleshiness of my lips, the spread of my nos-
trils, the unruliness of my hair. I experience myself as behind my face, look-
ing through the windows of my eyes, like the prisoner in the iron mask in
Dumas’s novel.”22
But it is also precisely because identity is thought to reside beneath
the surface, mapped onto but also hidden by the outward, visible aspect
of the individual, that portraiture can operate without conveying phys-
ical likeness at all. Although musical portraits, as well as abstract vis-
ual portraits of the twentieth century such as Demuth’s painting of
Williams and Dreier’s of Duchamp, do not depict physical likeness,
they still rely on the metaphoric conception of an individual’s identity
as interior, available to the senses through artistic representation and
interpretation.
Metaphors factor heavily in the ways music, like identity, is described
in Western cultures, and these metaphors are typically brought into play
in musical portraiture’s representations. Music is often conceptualized
metaphorically through reference to qualities associated with physical
movement, language, the visual, and other domains of human experi-
ence.23 More than simply descriptive tropes or figures of speech, such
metaphors are defining concepts in cultural modes of understanding
music, and contribute to how sound is perceived in relation to other
aspects of aesthetic contemplation, physical and social experience, and
cultural notions of one’s place in the world.24 In the musical portrait,
the metaphorical concepts that govern the understanding of both the
human individual and the musical work interact and combine. For exam-
ple, the twin metaphors of the piece of music as a container for the com-
poser’s ideas and the body as a container for the self overlap in the case
of the musical portrait, so that the expressive and emotional content of
the composition are understood to depict the corresponding attributes
of the person being represented. In this way, for instance, the struc-
ture of the piece may be used to outline ordered aspects of the subject’s
10
biography, in a manner that depends in part on the metaphors of both

music and life as types of narrative.
The metaphors that help form the understanding of music by relating
it to visual art also play an important role in the depiction of the musical
portrait’s subject. Though arguably those musical elements typically char-
acterized as “lines,” “shapes,” “colors,” and “textures” are rarely combined
in the imagination into anything resembling physical likeness, they can
map onto the way we employ visual metaphors in understanding human
character as embodying varying degrees of color, vibrancy, darkness, hard
and soft edges, and so forth. For example, a piece described as colorful—
perhaps because it incorporates a variety of contrasting timbral or “tone
color” effects—might be understood to convey a portrait subject’s “color-
ful” personality.
Paying critical attention to the connections we make between sound and
sight helps to reveal what Simon Shaw-Miller calls the “close and porous
mutual surfaces” between musical and visual art forms that are too often treated
as entirely distinct.25 Adapting philosopher Jerrold Levinson’s approach, in
the essay “Hybrid Art Forms” (1984), to works of art that correlate differ-
ent media types through processes of juxtaposition, synthesis, and transfor-
mation, Shaw-Miller proposes the study of the hybrid arts as a way to reveal
the rich interactions between music and the visual.26 Indeed, the appreciation
of music often entails a visual dimension, one that involves the image of the
human body, particularly that of the performer. Leppert explains, “Whatever
else music is ‘about,’ it is inevitably about the body; music’s aural and visual
presence constitutes both a relation to and a representation of the body.”27
Because many listeners are conditioned to associate the sounds of music with
the appearance—present or imagined—of the body of the performer, and
with human form and movement more generally, music operates particularly
effectively as a medium in the construction of individual identities in portrai-
ture, even if it is incapable of reproducing detailed physical likeness.28
Of course viewing art, like listening to music, also brings us in touch with
the human body; while the sonic and visual arts are distinct in many funda-
mental ways, physical and psychological aspects of perception in both fields
also overlap. In particular, although it may seem intuitive to describe music
as temporal and gestural and visual art as static in time and space, the appre-
ciation of visual art, like the experience of music, in fact also involves phys-
ical movement and gesture, as we reposition ourselves before an artwork
to see it from different angles, move our eyes across its surface, and experi-
ence it in time, shifting our perspective from one area to another to observe
different aspects of the image’s construction and narrative.29 Furthermore,
we might infer from brush strokes and other elements of the canvas the
1
motions that were made by the artist during the creation of the painting,
much as we interpret the physical gestures of musicians when attending a
performance or imagine them when listening to a recording, and such per-
ception of the artist’s movements in any medium can influence the inter-
pretation of the content and subject of the work.30
CONSTRUCTING THE CONTEMPORARY SELF

IN MUSIC
The philosopher Jerrold Seigel writes that the Western conception of the
self consists of three principal components: the bodily, or physical exist-
ence; the relational, deriving from social interaction and cultural contexts;
and the reflective, the capacity to examine and question oneself.31 Of course,
conceptions of what constitutes these three aspects of human identity have
varied considerably over time, and conventions in both visual and musi-
cal portraiture have developed in parallel. According to the modern view,
whose origins are found in the Renaissance, the self entails a coherent entity
associated with notions of autonomy and free will; it is this isolated self that
characterizes people as separate individuals with unique identities.32 With
the postwar perspectives introduced by deconstructionist critique and the
new understandings of identity developed by proponents of postcolonial-
ism, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race, and other modern schools of thought,
the self came generally to be recognized as fragmented and mutable, and as
formed discursively through social interaction, rather than unified and fixed
at a single point of emergence.33 Madan Sarup writes, “Identity in postmod-
ern thought is not a thing; the self is necessarily incomplete, unfinished—it
is ‘the subject in process.’ ”34
If the self is constructed, it is also performed and interpreted: individu-
als adopt certain actions in public that will express corresponding aspects
of character, and onlookers interpret these behaviors to combine in the
impression of an identity.35 In portraiture, the artist constructs an identity
on the canvas, generally by representing physical appearance, but the sub-
ject posing for the image may also play a role in this construction through
an act of performance that aims to depict the self. Roland Barthes describes
his behavior when he is photographed as involving a self-conscious sort of
performance:
I decide to “let drift” over my lips and in my eyes a faint smile which I mean to be “inde-
finable,” in which I might suggest, along with the qualities of my nature, my amused
consciousness of the whole photographic ritual: I lend myself to the social game, I pose,
12
I know I am posing, I want you to know that I am posing, but (to square the circle) this
additional message must in no way alter the precious essence of my individuality: what
I am, apart from my effigy. What I want, in short, is that my (mobile) image, buffeted
among a thousand shifting photographs, altering with situation and age, should always
coincide with my (profound) “self ”; but it is the contrary that must be said: “myself ”
never coincides with my image.36
For Barthes, this performance, however superficial it might seem in its

predication on the “social game” of image-making, depends on position-
ing his external qualities to provide a view of the identity that resides deep
within himself, under the surface. That the image that results is never suffi-
ciently neutral to be entirely true to his identity is a necessary shortcoming
of representation.
Kenneth Gergen argues that the postmodern view of identity is not “the
result of our ‘personal essence’ ” but the product of “how we are constructed
in various social groups. . . . As a category of ‘real self ’ continues to recede
from view, however, one acquires a pastiche-like personality.”37 This defini-
tion of identity, which overlaps with fundamental aspects of the standard
understanding of postmodernism itself, is characterized by polyvocal-
ity: rather than being guided by a unique, personal voice, our identities,
according to this view, are tuned to parallel streams of the voices of those
around us and the constant drone of contemporary media, and this leads
to a fragmentation and decentering of identity.38 Identity is also viewed as
malleable and transient, constantly being reconstructed and presented in
new ways through social interaction, and therefore lacking in coherence.39
Our understanding of our selves and the world in which we live is rooted in
our relationships with others.40 The self is therefore founded in creative acts
occurring within the contexts provided by one’s social, cultural, and politi-
cal surroundings.41 Invoking Shakespeare’s line “all the world’s a stage,” Olav
Bryant Smith writes, “What is equally true, and more fundamental, is that
we are coauthors of the very plays in which we act.”42
The contemporary understanding of identity as multivalent, mediated,
perpetually under construction, and open to varied interpretation has
posed certain challenges to traditional modes of representing subjectivity
in portraiture. Such complexity is conveyed in Calvin O. Schrag’s descrip-
tion of the philosophical project he undertakes in his book The Self after
Postmodernity, which he describes in the introduction through the meta-
phor of “sketching a portrait of the human self ”:
There is first the obvious truth that we are dealing not with a single, unitary, sharply
defined portrait, but rather with a portrait that is itself curiously diversified. What thus
appears to be at issue is a multiplicity of profiles and perspectives through which the
13
human self moves and is able to come into view. . . . There is, however, another set of
obstacles facing the projected undertaking. This has to do with the very grammar of por-
traits or profiles or perspectives. It is a grammar that invites a philosophical optics bent
upon the field of vision as somehow privileged for the disclosure of self and world. But
knowledge of self is as much the rendering of an account, the telling of a story, as it is the
discernment of perceptual profiles—and indeed it is the telling of a story in which the
self is announced as at once actor and receiver of action. . . . I thus propose a metaphor-
ical extension of the grammar of portraits, profiles, or perspectives to include the telling
and hearing of stories and the performance and reception of action.43
The contemporary understanding of identity and the self has permitted art-
ists to use more abstract means to represent individual subjects in a host
of media. It has also made a space in the field of portraiture for the repre-
sentational techniques of music, whose temporal aspect permits a narrative
quality and whose reliance on performance requires an active and discur-
sive process of creating meaning, reflecting Schrag’s call for “the telling and
hearing of stories and the performance and reception of action” in the post-
modern “grammar of portraits.”
Composers of musical portraits typically construct representations of
identities by selecting and depicting individual aspects of the sitter’s life,
such as biographical experiences, artistic style, and emotional traits, in ways
that reflect how we tell stories in the construction of our own characters. It
is common to define identity through the selection and retelling of stories,
creating what has been called a “narrative self.”44 Marya Schechtman argues,
in her theory of what she calls the “narrative self-construction view”:
At the core of this view is the assertion that individuals constitute themselves as per-
sons by coming to think of themselves as persisting subjects who have had experience
in the past and will continue to have experience in the future, taking certain experiences
as theirs. Some, but not all, individuals weave stories of their lives, and it is their doing
so which makes them persons. On this view a person’s identity . . . is constituted by the
content of her self-narrative, and the traits, actions, and experiences included in it are, by
virtue of that inclusion, hers.45
Though Schechtman is writing primarily about the way individuals con-

struct their own identities through narrative, these principles apply to
much portraiture as well, particularly in music, with its temporal dimen-
sion that permits the weaving of a narrative over a period of time.46 John
Berger, who similarly invokes the value of looking forward and backward
in the description of a life and identity, also links this sort of storytelling to
portraiture: “Drawing a face is one way of noting down a biography. Good
portraits are both prophetic and retrospective.”47
14
It has become a common observation among sociologists of music and

media that music is used every day as a tool of identity construction, a
process viewed as both social and narrative.48 One reason music operates
effectively through composition and performance as a tool in the construc-
tion of identities in portraiture is that we are conditioned in our daily lives
to consider music an important element in the social construction of our
own sense of self as well as in the interpretation of other people’s identi-
ties. In the compositions under examination in this book, music is used to
represent the self through a creative act of aesthetic construction; and the
final product, the musical portrait, is a work of music that permits further
reconstructions through the hermeneutic processes of performance and
listening.
THE CONTENTS OF THIS STUDY
Musical Portraits views works in the genre of musical portraiture composed

after 1950 as representations of human identities that privilege a view of the
self as socially and narratively constructed and changing through time. The
mode of representation in the musical portrait relies principally on meta-
phors that draw connections between music and language, the visual, and
aspects of human character. The musical portrait is a category of program
music that relies on text—at least in its title—to identify it as a constitu-
ent of the genre and to aid in its interpretation; in this way it reflects the
common view of the self as constructed by means of language.49 The form
of programmatic representation in musical portraiture is typically highly
abstract and therefore demands a particularly engaged and often playful
form of interpretation.
The book is structured around case studies that offer detailed readings
of individual musical portraits, showing how one might construct impres-
sions of the subjects of these works through interpretations of the music’s
metaphorical meanings, guided by knowledge of the composers’ and sit-
ters’ biographies. In particular, chapters examine portraits of artists whose
work in the fields of literature, painting, and drama engage in multiple
forms of portraiture, as well as musical self-portraits in which composers
explore various aspects of their own identities, especially by interpreting
their own musical styles and influences. Following these studies of por-
traits that view how music can offer metaphors of linguistic, visual, and
even musical modes of representation, the book turns to a set of works that
combine all of these art forms together in multimedia portraiture, both
in small-scale creations and in the monumental genre of portrait opera,
15
in which music takes center stage in the representation of an individual

identity.
Chapter 1 focuses on the critical role language plays in the composition,
performance, and interpretation of the musical portrait. It examines musi-
cal portraits based on literary models, specifically “Buffie Johnson: Drawing
Virgil Thomson in Charcoal” (1981) by Virgil Thomson (1896–1989)
and Pli selon pli: portrait de Mallarmé (1957–1962, later revised through
1989) by Pierre Boulez (1925–2016). Virgil Thomson was inspired by the
modernist literary portraits of Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) to develop
his unique method of writing over 140 musical portraits, in which he sat
before his subjects while composing in the manner of a portrait painter.
Boulez’s portrait was inspired by his deep familiarity with the poetic works
of the French symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898), and his interest
in Mallarmé’s description, in his essays, of an idiosyncratic theory accord-
ing to which poetry should aspire to a representational purity and abstrac-
tion exemplified in music. Through the discussion of these two musical
portraits, the chapter explores the crucial role of language in the musical
representation of identity.
Chapter 2 considers the connections between musical and visual modes
of representing identity by examining musical portraits of visual artists.
This chapter examines works that reflect the influence of modern trends
in visual portraiture, focusing on musical portraits of contemporary paint-
ers: “de Kooning” (1963) by Morton Feldman (1926–1987) and “A Musical
Portrait of Chuck Close” (2005) by Philip Glass (b. 1937).50 Considering
these musical portraits of the painters Willem de Kooning (1904–1997)
and Chuck Close (b. 1940) in relation to canvases by these artists reveals
how the works portray their subjects by organizing musical structures to
serve as metaphors of visual strategies of representation, evoking aspects
of biography while mimicking painterly techniques in musical structures.
In chapter 3 the book turns its attention to self-portraiture, to explore
the methods by which composers have depicted themselves and their com-
positional techniques and styles. It views musical self-portraits in relation
to self-portraiture in visual art to identify techniques shared by the two
art forms. The chapter focuses in particular on two self-portraits, one that
explores the question of artistic influence, and a second that represents its
composer’s unique and personal perception of sound. The first case study
is of György Ligeti’s two-piano “Selbstportrait mit Reich und Riley (und
Chopin ist auch dabei)” (Self-Portrait with Reich and Riley (with Chopin
in the Background)), from Drei Stücke (Three Pieces, 1976), in which
Ligeti (1923–2006) portrays himself with two musical contemporaries,
Steve Reich (b. 1936) and Terry Riley (b. 1935), and their forerunner
Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849), by demonstrating overlapping elements
16
of their compositional techniques. In the second case study, “Quadraturen

IV: ‘Selbstportrait mit Berlin’ ” (Self-Portrait with Berlin, 1998), by Peter
Ablinger (b. 1959), a compact disc recording of ambient sounds collected
by the composer accompanies an instrumental ensemble playing a score
produced by a computer analysis of this recording. In their self-portraits,
Ligeti and Ablinger reflect on their professional and artistic identities in the
contexts provided by the music and sounds that they hear around them.
Having explored musical interactions and intersections with literature,
painting, and other music, the book turns in its final chapter to hybrid
works of multimedia portraiture and the genre of the portrait opera, to
consider how music operates in conjunction with these other artistic
forms in the depiction of identity. Focusing in particular on strategies for
the representation of contemporary cultural and intellectual icons, the
chapter first introduces the Voom Portraits of the American avant-garde
director Robert Wilson (b. 1941), an ongoing series of multimedia video
portraits of celebrities begun in 2004, made using high-definition audio-
visual technology. These works rely on the combination of image, music,
and text, and feature eclectic sound effects and scores by composers whose
work occupies a range of contrasting styles, such as Bernard Herrmann
(1911–1975), Michael Galasso (1949–2009), and Tom Waits (b. 1949).
The chapter then examines the portrait opera, with particular attention to
Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, created in collaboration with Wilson
and choreographer Lucinda Childs (b. 1940), and premiered in 1976.
The discussion considers how this trio of artists produced what they call
a “portrait” of Einstein, an abstract representation that combines allusions
to disparate objects, events, and concepts from his biography such as his
physical appearance, his clothing, and the theory of relativity, as well as his
artistry as an amateur violinist. The Voom Portraits and Einstein on the Beach
evoke their subjects’ artistry to engage a particularly contemporary notion
of identity, while they also foreground the complex ways music has been
made to interact with imagery and theater in the production of meaning in
multimedia arts of the second half of the twentieth century and the start of
the twenty-first.
The book’s epilogue explores the place of musical portraiture in the con-
text of posthumous depictions of the deceased, and in relation to the so-
called posthuman condition, a way of describing contemporary changes in
the relationship of the individual with such aspects of life as technology
and the body. It first examines the treatment of music in Alfred Hitchcock’s
Vertigo as a medium that can represent the overlapping identities of the
living and the dead through the soundtrack scoring. It then considers the
work of experimental musician Neil Harbisson (b. 1982), who has aimed,
through the use of new digital capabilities, to convey something akin to
17
visual likeness in his series of Sound Portraits. Harbisson has produced

multiple brief portraits using his implanted audiovisual “eyeborg” device, a
technology that he was inspired to develop as a result of his colorblindness,
to enhance his sensory experience by creating a sonic analog to color, trans-
forming light-waves into pitches. The epilogue shows how an examination
of musical portraiture in the context of the posthumous and the posthuman
helps to illuminate the ways music represents identity throughout the genre
of musical portraiture.
One of the central claims of this book is that musical portraiture does
not typically rely on techniques of mimesis to reproduce a convincing
likeness, but draws instead on more abstract modes of representation
that, through established metaphors that associate music with language,
emotion, the self, and the visual, contribute to the rich opportunity for
interpretation that is characteristic of the genre. Portraits in all art forms
trade on the common belief that the genre makes human identity availa-
ble to the senses. But they also rely on the fact that our understanding of
identity and of how it is represented in art remains a subject of debate.51
Portraits—in visual art, literature, music, and other media—in this way
permit a particularly imaginative form of interpretation on the part of
the audience, and make possible the construction of a sense of iden-
tity through independent contemplation or discourse among multiple
onlookers. For this reason portraits often provoke debate over whether
or not their representations are “successful”: audiences may be likely to
judge them not only on their artistic merits, but also on whether or not
they convey the sitter’s identity in a way that accords with their prior con-
ception of it. The analysis of what a musical portrait reveals to its viewers
about its sitter’s identity is thus always a subjective and highly personal
process, but the impossibility of offering any one definitive interpreta-
tion of a portrait is also what makes portraiture so rich and provocative
a genre.
NOTES
1. George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy (Auckland: The
Floating Press, 2012), 63.
2. Music making and musical instruments are also prominent tropes in painted portrai-
ture. See Richard Leppert, Music and Image: Domesticity, Ideology and Socio-Cultural
Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988); Richard Leppert, The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of
the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 4–12; Michael A. Brown,
“Portraits, Music and Enlightenment in the Atlantic World,” in Patrick Coleman (ed.),
The Art of Music (San Diego: San Diego Museum of Art; New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2015), 167–83.
18
3. Lorenzo Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. John R. Spencer (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1956, rev. ed. 1966), 63. For further discussion of the extension of a sub-
ject’s “life” through portraiture, see also Richard Leppert, Art and the Committed Eye: The
Cultural Functions of Imagery (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996), 98–9, 153.
4. Edgar Allan Poe, The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Edition, ed. Stuart
Levine and Susan Levine (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 68.
5. Michal Peled Ginsburg, Portrait Stories (New York: Fordham University Press,
2015), 23–4.
6. See Shearer West, Portraiture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 37; Richard
Brilliant, Portraiture (London: Reaktion Books, 1991), 15; Ludmilla Jordanova, Defining
Features: Scientific and Medical Portraits 1660–2000 (London: Reaktion Books and
National Portrait Gallery, 2000), 22–5.
7. “Bodies: Real and Ideal,” www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/features/introduction-to-greek-
bronzes/bodies-real-and-ideal.html, accessed June 21, 2016; Luke Syson and Dora Thornton,
Objects of Virtue: Art in Renaissance Italy (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2001), 115.
8. Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers 1956– 1972
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 1.
9. Paul Klee, Paul Klee (New York: Parkstone, 2012), 16.
10. George Eliot, Adam Bede, ed. Carol A. Martin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008;
orig. 1859, rev. 1861), 159.
11. Eliot, Adam Bede, 162.
12. For a description of how realism operates in music, see Joshua S. Walden, Sounding
Authentic: The Rural Miniature and Musical Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2014), 7–9.
13. West, Portraiture, 187; Andrew Graham-Dixon, foreword to Andrew Graham-Dixon, Sandy
Nairne, Sarah Howgate, and Jo Higgins (eds.), 21st-Century Portraits (London: National
Portrait Gallery, 2013), 7–9; Lee Siegel, “On the Face of It,” in Donna Gustafson and Susan
Sidlauskas (eds.), Striking Resemblance: The Changing Art of Portraiture (New Brunswick,
NJ: Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University; London: Prestel, 2014), 50.
14. West, Portraiture, 194–201.
15. See Edward A. Aiken, “‘I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold’: Charles Demuth’s Emblematic Portrait
of William Carlos Williams,” Art Journal 46.3 (Autumn 1987): 179.
16. Leppert, Art and the Committed Eye, 153.
17. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1958), II: iv, 178.
18. Jennifer Montagu, The Expression of the Passions: The Origin and Influence of Charles
Le Brun’s Conférence sur l’expression générale et particulière (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1994), 1.
19. Charles le Brun, The Conference of Monsieur Le Brun, cheif [sic] painter of the French King, . . .
upon Expression, General and Particular, trans. J. Smith (London, 1701), 1–2, 39–40.
20. William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty. Written with a View of Fixing the Fluctuating Ideas
of Taste (London: J. Reeves, 1753), 126.
21. For detailed historical and philosophical discussion of the relationship between
expression and personality, see Sandra Kemp, Future Face: Image, Identity, Innovation
(London: Profile, 2004), 56–66.
22. Susan Sontag, “Certain Mapplethorpes,” in Susan Sontag (ed.), Where the Stress
Falls: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 234.
23. Lawrence M. Zbikowski refers to this form of metaphor as “cross-domain mapping,”
in Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002), 64. On visual metaphors in discourses around music, see also
Gurminder Kaur Bhogal, “Visual Metaphors in Music Analysis and Criticism,” in Tim
Shephard and Anne Leonard (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture
(New York: Routledge, 2014), 191–9.
24. On metaphor and the perception of music, see Steven Feld, “‘Flow Like a Waterfall’: The
Metaphors of Kaluli Musical Theory,” Yearbook for Traditional Music 13 (1981): 22–47;
19
Laurence Dreyfus, “Christopher Peacocke’s ‘The Perception of Music,’” British Journal of

Aesthetics 49.3 ( July 2009): 294. In their foundational book on the subject, Metaphors We
Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson write that metaphor plays a fundamental role in
constructing the ways people perceive the world and interact culturally and socially with
others. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1980), 3–5. On metaphors that characterize the visual arts in relation to
music, see Simon Shaw-Miller, “The Art of Music: A Complex Art,” and Patrick Coleman,
“Music, Said and Scene: Encounters in Metaphor, Theory and Performance,” in Coleman,
Art of Music, 33–59, 105–27.
25. Simon Shaw-Miller, Eye hEar: The Visual in Music (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013), 185.
An extensive history of artists and art theorists whose work explores the borders between
music and the visual arts can be found in Peter Vergo, That Divine Order: Music and the
Visual Arts from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (London: Phaidon, 2005); Peter
Vergo, The Music of Painting: Music, Modernism, and the Visual Arts from the Romantics to
John Cage (London: Phaidon, 2010).
26. Simon Shaw-Miller, Visible Deeds of Music: Art and Music from Wagner to Cage (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 11. Shaw-Miller partially attributes the ten-
dency to view the arts as fully distinct to academic disciplinarity: “Attempts at purifica-
tion and homogeneity are reinforced by, and carried out within, the professionalization
of academic disciplines as they form themselves into discrete subjects” (35).
27. Leppert, Sight of Sound, xx. The relationships between music, the visual aspects of perfor-
mance, and the physical gestures of the body—even those inferred rather than witnessed
when music is appreciated by listening to sound recording—have also been studied
extensively in the field of psychology. See, from the perspective of perceptual psychology,
W. Luke Windsor, “Gestures in Music-Making: Action, Information and Perception,” in
Anthony Gritten and Elaine King (eds.), New Perspectives on Music and Gesture (Farnham,
UK: Ashgate, 2011), 45–66; and from the field of embodied cognition, Marc Leman
and Pieter-Jan Maes, “The Role of Embodiment in the Perception of Music,” Empirical
Musicology Review 9.3–4 (2014): 236–46; Rolf Inge Godøy, “Gestural Affordances of
Musical Sound,” in Rolf Inge Godøy and Marc Leman (eds.), Musical Gestures: Sound,
Movement, and Meaning (New York: Routledge, 2010), 103–25.
28. The musical gestures in a composition labeled as a portrait might also imply cer-
tain aspects of the subject’s physical presence and bearing. On the correspondences
between the ways meaning is communicated by musical gestures and the physical ges-
tures made during speech, see Lawrence M. Zbikowski, “Musical Gesture and Musical
Grammar: A Cognitive Approach,” in Gritten and King, New Perspectives on Music
and Gesture, 83–98. On music’s influences on the embodied perception of time, see
Barbara G. Goodrich, “Tempos of Eternity: Music, Volition, and Playing with Time,” in
Joseph P. Huston, Marcos Nadal, Francisco Mora, Luigi F. Agnati, and Camilo Jose Cela
Conde (eds.), Art, Aesthetics, and the Brain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015),
500–18.
29. On the functions of body and eye movement in the contemplation of art, see Michael Madary,
“Visual Experience,” in Lawrence Shapiro (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Embodied
Cognition (London: Routledge, 2014), 263; Paul J. Locher, “Empirical Investigation of
an Aesthetic Experience with Art,” in Arthur P. Shimamura and Stephen E. Palmer (eds.),
Aesthetic Science: Connecting Minds, Brains, and Experience (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2012), 163–88 (esp. 175–9); Raphael Rosenberg and Christoph Klein, “The Moving
Eye of the Beholder: Eye Tracking and the Perception of Paintings,” in Huston, Nadal,
Mora, Agnati, and Conde, Art, Aesthetics, and the Brain, 79–108.
30. In the twentieth century a number of visual artists began to explore methods for depict-
ing the passing of time, the temporal “movement” of music, and the physical, rhyth-
mic motions of dance through visual means. See Karin v. Maur, The Sound of Painting
(London: Prestel, 1999), 43–59, 94–101.
31. Jerrold Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the
Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 5–6.
20
32. Paul C. Vitz, “Introduction: From the Modern and Postmodern Selves to the Transmodern
Self,” in Paul C. Vitz and Susan M. Felch (eds.), The Self: Beyond the Postmodern Crisis
(Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), xi–xii.
33. John Barresi and Raymond Martin, “History as Prologue: Western Theories of the
Self,” in Shaun Gallagher (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Self (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 33–56; Madam Sarup, Identity, Culture and the Postmodern World
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), 14; Kenneth Allan, “The Postmodern
Self: A Theoretical Consideration,” Quarterly Journal of Ideology 20.1–2 (1997): 3–24.
On the ways social and political movements in the 1960s in North America and Western
Europe contributed to the rise of the social constructionist view of identity, see Kenneth
J. Gergen, “The Social Construction of Self,” in Gallagher, Oxford Handbook of the Self,
634. The notion of a fragmented identity is implied by some portraiture from the ear-
lier half of the twentieth century as well. For example, the surrealist artist Max Ernst, in
preparing his 1935 self-portrait, broke the glass-plate negative of a photograph taken of
his face by Man Ray, and adhered it back together, writing the details of the exhibition
onto the surface of the tape. The image of the result of this fractured, reassembled likeness
was then printed on the cover of the invitation to the exhibition of his works in Paris,
Exposition Max Ernst—dernières oeuvres. Ernst repaired the broken glass, but permitted
the cracks in his reflection to remain. See Elza Adamowicz, “The Surrealist (Self-)Portrait:
Convulsive Identities,” in Silvano Levy (ed.), Surrealism: Surrealist Visuality (Edinburgh:
Keele University Press, 1996), 32.
34. Sarup, Identity, Culture and the Postmodern World, 45.
35. An important early study of the performance of the self is found in Erving Goffman, The
Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1959).
36. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang,
1982), 11–12.
37. Kenneth Gergen, The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life
(New York: Basic Books, 1991), 170. See also Vitz, “Introduction,” xiii–xiv.
38. Vitz, “Introduction,” xiii. Helene Tallon Russell and Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki interpret
the writings on selfhood of Søren Kierkegaard and Alfred North Whitehead, in order to
argue that the self is multiple and relational, but they oppose the common understanding
that the unity of the self ultimately triumphs over its multiplicity in the way the self is
constructed and experienced. They conclude that “the self is composite, not singular; it is
constituted in and through multiple relationships. This multiplicity is essential to the self,
and is also, through dialectic, the basis for the common experience of the self as a unity.”
Helene Tallon Russell and Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, “The Multiple Self,” in J. Wentzel
van Huyssteen and Erik P. Wiebe (eds.), In Search of Self: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on
Personhood (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2011), 196.
39. Vitz, “Introduction,” xiii–xiv. Shari Stone-Mediatore counsels against viewing identity as
defined entirely in one of two contrasting ways, according to the modern or postmod-
ern conceptions, recommending instead a consideration of identity as merging notions
of the self as at once both true and constructed. Shari Stone-Mediatore, “Postmodernism,
Realism, and the Problem of Identity,” Diaspora 11.1 (2002): 131.
40. Gergen, “Social Construction,” 635.
41. Anthony Elliott, Concepts of the Self, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 9. For Elliott, “all
forms of identity are astonishingly imaginative fabrications of the private and public, per-
sonal and political, individual and historical” (10–11).
42. Olav Bryant Smith, Myths of the Self: Narrative Identity and Postmodern Metaphysics
(Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004), 176.
43. Calvin O. Schrag, The Self after Postmodernity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1997), 1.
44. Valerie Gray Hardcastle, Constructing the Self (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2008), 35.
45. Marya Schechtman, The Constitution of Selves (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996),
94. See also Marya Schechtman, “The Narrative Self,” in Gallagher, Oxford Handbook of
the Self, 394–416.
21
46. On the narrative element in contemporary visual portraiture, see Sarah Howgate and
Sandy Nairne, introduction to 21st-Century Portraits, 16.
47. John Berger, Portraits: John Berger on Artists, ed. Tom Overton (London: Verso, 2015), 442.
48. For example, Simon Frith writes, “Music constructs our sense of identity through the
experiences it offers of the body, time, and sociability, experiences which enable us to
place ourselves in imaginative cultural narratives.” Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the
Value of Popular Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 275. For Tia
DeNora, music is a “building material of self-identity,” a “resource to which people turn
in order to regulate themselves as aesthetic agents, as feeling, thinking and acting beings
in their day-to-day lives.” Tia DeNora, Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), 62.
49. Sarup, Identity, Culture and the Postmodern World, 47.
50. On Glass’s portrait of Close, as well as György Ligeti’s musical self-portrait explored
in chapter 3, see also Joshua S. Walden, “Representation and Musical Portraiture in
the Twentieth Century,” in Joshua S. Walden (ed.), Representation in Western Music
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 127–43.
51. Ludmilla Jordanova, “Visualizing Identity,” in Giselle Walker and Elisabeth Leedham-
Green (eds.), Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 132. E. H.
Gombrich writes, “Expression is hard to analyze and harder to describe unequivocally. It is
a curious fact, moreover, that our immediate reaction results in firm convictions, but con-
victions which are rarely shared by all—witness the pages of interpretation that have been
devoted to Mona Lisa’s smile.” E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology
of Pictorial Representation (London: Phaidon, 1969), 268.
22
CH A P T E R 1
Musical and Literary Portraiture
Portrait painting is the biography of the pencil, and he who gives most of the peculiarities and
details, with most of the general character . . . is the best biographer, and the best portrait-painter.
—William Hazlitt1
T he first half of George Eliot’s 1876 novel Daniel Deronda focuses pri-
marily on the story of the beautiful, complicated young anti-heroine
Gwendolyn Harleth and her vain attempts to dig herself and her fam-
ily out of financial ruin by attracting a wealthy suitor. In her narration of
Gwendolyn’s story, Eliot describes her authorial task by analogy to portrai-
ture: “Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would
have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not
have had to represent the truth of change—only to give stability to one
beautiful moment.”2 In this statement, Eliot assumes overlaps between the
goals and techniques of portraiture in painting and in literature—princi-
pally, that the genre functions in both media to represent an individual sub-
ject’s appearance and character—but, more significantly, she also points to
an underlying difference that relates to the temporal dimension of writing.
The painted portrait represents the subject in a single moment, even if that
momentary glimpse features some elements that aim to evoke everlasting
characteristics such as heroism, beauty, or social position, and if the experi-
ence of viewing the portraiture necessarily involves an element of time. The
literary portrait, by contrast, must account for how the self varies over some
chronological period. Whether it is a work of fiction or history, its author
demonstrates the effects of the passage of time on the development of char-
acter, showing how all those moments that could be captured in individual
painted portraits unite into a coherent but also changeable self.
The novelist and literary critic A. S. Byatt, elaborating on the differ-
ence between literary and visual portraits, states that the two genres “are
23
M u s i c a l a n d L i t e r a ry P o rt r a i t u r e ( 23 )
opposites, rather than metaphors for each other,” because the painting
depicts surface appearance outside of the progress of time, while the story
records the invisible aspects of a person.3 Literary portraiture may even rely
on this invisibility: “The description in visual language of a face or body may
depend on being unseen for its force.”4 The functions of time, the unfolding
of description, and the triggering of the spectator’s imagination are central
to this distinction between the verbal and the visual in this genre, and the
musical portrait, particularly in works that emulate or show the influence of
literary portraiture, also relies on these attributes to represent its subject’s
self. Byatt concludes, “What a novelist can do, which is difficult for a painter,
is convey what is not, and cannot, be known about a human being.”5 The
composer of a musical portrait has a power similar to that Byatt attributes to
the novelist, but in a medium that minimizes language for an entirely audi-
tory form of narrative or description, or that in some cases employs text in
combination with sound to make possible diverse, hybrid meanings.
Like the musical portrait, the literary portrait—a form whose early
roots are typically traced to the Characters of the classical philosopher
Theophrastus, Aristotle’s pupil and successor at the Lyceum—does not
conform to a single standard form, length, or approach to its subject matter.6
It can be short or long; it can stand on its own as an isolated work or appear
as a passage embedded within a larger text; and it can represent a person’s
outward appearance, inner character, or psychology, or even describe a
painted portrait.7 And though many scholars accept only representations
of living or historical individuals as portraits, others find it helpful to con-
sider descriptions of fictional subjects or even character types as forms of
literary portraiture.8 Meanwhile, portraiture is also frequently invoked as
a metaphor to characterize the more widely recognized and easily defined
genre of biography.9
Literary portraiture, in forms representing general character types as well
as living or historic individuals, offered a source inspiration for composers
of musical portraits at several points in the history of the genre. For exam-
ple, the stimulus for François Couperin’s development of the pièce de carac-
tère (character piece) was the fad in 1650s France for short literary portraits,
prose documents of around 1,000 words written by and about members
of high society.10 During this decade, Couperin’s uncle Louis composed
short keyboard works, which, in a manner prefiguring the pièces de caractère
that his nephew would eventually write, served the aristocratic audiences
for these literary portraits by incorporating playfulness and “preciosity,”
and emphasizing sophistication and delicacy.11 In the nineteenth century,
Robert Schumann’s imaginary duo Florestan and Eusebius, whom the
composer described repeatedly in his portrait essays as studies in contrast-
ing characters—depicted respectively as passionately fiery and dreamily
24
tranquil—found their musical representation in individual movements of

his Carnaval, Op. 9. And in the early twentieth century, Virgil Thomson
decided to write musical portraits after becoming acquainted with the liter-
ary portraits that were an important component of the oeuvre and stylistic
development of his friend, the modernist author Gertrude Stein.12
Even as some other composers of portraits were influenced more directly
by painted rather than literary portraits, the important role of written lan-
guage in musical portraiture brings the genre into perpetual contact with
its linguistic counterpart. Because music cannot directly depict physical
likeness in the manner of images or describe appearance or character the
way language can, musical portraits require the aid of a title simply to be
recognized as such. The title will often include the word “portrait,” but it
will at least posit the name of the individual the work represents. The titles
of musical portraits often also offer additional information that will further
guide the listener’s interpretation of the piece. John Adams’s self-portrait
My Father Knew Charles Ives, for example, indicates that the composer rep-
resents himself in relation to his father, the iconic American composer who
came before him, and the New England region in which he grew up and his
father and Ives both built their homes and careers. Many musical portraits
also use language in their scores’ paratexts to further identify their subjects
and direct the listener’s interpretation; for instance, some of Thomson’s
scores containing multiple brief portraits open with descriptions of each
individual depicted in these works. Written historical documentation
can additionally become a part of the contextual framework surrounding
musical portraits, inspiring how people conceive of them as representa-
tions of individuals. For instance, the subjects of most of Carl Philipp
Emanuel Bach’s musical portraits of the 1750s, long unknown to scholars
and performers, have recently been identified, and this has inspired further
research on and interpretations of these works (not least because this con-
textual writing was necessary to disprove the persistent assumption that his
portraits, titled with the French feminine definite article La followed by the
subject’s last name, were not depictions of women: La implied the noun
pièce, not the sitter’s gender).13
This chapter examines two sets of musical portraits that illuminate the
genre’s association with literary portraiture and its complex and essential
relationship with language. The first is Thomson’s large corpus of musical
portraits, composed across nearly sixty years of his career. These works pro-
vide an example of musical portraiture modeled directly on corresponding
works of literature, rather than painting. In his portraits, Thomson explores
music’s capacity for representation in spite of its perceived abstraction by
developing a method for depicting human subjects that he hoped would
produce something analogous to Stein’s modernist literary experiments.
25
The second is Pierre Boulez’s set of pieces that are combined in his five-
part Pli selon pli: Portrait de Mallarmé (Fold according to Fold: Portrait of
Mallarmé), composed over more than thirty years, between 1957 and 1989.
In Pli selon pli Boulez incorporates, into a large-scale and varied musical con-
text, fragments from the poems of the French symbolist poet and author
Stéphane Mallarmé, whose “L’après-midi d’un faune” (The Afternoon of
a Faun, 1876) famously became the model for Claude Debussy’s path-
breaking orchestral work Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1894), about
which Boulez stated, “The flute of the faun brought new breath to the art of
music.”14 Through Boulez’s rendering, Mallarmé’s poems become the core
material of his own portrait, in which Boulez transforms Mallarmé’s com-
plex linguistic inventions into a representation of his identity and his ideas
about the relationship between music and literature.15
THE MUSICAL PORTRAITS OF VIRGIL THOMSON AND

THE COMPOSITION OF PRESENCE
Virgil Thomson dedicated himself to experimenting with musical portrai-

ture for many decades, composing over 140 works in the genre, for a variety
of ensembles, between 1928 and 1985. He was inspired to create portraits
by his friend and collaborator Gertrude Stein, who from 1908 onward
wrote approximately 132 literary portraits in which she attempted to depict
her subjects using language abstracted from traditional forms of narrative
and grammar. Thomson had first encountered Stein’s work in 1919, and
the two met several years later and soon developed a close personal rela-
tionship; he wrote in his autobiography that between their first encoun-
ter in 1926 and her death twenty years later, “we were forever loving being
together, whether talking and walking, writing to each other, or at work.”16
In the words of Stein’s partner Alice B. Toklas, Stein and Thomson “got on
like Harvard men.”17 Among other projects that brought them together,
Thomson worked with Stein on the operas Four Saints in Three Acts and The
Mother of Us All, wrote a musical arrangement of her play Capital Capitals
for four male voices, and composed art songs based on her literary portraits
“Susie Asado” and “Preciocilla.” In addition, Thomson wrote frequently
about Stein, including in a chapter of his autobiography titled “A Portrait
of Gertrude Stein” and an essay that served as the introduction to a 1953
collection of her poems.
Thomson recognized a similarity between the modes of representation
in Stein’s use of language and in his own music. In setting her writing in art
songs, he explains, her literary style, “with meanings jumbled and syntax
violated, but with the words themselves all the more shockingly present,”
26
inspired him to “put those texts to music with a minimum of temptation

toward the emotional conventions, spend[ing] my whole effort on the
rhythm of the language, . . . adding shape, where that seemed to be needed,
and it usually was, from music’s own devices.”18 He elaborates on the effects
of working with Stein’s texts in his autobiography:
My hope in putting Gertrude Stein to music had been to break, crack open, and solve
for all time anything still waiting to be solved, which was almost everything, about
English musical declamation. . . . I had no sooner put to music after this recipe one short
Stein text than I knew I had opened a door. I had never had any doubts about Stein’s
poetry; from then on I had none about my ability to handle it in music.19
Setting Stein’s poetry to music proved to be an early turning point for

Thomson in the development of his style.
In his musical experimentations with the depiction of personal identi-
ties in music, Thomson sought to mimic Stein’s linguistic representations of
individuals. As he would write to Stein, “the idea of it comes obviously out of
you.”20 He particularly admired what he viewed as the spontaneity of Stein’s
literary portraits, which he described as “an exercise not only in objectivity
but also in avoiding the premeditated.”21 It has been widely argued that Stein
took technical and aesthetic inspiration in her portraits from her experience
of sitting for Pablo Picasso’s iconic portrait of her, painted in 1905 and 1906
(Figure 1.1). Stein posed for Picasso in his Paris studio repeatedly during
that winter; the details of this process have proven difficult to confirm, but
it seems possible the sittings took place over a period of three months.22 She
and her brother Leo, who together collected modern paintings and inter-
acted with a large number of the cutting-edge artists in France during this
period, had met Picasso in 1905, and they became his most important spon-
sors and collectors for the following nine years.23 The idea to create this por-
trait belonged to Picasso, and he gave the completed canvas to Stein as a gift.
But Picasso took an uncharacteristically long time to finish the portrait of
Stein. In early 1906, at the end of the winter in which she sat repeatedly for
him, he grew frustrated, and, having “painted out the whole head” (in Stein’s
words), left the canvas abandoned. It was not until he returned from Spain
at the conclusion of the summer that he felt able to complete the face, and
to do so without calling Stein in for an additional sitting.24 In its final render-
ing her head took on attributes of the mask-like faces he had begun to paint
that summer, partly on the basis of the inspiration he found in the so-called
Gósol Madonna, a twelfth-century sculpture housed in a church near his
vacation spot. In this way Stein’s likeness presaged the masks that stood in
for the heads of the bathers in Picasso’s monumental and path-breaking paint-
ing “Les demoiselles d’Avignon,” completed the following year.25 The work
27
Figure 1.1: Pablo Picasso, “Gertrude Stein,” 1905–1906, oil on canvas, 39-3/8 x 32 inches.
© 2016 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image copyright © The
Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.
this proved a critical breakthrough for Picasso in his stylistic development

and the transition to his Cubist phase.26
Picasso acknowledged the portrait’s importance in his career, and Stein
adored the work; she later wrote to Picasso, in 1938, “I was and I still am
satisfied with my portrait, for me, it is I, and it is the only reproduction of me
which is always I, for me.”27 The painting in fact made Stein famous as an icon
of the avant-garde before she had made an international name for herself as
a modernist writer.28 And it appears to have influenced the development of
Stein’s modernist technique of writing portraits, in which she used words
in a manner that resembles how the individual colors and shapes a modern
artist assembles on an abstract canvas may derive meaning from their spatial
relations to one another rather than from any specific signification.29
In her literary portraits, Stein aimed to portray her sitters as they existed
in a single moment, the way they would be represented in painted por-
traiture, rather than in the context of any sort of story that involves action
and change and plays out over time. In this way her portraits come closer
28
to resembling how George Eliot, in the passage from Daniel Deronda dis-
cussed earlier, describes visual, rather than literary, works in the genre.
Stein explains her rejection of narrative and emotion in her portraits in the
1935 essay “Portraits and Repetition,” saying that these are to be avoided
because of their association with memory. These forms of description, for
Stein, portray only a person’s resemblance, not who he is; they render him
into a type rather than an individual self, by inciting the reader to recall
other encounters with similar descriptions of character and thus, through
memory, to draw connections between different people.30 Instead, she
wished to use portraiture to represent what she sometimes dubbed the
subject’s “existence,” and elsewhere characterized as the person’s unique
inner “movement.”31 She aimed to create depictions of her subjects’ interior
selves as she apprehended them, using the most direct, momentary, and
unmediated literary means she could devise.32
Stein’s notion of the self was based in large part on the ideas of psychol-
ogist William James, whose theoretical writings she had read as a student
at Radcliffe College.33 According to James’s The Principles of Psychology,
there are two ways to contemplate other people: through “acquaintance,”
which constitutes a sort of immediate awareness, and through “knowl-
edge about,” which involves the ability to recognize the continuity that
links a succession of moments of awareness into a single entity. For James,
the notion of identity requires “knowledge about,” because it demands
the understanding, through processes of memory and comparison, that
one is the same person from any one moment to the next.34 Stein con-
curred with James’s position in her early essays, but as she developed her
philosophy and prose style, she grew to feel that portraiture required not
the kind of description that will contribute to knowledge about a per-
son, but instead an attempt at representing her unmediated perception
of a subject.35 This way she could approach her goal of making the read-
er’s immediate acquaintance with her subject’s existence, as though in a
moment that stands outside the forward progress of time and therefore
does not permit comparison and memory.
In some of the portraits that Stein wrote in what has been called
the second phase of her work in the genre, including “Susie Asado” and
“Preciosilla,” she felt that she accomplished an effect in language that was
akin to music, producing “an extraordinary melody of words” that was able
to represent the corresponding “internal melody of existence.”36 Though
she subsequently grew to feel that the effect of this style came too perilously
close to beauty, an effect she wished to avoid, and decided to find a more
sober approach to writing, she allowed that this accomplishment served as
an important stage in the development of her portraiture, and indeed these
were two portraits that Thomson would later set to melody.
29
In “Portraits and Repetition,” Stein explains why portraiture was so

inspirational and formative a genre for her and elaborates on her personal
notion of what constitutes the individual self, discussing why she chose to
write her portraits in such abstract language:
I had to find out what it was inside any one, and by any one I mean every one I had to
find out inside every one what was in them that was intrinsically exciting and I had to
find out not by what they said not by what they did not by how much or how little they
resembled any other one but I had to find it out by the intensity of movement that there
was inside in any of them.37
Stein described both the quality of existence that she aimed to portray
in her works and the portraitist’s method of reproducing it by analogy to
the experience of simultaneously “listening and talking”:38 “by listening
and talking I conceived at every moment the existence of some one, and
I put down each moment that I had the existence of that one inside in me
until I had completely emptied myself of this that I had had as a portrait
of that one.”39 It was thus a thorough contemplation of a subject that took
place through a process akin to a deep layering of dialogue within oneself
that brought Stein in touch with the individual, interior existence of her
acquaintances that she wished to represent in her portraits.40
A principal characteristic of many of Stein’s portraits is the restatement
of words and phrases through a technique that she called “insistence,” and
was careful to distinguish from repetition.41 Through insistence, locutions
can take on different emphases each time they recur, despite their simi-
larity, and in this way come to resemble a person’s life, throughout which
attributes of experience frequently reappear but their meanings shift.42
Explaining the process, she writes: “Each sentence is just the difference in
emphasis that inevitably exists in the successive moment of my containing
within me the existence of that other one achieved by talking and listen-
ing inside in me and inside in that one.”43 She likened this technique to the
content of a reel of film, in which the sequence of multiple frames, each of
which is much like the one that preceded it but has its own unique differ-
ences in form and emphasis, merge together when projected, to create a sin-
gle image that contains an overarching sense of movement, or existence.44
During Thomson’s early efforts at writing musical portraits, he devel-
oped a method of composition that was inspired by Stein’s process of creat-
ing her literary portraits, as well as by the tradition in visual portraiture of
creating representations in their sitters’ presence: he sat before his subjects
and composed spontaneously, writing notes on the page as he felt inspired
to by their proximity.45 Thomson explained, “It was in search of . . . immedi-
acy that I began making musical portraits as a painter works, in the model’s
30
presence. This led me toward seeking ways to keep my work spontaneous,

the music flowing out of me unhindered by thoughts, at least by verbaliz-
ings.”46 In doing so, he believed, he was best able to represent the abstract
essence at the core of the sitter’s identity, bypassing physical appearance. As
he wrote, “I do not try evoking visual art; in all my portraits only the sitter’s
presence is portrayed, not his appearance or his profession.”47 Thomson
also drew inspiration from the study of prior composers who took liberties
with traditional musical forms; as he put it in his autobiography, his dis-
covery of their rule-breaking gave him a sense of freedom that “meant that
I could write almost automatically, cultivate the discipline of spontaneity,
let it flow.”48
In describing the genre of musical portraiture, Thomson suggested that
all composition is inherently representational, but that musical portraits are
unusual in that they aim to render a singular, identifiable image: “Very little
has ever been written down that the author did not think was about some-
thing. Some thing or some body. So every musical portrait is tied to an indi-
vidual, and the composer of it tends to believe it a true likeness.”49 Thomson
understood representation in the composition of music to involve creat-
ing metaphoric connections between music and sights, sounds, perfumes,
language, and emotion.50 The musical portrait, therefore, related to its sub-
ject, the sitter named in the title, through a variety of affective and sensory
metaphors linking the music’s compositional structures and those abstract
aspects of a sitter’s presence—Thomson’s analogue to Stein’s existence—
that he believed could be perceived most effectively through a momentary,
spontaneous meeting.
The simplicity and brevity of Thomson’s portraits is an outcome of the
aesthetic goal of rendering the subject present before the listener as he once
sat before the composer, making him available to the senses in a way that
allows for an immediate encounter that does not require the interpretation
of meaning (though it does not preclude such a reading, either, as the fol-
lowing analyses show).51 In this way Thomson attempts in his portraits to
capture the sense of epiphany he feels in a person’s presence, and to repro-
duce this intense but ephemeral event for his portraits’ players and listeners.
In other words, he hopes, in these works, to stage for the listener a similar
confrontation with the sitter in the moment of the performance.52
In the late 1920s, Stein and Thomson exchanged portraits of one another
through the mail. Thomson produced his first, in 1928; after its premiere
performance in Paris (the reviewer for the New Yorker called it a “ ‘bust’ of
Gertrude Stein”), he reported back to her, “Your portrait pleases. Is said to
resemble.”53 Thomson received Stein’s rendering of him the following year.
Stein explained that it exhibited a “profundity” that conveyed her belief in
him, and Thomson wrote back that it was “very beautiful and serious and
31
like me too. Yes very serious and with a quite gratuitous beauty.”54 In their
respective media these two portraits resemble one another in the way they
exhibit the technique of insistence, the restatement of musical or linguistic
motifs with gradual and unpredictable variations that result in a shifting of
emphasis and therefore of meaning.
In Thomson’s portrait of Stein, titled “Miss Gertrude Stein as a Young
Girl” and later published in the collection Eight Portraits for Violin Alone
(1981), the composer restates and varies motivic fragments in a manner
that resembles Stein’s linguistic insistence. Thomson explores several meth-
ods of slightly altering brief musical materials in just the first ten measures
of the portrait (Example 1.1). He begins with the technique of sequencing,
restating the opening two-measure phrase in measures three and four, but
at a whole step below. He then introduces a new five-note motif in meas-
ure 5, which is in 5$time. This recurs three additional times in succession,
always with a different set of emphases produced by changes in bowing,
note length, or meter. In the first version of this motif, the notes are slurred
in two groupings, the first comprised of three notes and the second of two.
In the following measure, Thomson restates the motif with a different slur-
ring, in groups of two and then three, altering the emphasis produced by
the violinist’s bow changes from notes 1 and 4 to notes 1 and 3. In the sec-
ond restatement of the motif, notes 1 and 4 are expanded in length to half
notes, so the emphasis is now on these two pitches, both of which fall on
downbeats. And in the final restatement, which begins on the third beat of
the measure, the emphasis is on notes 2 and 5, which fall on downbeats in
the new meter of 3$time.
Something analogous to Thomson’s motivic restatements with altered
emphases can be found in the insistence of individual words and phrases in
the first portion of Stein’s portrait “Virgil Thomson,” which begins:
Yes ally. As ally. Yes ally yes as ally. A very easy failure takes place. Yes ally. As ally. As ally
yes a very easy failure takes place. Very good. Very easy failure takes place. Yes very easy
failure takes place.55
Example 1.1: Virgil Thomson, “Miss Gertrude Stein as a Young Girl,” 1928, mm. 1–11.
32
In this passage Stein constructs several fragmented motifs and then restates
them, each time modifying, conjoining, and reshuffling them. The text
has no clear meaning, and the dizzying recurrence of several one-syllable
words—“yes,” “as,” and “ally”—has the result of separating these words
from their usual signification and turning them into abstract sounds, whose
shared letters (the y’s that open “yes” and close “ally” but produce different
phonemes in these words) and assonance on the short “a” contribute to
a rhythmic staccato that is broken up with the occasional insertion of the
rarer multiple-syllable words. Additionally, the division of word groupings
with the punctuating period imposes emphases on the words that fall at
the start and end of each individual “sentence,” in the manner of the bar-
lines within the shifting time signatures of Thomson’s portrait. In the end,
the danger of a “very easy failure” may loom ominously, but the affirma-
tive repetition of “yes” (an echo of an ecstatic Molly Bloom at the close of
Joyce’s Ulysses?) and the implication of collaboration in the word “ally” hint
at a “very easy” friendship between these two portraitists, as do the lilting
rhythmic variations of Thomson’s whimsical portrait of Stein.
Musical restatement is also an important feature of one of Thomson’s
much later portraits, “Buffie Johnson: Drawing Virgil Thomson in
Charcoal,” where it is manifested in the simple, antiquated technique of
imitation between the two musical voices, played by the left and right hand
of the piano. This portrait was published in his collection Nineteen Portraits
for Piano (1981), which included musical portraits of three artists of his
acquaintance—Buffie Johnson, Franco Assetto, and John Wright—that he
created in their presence while they simultaneously sketched portraits of
him. In the introduction to the score of this collection, Thomson identifies
his sitters, describing Johnson as an artist “celebrated for her giant flowers
and for her portraits.” Johnson’s artistic mode was generally realist: though
her portraits could be stylized in ways that gestured toward early twentieth-
century expressionism, they did not engage with abstraction. In an earlier
portrait of Thomson from 1963, for example, Thomson’s face, a recogniz-
able likeness shown in three-quarter view, emerges from—and merges
with—a sketchy, shadowy background (Figure 1.2). His downturned lips
convey an austere, taciturn character, and his heavy eyelids and distant gaze
out of the right side of the canvas appear to indicate that he has become lost
in thought.
While both Morton Feldman and Philip Glass depict the subjects
of their musical portraits of the painters Willem de Kooning and Chuck
Close in part through the evocation of their characteristic artistic styles and
techniques, as chapter 2 will demonstrate, Thomson once stated that his
musical portraits of artists do not mimic the subjects’ own works of art.56
It might be the case that Thomson does not imitate the style or appearance
3
Figure 1.2: Buffie Johnson, “Portrait of Virgil Thomson,” 1963, oil on Masonite, 23-3/4 x 19-1/2
inches. Used by permission of the University of Missouri-Kansas City Libraries, Dr. Kenneth
J. LaBudde Department of Special Collections. Additional permission granted by Jenny J. Sykes.
of Johnson’s artworks, as he protests, but in this portrait, her act of creat-

ing art—in particular, a representation in the genre of portrait drawing—
becomes the central subject of Thomson’s musical construction of her
identity. This is accomplished in this short neoclassical composition by way
of its imitative structure, in which the left hand plays the same through-
composed melody as the right, always two bars behind and a minor tenth
below. With its canonic form, in which the melody is constantly at once
presented and re-presented in a large-scale manifestation of Stein’s tech-
nique of insistence, “Buffie Johnson” appears to depict a mirroring effect,
as the two artists serve as both model and portraitist for one another, each
depicting the other in the process of creating a representation.
The melodies in each line of Thomson’s portrait convey a neoclassical
quality that gestures back to the Baroque era. For example, opening dotted
rhythms evoke the French overture style (measures 1–4, Example 1.2), and
brief melodic fragments reappear throughout at differing pitch levels, in
clear instances of sequencing (as in measure 20, Example 1.3). The imitative
quality of the entire composition heightens this retrospective, learned-style
34
Example 1.2: Virgil Thomson, “Buffie Johnson: Drawing Virgil Thomson in Charcoal,” 1981,
mm. 1–6.
Example 1.3: Virgil Thomson, “Buffie Johnson: Drawing Virgil Thomson in Charcoal,” 1981,
mm. 20–4.
effect. In composing the portrait in this way, Thomson depicts Johnson as

possessing a refined, classic, perhaps old-fashioned affect and bearing.
“Buffie Johnson” is a whimsical representation of the act of producing a
portrait, in which the portrait’s subject is not only the sitter, but also the pro-
cess of artistic representation. Just as portraiture has long been recognized
as a medium that renders indelible an ephemeral moment in an imperma-
nent life, Thomson’s work offers a permanent musical representation of the
fleeting act of creating a portrait. And as a depiction of both Johnson and her
process of drawing Thomson, this musical work operates not only as a por-
trait of another artist, but also as an unusual kind of self-portrait. Thomson
represents two artists, filtered through one another’s perception: he depicts
Buffie Johnson as he experiences her “presence” when he sits before her, and
he also describes himself as she perceives him, on the evidence of the way
she portrays him at the same time in her charcoal drawing.
In its reliance on repetition (or, for Stein’s sake, insistence) in a musi-
cal exploration of portraiture, likeness, and the representation of presence,
35
Thomson’s imitative portrait of Buffie Johnson recalls a line in Stein’s sec-

ond portrait of Picasso, titled “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of
Picasso,” from 1923. In this literary depiction of the artist who had created
the iconic portrait of her that she would find so inspiring throughout her
life, and whom she had first represented in one of her earliest word por-
traits, Stein writes:
Exact resemblance to exact resemblance the exact resemblance as exact as a resem-

blance, exactly a resembling, exactly resembling, exactly in resemblance exactly a resem-
blance, exactly and resemblance.57
In Stein’s portrait, the aesthetic quality of exact resemblance appears to be

attributed not to naturalism or realism, typical styles of portraiture in the
artistic tradition, but to motivic restatement and developing variation as
elements of literary depiction. It additionally seems to refer to some form
of mutual contemplation and representation, of the sort Picasso and Stein
engaged in, and Thomson also participated in with Stein and again with
Johnson. Stein’s second portrait of Picasso is one of her more opaque texts,
to be sure, but with its recurring verbal motifs operating as a kind of literary
analogue to musical canon form, it may be seen as a work that explores how
two portraitists can represent one another, the theme that Thomson would
address many decades later in “Buffie Johnson.”
Indeed, in “If I Told Him,” Stein continues, “Now actively repeat at all,
now actively repeat at all, now actively repeat at all,” and this is a directive
that Thomson appears to take to heart in both of the musical portraits dis-
cussed here.58 In representing his experience of Johnson’s presence and
her impression of his—her act of drawing him as he “composes” her—
Thomson creates a portrait whose subject matter is the very process of pro-
ducing a work of portraiture, of encountering, perceiving, interpreting, and
depicting an individual’s identity through artistic creation. In other words,
this composition is, ultimately, a study of musical representation itself, as
well as of music’s capacity to represent the self.
PIERRE BOULEZ’S PLI SELON PLI: PORTRAIT DE

MALLARMÉ AND “MUSIQUE, PAR EXCELLENCE”
Where Thomson took both the literary portraits of Stein and her philo-
sophical and critical essays on the subjects of identity and linguistic rep-
resentation as sources of influence for the creation of his own musical
portraits, Pierre Boulez found inspiration in Stéphane Mallarmé’s poetry
and essays on aesthetics in devising his portrait of the French poet. In the
36
case of Boulez’s portrait, however, the composer also incorporated the

texts of a number of Mallarmé’s poems into the musical texture. The result-
ing work, Pli selon pli: Portrait de Mallarmé, was composed across a num-
ber of years and repeatedly revised over the course of several decades,
through the 1980s.59 Comprised of five movements for soprano and a
changing ensemble that were written out of the sequence in which Boulez
eventually ordered them, Pli selon pli opens with “Don” (Gift, composed
1961–1962), based on Mallarmé’s “Don du poëme”; continues with three
“Improvisations” (the first two composed in 1957 and the third in 1960)
on Mallarmé’s sonnets “Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui” (The
Lively, Lovely and Virginal Today), “Une dentelle s’abolit” (Abolished the
Curtains Half-Spread), and “A la nue accablante tu” (Still by the Crushing
Cloud); and concludes with “Tombeau” (Tomb, 1959– 1961), based
on Mallarmé’s poetic remembrance of the symbolist poet Paul Verlaine,
“Tombeau de Verlaine” (the titles are given here as they appear in transla-
tions by William Matheson).60 The piece came together gradually: having
drafted “Improvisation I” and “Improvisation II,” Boulez started compos-
ing “Tombeau” and, realizing he had begun to conceive of it as a commen-
tary on the two Mallarmé “Improvisations,” he stopped briefly in order to
round out the earlier set, writing “Improvisation III.” He then completed
“Tombeau,” and finally composed “Don” in order to provide a symmetrical
structure to the overall portrait, framing the three “Improvisations” by bal-
ancing the conclusion with an introduction.61
Boulez’s interest in literature was extensive, and he developed his liter-
ary theories across his career through numerous critical essays, in which
he frequently raised the subject of Mallarmé’s poetic style and innovations.
He wrote repeatedly about other poets and authors as well and composed
incidental music for a production of the Oresteia, and around a decade after
completing the first version of Pli selon pli he composed a piece evoking the
poet e. e. cummings and incorporating his texts, cummings ist der Dichter
(cummings Is the Poet, 1970, rev. 1986). Boulez’s collected prose also
includes a number of literary portraits, brief character studies of composers
including Bartók, Berg, Debussy, Schoenberg, and Webern.62
In his 1960 essay “Sonate, Que me Veux-tu?” (Sonata, What Do You
Want from Me?), Boulez, writing of the literary works that inspired the
innovative formal techniques he developed in his Third Piano Sonata, lists
Mallarmé and James Joyce as especially influential, explaining:
Musical considerations have counted less than the literary contacts I have happened to
have. Finally, my current form of thought arose more from reflections about literature
than about music. . . . It seems to me . . . that certain writers have gone, as of now, much
further than musicians in the realm of organization, of the mental structure of a work.63
37
It is a particular sort of formal self-awareness that Boulez finds in the

modern novel and poem, and that informs his compositional innovation
and his portrait of Mallarmé more specifically.64
Boulez was especially inspired by Mallarmé’s complex ideas about the rela-
tionships between poetry and music, and about choice and openness as factors
in artistic performance and reception.65 Mallarmé’s poetry is notoriously chal-
lenging, and the obscurity of his imagery and use of language open his writings
to a vast range of potential interpretations. The difficulty of Mallarmé’s poetry
was widely acknowledged during his lifetime: even in France, in the period of
his career in which he experienced the greatest popularity, his work was widely
considered inscrutable, prompting French audiences to ask facetiously for the
chance to read it in French translation.66 Reflecting a similar frustration, Marcel
Proust wrote of Mallarmé in the last decade of the nineteenth century, “How
unfortunate that so gifted a man should become insane every time he takes up
the pen.”67 Mallarmé himself characterized his own works as deliberately avail-
able to multiple interpretations; he explained that he hoped his poems would
reveal different meanings to the same reader on different days, and famously,
describing his poetry by analogy to visual art, wrote that his desire was, “To
paint not the thing but the effect that it produces.”68
The task of constructing an open text that offers the audience the chance
to complete the art piece through an interactive form of readership was a
preoccupation for Mallarmé, particularly in his effort to create his unfin-
ished Le Livre, which Boulez encountered through its posthumous publi-
cation in a 1957 edition with an introduction by Jacques Schérer. Boulez’s
musical portrait of Mallarmé incorporates something analogous to the way
the poet’s works invite and even require participatory acts of readership. Its
open formal attributes invite the performer to be an active collaborator in
the structuring of the text, for example by leaving to the players’ discretion
the ordering of various gestures, passages, and text fragments in “Don.” This
structure also allows the listener to form a unique and personal interpreta-
tion of this complex and monumental composition.69
Boulez believed that in taking a critical approach to one’s aesthetic fore-
bears, an artist is able to initiate a dialogue with the past in his own works.
He writes: “If you question the masters of an earlier period with persever-
ance and conviction you become the medium of their replies: they speak
of you and through you.”70 Given his view that the artist can channel the
responses of the predecessors he “questions,” it may seem unsurprising that
Boulez stated in an interview in 1996 that Pli selon pli is a “double portrait: It
is a portrait of Mallarmé and myself. Of course Mallarmé is a poet who has
been terribly important to me. The kind of relationship we had, our work-
ing together—in spite of the difference in centuries!—brings up somebody
else: That is the portrait of a kind of mixture of Mallarmé and me, finally.”71
38
Pli selon pli was thus, for Boulez, the product of a process resembling col-
laboration with the deceased poet, a portrait in which Mallarmé spoke back
through him as though the two were producing portraits of one another
within the same work of art, in a manner that reflects, on a grander scale,
Virgil Thomson’s portrait of Buffie Johnson drawing a portrait of him.72
In this way Pli selon pli comes across as a hybrid work, an instance of
both musical and literary portraiture that depicts its subject through a rich
intertextual interpretation of the relationship between the two artistic
media. Boulez wrote of the interaction between these forms: “I have a pro-
found belief in reciprocal influences between literature and music, not only
through direct and effective collaboration, but at least as much through
the transmutation of modes of thought which hitherto seemed confined
to one or other of these two means of expression.”73 The basis of Boulez’s
portrait is the selected works by Mallarmé that he incorporates, in some
cases in their entirety and in others in fragments. In using Mallarmé’s texts
to evoke the poet’s identity, Boulez engages in a representational mode that
resembles a device that formed one of the oldest roots of literary portrai-
ture, the classical rhetorical technique of prosopopeia. An orator engages
this device when representing an individual by speaking as though in the
person’s words and voice. Quintilian writes that in prosopopeia, “we dis-
play the thoughts of our opponents, as they themselves would do in a solil-
oquy. . . . In this kind of figure, it is allowable even to bring down the gods
from heaven, evoke the dead, and give voices to cities and states.”74 Through
prosopopeia, in other words, the living channel the dead within a single
speech act, in a manner that resembles Boulez’s claim that by sufficiently
questioning Mallarmé’s works he is able to make the poet “speak of . . . and
through” him in Pli selon pli.
The term prosopopeia derives from the phrase “to make a face,” and it is
through the metaphoric conjuring of an individual’s likeness that the rhe-
torical device becomes an early root of portraiture. Paul de Man writes that
in prosopopeia, “Voice assumes mouth, eye and finally face. . . . Prosopopeia
is the trope of autobiography, by which one’s name . . . is made as intelligible
and memorable as a face.”75 And so, through a triple layering of metaphors
that reach across artistic media, Boulez retools Mallarmé’s language in Pli
selon pli through an act of prosopopeia as a means of summoning his voice,
transmuting it into music to conjure the impression of his face. This makes
of Pli selon pli a portrait that shares aspects of the genre as it is manifested in
the literary, musical, and visual arts.
Nevertheless, Boulez’s conclusion in “Sonate, Que me Veux- tu?”
might seem to preclude the use of prosopopeia to conjure the presence
of the author. He suggests that in their writings, figures such as Mallarmé
and Joyce have succeeded in effacing themselves and creating a kind of
39
“absolute” literature: “The text becomes ‘anonymous’ in them, one might

say, ‘speaking for itself and without an author’s voice.’ If it were necessary
to find a profound motive for the work I have tried to describe, it would
be the search for such ‘anonymity.’ ”76 To characterize this phenomenon,
Boulez adopts a phrase Mallarmé wrote in a letter to Verlaine, “y parlant
de lui-même et sans voix d’auteur.”77 Boulez later elaborated that, in his
view, artworks
should go beyond the [artist’s] personality. . . . That is when I use the term “anonym-
ity”: When the writer or the composer is no longer necessary as a presence; when the
work goes beyond the person and is much stronger than the person himself. . . . With
“anonymous” I mean beyond the author. A work that remains in itself—and this is very
important.78
Boulez’s theory of anonymity and the loss of the author’s voice in sym-
bolist and modernist literature resonates strongly with the argument of
the influential essay “The Death of the Author” by the French structuralist
critic Roland Barthes, written in 1968, only a few years after “Sonate, Que
me Veux-tu?” In this essay Barthes proposes that in the novel, “As soon as a
fact is narrated . . . the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own
death, writing begins.”79 Barthes writes this thesis in part to oppose the per-
sistence of critical approaches to literature in which “The author still reigns”
and “the explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who
produced it, as if it were always in the end . . . the voice of a single person,
the author ‘confiding in us.’ ”80 But in spite of Boulez’s claims about the abso-
lutism of the poetry of the author whose works form the textual basis of
Pli selon pli, this composition in fact accomplishes the opposite of the kind
of anonymity that Boulez describes. Instead of marking the death of this
author, divorcing his voice from its origin, or reaching beyond his person-
ality, the composition uses Mallarmé’s words to summon his presence, or
“make his face,” through the process of prosopopeia in which the author’s
words gesture directly toward his identity.
Pli selon pli conjures Mallarmé in two principal respects, one essentially
narrative and the other more conceptual, but each produced by way of
Boulez’s experiments with sound and with musical form, from movement
to movement and across the work as a whole. And through these represen-
tational modes, the composition, as innovative as it is both structurally and
as a work of musical representation, evokes the likeness of the deceased
author rather than announcing his death. In this manner, Pli selon pli comes
in some respects to resemble the rather traditional critical form that Barthes
sought to move beyond, the “His Life and Works” genre of biography or lit-
erary portrait.
40
In the narrative sense, the five movements of Pli selon pli form an arc
that begins with a birth and ends with a death and crosses through a life
in between. The first movement, “Don,” is based on a poem Mallarmé
published early in his career, in 1865, at the early age of twenty-three. The
theme of this text is the creation of a poem (Boulez suggests that in his
musical arrangement, Mallarmé’s “don du poëme” is transformed into a
“don de l’oeuvre,” a “gift of the [musical] work”),81 described according to
the metaphor of a new mother’s harrowing labor and birth. Boulez uses
only the first line, “Je t’apporte l’enfant d’une nuit d’Idumée!” (I bring you
the child of an Idumaean night!); Mallarmé’s original continues, “O la ber-
ceuse, avec ta fille et l’innocence /De vos pieds froids, acceuille une horri-
ble naissance” (O nursing mother, with your child and the innocence /Of
your cold feet, receive this horrible birth).82 As Boulez put it, “if you read
the entire poem, that is a kind of excruciating experience of giving birth
to the poem.”83 Boulez’s first movement follows the poem’s opening line
with individual words and phrases borrowed from the three sonnets that
are adapted in the ensuing “Improvisations.” “Don” introduces these frag-
ments in a perfunctory manner as though giving the gift of life to the work’s
subsequent poems and their musical settings, which will fully take form and
find their legs in the movements to follow.84
The sonnets that form the basis of the three “Improvisations” that come
next were published in 1885, 1887, and 1895, respectively, when Mallarmé
was in his forties and fifties. The final movement, whose title is abstracted
from Mallarmé’s “Tombeau de Verlaine” to the shorter and less specific
“Tombeau,” dates to 1897, and though it was written to commemorate
Verlaine shortly after his passing, it becomes, in Boulez’s hands, a reminder
of the death of Mallarmé the year after he wrote the poem. In this move-
ment, Boulez incorporates only the final line of the sonnet, “Un peu pro-
fond ruisseau calomnié la mort” (A shallow stream calumniated death).85
In this musical setting the text enters late in the movement, arranged in a
highly melismatic fashion that renders it essentially unintelligible, until the
final two syllables, “la mort,” meaning “death.” These words can be heard
more clearly, at the very conclusion, embedded within an extended elegiac
drone in the orchestra and “Parlé sans timbre, uniquement sur le souffle”
(Spoken without timbre, only breathed), as the score instructs. By com-
bining these five poems in this manner, Pli selon pli: Portrait de Mallarmé
offers something analogous in form to a chronological literary portrait or
biographical study of Mallarmé, the type of text that might bear the subti-
tle “His Life and Works,” in which key poems spanning the middle and late
periods of the poet’s career are framed by musical settings of the first line of
an early poem that implies the subject of his birth and the closing words of
a late sonnet that commemorates his death.86
41
In addition to serving up a select poetic chronology and honoring

Mallarmé’s life, Pli selon pli also operates as a portrait of its subject at a
deeper level, by offering an attempt at realizing Mallarmé’s aesthetic
goals, which he described in his essays using a complex musical metaphor
for the way he wished to develop poetic language. Pli selon pli attempts to
achieve, through an innovative approach to musical form, what Boulez
called “a musical equivalent, both poetic and formal, to Mallarmé’s
poetry.”87 As a model for his own experimentation with form, Boulez
adopts Mallarmé’s use of traditional poetic structures such as the sonnet
as a framework within which to experiment with syntax. Boulez stated
that “the poems that are in verse are extremely disciplined,”88 but also
that “Mallarmé tried to rethink the foundations of French grammar,” and
“never has the French language been taken so far in the matter of syntax,”
before or after the poet’s life.89 He compared this combination of formal
traditionalism and syntactical complexity with the serialist composer
Anton Webern’s pervasive but frequently indiscernible use of the imita-
tive technique of musical canon.90
In the view of the poet and essayist Paul Valéry, Mallarmé’s vexed rela-
tionship with music could be characterized as “une sublime jalousie” (a
sublime jealousy).91 Mallarmé regularly attended musical performances,
with notebook and pencil in hand, listening with voracious attention
for what he could assimilate into the language of his poetry.92 What he
wished to achieve was a literature that would rise to the challenge posed
by the ineffable and evocative expressivity of music, and in replicating
this power would ultimately replace it; the resulting poetry would be
“Musique, par excellence.”93 Mary Breatnach writes that for Mallarmé,
the term “music” stood for—in addition to its standard meaning—“a sys-
tem of relationships, an essentially silent structuring force which the poet
believed underlay not only musical sounds, but the whole of existence,
a force which was nothing less than the key to an understanding of the
nature of the universe.”94 Mallarmé sought to create poetry that could
express itself in a language equivalent to music, that could, in his words,
“find . . . a way of accomplishing the transposition of the symphony to the
Book” and thus reveal “the totality of the relationships existing between
everything.”95
Music is a recurrent theme in the poems Boulez assembles in his por-
trait, whether it is vocal, instrumental, animal, silent, muffled, or carried by
a distant echo. “Don du poëme” entreats the nursing mother:
Et ta voix rappelant viole et clavecin,

Avec le doigt fané presseras-tu le sein
Par qui coule en blancheur sibylline la femme
42
Pour les lèvres que l’air du vierge azur affame?

(And with your voice recalling viol and clavecin, /With your faded
finger, will you press the breast /Whence flows in the sibylline white-
ness woman /For lips made hungry by the blue virgin air?)96
The voice of this mother of poetry resembles the muted timbres of Baroque
instruments when their strings are bowed, plucked, or struck. And in “Le
vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui,” Mallarmé evokes (absent) music in
the recollection of the silent singing voice of the swan trapped on an icy lake:
Un cygnet d’autrefois se souvient que c’est lui

Magnifique mais qui sans espoir se délivre
Pour n’avoir pas chanté la région où vivre
Quand du stérile hiver a resplendi l’ennui.
(A swan of past times remembers he’s the one /magnificent but sur-
viving without hope /for not having sung a land where he could stop /
when the ennui of sterile winter has shone.)97
“Une dentelle s’abolit” follows up on the references to the antiquated

instruments of the viol and clavecin in “Don du poëme” with an even more
arcane gesture toward an obsolete strummed instrument:
Mais, chez qui du rêve se dore

Tristement dort une mandore
Au creux néant musicien.
(But with him of the gilded dream /a mandola sleeps in sorrow /in a
hollow of musical zero.)98
The mandola is a round-backed stringed instrument that is strummed and can

accompany singing. Here it rests “asleep” and unplayed; perhaps the “hollow
of musical zero” is silent like the swan’s unsung melody, but one can imagine
that the breeze entering through the lace curtains might cause the strings to
vibrate like those of an Aeolian harp. This gesture toward the sound of the
plucked strings is emphasized by the rhythmic repetition of the syllable “dor,”
with its percussive “d,” in the French “. . . se dore /Tristement dort une man-
dore.” Perhaps the last tercet of the poem implies that the instrument might
give birth to music, providing a counterpart to the birth of the poem in “Don
du poëme”:
Telle que verse quelque fenêtre

Selon nul ventre que le sien,
43
Filial on aurait pu naître.

(Such that toward some pane /involving no womb but its own /one
might be born as son.)99
In the following sonnet in Pli selon pli, “A la nue accablante tu,” the hint of a
gust of air producing musical sounds from an instrument is compounded by
a reference to the trumpet, which in this instance is heard as a muffled, dis-
tant sound rather than as music emerging directly from the original source:
A la nue accablante tu
Basse de basalte et de laves
A même les échos esclaves
Par une trompe sans vertu
(Stilled by the crushing cloud /low of basalt and lava /by even the
enslaved /echoes of a trumpet not loud [without quality].)100
It seems implicit in this highly abstract poem that the trumpet is sounding the
distress signal of a capsized ship; beneath the sea foam, the trumpet’s timbre is
stifled and indistinct, rendered ineffective in its task. This notion is mirrored
at the conclusion of the poem by an alternative interpretation of the foam as
the white hair of a sunken siren. From underwater, the voice of this mythi-
cal creature, whose seductive song tempted Odysseus on his voyage home in
Homer’s tale, is silenced, only a whispered or remembered echo of a sound.
In the final poem of the set, “Tombeau de Verlaine,” Mallarmé returns to the
theme of birdsong first taken up with reference to the swan trapped in the ice:
Ici presque toujours si le ramier roucoule

Cet immatériel deuil opprime de maints
Nubiles plis l’astre mûri des lendemains
Dont un scintillement argentera la foule.
(Usually if the ringdove coos here /this immaterial grief with
many a cloud / enfolding crushes tomorrow’s ripened star / whose
scintillations will besilver the crowd.)101
The sonic ambiguity of the previous poems, with their unsinging voices,
instruments at rest, and sounds carried by echoes or muffled by water, is here
augmented by the use of the conditional tense; we are told that something usu-
ally happens if the ringdove coos, but do not know whether, in fact, it does coo.
The sounds conjured in Mallarmé’s works seem finally to resonate in the
real world through Boulez’s music, whose timbral variety and innovation
evokes the silent birdsong, echoes, wind-strummed strings, and glittering
44
atmospheres of the poet’s texts. In “Don,” for example, the juxtaposed

decaying sustained notes and abrupt staccatos of the vocal line “recall viol
and clavecin” like the voice described in “Don du poëme,” an association
supported by the held notes in winds, brass, and strings that surround the
brief tones produced by the plucked harp, hammered tubular bells, vibra-
phone, and gong, and the sparkling combination of the celeste, mandolin,
and guitar. The high-pitched embellished gestures the soprano sings at the
start of Improvisation I call to mind the voice of the swan trapped in the
ice in “Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui.” The shimmering, almost
iridescent timbres of plucked and struck instruments, including harp, vibra-
phone, chimes, bells, and crotales in Improvisation II resemble how one
might imagine the sounds of Mallarmé’s sleeping mandola “in a hollow of
musical zero” in “Une dentelle s’abolit.” The muted trombone that blows
the first note of Improvisation III is a more direct representation of the
“echoes of a trumpet not loud” that sound the alarm in the correspond-
ing poem. And the recurrence of the quiet attacks in piano, percussion,
harps, and tubular bells in Tombeau construct an envelope of sound that
seems to come as close as a set of instruments can to evoking the atmos-
phere Mallarmé describes in the redolent phrase, “many a cloud /enfold-
ing crushes tomorrow’s ripened star /whose scintillations will besilver the
crowd.”
Boulez appears to attempt to fulfill Mallarmé’s ideas about the rela-
tionship between poetry and music in Pli selon pli through a process the
composer described as “osmosis,” “transformation,”102 and “transmuta-
tion.”103 He brings Mallarmé’s poetry together with musical sounds and
structures in a way that aims to turn the language into something resem-
bling the poet’s “Musique, par excellence,” absorbing the language into the
music and making the connection between these art forms a main sub-
ject of the portrait. As he explains, “The relationship between poem and
music is not only on the plane of emotional significance: I have tried to
push the alliance still further, to the very roots of the musical invention
and structure.”104 Elsewhere he writes not specifically about Pli selon pli,
but in a reflection on the relationship between the arts, “In music, word
and thought are one.”105 This theme of the association between expressive
media is implied in the title “Pli selon pli,” which, Boulez writes, “indicates
the meaning and direction of the work.”106 The phrase, which comes from
Mallarmé’s poem “Remémoration d’amis belges” (Recollection of Belgian
Friends), is not idiomatic in French and poses a challenge to translators. As
Breatnach has shown, though the approximation “fold upon fold” might
sound most familiar in English, the French words come closer to meaning
“fold according to fold,” an expression that implies a deep examination of
the structural associations between music and poetry and an interest in
45
experimenting with how they can be made to fold in on, in the manner of,
and as determined by one another.107
Though Boulez does not adopt any additional text from “Remémoration
d’amis belges” in Pli selon pli, the poem is essential to the development of
the five-movement portrait. This sonnet describes in abstract terms the ris-
ing of the mist in the Belgian city of Bruges to reveal the old stones that
construct its buildings. Boulez describes the poem as follows: “Under
something absolutely vague, which you cannot grasp, suddenly the reality
is there, in front of you. . . . For me . . . you have to wait patiently before
the real face of the world is revealed to you.”108 In the liner notes to the
first recording of Pli selon pli, Boulez explains that much as the mist lifts
to uncover the architecture of Bruges, “In a similar manner the develop-
ment of the five pieces reveals, ‘fold upon fold,’ a portrait of Mallarmé him-
self.”109 At first blush, the series of increasingly complex musical treatments
from one “Improvisation” to the next in Pli selon pli arguably appears to do
the opposite, to enshroud further and further, with every musical fold, the
already abstract poetic symbolism. Mallarmé’s language, with an abstrac-
tion that famously often borders on the unintelligible for even the most
diligent reader, becomes progressively more difficult to make out in each
successive vocal setting, the last of which uses only three lines of the poem,
and the labyrinthine musical forms simultaneously grow less obvious in
their connection to the French sonnet forms Mallarmé uses. But on closer
examination, it becomes clear that Boulez is performing, through music,
an archaeological analysis of Mallarmé’s writings—both the poems Boulez
selects and the essays in which Mallarmé describes his ideas about music
and poetry—that gradually aims to lift the fog that blankets Mallarmé’s
abstract use of language by setting the poems to musical interpretations
that delve ever more deeply into the sonnets’ formal structures.110
In a published interview, Boulez explains of the middle movements of
Pli selon pli:
These Improvisations become an analysis of the sonnet structure, in a more and more
detailed and more and more profound way. The first takes a sonnet and uncovers only its
strophic character, which is not very intense work; the second is elaborated at the level of
the line and verse itself—in other words, it is already an analysis of the stanza; the third
proceeds in the sense that the line itself has a particular structure in terms of its position
within the sonnet.111
Boulez also characterized his settings of the text as progressively orna-

mented, from the first, in which the poem is declaimed quite simply, to
the third, in which it is devoured by ornamentation.112 The three poems
Boulez selects for his “Improvisations” conform to the Petrarchan sonnet
46
form: each is constructed of fourteen lines, split between an octet and ses-
tet, which are further divided into pairs of quatrains and tercets. They also
follow the same rhyme scheme, ABBA CCD EDE. “Le vierge, le vivace et
le bel aujourd’hui” is built of alexandrines, the traditional twelve-syllable
line found in French poetry going back at least to the twelfth century; “Une
dentelle s’abolit” and “A la nue accablante tu” consist of octosyllabic lines.
James McCalla has shown through an analysis of Pli selon pli how the
musical treatment of the sonnet form, at first closely aligned in an obvious
manner, becomes progressively more complex in each “Improvisation.”113
“Improvisation I” is divided into two major sections, separating the two
quatrains from the tercets that follow.114 Between these sections, a brief tran-
sition (measures 32–45), itself split into two parts, sits awkwardly as a sort of
interpolated miniature improvisation, in which, writes McCalla, Boulez “ini-
tiates his progressive disintegration of Mallarmé’s forms.”115 “Improvisation
II” is also written in a binary division that maps onto the two-part struc-
ture of the Petrarchan sonnet, but the separation between these sections is
considerably more vague, and melismatic text-setting and formal variabil-
ity in the work (certain decisions are left to the discretion of the conductor
and performers) replace the clear articulation and punctuation of the poem
and relatively straightforward musical structure of “Improvisation I.”116
“Improvisation III,” which is based on what is arguably the most challeng-
ing of the Mallarmé poems assembled in Pli selon pli, finally brings the grad-
ual breakdown of the musical transmutation of sonnet form to its furthest
extreme. As noted earlier, only the first three lines of the poem are incorpo-
rated into the movement, and they are set to music in such a way that they
become incomprehensible, converted into long, heavily ornamented melis-
mas that transform the poem’s vowel sounds into meaningless vocables and
all but bury the consonants and any sense of punctuation. By contrast with
“Improvisation I,” in which the musical structures are dictated by the lan-
guage, here the poetry is fully absorbed into the surrounding orchestration,
which has also dispensed with the binary form, replacing it with something
fractured and more opaque.117 Mallarmé’s poem disintegrates fully late in the
movement when the vocal line is no longer set to words, and the singer is
instead instructed to utter sounds sometimes with the mouth closed and at
other times with it open (the third line of the poem returns at the conclu-
sion of the movement). Across the three “Improvisations,” Boulez’s musical
setting has progressively plumbed the depths of Mallarmé’s poetic forms and
syntactical innovations, in a way that mirrors how Mallarmé’s texts reached
perpetually away from clarity of meaning and syntax, and toward a state of
“Musique, par excellence.”118
Boulez wrote Pli selon pli principally as a portrait of Mallarmé, but he
also viewed it as a form of self-portrait. The work is a double portrait in
47
which Boulez worked out a method of “transmuting” poetry into music that
would bring together Mallarmé’s theory of an ideal poetry as “Musique, par
excellence” with his own notion of a literary music inspired by the symbol-
ist and modernist syntax of Mallarmé and Joyce. Additionally, while the
portrait follows a narrative structure to depict Mallarmé across his life, from
his birth, through a chronological tour of his mature poetic writings, and to
his death, it accounts for a considerable portion of Boulez’s career as well,
as about thirty-two years span the period from his first work on the move-
ments that would make up Pli selon pli to the completion of his final revi-
sions. And the piece also incorporates and adapts fragments of other works
by Boulez: the vocal line in “Improvisation I,” for example, is based on the
pitch sequence in the unpublished “Strophes” for solo flute (1957),119 and
this movement also reuses and orchestrates material from the solo piano
Notations, numbers 5 and 9 (1945).120
But Boulez saw the work not only as a portrait of the author and, perhaps
more abstractly, a portrait of the composer, but also as the material from
which a listener can fashion a self-portrait. Though the notion that a work
of art permits spectators to explore their own identities is far from novel,
Boulez offers a unique metaphor to link the experience of contemplating a
portrait with the mirror’s reflection and with the layering of representations
and art forms that inspired the title of this work:
The listener can make his own portrait after that. He can look at himself in the work.
Sometimes in museums some paintings are protected by glass. Francis Bacon likes his
paintings to be presented like that, so that people are confusing the painting and their
own face reflected in this glass panel. That is exactly the comparison I would like to make
for the person listening to this piece of mine.121
Pli selon pli presents a complex sonic adaptation of some of the most
abstract poetry of Mallarmé, but on close listening, it might offer to lift the
fog that veils our own sense of who we are, what constitutes our selves at
a given moment, and where we stand in relation to the art we contemplate
and interpret. As listeners, we are invited to seek out our faint reflections in
the music, as they are superimposed, fold according to transparent fold over
the likenesses of Mallarmé and Boulez.
CONCLUSION
In “Buffie Johnson” and Pli selon pli, Thomson and Boulez, like most paint-
ers and authors of portraits in the visual arts and literature, aim to represent
something of their subjects’ unique identities or selves. Thomson created
48
his portrait in front of his sitter, in order to depict what he called “pres-
ence,” a kind of energy or attitude that he felt people naturally and spon-
taneously reveal during a personal encounter. Boulez engaged in a creative
process that recalls the oratorical device of prosopopeia, recycling and
transmuting Mallarmé’s language in order to conjure the impression of his
presence. And in their very different portraits, both Thomson and Boulez
portray their subjects’ artistic processes: Thomson composes a depiction
of Johnson’s act of sketching in charcoal, while Boulez delves deeply into
the experimental literary techniques that Mallarmé developed within the
framework of centuries-old poetic forms.
In an essay about painted portraiture, the French philosopher Jean-Luc
Nancy writes that the portrait does not merely depict a subject’s identity,
but in fact contains it: “The person ‘in itself ’ is ‘in’ the painting. Devoid
of any inside, the painting is the inside or the intimacy of the person. It
is, in short, the subject of its subject.”122 The portrait, for Nancy, is not
so much a representation as a presentation; it does not portray the self,
but rather originates it. According to this notion, we can understand the
portrait as revealing the self to us directly and without mediation, rather
than as a form of secondary source material that might help us in coming
to understand a person’s identity, or as a translucent layer, like the surface
of Mallarmé’s icy lake or his lace curtain waving in the window, that ren-
ders the subject at once visible but also separate from us.123 To the extent
that we can consider Thomson’s and Boulez’s portraits as also being self-
portraits—something that both authors suggested, Thomson in his title
and Boulez in his later statements—this directness arises out of the sense
that Johnson and Mallarmé are simultaneously represented by their por-
traits and engaged in creating portraits of their composers, from within the
music. Nancy writes, “The portrait is less the recollection of a (memora-
ble) identity than it is the recollection of an (immemorial) intimacy.”124 It
is ultimately the intimacy of relationships—between Thomson and Stein,
Thomson and Johnson, Boulez and the writings of Mallarmé, and the lis-
tener and the sounds of these compositions—that is most compellingly
depicted in the overlapping folds of music, language, and visual art in these
musical portraits.
NOTES
1. William Hazlitt, “On the Imitation of Nature (1814),” in A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover
(eds.), The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, 12 vols. (London: J. M. Dent, 1904), xi: 221.
2. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1876), i: 119.
3. A. S. Byatt, Portraits in Fiction (London: Chatto and Windus, 2001), 1.
4. Byatt, Portraits in Fiction, 1.
49
5. Byatt, Portraits in Fiction, 91–2.

6. Theophrastan character types were revived and became widely influential in the
Renaissance. Wendy Steiner, Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary
Portraiture of Gertrude Stein (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), 9.
7. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the literary portrait became an impor-
tant vehicle for authors experimenting with new techniques of writing. Walter Pater,
Maxim Gorky, Lytton Strachey, and Virginia Woolf each wrote multiple texts in the genre,
and the titles of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man indicate that these turn-of-the-century novels, published around
three decades apart, operate by analogy to novel-length portraits as well.
8. For a variety of approaches to the genre, see Edmund Heier, “‘The Literary Portrait’ as
a Device of Characterization,” Neophilologus 60.3 ( July 1976): 321–2; Ulla Haselstein,
“Gertrude Stein’s Portraits of Matisse and Picasso,” New Literary History 34.4 (Autumn
2003): 724; Steiner, Exact Resemblance, 3. Studies of literary descriptions of painted por-
traits are found in Françoise Meltzer, Salome and the Dance of Writing: Portraits of Mimesis
in Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Michal Peled Ginsburg,
Portrait Stories (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). A. S. Byatt describes her
own incorporation of painted portraits in fictional narratives in Portraits in Fiction. The
broadest conception of literary portraiture is proposed by Jeffrey Wallen, who recom-
mends against the imposition of any restrictive definition of the genre in terms of form,
technique, or content. Jeffrey Wallen, “Between Text and Image: The Literary Portrait,” a/
b: Auto/Biography Studies 10.1 (1995): 56–8.
9. Hermione Lee, Biography: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009), 2–3.
10. David Fuller, “Of Portraits, ‘Sapho,’ and Couperin: Titles and Characters in French
Instrumental Music of the High Baroque,” Music and Letters 78.2 (1997): 155–6. The pro-
duction of these literary portraits came to be instrumental to the configuration of salon
society during the short period of their intense popularity.
11. Fuller, “Of Portraits, ‘Sapho,’ ” 161.
12. Aspects of literary portraiture have influenced the genre’s visual counterpart as well. In
Janice Krasnow’s 1999 oil painting “Portrait of Serena,” for example, the subject is depicted
as a likeness conveyed in text rather than shapes and colors: Krasnow has painted, in black
lettering over a pale background, the words, “vivid streaks of blonde and brown hair
and uniquely broad visible cheekbones.” Donna Gustafson and Susan Sidlauskas, “One.
2. Many: Portraits by Numbers,” in Donna Gustafson and Susan Sidlauskas (eds.), Striking
Resemblance: The Changing Art of Portraiture (New Brunswick, NJ: Zimmerli Art Museum
at Rutgers University; London: Prestel, 2014), 27.
13. Joshua S. Walden, “Composing Character in Musical Portraits: Carl Philipp Emanuel
Bach and L’Aly Rupalich,” Musical Quarterly 91.2 (Fall–Winter 2008): 379–411. For iden-
tifications of the subjects of C. P. E. Bach’s portraits, see Peter Wollny (ed.), Carl Philipp
Emanuel Bach: Miscellaneous Keyboard Works II (Los Altos, CA: Packard Humanities
Institute, 2005), xvii; Darrell M. Berg, “C. P. E. Bach’s Character Pieces and His Friendship
Circle,” in Stephen Clark (ed.), C. P. E. Bach Studies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 6.
14. Paul Roberts, Claude Debussy (London: Phaidon, 2008), 105.
15. Composer Peter Gena also uses language, either quoted or implied, as an element of
musical portraiture in his series Socio-Political Portraits, which includes McKinley (1983),
Mother Jones (1985), John Henry (1986), and Joe Hill Fantasy (1992–1993). In these
works, which represent figures from American political history and the labor movement,
Gena incorporates elements of popular songs by and about his subjects, in some cases
using their texts and in others melodic fragments that will remind listeners of the asso-
ciated lyrics. See Peter Gena, “Socio-Political Portraits,” http://petergena.com/political.
html, accessed June 21, 2016. Tyshawn Sorey’s “Josephine Baker: A Portrait” (2016), a
ninety-minute work for vocalist and ensemble, similarly merges the words from a number
of the songs she made famous with new poetry by Claudia Rankine, to form a multimedia
representation of the American-born singer, dancer, and actor who made her career in
Paris in the early twentieth century.
50
16. Virgil Thomson, Virgil Thomson (New York: Knopf, 1966), 97. On the relationship
between Thomson and Stein, see Thomas Dilworth and Susan Holbrook (eds.), The
Letters of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson: Composition as Conversation (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2010), 3–22. A collection of several of Thomson’s writings on Stein
can be found in Richard Kostelanetz (ed.), Virgil Thomson: A Reader: Selected Writings
1924–1984 (New York: Routledge, 2002), 201–13.
17. Linda Simon (ed.), Gertrude Stein: A Composite Portrait (New York: Discus Books,
1974), 121.
18. Kostelanetz, Virgil Thomson: A Reader, 212.
19. Thomson, Virgil Thomson, 90.
20. Anthony Carl Tommasini, “The Musical Portraits by Virgil Thomson,” Musical Quarterly
70.2 (Spring 1984): 239; Thomson, Virgil Thomson, 123.
22. Vincent Giroud, Picasso and Gertrude Stein (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art;
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 20.
23. Giroud, Picasso and Gertrude Stein, 16–17. For more on the close relationship between
Stein and Picasso, see Lucy Daniel, Gertrude Stein (London: Reaktion, 2009), 57–9.
24. Giroud, Picasso and Gertrude Stein, 26–7.
25. Giroud, Picasso and Gertrude Stein, 29.
26. Daniel, Gertrude Stein, 64.
29. Stein’s literary portraits in turn influenced other modernist visual artists in their work in
the genre. For example, Charles Demuth found inspiration in her works for his “poster
portraits,” a series that included his image of William Carlos Williams addressed in the
introduction of this book, as well as his portrait of Stein, titled “Love Love Love.” See
Daniel, Gertrude Stein, 91. On her influence on visual portraiture, see also Wendy Steiner,
“Postmodern Portraits,” Art Journal 46.3 (Autumn 1987): 173–7.
30. Gertrude Stein, “Portraits and Repetition,” in Lectures in America (London: Virago, 1985,
orig. 1935), 178. For some years in the early stage of her career, Stein attempted to develop
a theory of human typology. She worked out her ideas in a number of texts, including
The Making of Americans, written over seven years between 1905 and 1912, in the middle
of which period she produced her first portraits. On Stein’s categorizations of character
types, see Steiner, Exact Resemblance, 32–41.
31. Stein, “Portraits and Repetition,” 181, 171; Steiner, “Postmodern Portraits,” 173.
32. Steiner, “Postmodern Portraits,” 174.
33. Steiner, Exact Resemblance, 29. On the influence of James’s psychology on Stein’s
thought, see also Allison Blizzard, Portraits of the 20th Century Self: An Interartistic
Study of Gertrude Stein’s Literary Portraits and Early Modernist Portraits by Paul
Cézanne, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso (Frankfurt am Main and Berlin: Peter Lang,
2004), 36–40.
34. Steiner, Exact Resemblance, 30.
36. Stein, “Portraits and Repetition,” 197–8. Steiner divides Stein’s portrait-writing into three
periods, the first from 1908 to 1913, the second from 1913 to 1925, and the third lasting
from 1926 until her death twenty years later. Steiner, Exact Resemblance, 65.
37. Stein, “Portraits and Repetition,” 183.
39. Stein, “Portraits and Repetition,” 198. See also her description of this process on 178.
40. As Stein writes in “Portraits and Repetition,” 188–92, around 1912 she expanded her
process of listening and talking to include looking as well.
41. On Stein’s writings about insistence as a technique she developed throughout her literary
oeuvre, see Steiner, Exact Resemblance, 49–50.
42. Stein, “Portraits and Repetition,” 167–8.
51
45. Virgil Thomson, “Of Portraits and Operas,” Antaeus 21/22 (Spring/Summer
1976): 208–10.
46. Virgil Thomson, Preface to Anthony Tommasini, Virgil Thomson’s Musical Portraits
(Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 1986), ix–x (x).
47. Tommasini, “Musical Portraits by Virgil Thomson,” 243.
49. Thomson, Preface, x.
50. Thomson, Preface, ix.
51. The directness with which these representations aim to recreate the effect of the unmedi-
ated impression one has in a fleeting encounter with another person reflects what philos-
opher and literary critic Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht has called the “production of presence.”
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Redwood
City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). A similar effect of an unmediated, momentary
impression is produced by this book’s cover, which depicts a close-up black-and-white
photograph of Gumbrecht staring out at the viewer, unsmiling and with tired eyes and
unkempt hair, as though in a spontaneous and unprepared encounter with the reader.
52. Gumbrecht outlines his conception of epiphany as a mode of experiencing presence
through art in Production of Presence, 94–5, 111–14. Carolyn Abbate distinguishes the
“drastic” experience of music in performance from the “gnostic” act of interpreting a
musical work, in terms that overlap with Gumbrecht’s theories of the production of pres-
ence and the interpretation of meaning. Carolyn Abbate, “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?,”
Critical Inquiry 30.3 (Spring 2004): 505–36 (536).
53. Dilworth and Holbrook, Letters of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson, 91–2.
54. Dilworth and Holbrook, Letters of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson, 102–3. In a subse-
quent letter he mentions the portrait again to reiterate and elaborate on his praise (105).
55. Reprinted in Dilworth and Holbrook, Letters of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson, 307.
56. Tommasini, Virgil Thomson’s Musical Portraits, 17.
57. Gertrude Stein, “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso,” in Joan Retallack (ed.),
Gertrude Stein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 190.
58. Stein, “If I Told Him,” 191.
59. On Boulez’s revisions, see Philippe Albèra, “Entretien avec Pierre Boulez,” in Philippe
Albèra (ed.), Pli selon pli de Pierre Boulez: Entretien et études (Geneva: Éditions
Contrechamps, 2003), 16.
60. The Mallarmé poems assembled in Pli selon pli are translated in William Matheson, “Fold
Upon Fold: Stéphane Mallarmé and Pierre Boulez,” Yearbook of Comparative and General
Literature 36 (1987): 75–9 (77–9).
61. Susan Bradshaw, “The Instrumental and Vocal Music,” in William Glock (ed.), Pierre
Boulez: A Symposium (London: Eulenberg, 1986), 180–1.
62. These are included in Pierre Boulez, Notes of an Apprenticeship, trans. Herbert Weinstock
(New York: Knopf, 1968), 305–91; and Pierre Boulez, Orientations: Collected Writings,
ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, trans. Martin Cooper (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1985). Jonathan Goldman argues that, taken together, these miniature literary por-
traits merge into a larger literary self-portrait of Boulez. Jonathan Goldman, The Musical
Language of Pierre Boulez: Writings and Compositions (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2011), 41.
63. Pierre Boulez, “Sonate, Que me Veux- tu?,” trans. David Noakes and Paul Jacobs,
Perspectives of New Music 1.2 (Spring 1963): 32. Boulez writes in particular about the
unique typographical structure of Mallarmé’s Coup de Dés and the formal considerations
he learned from Le Livre.
64. Boulez, “Sonate, Que me Veux-tu?,” 32–3.
65. Goldman, Musical Language of Pierre Boulez, 14. For an analysis of openness in artworks,
see Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1989).
66. Alex Ross, “Encrypted,” New Yorker, April 11, 2016.
67. Charles Rosen, Freedom and the Arts: Essays on Music and Literature (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 354.
52
68. “Peindre, non la chose, mais l’effet qu’elle produit.” Stéphane Mallarmé, Correspondance,
ed. Lloyd James Austin and Henri Mondor, 11 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), i: 137. The
literary scholar Malcolm Bowie writes that for readers of Mallarmé’s deliberately difficult
poetry, “our most important collaboration with the poet begins when we ourselves agree
to be uncertain.” Malcolm Bowie, Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1978), x.
69. On Le Livre as an open work of art, see Eco, Open Work, 12–13. On Boulez’s early encoun-
ters with Mallarmé and Le Livre, see Albèra, “Entretien avec Pierre Boulez,” 7.
70. Pierre Boulez, Boulez on Music Today, trans. Susan Bradshaw and Richard Rodney Bennett
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 19.
71. Erling E. Guldbrandsen, “Pierre Boulez in Interview, 1996 (IV) Some Broader Topics,”
Tempo 65.258 (October 2011): 37.
72. Several years before Boulez made this statement in the interview cited in the previous
note, James McCalla argued similarly in an analysis of Pli selon pli that the work is a por-
trait of Boulez that reflects the composer’s own “mindset and mental processes.” James
McCalla, “Sea-Changes: Boulez’s Improvisations sur Mallarmé,” Journal of Musicology 6.1
(Winter 1988): 83–106 (83).
73. Translated in Mary M. Breatnach, “Pli selon pli. A Conflation of Theoretical Stances,”
in Walter Bernhart, Steven Paul Scher, and Werner Wolf (eds.), Word and Music
Studies: Defining the Field: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Word and
Music Studies at Graz, 1997 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 273.
74. Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory, Book 9, Chapter 2, http://rhetoric.eserver.org/quin-
tilian/9/chapter2.html, accessed June 21, 2016. On the relationship of modern literary
portraiture to prosopopeia, see Wallen, “Between Text and Image,” 55; Steiner, Exact
Resemblance, 12.
75. Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-facement,” MLN 94.5 (Dec. 1979): 919–30 (926).
76. Boulez, “Sonate, Que me Veux-tu?,” 44.
77. Erling E. Guldbrandsen, “Pierre Boulez in Interview, 1996 (III) Mallarmé, Musical Form
and Articulation,” Tempo 65.257 ( July 2011): 11.
78. Guldbrandsen, “Pierre Boulez in Interview, 1996 (III),” 11.
79. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image—Music—Text, trans. Stephen Heath
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142. Boulez was acquainted with Barthes; he once
stated, “I met DeLeuze [sic], Foucault, Roland Barthes, Derrida. I met and read all those
people.” Rocco Di Pietro, Dialogues with Boulez (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2001), 56.
80. Barthes, “Death of the Author,” 143.
81. Boulez, Orientations, 174. Originally published in the liner note to the recording Pierre
Boulez, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Boulez Conducts Boulez—Pli Selon Pli, Columbia
Masterworks, CBS 75.770, 1970.
82. Matheson, “Fold Upon Fold,” 77.
84. See William Matheson, “Pli selon pli: Mallarmé (and Boulez),” Yearbook of Comparative
and General Literature, 36 (1987): 84–7 (85).
86. Mary Breatnach shows that in Mallarmé’s reference to death in this final poem of the set,
there lies the implication of a kind of permanence to life as well. Mary Breatnach, Boulez
and Mallarmé: A Study in Poetic Influence (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 1996), 108–9.
87. Célestin Deliège, Pierre Boulez: Conversations with Célestin Deliège (London: Eulenberg,
1976), 94.
89. Deliège, Pierre Boulez, 93.
90. Guldbrandsen, “Pierre Boulez in Interview, 1996 (III),” 12. Webern used imitation
in compositions such as the third movement of Five Pieces for String Quartet (1909),
which features imitative gestures between voices in which instruments follow so closely
upon one another that they can be found in an analysis but are essentially inaudible to
the listener. On Boulez’s interest in Webern’s experimentation with canons, see Goldman,
Musical Language of Pierre Boulez, 51–2.
53
91. Breatnach, “Pli selon pli,” 266.

92. Breatnach, “Pli selon pli,” 267. On Mallarmé’s ideas about music, see also Pascal Durand,
“‘Pli selon pli’: Les Modèles musicaux de Mallarmé,” in Philippe Albèra (ed.), Pli selon
pli de Pierre Boulez: Entretiens et études (Geneva: Éditions Contrechamps, 2003),
83–100.
93. Breatnach, “Pli selon pli,” 266. On Mallarmé’s ideas about music, and how his poetry
evokes and inspires musical interpretation, see Michel Butor, “Mallarmé selon Boulez,” in
Michel Butor, Répertoire, 5 vols. (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1964), ii: 243–51.
94. Breatnach, “Pli selon pli,” 266.
95. These words come from Mallarmé’s essay “Crise de vers.” The translation is included in
Breatnach, “Pli selon pli,” 267. See also Breatnach, Boulez and Mallarmé, 29–30.
103. Boulez, Orientations, 175.
105. Breatnach, Boulez and Mallarmé, 70.
106. Boulez, Orientations, 176; see also Breatnach, “Pli selon pli,” 269.
107. Breatnach, “Pli selon pli,” 270–2.
108. Guldbrandsen, “Pierre Boulez in Interview, 1996 (III),” 14. Eric Wayne argues that
Boulez uses the phrase “pli selon pli” as a metaphor for his musical experiments with
time. According to this interpretation, the layers implied by the French expression are
units of time that rest upon one another in an evocation of temporal depth, and the folds
are the junctures at which they meet. Eric Wayne, “Mallarmé’s Folds: Mallarmé, Boulez,
Pli selon pli,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 9.3/4 (Spring–Summer 1981): 220–32
(223–4).
110. Detailed analyses of the movements in Pli selon pli can be found in Bradshaw, “Instrumental
and Vocal Music,” 180–98; Breatnach, Boulez and Mallarmé, 103–37; Iwanka Stoïanowa,
“Pli selon Pli. Portrait de Mallarmé,” Musique en jeu 11 ( June 1973): 75–98.
111. Deliège, Pierre Boulez, 94–5. “Don” also appears to suggest a detailed analysis of the
poetic form: Roland Jordan views the movement as divided into fourteen sectional
units, matching the number of lines in the original poem, and each featuring musical
gestures that evoke the linguistic content of its corresponding line. Roland Jordan, “Fold
Upon Fold: Boulez (and Mallarmé),” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 36
(1987): 88–97.
112. Albèra, “Entretiens avec Pierre Boulez,” 8.
113. McCalla, “Sea-Changes,” 93–106.
115. McCalla, “Sea-Changes,” 95.
117. McCalla, “Sea-Changes,” 104.
118. Breatnach, Boulez and Mallarmé, 136–7.
119. Erling E. Guldbrandsen, “Pierre Boulez in Interview, 1996 (II) Serialism Revisited,”
Tempo 65.256 (2011): 18–24 (18–19).
120. Goldman, Musical Language of Pierre Boulez, 33.
121. Guldbrandsen, “Pierre Boulez in Interview, 1996 (IV),” 37. It is also a common trope in
literature for characters to contemplate painted portraits, in Byatt’s words, “as temporary
mirrors to see themselves with a difference.” Byatt, Portraits in Fiction, 5. The notion of
portraiture as a medium of self-reflection is brought to its extreme in the artist Gavin
Turk’s Your Authorised Reflection (2009), in which a framed wall-mounted mirror, signed
by Turk in the lower right-hand corner, transforms the image of one’s reflection into the
54
artist’s creation; the artwork becomes both portrait and self-portrait of each individual
spectator. Andrew Graham-Dixon, Sandy Nairne, Sarah Howgate, and Jo Higgins, 21st-
Century Portraits (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2013), 52.
122. Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Look of the Portrait,” in Simon Sparks (ed.), Multiple Arts: The
Muses II (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 225.
123. Nancy, “Look of the Portrait,” 226.
124. Nancy, “Look of the Portrait,” 239.
5
CH A P T E R 2
Musical Portraits of Visual Artists

The soul is like music playing behind the veil of flesh; one cannot paint it, but one can make it
heard or at least try to show what you have thought of it.
—Henri Fantin-Latour1
O ne goal of visual portraiture throughout the history of the genre

has been the depiction of the interior aspects of a person’s identity,
something that until recently has typically been accomplished through the
depiction of traces of personality that can be read from outward appear-
ance. Music has long been understood to be the art form with the most
direct access to subjectivity, the one most able to invoke affects, emotions,
and the ineffable and intangible aspects of personality. Although music is
often assumed to have a more immediate access to interiority, however,
musical evocations of character are still described using metaphors that
refer to the creation of visual arts and architecture. In the early days of the
genre of musical portraiture, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s works were char-
acterized by analogy to painting: in the 1770s, Johann Georg Sulzer wrote
in an article titled “Mahlerey” (Painting) that Bach’s portraiture “entails
more than painting inanimate elements of nature in music—impressing
the ear with the sounds found in nature itself. . . . It entails painting those
emotions that stir our soul through specific sentiments.”2 Bach conveys
character, according to Sulzer, by painting human feelings with musical
brushstrokes.
The notion that sound provides direct access to that which is beyond
vision, that it can represent a human depth that is unavailable to the eye and
can only be inferred from visual portraiture rather than depicted directly
in it, has remained a trope in many theorists’ and artists’ approaches, up
through the present day. For example, a related idea appears in the theo-
ries of the film artist Oskar Fischinger, who used film to create avant-garde
56
pairings of sonic and visual effects: “Eye and ear supplement each other in
orthogonal function. The eye seizes the exterior, surface, form, and color.
The ear seizes through sound, which is particular to each body, the internal
structure which the eye spies outwardly.”3 As identity is believed to reside
beyond physical likeness, music adopts an important role in creating an
impression of the hidden reaches of the self.
In further exploring the relationship between music and the visual in
the realm of portraiture, this chapter considers musical portraits whose
composers, in seeking new ways to depict the personal identities of their
acquaintances, reflect the influence of contemporary trends in the graphic
arts. The chapter focuses in particular on twentieth-and twenty-first-cen-
tury musical portraits of contemporary artists, Morton Feldman’s “de
Kooning” (1963) and Philip Glass’s “A Musical Portrait of Chuck Close”
(2005). By considering these musical portraits in relation to works by the
artists they represent, the chapter reveals how Feldman and Glass develop
musical structures that operate as metaphors for visual strategies of repre-
sentation. Through novel experiments with the device of musical ekphrasis,
involving the use of music to depict a visual representation, or in these cases
to describe styles of painting, these composers aim to portray not only the
personalities of their subjects, but also their distinctive artistic techniques.4
For example, in Feldman’s portrait of Willem de Kooning and Glass’s por-
trait of Chuck Close, the metaphorically “colorful” use of legato lines and
vivid timbral effects or the “angular” qualities of sudden juxtapositions
between notes of different durations, pitch range, and volume operate as
sonic analogues to the varied colors or sharply intersecting lines on these
painters’ canvases. In such instances, the aesthetic character of the artist’s
works is understood to be an important aspect of his identity. Although
ekphrasis often involves the musical portrayal of an existing work of art, in
the case of these compositions the subject of the ekphrasis is not any partic-
ular paintings by de Kooning or Close; rather, the musical portraits conjure
for the imagination, more generally, the technical and stylistic attributes
associated with these artists’ oeuvres.
As the subject of each of these musical portraits is the identity of the art-
ist named in the title, the paintings they evoke for the mind’s eye may be
imaginary self-portraits by these artists. Importantly, Feldman and Glass
have chosen to depict artists whose characteristic styles seem especially well
suited to their own musical techniques. Feldman’s works generally explore
aspects of musical movement and stasis and expansion of the sense of time,
in ways that overlap with de Kooning’s intricately planned but apparently
violent and impromptu canvases. Similarly, Glass’s distinctive use of musi-
cal patterns that slowly transform through incremental variation resembles
the repeated lozenges of layered colors that appear from a distance to merge
57
M u s i c a l P o rt r a i t s o f V i s ua l A rt i s t s ( 57 )
together to make up the images in Close’s paintings. By exploring analogies

between their techniques, and, more fundamentally, between hearing and
vision, these composers ultimately turn the focus of their portraits back onto
the nature of music itself. The subject of their works becomes not only the
artists named in the titles, but also the ways their own compositional tech-
niques correspond with the visual styles developed by their subjects, and,
more generally, the ways music can operate as a medium of representation.
MORTON FELDMAN’S MUSICAL PORTRAIT

“DE KOONING”
Feldman wrote and spoke extensively about the connections between

music and the visual, and what he perceived as the spatial aspects of sound
and listening. In 1963, the same year he completed his one-movement por-
trait “de Kooning,” for chamber ensemble, Feldman proposed a “vertical”
mode of contemplating music, according to which time could be experi-
enced as static while music could be understood to operate in the man-
ner of a painting that conveys its entire “message” at once, in a single given
moment. Instead of organizing a piece as “a horizontal series of events”
differentiated by the forward progress of time, he wished for each element
to be understood as “suggesting its own proportions,” in a manner analo-
gous to the way a painter might find “that a colour insists on being a certain
size, regardless of his wishes.”5 The composer should not attempt to con-
trol sound, he argued; thinking “vertically” rather than “horizontally,” one
should “simply allow it to ‘be.’ ”6
Furthermore, Feldman believed that “horizontal thought” about com-
position prevented music from possessing a sound of its own that could be
accessed directly. Instead, “What we hear is rather a replica of sound, and
when successfully done, startling as any of the figures in Mme. Tussaud’s
celebrated museum.”7 For Feldman, the horizontal approach to music that
unfurls over time thus ends in a form of representation resembling the hyper-
realist wax sculpture portraits of celebrated figures that trick the eyes with
their detailed imitations of external appearance, but remain inert. By contrast,
a piece conceived through vertical thought, in which the music is heard, met-
aphorically speaking, as a system of sounds distributed across a “surface aural
plane,”8 contributes more than a mere lifeless representation. Rather, it allows
direct access to the ideal sound in itself, which Feldman imbues with an inter-
nal subjectivity, by permitting it to “be” and submitting to its “wishes.” To
approach his goal of creating “vertical” music, Feldman sought a methodol-
ogy that would eliminate, to the degree that this was possible, the “horizon-
tal” dimension, time, from the experience of the composition.
58
In their increasing abstraction, Feldman’s ideas about musical horizon-

tality and verticality at times strain the bounds of describing the actual
experience of musical perception for most listeners. Feldman takes these
spatial metaphors far from their typical metaphorical meanings in relation
to music, creating out of them something idiosyncratic and sometimes con-
founding. It is useful in the context of the discussion of Feldman’s musical
portraiture, nevertheless, to extend Feldman’s analogy between wax sculp-
ture portraits and musical subjectivity slightly further. If horizontal thought
offers a detailed but lifeless representation of external appearance, vertical
thought bypasses the trivial aspect of mimetic likeness to portray instead
the invisible qualities of inner life and identity.
Feldman composed the portrait “de Kooning,” his first experiment in
“vertical thought,” for a short documentary film by Hans Namuth and
Paul Falkenberg about the painter, and the score was premiered as a con-
cert work independent of the film in September of the same year. Feldman’s
emphasis on the “vertical” or “static” in music must be seen in the context
of his long engagement with a group of New York artists that included de
Kooning. Feldman and de Kooning had been acquaintances since 1951,
and met regularly with other members of the art world at the Artists’ Club
on Eighth Street in Manhattan. The two were supportive of each other’s
work: de Kooning at one time reported having attended performances of
Feldman’s music with some regularity over the period of a decade,9 and
Feldman would later recall, “De Kooning was nuts about us. He gave us the
green light.”10 Feldman also attributed “the beginning of my life”—that is,
the start of his career as a composer—to de Kooning’s inspirational words,
“I work—other people call it art.”11 For Feldman, de Kooning’s “vulnerabil-
ity . . . took me out of my romantic dream of what it was to be an artist, into
the reality of it.”12 De Kooning was perhaps a natural choice of subject for a
musical portrait, as he was known for his abstract portraits of archetypal fig-
ures, as in his Woman series, which he also associated with self-portraiture,
stating, “Those women are perhaps the feminine side of me,” and “Many of
my paintings of women have been self-portraits.”13
Throughout his career Feldman composed multiple works whose titles
referred to living artists, poets, and composers, including “For Franz Kline”
(1962), “Christian Wolff in Cambridge” (1963), “Rothko Chapel” (1971),
“For Frank O’Hara” (1973), “For John Cage” (1982), “For Philip Guston”
(1984), “For Stefan Wolpe” (1986), and “For Samuel Beckett” (1987). The
preposition “for” in most of these titles indicates that they are dedications,
as Feldman confirmed in an interview in 1976.14 He also distinguished “de
Kooning” as more abstract in its relationship to its subject than “Rothko
Chapel,” which he viewed as unusually referential among his works, with
its allusions to Rothko’s biography and his art, as well as to the Houston
59
chapel where it was to be premiered. The absence of the preposition in

the title of “de Kooning,” however, implies a more direct correspondence
between the music and the painter that it names than does a standard ded-
ication, and in this way the title invites the listener to interpret the music
as a portrait.15 Feldman acknowledged this representational aspect, stating
that in “De Kooning there is a little bit of a tragic flavour which Bill still has.
Remember, he is the most European.”16 Indeed Feldman appears to have
been experimenting with ideas associated with musical portraiture during
this period of his stylistic development, as two additional works from the
time are named for historical figures, “Rabbi Akiba” (1963) and “The King
of Denmark” (1964).17
Most of the artists named in Feldman’s dedicatory titles—including
Kline, Rothko, Guston, and de Kooning—were among the friends and col-
laborators Feldman met in New York in 1951, the year after his inspirational
first encounter with John Cage. They were members of the loosely associ-
ated group of artists that was known since 1946, to their general reluctance,
as the “abstract expressionists,” and that was later dubbed the “New York
School” by participant Robert Motherwell.18 Feldman forged strong bonds
with these artists, whom he frequently credited as considerable influences
on his career, and many of whose works he discussed in essays and lectures,
and curated in the 1967 exhibition Six Painters at St. Thomas University.19
Though at times he downplayed the influence of contemporary composers
on his music, including his teacher Stefan Wolpe and even his supportive
and galvanizing older colleague Cage, Feldman never hesitated to credit the
artists in his circle; in a 1985 lecture he stated, “I learned more from paint-
ers than I learned from composers.”20 The degree to which painting inspired
Feldman’s work is also evident in the titles he gave his compositions and the
terminology he employed in writing and speaking about music. He uses
visual and spatial metaphors in some of his titles that indicate an ekphras-
tic representational quality, accomplishing a form of visual representation
through musical sound, in works including “Illusions” (1950), his series
Projections (1950–1951) and Vertical Thoughts (1963–1964), “Patterns in
a Chromatic Field” (1981), “Crippled Symmetry” (1983), and “Coptic
Light” (1986). In essays, interviews, and lectures, he discusses artists from
Piero della Francesca to Cézanne and Picasso, in addition to his contem-
poraries in the abstract expressionist movement.21 He attributes his notion
of temporal stasis in music to the influence of the abstract canvases of
Rothko and Guston.22 His essays also frequently employ spatial and visual
metaphors, such as in his 1962 characterization of Durations I, in which he
describes musical notes as located “behind” and “ahead” of one another and
addresses the process of “thinning and thickening my sounds [to keep] the
image intact.”23 He even uses a visual metaphor in his homage to Wolpe,
60
thanking him late in life “for teaching me the plastic possibilities of musical
shape.”24
For Feldman, notation was a crucial aspect of the composer’s art, and
he developed novel notational practices multiple times during his career.
These included his grid-like graphic scores for Projections, constructed
of squares and rectangles indicating tessitura and duration and contain-
ing numbers designating the quantity of pitches to be played; his free-
duration scores, in works such as “Two Pianos” (1957), featuring staves
without bar lines and note heads without stems; and the solid and dotted
lines linking stemless note heads in different staves to signify simulta-
neity and sequence in “de Kooning” and other compositions from the
early 1960s.25 Feldman approached the creation of the score as though
he were painting. He frequently invoked metaphors that likened notat-
ing the score to daubing colors or hues (sounds) on a surface (time, con-
ceived of as a static “aural plane”). He elaborated, “My obsession with
surface is the subject of my music. In that sense, my compositions are
really not ‘compositions’ at all. One might call them time canvases in
which I more or less prime the canvas with an overall hue of the music.”26
This rather obscure description of his method appears to indicate a dis-
tinction between foreground and background in his music, the notion
that principal musical figures are heard before a background “colored”
by musical atmosphere, like the backdrop a portraitist chooses to depict
behind his subject.
Feldman’s music was thus caught, in his view, “Between Time and Space.
Between painting and music. Between the music’s construction, and its sur-
face,” a liminal position described by the title of the 1969 essay in which he
wrote these words, and of a corresponding composition from the same year,
“Between Categories.”27 This phrase can best be understood as reflecting
Feldman’s desire for a vertical music from which time would be eliminated
as a dimension of experience, but also as recognizing that pure “verticality”
could not be achieved: music, which cannot be completely static, can nev-
ertheless represent, through its notation, a desire to be static like painting.
Of course painting does not permit complete stasis either: there is an ines-
capable temporal dimension to the contemplation of a painting as well as to
its creation. Indeed, the time involved in making a painting was frequently
acknowledged and celebrated among the abstract expressionists, particu-
larly in the case of Jackson Pollock, whose unique process became the sub-
ject of an important part of the discourse around his works. De Kooning’s
paintings, too, in their seemingly energetic and spontaneous brushstrokes,
drew attention to the temporal dimension of their creation.
In developing his ideas of notation for compositions that would occupy a
space between painting and music, Feldman was inspired by the techniques
61
of contemporary painters. According to his acquaintance Brian O’Doherty,

“Phillip Guston, his closest friend, helped him to the idea of sound as a
medium to use and abuse like paint.”28 Feldman devised his grid notation,
found in the Projections series, under the influence of watching Pollock’s
method of splattering paint in the early 1950s: “I put sheets of graph paper
on the wall. . . . What resembled Pollock was my ‘allover’ approach to the
time-canvas.”29 In Feldman’s view, notation was far from a transparent set
of instructions for the performer: as he explained, “The degree to which a
music’s notation is responsible for much of the composition itself, is one of
history’s best kept secrets.”30 Notation possessed “an aspect of ‘role playing,’ . . .
a very strong voice, if not onstage, then off.”31 It was also performative in
that it played an important part in the creation of musical style: “I find that
if you use a certain type of notation, it cannot help but develop into a cer-
tain style. . . . All I’m really saying . . . is that notation, at least for me, deter-
mines the style of the piece.”32
As uncommon as Feldman’s preoccupation with the appearance of nota-
tion may appear, the analogy he frequently proposed between the com-
poser’s work on the score and the artist’s process of applying paint to a
canvas was not entirely novel; indeed it is implied in the centuries-old met-
aphorical concepts that guide the perception of the horizontal relationships
between notes printed on the staff as indicative of rhythmic relationships,
and of the vertical positions of notes as equivalent to differences in musical
pitch. But Feldman was interested not only in what the standard visual met-
aphors of musical notation can reveal about the relationships between dis-
tinct sounds, but also in what they fail to reflect. His notational innovations
played with both the precision and the pitfalls inherent in the translation
of visual-aural metaphors. For example, his graph notation indicated pre-
cise durations but not pitch, while his “free duration” notation instructed
musicians which pitches to play, but not how long to hold them. Patterns
in the musical score, for Feldman, translated into “rhythmic shapes” in
performance, but they were also, he writes, “in part notational images that
do not make a direct impact on the ear as we listen. A tumbling of sorts
happens in midair between their translation from the page and their execu-
tion.”33 In works such as “de Kooning,” the ways visual metaphors fall short
in describing precise musical sounds can be as important as the ways they
succeed. It is in this ambivalent space “between categories” that Feldman
felt he could allow his music to “be,” to evoke a subjectivity and identity of
its own, something that becomes especially important in his musical por-
traits of the early 1960s.
The notion of a space between the artwork and the self, whose breadth is
determined in part by the distinction between what the painted or notated
surface can communicate directly to the spectator and what it cannot, was
62
instrumental to the stylistic development of the abstract expressionist

painters, as it was to Feldman. For the composer, it was in this liminal space
that the music contained a sense of identity and selfhood, an “omnipotent
‘I.’ ”34 Attempting to elaborate on Feldman’s intention in using this phrase,
O’Doherty writes:
He means an identity that is a sort of grown-up surrealist “I”—one that extends experi-
ence, balancing inside and outside, subject and object, discipline and freedom in a way
that makes his music a sort of living sound object, a motif in time, the silence of the
white canvas painted with sound. Like the action painters, he makes one aware of his
medium as if it were a substance. . . . Attention switches from silence to sound and back
again in a way reminiscent of figure-ground relationships in the painting he admires.35
O’Doherty’s reference to “figure-ground” relationships recalls Feldman’s

metaphor of “priming” a musical “canvas.” In Feldman’s musical portraits, it
is the figure of the subject named in the title that emerges before the musical
background he supplies. As this passage implies, the abstract expressionists
likewise focused their attention on the representation of the self, experi-
menting with visual means to depict individual subjectivities in painted
abstractions, as indicated in the title of a 1949 exhibition featuring works
by members of the group including de Kooning, “The Intrasubjectives.”36
In describing the New York School, Motherwell stated, “the idea of the
‘self ’ now became foregrounded as the cornerstone and mainstay of artistic
expression.”37
In a process that recalls musical portraiture as well as traditional painted
portraits, the notion of abstract painting’s capacity to depict the self—
either the artist’s own subjectivity or that of another individual—depended
on the interpretation of colors, shapes, the application of paint, and other
attributes of the canvas visible to the eye as signifying aspects of identity.38
Through these metaphoric associations, the abstract painting represents, in
the words of Meyer Schapiro, who sees an aspect of self-representation in
abstraction, “an individual who realizes freedom and deep engagement of
the self within his work. . . . The art is deeply rooted, I believe, in the self and
its relation to the surrounding world.”39 In seeking a musical language to
depict the “omnipotent ‘I,’ ” Feldman similarly aimed to develop techniques
for manipulating musical “materials” to relate through metaphor to aspects
of the artist’s self. In his liner notes to a 1959 album of Feldman’s music, the
poet Frank O’Hara describes the composer’s ability to conjure subjectivity
in music as dependent on the visual aspect of his scores: “Whether notated
or graphic, his music sets in motion a spiritual life.”40 In a portrait such as
“de Kooning,” the subjectivity depicted is identified as belonging not to the
composer himself but to the individual named in the title.
63
“De Kooning” is thus a musical portrait that continues this abstract

artistic engagement with selfhood, in the representation of the identity of
the artist named in the title. As is typical in musical portraits of artists, the
work depicts aspects of both its subject’s character and his artistic style.
In this case, in addition to conveying de Kooning’s general affect, which
Feldman understood as defined by a European “tragic flavor,” it evokes the
artist’s method of painting and the appearance of his artworks, through
not only the sound of the music but the visual aspect of the notated score
as well.
Although many listeners are unlikely to have access to the score,
for those with the opportunity to view it, the notation of this work,
in keeping with Feldman’s emphasis on the appearance of his scores
as works of art in their own right, has an important representa-
tional function, apart from its role as a set of performance instruc-
tions. Considered separately from the musical sound, the score is
ekphrastic in that given the title “de Kooning,” it has the potential
on its own to conjure, in the viewer’s interpretation, an imagined art-
work by de Kooning—perhaps, given the genre of the composition,
a self-portrait.41 For those contemplating the score while listening to
the music, this portrait is enriched by the way Feldman challenges
established visual signifiers of musical sound in his notation, focus-
ing attention on perceptual incongruities between the senses. By
highlighting both the intricately close relationship and the inevitable
gap between sight and sound in music, Feldman creates a work that
emphasizes the space in art that lies between viewing—o r listening—
and understanding. This is the metaphoric space in which, according
to the composer, he could allow the music to “be,” to take on aspects
of a living subject, rather than signifying reality through a more imita-
tive but lifeless form of representation like a wax sculpture at Madame
Tussaud’s. In this manner, the portrait of de Kooning represents its
subject by keeping him inaccessible rather than conjuring him clearly
to the eye or ear: the painter’s identity is obscured in the enigmatic,
slow musical phrases, and in the space “between” the sound and the
score that prescribes its performance.
Feldman composed “de Kooning” for a quintet featuring French horn;
violin and cello playing arco, pizzicato, and artificial harmonics; a keyboard-
ist alternating between piano and celeste; and a percussionist playing a
range of instruments of contrasting timbres, the vibraphone, tenor and bass
drums (usually rolled but occasionally struck), chimes, and antique cym-
bals (Example 2.1). The piece makes broad use of timbral effects through
the juxtaposition of these different instruments and by calling for multi-
ple ways of approaching their performance. This mix of tone qualities plays
64
Example 2.1: Morton Feldman, “de Kooning,” first page. Copyright © 1963 by C. F. Peters
Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.
upon the metaphor of timbre as musical color, an association between sight

and sound that was an important feature in much music of the first half
of the twentieth century, particularly in works by Anton Webern, whose
development of Klangfarbenmelodie (the notion that something akin to
melody could be constructed of a string of contrasting timbres rather than
pitches) inspired Feldman’s assessment that “In Webern, one also hears the
65
beauty of simultaneity of movement and color.”42 The instruments in “de

Kooning” sometimes play simultaneously, indicated by solid vertical lines
between their staves, with an arrowhead to designate which performer is to
cue the others. But for the most part the work is constructed of a series of
solo attacks, with straight dashed lines marking the sequence in which the
musicians enter one by one. Perhaps in the association with figure-ground
painting mentioned by O’Doherty, these unevenly distributed attacks rep-
resent the primary structural figures that emerge in focus before the back-
ground of the continuation and decay of each note. The piece’s musical
phrases are marked numerically—following an unnumbered introduction
there are thirty-two phrases—and are separated by the absence of dashed
lines between the concluding pitch of one phrase and the first pitch of
the next.
As in Feldman’s other free-duration compositions, the note heads are
not given stems, other than the occasional grace-note stem to indicate
that a pitch is to be cut off or to enter earlier than usual (though Feldman
indicates such notes are also “to be played slowly”). The musicians have
unusual freedom of interpretation and must respond in an improvisatory
manner to their collaborators and surroundings in performing this work.
They are supposed to begin any note as the previous one decays—that is,
as the sounds of the keyboard, percussion, and plucked strings fade out, or
as the string players reach the end of a bow or the horn player comes to the
end of a breath. This makes for an indeterminate tempo and pitches whose
durations will depend on the acoustics of the performance space, the size of
the audience, and technical aspects of the musicians’ rendition of the piece.
The work also lacks meter and bar lines, except for a few interruptions of
metered measures of rest with tempo indications, as well as the chord that
concludes the piece, marked as a single measure containing a whole note
played by strings, horn, and chimes. The music’s durational variability and
the uneven length of individual phrases (which range from one attack to
sixteen) interfere with the listener’s ability to anticipate the exact placement
of each note. Compounding the effect of atmospheric mystery produced
by the absence of meter and of rhythmic patterns, the score dictates, “Each
sound with a minimum of attack,” and “Dynamics very low throughout.”
Feldman’s novel musical notation in this work, joining elements of
standard practice with the innovative graphic component of the solid and
dotted lines, provides clear instructions for the performing ensemble. At
the same time, however, its general appearance implies a set of musical
“shapes” and sonic relationships that contrast markedly with what the lis-
tener hears in the performance of the portrait. If viewed as a work of art in
its own right in the tradition of Augenmusik (“eye music,” the Renaissance
and Baroque trend in pictorial music scores) or graphic notation that offers
66
a descriptive visual impression of the musical sound, the score, with its long,
straight lines joining voices between staves and the sharp angles at which
these splayed vertical and diagonal lines meet, implies harsh sound patterns
that diverge in the viewer’s imagination from the atmospheric music the
ensemble produces when reading the score prescriptively as a set of perfor-
mance instructions. This conflict between the visual aspect of the score and
the sound of its performance recalls contrasts and surprises inherent in de
Kooning’s artworks. For Feldman, as for de Kooning, these conflicts arise
from the disruption of the audience’s expectations regarding the connec-
tion between artworks and the objects they represent. The irresolvable chal-
lenges Feldman poses to the standard metaphoric links between the senses
of sight and hearing serve in the depiction of what he understood to be the
essentially tragic quality of de Kooning’s art, especially in conjunction with
the more traditional association of the music’s ponderously slow tempo and
desultory indeterminacy with the sense of a melancholy sensibility.
The principal perceptual conflict between corresponding visual and aural
components of the work’s notation and performance arises in listening to
the piece while viewing the contours created by the lines joining simultane-
ous and sequential pitches, which, if the score is considered as a descriptive
representation of the sound, appears to indicate that the music could be
characterized as dynamic, energetic, angular, sharp, and fragmented. In fact
these markings in the score instruct the musicians in the performance of a
work that is leisurely and hushed, more rounded than pointed, and smooth
rather than jagged, focusing not on articulation and sustained sounds but
on decay and silence.
This contrast between the appearance of speed and harshness in the
notation and the almost static slowness and muffled timbres of the perfor-
mance in Feldman’s work resembles the gap between the appearance of de
Kooning’s canvases and the method by which he created them. Watching
de Kooning paint, Feldman was surprised to find that the artist produced
his seemingly spontaneous and hastily applied strokes of paint, for exam-
ple in his “Woman, I” (1950–1952, Figure 2.1), in an unexpectedly slow,
methodical, and extended process. Feldman recounted:
What was fascinating about watching de Kooning paint was that when you look at his
pictures they look very, very fast but if you see him paint, he paints very slowly. Because
of the way he would use a big brush, he would go like this and you would see that some-
thing is thinning out here, it seems gestural—but it’s not. It’s in slow motion. It’s fascinat-
ing. . . . I just didn’t believe it. Very slow and everything looked like speed.43
Furthermore, as Jonathan W. Bernard has noted, by the time of Feldman’s

composition of “de Kooning,” the painter was six years into a new phase
67
Figure 2.1: Willem de Kooning, “Woman, I,” 1950–1952, oil on canvas, 6 feet 3-7/8 x 58 inches.
© 2016 The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital Image
© The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.
of his stylistic development in which he was creating relatively sparse

constructions, whose brush strokes, still seemingly rough and energetic,
formed broader shapes and fewer gradations of color than are found in his
earlier, more chaotic canvases.44 This is a body of works that appears to con-
form to Feldman’s notion of allowing each color to “suggest its own propor-
tions,” as he aimed to do with sound.45 In this way Feldman draws a further
connection between his own art and that of de Kooning, as he develops his
compositional technique of allowing his artistic materials “to be,” imbuing
them with subjectivity and submitting to their “will.”
The listener who attends to Feldman’s portrait while reading along with
the score must learn not to associate the shapes produced by the lines
68
with the sounds they indicate, as the viewer contemplating de Kooning’s

portraits must mentally reassemble the fragmented elements to perceive
an intact human body. As O’Doherty puts it, de Kooning’s subjects’
limbs “look as if they want to be elsewhere. An elbow wants to be a foot,
an eye wants to be a breast, a flank wants to be a thigh.”46 Techniques of
representation are thus reoriented in de Kooning’s paintings of women,
which exhibit the sorts of distortion and fragmentation of gesture that
characterized much of the output of the abstract expressionists whose
canvases explore matters of subjectivity and the self. De Kooning experi-
ments with difference, rather than likeness, in his depictions of the
human body, challenging deeply ingrained metaphors about people’s
“interior” and “exterior,” and demanding that spectators derive their own
impressions of the sitter’s inner subjectivity through a more dynamic act
of interpretation. In “de Kooning,” Feldman similarly points to difference
and to what the senses do not reveal about the world, in his case by chal-
lenging standard ways of reading visual signifiers of sonic effects, creat-
ing a score for his musical portrait that fails to map predictably onto the
sounds produced in the work’s performance. In de Kooning’s “Woman,
I” and Feldman’s “de Kooning,” the parts of the whole are all present and
accounted for, but the representations in these artworks distort the real-
ity they depict, and require us to relearn and reinterpret standard visual
modes of signification.
In fragmenting the viewer’s notion of space and form in his artworks,
de Kooning aimed to replace the locus of meaning from the canvas to the
painter, to transform the artist, in his words, into “the idea, the center,
and the vanishing point himself—and all at the same time.”47 The use of
a vanishing point is a central technique in the representation of perspec-
tive in painting, and Feldman too invoked concepts relating to Renaissance
theories of perspective when he described his changing views of nota-
tion during the year he composed “de Kooning,” in the essay “Vertical
Thoughts”: “Precision did not work for me either. . . . It was like painting
a picture where at some place there is always a horizon.”48 He sought, in
his new works, to distort the “aural surface,” metaphorically shifting the
horizon and vanishing point as de Kooning described. With this in mind,
one might be struck by the resemblance between the lines and angles of
Feldman’s score and the converging solid and dotted lines that adorn stand-
ard textbook analyses of perspective in works of Renaissance painting.49 In
the case of “de Kooning,” however, rather than meeting at a single vanishing
point, the lines lead, phrase by phrase, in multiple directions, leaving it up
to the music’s performers and listeners to give them a focus, as they actively
interpret the work in a process analogous to the experience of contemplat-
ing a painting by de Kooning.
69
PHILIP GLASS’S “A MUSICAL PORTRAIT

OF CHUCK CLOSE”
Philip Glass’s 2005 musical portrait of Chuck Close, for solo piano, is
another work that, like Feldman’s “de Kooning,” was created as a represen-
tation of an artist who was a close friend of the composer and who influ-
enced his stylistic development. The portrait was commissioned by pianist
Bruce Levingston, who was inspired to suggest the idea for the piece when
he viewed Close’s large-scale portrait of Glass hanging outside Caspary
Hall at Rockefeller University. Glass’s work is constructed of two move-
ments, though Glass originally conceived of it in another form, and its gen-
esis is the result of serendipity.50 Glass had prepared two alternate works
before choosing one that he favored as the final portrait, but his assistant
mistakenly delivered Levingston the abandoned version. Later, when the
error was discovered and Levingston received the composition Glass had
intended to fulfill the commission, the pianist was enamored of both, and
convinced Glass to combine them into a two-movement work, also per-
suading him of the order in which they should be played.
After hearing Levingston’s performance, Glass approved of the final
two-movement form of the musical portrait, stating, “I now think the cur-
rent order is the right order. This is the fortunes of happenstance and syn-
ergy.”51 The formal and harmonic attributes of Glass’s composition in its
final form allude to a narrative that depicts the trajectory of Close’s artistic
career from his days as a young artist to the present as well as the chronol-
ogy of major periods of emotional change during his life associated with
periods of fluctuating health. At the same time, the short modular rhyth-
mic and melodic gestures in “A Musical Portrait of Chuck Close” operate
through ekphrasis to evoke the small repeating and gradually changing
cells of overlapping colors typical of the technical construction of Close’s
works of portraiture. In this way the work’s title provokes the listener to
apprehend correspondences between Glass’s and Close’s signature artistic
techniques.52
Glass and Close met in Paris in 1964 through mutual friends, the art-
ists Richard Serra and Nancy Graves. They soon reunited in Manhattan,
where they became integrated into the art world, forming relationships
with prominent painters and sculptors, and occasionally collaborating;
for example, Graves and Sol LeWitt both created posters to advertise
Glass’s concerts.53 For a time Glass and Close worked as assistants in
Serra’s studio, and Glass, who raised money during periods of his early
career working as a plumber, laid the pipes in Close’s loft.54 Glass was
the subject of the 1969 painting “Phil,” one of Close’s first series of por-
traits, his oversized, highly realistic black-and-white Big Heads begun that
70
year on the basis of photographs he had taken of the faces of a number of

friends (Figure 2.2). Close has returned to many of these photographs
throughout his career to paint them again, reusing none more frequently
than the image of Glass, who has joked that he is the artist’s haystack,
in reference to the recurring subject in the paintings of Claude Monet.55
Close has stated that his fascination with this photograph derived from
the opportunities it offered him to experiment with modes of represen-
tation, taking inspiration from Glass’s “Medusa-like hair” and his “heavy,
hooded, druggy eyes and . . . sensuous mouth.”56 The portraits of Glass,
numbering over a hundred, appear in a variety of media including paint-
ing, spit-bite aquatint, dot drawing, finger painting, silk tapestry, water-
color, inkpad print, and paper pulp.57 In 2001 Glass sat for Close again,
to be the subject of a daguerreotype, made using the nineteenth-century
photographic technique in which Close has produced a series of portraits;
and in 2005, the year of Glass’s composition, Close created a representa-
tion of Glass in the form of a tapestry, “Phil, State I.”
The friendship between Glass and Close was cemented early on by their
shared interest in process as a basis for the creation of new works of music
Figure 2.2: Chuck Close, “Phil,” 1969, acrylic on canvas, 108 x 84 inches. © Chuck Close, courtesy
Pace Gallery.
71
and art.58 Glass relied on process for much of his oeuvre prior to Einstein
on the Beach (1976), allowing formal principles such as additive rhythms
and cyclical structures to govern his work on compositions including “Two
Pages” (1969), “Music in Similar Motion” (1969), and “Music in Twelve
Parts” (1968–1974).59 Like Glass in this process-oriented period, Close has
worked within strict, self-imposed creative limitations to produce the final
image. In an early series of large painted portraits, for example, he created
images in the full spectrum of colors by building layers of diluted primary
colors—magenta, cyan, and yellow—directly on the canvas rather than
mixing colors on a palette.60 Though his paintings rely on representation
and likeness, Close has professed affinity for the creations of minimalist art-
ists including Donald Judd and LeWitt, figures who were also supportive of
and influential to Glass.61
Throughout his career, Close has worked almost exclusively in the genre
of portraiture, but his focus has been primarily on the development of the
complex processes through which he creates his works. He has only rarely
accepted commissions, and has argued that his aim is not to portray the
sitter’s character, but to find new methods of depicting facial structures
in an objective manner. He explains, “I just want to present [faces] very
neutrally and very thoughtfully. I don’t try to orchestrate a particular expe-
rience or crank it up for high-impact emotional effect.”62 His processes typ-
ically involve the division of the artistic surface into a grid that corresponds
to his maquette, an expanded version of the original photograph overlaid
with a grid.63 Though early on the grid was typically a tool to help him cre-
ate oversized photorealist representations of his photographic originals, it
began increasingly to remain visible in his finished artworks, as a repeating
set of borders within which he painted contrasting colors or marked dots or
thumbprints of varying hues.
Because of his goal of depicting a generalized image, an aesthetic charac-
ter at odds with the specificity typical of the genre of portraiture throughout
much of its history, Close tended early in his career to call his works “heads,”
rather than “portraits,” in order to avoid the expectations of the depiction of
identity associated with the genre. In a 1970 interview, he explained, “I tried
to purge my work of as much of the baggage of traditional portrait painting
as I could.”64 In spite of his protestations of aesthetic neutrality, however,
Close’s portraits of family and friends lend themselves to interpretations of
his sitters’ characters and emotional states. In this way, they reveal that even
when an artist focuses only on the structures of the face and makes a con-
certed effort to avoid manufacturing affect, viewers will be prone to “read” a
portrait for signs of what a person’s exterior appearance can reveal about his
or her interior self and identity, as they do when regarding portraits from
other periods of the genre’s history as well as when meeting people face
72
to face. Close’s quasi-objective distance forces the viewer to be especially

creative in interpreting his portraits, complicating the task of imagining the
sitter’s character and identity where they are not explicitly signified. The
process of interpreting Close’s works thus resembles the way listeners are
invited to engage with and interpret musical portraiture, in which physical
likeness is excluded and musical elements must be contemplated as signs of
character and allusions to biography.
In 1988 Close suddenly experienced a devastating health trauma that
made it impossible to continue painting: he suffered a collapsed spinal
artery that left him paralyzed from the neck down.65 After a long, frus-
trating period of rehabilitation, Close slowly began to regain some move-
ment in his arms, though he never fully recovered the use of his hands
and remains in a wheelchair. His desire to return to making art inspired a
determination and stamina to recuperate, and through extensive physical
therapy he slowly learned to paint again. Close calls this pivotal experience
“the Event,” saying that art “saved my life.”66 The canvases he has created
since his injury are typically more painterly in texture than his previous
works, though they are still built on his maquette grids, over which he
layers squares, circles, and lozenges in intense colors that contrast strik-
ingly. In such paintings, the face is visible from a distance, but as the viewer
approaches the image, it disintegrates into repetitive patterns of abstract
cells that differ only slightly from those around them. It is these later
works, with their undulating patterns of gradually changing repetition on
the surface that combine to create a full portrait when contemplated from
a greater distance, that Glass appears to evoke most directly in his portrait
of the artist (Figure 2.3).
Because the cells of color appear to cohere only from a distance
into a detailed representation of a face, Close’s portraits seem to involve
a sort of optical illusion, an out-scaled analogue to the way an image is
conjured in the eye out of miniscule pixels of color or particles of light.
In his works the sense of a likeness and an identity seems to reside some-
where between the painted canvas and the perception of the viewer.
As Wil S. Hylton describes this effect, “You are no longer looking
at the actual surface of the painting, but some apparition hovering
above it.” 67 Hylton argues that in relying on the viewer’s ability to per-
ceive something that is not actually there, Close “exploit[s]‌ the way
we process human identity: the gaps of knowledge and the unknown
spaces we fill with our own presumptions, the expectations and delu-
sions we layer upon everyone we meet.”68 Glass’s portrait, in its repeti-
tion of melodic building blocks that coalesce to give the impression of
a gradually developing musical shape, operates in an analogous manner,
highlighting the way listeners form a sense of the larger work through the
73
Figure 2.3: Chuck Close, “Phil,” 2011–2012, oil on canvas, 108-5/8 x 84 inches. © Chuck Close,
courtesy Pace Gallery.
aural experience of its successive parts, linking moments together into

the perception of a broader framework.
In this way both Glass and Close, in their portraits, highlight, in Hylton’s
words, “the fragile boundary between identity and perception.”69 Glass
once described the experience of hearing music as being like looking over
a field enshrouded in mist, and watching as images gradually come into
view as the fog lifts. This simile recalls the impression of the mist lifting
in Bruges from Mallarmé’s poem “Remémoration d’amis belges,” the text
from which Boulez chose the title of his portrait Pli selon pli, and it could
describe the way both Close’s and Glass’s portraits emerge in the percep-
tion of their painted and musical patterns.70 These artists, in their portraits
of one another, provide just enough detail to permit the spectator to form a
unique sense of the identities evoked in music or paint, and in this way the
artists foreground the role of perception in the experience of art and in the
contemplation of the subjectivities of the people we encounter in life and
in aesthetic representation.
Glass’s “A Musical Portrait of Chuck Close” thus evokes Close’s por-
traits in the way it invites the listener to imagine the subject’s character and
74
identity by interpreting works constructed of repetitive patterns, here using

musical rather than visual clues.71 Glass employs formal techniques at both
low and high structural levels to convey in the temporal medium of music
Close’s varying affective states and life experiences over the period of their
acquaintance, referring through the combination of musical elements to
aspects of Close’s character. In particular, common metaphors that char-
acterize major harmonies and faster tempos with happier emotional states
and minor harmonies and slower speeds with sadness are engaged in the
construction of a narrative description of Close’s career. The music appears
to convey his vibrancy during the early period of his life as a painter, the
grief caused by his health trauma, and the increasing sense of invigoration
he felt during his period of gradual recovery.
The shorter first movement of Glass’s musical portrait has an air of
caprice. Glass creates a sense of playful energy out of rhythmic and har-
monic friction, through juxtaposition of duple and triple divisions of the
bar, rapid alternation between major and minor as a result of repeated
raising and lowering of the third scale degree, and brilliant fanfare-like
rhythmic patterns in high tessitura. Glass represents Close’s tendency
toward experimentation and both personal and creative unpredictability
through the incorporation of rising and falling scalar patterns, unprepared
dissonances, and recurring upward-reaching unfinished melodic phrases.
The movement concludes in F major, and is followed by the start of the
second movement in the relative key of D minor, opening with a simple
Alberti-like bass pattern played at a significantly slower tempo. Above this
ostinato, repeated arpeggios enter in groups of three pitches, in a plaintive
gesture reminiscent of the Adagio sostenuto of Beethoven’s “Moonlight”
Sonata in C♯ minor (Op. 27, no. 2). Approximately halfway through the
movement, the right hand stops playing again, and after a louder reestab-
lishment of the Alberti pattern, the treble returns with rapid, undulating
arpeggios in six-note groupings. These slower and faster passages alter-
nate, and elements of both at times combine in a single phrase. The move-
ment finally slows once more, to conclude in an ambivalent mood in the
minor tonic.
The structure of Glass’s work, with its movement from major to minor,
from a fast and playful first movement to a second movement that begins
with a bare texture and mournful, slow tempo before regaining speed and
energy, creates a programmatic arc, a narrative progression that maps the
major periods of his life through the music’s formal and harmonic struc-
tures, representing his creative and innovative work as a young artist, fol-
lowed by the tragic sense of loss that followed his collapse, and the gradual
return to work and the excitement of finding new ways to create his por-
traits. Interpreting the portrait’s structure to represent Close in this way,
75
Levingston has said, “Every time I play the piece, I think about that phrase
Chuck used about regaining his ability to paint: ‘loss and celebration.’ ”72
If Glass’s composition constructs a narrative identity for Close in its
overarching harmonic and formal characteristics, it mimics his art in its
structural detail. As a work of ekphrasis, this musical portrait creates a
quasi-visual representation by calling to mind the metaphors that are often
used to describe music by analogy to visual media—metaphors of shape,
color, space, and line—in creating a “surface” texture that evokes Close’s
process-oriented techniques of creating visual portraits. In an analogous
manner to Close’s portraits built of dots, thumbprints, grids, and other
small units that repeat across his gridded maquette, Glass’s musical por-
trait is constructed of brief modular “bricks” including scales, arpeggios,
and rhythmic gestures that recur and gradually change in structure, pitch
content, and other traits. As they appear in the score, these compositional
units reflect the look of Close’s patterns (or the “insistence” of Gertrude
Stein’s reiterated linguistic motifs) in the way they repeat with slight vari-
ation; as they reach the ear in performance, they work as sonic metaphors
of the shapes and colors Close uses as the building blocks for his late grid-
based portraits.73 Perhaps the pianist’s hand, too, as it plays the undulat-
ing recurring patterns in Glass’s work, mimics Close’s hand as he makes
thumbprints across the page or holds the paintbrush against the canvas
and paints circle after circle.
Close has interpreted Glass’s portrait of him as representing the techni-
cal qualities of his works and the ways his artistic methods have developed
across his career: “The first movement is more like my earliest work, much
more minimal and reductive, almost black and white. And the second is the
musical equivalent of a riot of color. It’s celebratory in much the same way
I try to build these big color images out of lots of little pieces.”74 Glass has
indicated that he also views a correlation between the brief gestures out of
which his piece and Close’s portraits are created:
To me the second piece has an expansiveness to it, it just seems to keep going on and on.
And it’s like trying to find the edge of the canvas in one of Chuck’s paintings. There’s an
edge there because there has to be an edge somewhere. But in another way you could say,
well, why doesn’t it keep going forever?75
Glass hints that the double bar at the close of the movement stands as an
arbitrary ending, that the work provides an unfinished, fragmented rep-
resentation of his friend. This resembles, through ekphrasis, the grid-like
patterns in Close’s own works that could continue beyond the edge of the
canvas, and it also indicates that Close’s identity, as well, is not a fixed entity,
but will continue to develop and change beyond the completion of Glass’s
76
portrait. The end of the piece does not represent the end of a life or the
boundary of an identity; the work concludes, rather, simply because it must
stop at some point, but in ending abruptly, it acknowledges that it could
continue indefinitely.
CONCLUSION
In portraying the identities of Willem de Kooning and Chuck Close

through references to their canvases, styles of painting, and processes of
artistic creation, Feldman’s “de Kooning” and Glass’s “A Musical Portrait
of Chuck Close” imply that an artist’s technical innovations open a win-
dow onto his personal identity. These compositions also function as stud-
ies of the elusive but vital relationship between music and the visual arts,
by finding points of overlap between the ways they operate as modes of
representation, and at the same time challenging standard metaphors that
associate them with one another. In a portrait one finds constructions of
the identity not only of its sitter but also of its creator and of the social and
institutional contexts of each.76 In the final scene of Hamlet, Shakespeare’s
Danish prince says of his dueling partner Laertes, “by the image of my
cause I see /The portrait of his.”77 One can almost imagine such a revela-
tion, both figurative and literal, striking Feldman and Glass in the process
of creating their portraits of their artist friends de Kooning and Close. In
constructing these painters’ identities in musical portraits, the composers
reveal significant similarities between their own musical innovations and
styles and those of their subjects. And in this way they produce portraits
that can be heard to merge the likenesses of composer and artist in a sin-
gle work.
Paul Cézanne remarked that the portrait is, in a sense, a form of self-
portraiture: “We are always successful with our portraits, because in them
we are one, you see, with the model.”78 As is evident in the case studies exam-
ined here, the genre of musical portraiture, too, has offered composers an
opportunity to explore ways of representing the identities of their acquain-
tances, but also of examining themselves, their own artistic styles, and the
nature of the relationship between music and painting. In creating musical
frameworks with which to represent artists and considering the ways their
own creative techniques overlap with those of their sitters, Feldman and
Glass construct works whose true subject, in the end, is music’s capacity
for representation. As their portraits demonstrate, this capacity is related
to the kind of representation achieved in visual art, in which elements such
as shapes, colors, and style are interpreted as suggestive of human quali-
ties. But in a modern age marked by aesthetic innovation, abstraction, and
7
the atomization of style, it is also apparent that it is an artistically willful

act that has not only produced the portrait, but also designed the method
by which it depicts its subject. It is ultimately the composer who stands at
the vanishing point of the musical portrait, determining the rules of artistic
representation.
NOTES
1. Henri Fantin-Latour, quoted in Therese Dolan, Manet, Wagner, and the Musical Culture of
Their Time (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013), 161.
2. Johann Georg Sulzer, “General Theory of the Fine Arts,” in Nancy Kovaleff Baker and
Thomas Christensen (eds.), Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition in the German
Enlightenment: Selected Writings of Johann Georg Sulzer and Heinrich Christoph Koch, trans.
Nancy Kovaleff Baker (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 89–90.
3. Oskar Fischinger, “‘Der absolut Tonfilm’ von Ingenieur Oskar Fischinger,” Dortmunder
Zeitung, January 1, 1933, reprinted in translation as “The Composer of the Future and the
Absolute Sound Film,” trans. James Tobias, in Cindy Keefer and Jaap Guldemond (eds.),
Oskar Fischinger 1900–1967: Experiments in Cinematic Abstraction (Amsterdam: EYE
Filmmuseum; Los Angeles: Center for Visual Music, 2012), 96.
4. On ekphrasis and music, see, for example, Siglind Bruhn (ed.), Sonic Transformations of Literary
Texts: From Program Music to Musical Ekphrasis (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2008),
7–10; Siglind Bruhn, “A Concert of Paintings: ‘Musical Ekphrasis’ in the Twentieth Century,”
Poetics Today 22.3 (Fall 2001): 551–605; Siglind Bruhn, Musical Ekphrasis: Composers
Responding to Poetry and Painting (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2000).
5. Morton Feldman, “Vertical Thoughts,” Kulchur 3.9 (Spring 1963): 88–9, reprinted in
Seán Kissane (ed.), Vertical Thoughts: Morton Feldman and the Visual Arts (Dublin: Irish
Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 3.
6. Feldman, “Vertical Thoughts,” 3.
7. Feldman, “Vertical Thoughts,” 3.
8. This phrase dates at least to a lecture Feldman gave in February 1951, and first appears in
print in his essay “Between Categories,” The Composer 1.2 (Sept. 1969): 73–7, reprinted
in B. H. Friedman (ed.), Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton
Feldman (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 2000), 84. On the content of the 1951 lecture,
see Brett Boutwell, “Morton Feldman’s Graphic Notation: Projections and Trajectories,”
Journal of the Society for American Music 6.4 (November 2012): 475.
9. Amy C. Beal, “‘Time Canvasses’: Morton Feldman and the Painters of the New York
School,” in James Leggio (ed.), Music and Modern Art (New York: Routledge,
2002), 229.
10. R. Wood Massi, “Captain Cook’s First Voyage: An Interview with Morton Feldman (on 3.3.
1987),” Cum Notis Variorum 131 (April 1989): 7–12, reprinted in Chris Villars (ed.), Morton
Feldman Says: Selected Interviews and Lectures 1964–1987 (London: Hyphen, 2006), 218.
11. Brian O’Doherty, “Feldman Throws a Switch Between Sight and Sound,” New York Times,
February 2, 1964.
12. Morton Feldman, “Give My Regards to Eighth Street,” Art in America 59.2 (March/April
1971): 96–9, reprinted in Friedman, Give My Regards, 98.
13. De Kooning offered these interpretations in 1967 and 1975. Quoted in Richard Schiff,
Between Sense and de Kooning (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), 57. Harold Rosenberg
similarly interpreted de Kooning’s Woman paintings from 1950–1952 as depicting the art-
ist’s own individuality. See Debra Bricker Balken, Abstract Expressionism, Movements in
Modern Art Series (London: Tate, 2005), 43.
14. Morton Feldman, “Morton Feldman: Interview by Fred Orton and Gavin Bryars,” Studio
International 192.984 (November–December 1976): 244.
78
15. On parallels between Feldman’s music and Rothko’s paintings, and the ways both art-
ists discussed their work, see Steven Johnson, “Rothko Chapel and Rothko’s Chapel,”
Perspectives of New Music 32.2 (Summer 1994): 6–53; Brett Boutwell, “‘The Breathing
of Sound Itself ’: Notation and Temporality in Feldman’s Music to 1970,” Contemporary
Music Review 32.6 (2013): 539; Morton Feldman, “Rothko Chapel,” liner notes to Morton
Feldman: Rothko Chapel/For Frank O’Hara, Columbia Records/Odyssey Y34138, 1976,
LP, reprinted in Friedman, Give My Regards, 125–6. Feldman also acknowledged that he
adopted a partially autobiographical approach to the form of Rothko Chapel ( Johnson,
“Rothko Chapel,” 16).
16. Feldman, “Morton Feldman: Interview,” 244.
17. The title “Rabbi Akiba” refers to the influential first-to second-century Jewish religious
leader Akiba ben Joseph, a chief contributor to the Mishnah, the codification of Jewish law.
“The King of Denmark” refers to the Danish King Christian X who, according to legend,
wore a yellow Star of David during World War II as a sign of solidarity with his Jewish
subjects. Brian O’Doherty, “Morton Feldman: The Burgacue Years,” in Kissane, Vertical
Thoughts, 71.
18. The term “abstract expressionism” originated in a review by the New Yorker art critic
Robert Coates. Motherwell coined the moniker “New York School” in 1949. Balken,
Abstract Expressionism, 7, 26.
19. Juan Manuel Bonet, “I Learned More from Painters than I Learned from Composers,”
trans. Jonathan Brennan, in Kissane, Vertical Thoughts, 8. On Feldman’s relationship with
the abstract expressionists, see Jonathan W. Bernard, “Feldman’s Painters,” in Steven
Johnson (ed.), The New York Schools of Music and Visual Arts (New York: Routledge,
2002), 173–215.
20. Quoted in Bonet, “I Learned More from Painters,” 7.
21. Feldman discusses Piero della Francesca and Cézanne in “Between Categories,” 83–6, and
elsewhere.
22. Feldman describes this influence in Morton Feldman, “Crippled Symmetry,”
RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 2 (Autumn 1981): 91–103, reprinted in Friedman, Give
My Regards, 134–49. See also Boutwell, “ ‘Breathing of Sound Itself,’ ” 540.
23. Morton Feldman, “Liner Notes,” Kulchur 2.6 (Summer 1962): 57–60, reprinted in
Friedman, Give My Regards, 7.
24. Bonet, “I Learned More from Painters,” 9.
25. On Feldman’s innovative scores of the early 1950s, see Boutwell, “Morton Feldman’s
Graphic Notation.” For a study of his graph scores, see David Cline, The Graph Music of
Morton Feldman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
26. Feldman, “Between Categories,” 88.
27. Feldman, “Between Categories,” 88.
28. O’Doherty, “Feldman Throws a Switch.”
29. Feldman, “Crippled Symmetry,” 147.
32. Tracy Caras and Cole Gagne, “Morton Feldman,” Soundpieces: Interviews with American
Composers (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1982), 163–77, reprinted in Villars, Morton
Feldman Says, 90–1.
36. Balken, Abstract Expressionism, 21.
37. Balken, Abstract Expressionism, 26.
38. On abstraction, meaning, and metaphor in abstract expressionist art, see Ann Gibson, “The
Rhetoric of Abstract Expressionism,” in Michael Auping (ed.), Abstract Expressionism: The
Critical Developments (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1987), 72.
39. Meyer Schapiro, Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries (New York: George Braziller, 1979),
218, 222.
40. Frank O’Hara, “New Directions in Music,” in Kissane, Vertical Thoughts, 89.
79
41. On “notational ekphrasis,” see Lydia Goehr, “How to Do More with Words: Two Views of
(Musical) Ekphrasis,” British Journal of Aesthetics 50.4 (October 2010): 408.
42. Morton Feldman, “A Life without Bach and Beethoven,” Listen 1 (May/June 1964): 14,
reprinted in Friedman, Give My Regards, 16.
43. Raoul Mörchen (ed.), Morton Feldman in Middelburg: Words on Music: Lectures and
Conversations, 2 vols. (Cologne: Edition MusikTexte, 2008), ii: 618.
44. Bernard, “Feldman’s Painters,” 199.
45. Boutwell, “ ‘Breathing of Sound Itself,’ ” 549.
46. Brian O’Doherty, American Masters: The Voice and the Myth (London: Thames and
Hudson, 1988), 122.
47. O’Doherty, Voice and the Myth, 120.
48. Friedman, Give My Regards, 6.
49. See, for instance, the perspective diagram of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper,”
c. 1495–1498, in Ross King, Leonardo and the Last Supper (London: Bloomsbury,
2012), 143.
50. Charles McGrath, “A Portraitist Whose Canvas is a Piano,” New York Times, April 22,
2005, www.nytimes.com/2005/04/22/arts/music/22glas.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1,
accessed June 21, 2016.
51. McGrath, “A Portraitist.”
52. For a similar observation, see also Tristian Evans, Shared Meanings in the Film Music of
Philip Glass: Music, Multimedia and Postminimalism (New York: Routledge, 2016), 27.
53. Keith Potter, Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip
Glass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 266. For an autobiographical
account of Glass’s collaborations with other artists and his musical influences during the
1960s and 1970s in the Soho area of New York, see Philip Glass, Music by Philip Glass, ed.
Robert T. Jones (New York: Da Capo, 1987), 11–24. Published in England as Philip Glass,
Opera on the Beach, ed. Robert T. Jones (London: Faber and Faber, 1988).
54. Christopher Finch, Chuck Close: Life (London: Prestel, 2010), 9, 117–19.
55. Martin Friedman, Close Reading: Chuck Close and the Art of the Self- Portrait
(New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2005), 182.
56. Dodie Kazanjian, “Metropolitan Opera: Close Encounter,” Playbill Arts, March 14, 2008,
www.playbillarts.com/features/article/7587.html, accessed June 21, 2016.
57. Christopher Finch, Chuck Close: Work (London: Prestel, 2007), 103.
58. Finch, Chuck Close: Life, 157.
59. See Potter, Four Musical Minimalists, ch. 4. On the role of process in the composition of
“Two Pages,” see Wes York, “Form and Process (1981),” in Richard Kostelanetz (ed.),
Writings on Glass: Essays, Interviews, Criticism (New York: Schirmer, 1997), 60–79. On the
construction and premiere of “Music in Twelve Parts,” see Tim Page, “Music in 12 Parts
(1993),” in Kostelanetz, Writings on Glass, 98–101.
60. Finch, Chuck Close: Work, 76.
61. Friedman, Close Reading, 39; Potter, Four Musical Minimalists, 266.
62. Friedman, Close Reading, 54.
63. Finch, Chuck Close: Work, 44.
64. Quoted in Robert Storr, “Chuck Close: Angles of Refraction,” in Robert Storr (ed.), Chuck
Close (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1998), 44.
67. Wil S. Hylton, “The Mysterious Metamorphosis of Chuck Close,” New York Times
Magazine, July 13, 2016.
68. Hylton, “Mysterious Metamorphosis of Chuck Close.”
69. Hylton, “Mysterious Metamorphosis of Chuck Close.”
70. Scott Hicks (dir.), Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts (Port Washington, NY: Koch
Lorber Films, 2009, orig. 2007), DVD; Philip Glass, “It’s a State of Attention,” in Margery
Arent Safir (ed.), Robert Wilson from Within (Paris: Arts Arena, 2011), 99.
71. Glass’s composition is not publicly available in published form, but can be heard on Bruce
Levingston, Portraits, Orange Mountain Music 0025, 2006, compact disc.
80
72. McGrath, “A Portraitist.” See also Bruce Levingston, “Portraits,” www.premierecommis-

sion.org/recordings/portraits.html, accessed June 21, 2012.
73. See also Sandra Benito and Anita Feldman, Introduction to Patrick Coleman (ed.), The
Art of Music (San Diego: San Diego Museum of Art; New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2015), 19.
74. Kazanjian, “Close Encounter.”
75. McGrath, “A Portraitist.”
76. Ludmilla Jordanova, Defining Features: Scientific and Medical Portraits 1660– 2000
(London: Reaktion Books and National Portrait Gallery, 2000), 18–20.
77. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in Stephen Greenblatt (ed.), The Norton Shakespeare
(New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1997), 1748. On the subject of portraiture
in Hamlet, see Marguerite A. Tassi, The Scandal of Images: Iconoclasm, Eroticism, and
Painting in Early Modern English Drama (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press,
2005), 193.
78. Malcolm Warner, “Portraits about Portraiture,” in Paloma Alarcó and Malcolm Warner
(eds.), The Mirror & the Mask: Portraiture in the Age of Picasso (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press; Fort Worth: Kimbell Art Museum; Madrid: Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
and Fundación Caja Madrid, 2007), 20.
81
CH A P T E R 3
Listening in on Composers’
Self-Portraits
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is
merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter
who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am
afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul.
—Basil Hallward, in The Picture of Dorian Gray1
A t the turn of the thirteenth century, the artist known as Brother Rufillus
of Weissenau illuminated a Passionale (Lives of the Saints), in which
he offered attentive readers a self-conscious view of his creative process
in the form of a miniature self-image. Under an initial letter R, the artist
depicted himself holding a mahl stick and brush, using red paint (in refer-
ence to his name; rufus is Latin for red) to put the finishing touches on this
calligraphic representation of the first letter of both the word that continues
in the adjacent text and also his name (Figure 3.1). To the left of the artist
stands a table holding cups of paint, and he sits on a bench among other
tools of his trade: he occupies his artist’s studio, housed within the bottom
of the capital letter. In this playful image, the artist shows himself at work
creating the illumination the reader holds in his hands. The initial R serves
a dual purpose, as part of the book’s linguistic content and as a gesture
outside of the text, toward the creator of the very letters that combine to
produce the document’s meanings, and of the illustrations that depict and
ornament them. In this way the artist embeds himself within his creation.2
The self-reflexive effect of the subtle image in Brother Rufillus’s illu-
minated R can be found in large-scale painting as well, for example in Jan
van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece (1432), in which the artist is thought to have
depicted his own likeness as one of the judges on horseback on the left of
82
Figure 3.1: Brother Rufillus, Initial R, from a Passionale from Weissenau Abbey, c. 1170–1200,
Cod. Bodmer 127, f. 244r. Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cologny (Geneva).
the massive work, and in Raphael’s Vatican fresco “The School of Athens”
(1509–1511), in which the painter peeks out from behind a group of figures
to the far right, making eye contact with the viewer.3 The miniature embed-
ded self-image functions in part as a signature, attributing the painting to its
83
L i s t e n i n g i n o n Co mp o s e r s ’ S e lf - P o rt r a i t s ( 83 )
Figure 3.2: Eugène Atget, “Coiffeur, Palais Royal,” 1927, albumen silver print (gold-toned),
7 x 9-1/2 inches. Museum of Modern Art. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed
by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.
creator. But beyond a simple attribution, it suggests that the larger work of
which it is a part does not only show the artist’s handiwork, but also reveals,
more profoundly, a view into the artist’s thoughts, access to the creative
inspiration that provides the underlying source of the painting’s substance.4
Centuries later a similar effect was created in the medium of photography,
in particular in the subtle reflections of the artist and his camera that can be
found in mirrors and windows in images by Eugène Atget such as “Coiffure,
Palais Royale” (1927) (Figure 3.2). This photograph is primarily a depic-
tion of a ubiquitous aspect of modern life rather than a self-portrait, but the
subtle reflection of Atget and his camera in the glass reminds the viewer of
the photographer’s method, and of the careful artifice involved in the crea-
tion of the image of a banal aspect of the everyday.
Despite music’s inability to convey detailed physical likeness, an anal-
ogous playful form of self-reference is found in a number of works dating
from the Baroque era to the present day, by composers who have used
monograms formed of their initials or letters from their names to deter-
mine patterns of pitches that conjure the impression of their presence in
the music. An early and well-known example is J. S. Bach’s incorporation of
his name, spelled with the pitches B-A-C-H (with B in German meaning
B♭ and H referring to B♮), in The Art of Fugue (early 1740s). Monograms
84
can be found with particular frequency in music of the twentieth century.

For example, Alban Berg incorporated his initials A-B—alongside H-F,
the initials of his mistress Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, and C-C, equivalent to
the solfège syllables Do-Do, a homonym of the nickname of her daughter
Dorothea—in his Lyric Suite (1925–1926). Dmitri Shostakovich built his
monogram, D-S-C-H (with S, or Es, denoting E♭ in German), into numer-
ous compositions, notably the String Quartet No. 8 (1960). Shostakovich’s
student Alfred Schnittke continued and expanded this practice: in addi-
tion to his own musical monogram, A-S-C-H-E, which appears in multi-
ple works, B-A-C-H recurs throughout much of his repertoire, in pieces
such as the Concerto Grosso No. 3 (1985), as do letters from the name of
the violinist Gidon Kremer, his frequent collaborator, which can be heard
in the Violin Concerto No. 4 (1984).5 Schnittke often combines multiple
monograms to reflect his compositional predecessors in his works, such
as in the opening of his String Quartet No. 3 (1983), which incorporates
Shostakovich’s D-S-C-H alongside A-D-D-A-S-S-A—letters from the
name of Orlando di Lasso merged with Schnittke’s own initials, A-S—and
Ludwig van Beethoven’s D-G-A-B-E-H.
In these examples, the pitches indicated by a monogram, in the man-
ner of Brother Rufillus’s illuminated R, serve two simultaneous functions.
Like the R that remains a functional part of the word it initializes, these
monograms operate as components of the music’s melodic, rhythmic, and
harmonic material. At the same time, the composers’ monograms serve,
like the tongue-in-cheek image of Brother Rufillus completing his initial,
as subtle attributions to the authors of the music, buried within its struc-
tures. They also reflect on the artistic process by which those artists created
their works.
But like Brother Rufillus’s self-reflexive drawing, which is subordinate to
the text of which it is a part, a musical monogram does not function as an
autonomous self-portrait: the Passionale is not principally about Brother
Rufillus, and works carrying monograms are in general not about their
composers’ identities. Composers’ musical monograms nevertheless self-
consciously emphasize the fact that the sounds the listener hears have been
assembled by the composer whose presence is echoed in the melodic sur-
face, like Atget’s reflection in the pane of glass through which his camera
peers. With its self-conscious reference to the composer who wrote the
piece and the creative process by which he did so, the work in which a mon-
ogram is embedded becomes, at least in part, a contemplation of the pro-
cesses of composition.
While some composers have used monograms to gesture toward the
evocation of the self in this peripheral way, others have engaged more thor-
oughly with the depiction of their own identities in a subset of musical
85
portraits that turn their focus back onto their creators. These autonomous
musical self-portraits invite the listener, usually by way of a title, to interpret
the piece as a representation of the composer’s impression of his own char-
acter and artistic process.6 This chapter explores musical self-portraiture,
considering how the genre relates to self-portraiture in the visual arts,
before turning to two works whose composers depict themselves princi-
pally by exploring the sense of hearing. The first of these pieces is György
Ligeti’s duet for two pianos “Selbstportrait mit Reich und Riley (und
Chopin ist auch dabei)” (Self-Portrait with Reich and Riley (with Chopin
in the Background), 1976), in which Ligeti represents himself in the com-
pany of the composers Steve Reich and Terry Riley, and in the ghostly
presence of their predecessor Frédéric Chopin. The chapter then turns to
Peter Ablinger’s “Quadraturen IV: ‘Selbstportrait mit Berlin’ ” (Self-Portrait
with Berlin, 1998), a piece that depicts its composer by representing and
analyzing his experience of the everyday urban thrum that surrounds him.
In Ablinger’s work, a compact disc of ambient sounds recorded by the
composer in Germany’s capital city is played back and accompanied by
an instrumental ensemble that mimics the noises captured on the disc by
performing a score produced using a computer analysis of this recording.
In their self-portraits, Ligeti and Ablinger reflect on their professional and
artistic identities as they listen to the sounds around them. In Ligeti’s case
this aural material constitutes his own music and that of his colleagues, and
in Ablinger’s it comprises the noises of the city in which he lives. In this way
these works reveal how their composers view the roles of their art, their
experiences of sound, and the sense of hearing more generally in the con-
struction of their own identities.
MUSICAL AND VISUAL SELF-P ORTRAITS
Since at least the nineteenth century there has been a recurrent critical
approach in writings on music that holds a composer’s works to be auto-
biographical and to offer insights into his character, calling to mind the
Renaissance dictum “Every painter paints himself.”7 One classic example
of this way of understanding composers’ relationships with their works
can be found in the multiple published nineteenth-century interpretations
of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 (1824) that held the work to be autobi-
ographical, in criticism by Friedrich Kanne, Franz Joseph Fröhlich, and
Richard Wagner, among others.8 In different ways, these authors consid-
ered the emotional progression implied in the symphony—its assemblage
of musical gestures indicating yearning, sadness, heroism, and, finally,
happiness—to mirror the mixture of affects that occupied Beethoven’s
86
troubled soul, and heard the move from darkness to exultation between the
work’s first and last movements as a narrative construction of Beethoven’s
identity, depicting his search for joy during his tumultuous struggle with
deafness.
Although this sort of approach to understanding composition as a
form of self-portraiture has persevered to the present day in the interpre-
tations of some listeners, musical works explicitly identified as conscious
representations of their composers in the form of self-portraiture occupy
a relatively rare but compelling and persistent genre. Among the earliest
examples of self-portraiture in music are François Couperin’s staid and
somber “La Couperin” (1730) and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s lively, play-
ful, and ironic “L’Aly Rupalich” (first titled “La Bach” and thought to be a
self-portrait, 1755), both for solo keyboard.9 By using titles to indicate that
these compositions are representations of their creators, these and other
composers of such works invite their performers and audiences to interpret
the music in a manner that corresponds with how they would contemplate
a painted self-portrait.
Self-portraiture in the visual arts is typically understood to have emerged
as a coherent genre in the late fifteenth century, as a result of the confluence
of both the developing notion of the painter’s intellectual and social role as
a creator rather than simply an artisan, and the growing availability of the
recent Venetian invention of the flat mirror, which allowed people to con-
template their own appearance in an unprecedented way.10 Self-portraiture
served in this period as an opportunity for artists to affirm their rising sta-
tus in society, while at the same time reflecting upon and depicting their
society through the way they portrayed themselves.11 In the early twentieth
century, self-portraiture flourished as a genre in which artists challenged
the longstanding association between outward appearance and inner self,
exploring ways of depicting identity in images that distorted physical like-
ness or even avoided it altogether. Art historian James Hall describes this
development in painting by analogy to the way affect is depicted in com-
position: he calls the end of the first decade of the twentieth century the
“high-water mark of the self-portrait as pure soul music.”12
Artists have often sought in their self-portraits to foreground their craft
and creativity as essential elements of their identities, interwoven with
signs of character and social position.13 One principal way they have done
this is through the depiction of the tools they use in the creation of art. In
classic and modern works of self-portraiture including Diego Velázquez’s
“Las Meninas” (1656), Rembrandt’s “Portrait of the Artist at His Easel”
(1660), Jacques-Louis David’s “Self-Portrait” (1794), Pablo Picasso’s “Self-
Portrait with a Palette” (1906), Norman Rockwell’s “Triple Self-Portrait”
(1960), Richard Avedon’s “Self-Portrait” (c. 1963), and Lucian Freud’s
87
“Painter Working, Reflection” (1993), artists have shown themselves with

easels, brushes, palettes, cameras, and other instruments of their trade, and
sometimes in the process of creating new works of art. In this manner, they
emphasize their roles as artists, and their methods, movements, and ways
of seeing and representing the world, as crucial aspects of their personal
identities.
Musical self-portraiture is often similarly self-conscious about the
musical materials the composer uses in the creation of music. In Benjamin
Britten’s “E. B. B.,” the second of his Two Portraits (1930), for exam-
ple, the composer chose to depict himself in musical form in a work for
string orchestra that accompanies a solo part for viola, the instrument
Britten himself played. The string orchestra and viola serve at one and
the same time as the medium of Britten’s representation and the objects
portrayed within it as the tools of his artistry, in the manner of the can-
vases and paintbrushes that are used in the construction of, and also
appear depicted within, so many painters’ self-portraits. The discussions
of Ligeti’s and Ablinger’s self-portraits in the sections that follow dem-
onstrate how these composers are similarly self-reflexive in their works,
offering musical representations whose subject is, in part, the very instru-
ments, technologies, and notes that form the components of the music
the listener hears.
In addition to representing the tools of their trade in self-portraits,
artists and composers have also treated the genre as providing an oppor-
tunity to explore their own aesthetic styles and creative influences.
Corresponding examples in the musical and visual arts can also be found
in works by the composer John Adams and the artist Richard Hamilton.
In Adams’s orchestral work My Father Knew Charles Ives (2003), a piece
he describes as a “musical autobiography, my own Proustian madeleine,”
the composer combines techniques that he has developed throughout his
career with others that he has borrowed from his predecessor Ives, creat-
ing a work that offers a fusion of self-reference and pastiche.14 In the title of
the work, Adams creates a fictional but plausible narrative backdrop to his
self-portrait: though his father never did meet Ives, Adams has pointed out
that they resided near one another for a time in New England, where they
both were businessmen and musicians, and were immersed in the writ-
ings of the transcendentalist philosophers who had lived and worked in
the region during the previous century.15 Adams states that Ives’s mixture
of “the sublime with the vulgar and sentimental,” which Adams views as
a particularly American compositional technique, has served as a potent
model for him in his career.16 This influence can be heard in Adams’s self-
portrait, which is structured in three orchestral movements, each named
for a place or element of the landscape in the northeastern United States,
88
mimicking the equivalent structure of Ives’s Three Places in New England

(1911–1914, rev. 1929). In the first movement, “Concord,” Adams opens
by juxtaposing extended chorale-like chords in the strings with a solo
trumpet that plays a line comprising multiple triplet patterns; this instru-
mentation creates a texture that closely resembles Ives’s “The Unanswered
Question” (1908, rev. 1930–1935). As the movement progresses, wind
instruments and ensembles begin to play distorted, overlapping melodic
fragments resembling Sousa marches and American patriotic tunes, a
technique that can be found in Three Places in New England. In Adams’s
hand, however, these references are interwoven with passages of repeated
staccato notes that recall earlier pieces by Adams himself such as “Short
Ride in a Fast Machine” (1986). In this work, Adams constructs a musical
representation of his personal identity by using compositional techniques
a knowledgeable listener will readily identify as typical of and unique to
Adams, but filtered through an equally recognizable pastiche of the music
of his predecessor Ives.
In his 1970–1971 self-portrait “A Portrait of the Artist by Francis Bacon,”
in oil on collotype, Richard Hamilton similarly refers back to his own char-
acteristic techniques while imitating the work of another artist, in this case
the painter Francis Bacon, to represent himself, through pastiche, in a man-
ner that conveys Bacon’s influence on his artistic development (Figure 3.3).
Working from a Polaroid photograph of his face that was taken by Bacon,
Hamilton manipulates the image, deforming his features and blurring its
lines to create a figure that resembles Bacon’s haunting paintings such as his
1969 “Self-Portrait.”17 The medium, manipulated photography and print-
making, is more typical of Hamilton’s oeuvre than Bacon’s, but the overall
appearance and the use of oil paints is highly redolent of Bacon’s painted dis-
tortions of the human face, and the result is a hybrid self-portrait, in which
Hamilton shows his own visage as if a portrait of him had been painted by
Bacon and then captured on photograph and retouched by Hamilton him-
self. Hamilton explained that he received feedback from Bacon while work-
ing on the image, and the final version—which was, of the several studies for
the work, the one that Bacon approved—felt complete at “the point where
I produced something that I found like Francis Bacon, and reasonably sat-
isfying as something of mine. And I learned a great deal—the interest for
me was that I learned so much about Francis Bacon’s work in doing this.”18
In this way Hamilton depicts his artistic self by altering his own likeness in
Bacon’s painterly style, an experimental process that offered him an oppor-
tunity to study and explore both his own identity and the artistic technique
of a contemporary. This method is analogous to Adams’s representation of
his identity by merging well-known technical elements of the music of his
American musical forebear with signature attributes of his own style, all
89
Figure 3.3: Richard Hamilton, “A Portrait of the Artist by Francis Bacon,” 1970–1971, collotype
and screenprint, 32-3/8 x 27-3/8 inches. © R. Hamilton. All Rights Reserved, DACS and ARS 2016.
Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.
within a larger work whose structure is distinctly Ivesian and whose title is a
personal homage to both Adams’s father and his artistic father figure.
Self-portraiture is a particularly intimate genre, one in which artists
explore their own subjectivities in order to construct the image of their
sense of self, typically through the representation of its visual manifestation
in their physical appearance. T. J. Clark explains that self-portraiture depicts
not only the artist’s own likeness, but “the activity of self-scrutiny[,]‌. . . the
physical ‘look’ of looking at one’s face.”19 In the self-portrait, he writes, “the
self to be is shown representing itself.”20 And in this way, in self-portraiture,
the image works as “a metaphor of representing.”21 This genre of painting,
then, involves the representation of the sense of sight, the process of visual
contemplation. The intense intimacy of the self-portrait, which requires of
the artist an act of sustained personal reflection on himself and his craft,
can give the genre an air of inaccessibility, as though the viewer is spying on
a particularly private and penetrating gaze into a looking glass. Thus John
Berger describes viewing self-portraits as “watching the drama of a double-
bind which excludes us.”22 Indeed, the onlooker’s position in relation to the
90
artist and his painting may feel ambiguous and even awkward: if the canvas
conveys the artist’s identity in the manner of the mirror into which he peers
to study his likeness, where can we stand so as to avoid obstructing this pri-
vate moment of self-reflection?23
The musical self-portrait shares a similar sense of intimacy, offering
the audience a chance to listen in on a private act of aural contemplation.
Ligeti’s self-portrait, for example, depicts the fruits of sonic self-scrutiny,
portraying what the composer hears when he meditates on the sounds of
his own music. Ablinger’s work in the genre may give access to an aspect of
hearing even more introspective and personal, as it offers an external real-
ization of his cognitive experience of his urban soundscape, and thereby
appears to depict not only how he understands his own music as he listens
to it, but most fundamentally how he interacts, through the sense of hear-
ing, with the world around him.
GYÖRGY LIGETI’S GROUP SELF-P ORTRAIT

“SELBSTPORTRAIT MIT REICH UND RILEY
(UND CHOPIN IST AUCH DABEI)”
In 1976, György Ligeti composed his musical representation of himself

in the company of his contemporaries Reich and Riley and their prede-
cessor Chopin, in the second movement of Drei Stücke für zwei Klaviere
(Three Pieces for Two Pianos), bookended by “Monument” and “In zart
fließender Bewegung” (In a Gentle Flowing Movement). Writing the
piece at the request of the pianists Alfons and Aloys Kontarsky, Ligeti
initially wished to call it “Still Life with Reich and Riley,” but, partly in
order to avoid the morbid resonances of the still life genre, known in
French as nature morte, he changed the title to Portrait, and then Self-
Portrait.24 Ligeti had only first encountered the music of American
minimalists in recent years, and was particularly inspired by Riley’s “In
C” (1964) and Reich’s “It’s Gonna Rain” (1965) and “Violin Phase”
(1967), which he heard on recordings at Stanford University in 1972,
during his first visit to the United States.25 Ligeti employs pastiche in
his “Selbstportrait” to emphasize compelling similarities between tech-
niques developed independently but simultaneously in his works and
those of his contemporaries, whose music he had not yet heard while
he was writing “Continuum” (1968), his String Quartet No. 2 (1968),
“Coulée” (1969), and other experimental compositions of the 1960s. In
this self-portrait he also highlights striking and unexpected resonances
between compositions by these musicians and the romantic pianism of
Chopin.
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The title of Ligeti’s movement evokes an imaginary snapshot of him

alongside his American contemporaries, with Chopin’s visage in the
background—a ghostly apparition, as implied by the parentheses. Ligeti
uses the title to indicate that the piece situates his own compositional
technique in relation to piano music’s present and past. Ligeti’s group
self-portrait depicts the four musicians’ compositional innovations, in a
manner that recalls the tendency of painters of self-portraiture to empha-
size their creative endeavors by depicting themselves with their artistic
implements. He follows in this tradition by depicting his subjects in a
manner that emphasizes their profession as composers. Painted self-
portraits typically rely on mimesis to depict artists with their tools: the
self-conscious evocation of the artist’s profession in these works depends
on the representation of palettes, brushes, and cameras. Without visual
mimesis, Ligeti must find other means to portray himself, Reich, Riley,
and Chopin as composers, and to indicate that the notes on the page do
not only prescribe the structures for a performance, but also stand self-
consciously for themselves as the tools these musicians employ in their
art. Ligeti borrows musical techniques developed by his subjects to depict
them through a stylistic pastiche that combines their compositional pro-
cesses with his own.26
In painted self-portraiture since the turn of the twentieth century as well,
artists have repeatedly represented themselves not only through direct like-
ness, but also by emphasizing the artistic techniques they developed ear-
lier in their careers.27 For some artists who challenged the supremacy of
mimesis in their works, style and technique took clear precedence over
likeness in self-portraiture. In Picasso’s 1972 “Self-Portrait,” the viewer
sees the artist in the image less because it presents a recognizable likeness
than because it offers an exemplar of the cubist style in which Picasso had
worked throughout much of his career. Kazimir Malevich similarly turned
to technique rather than likeness in self-portraiture, representing himself
in “Suprematism: Self-Portrait in Two Dimensions” (1915) as an abstract
pattern of quadrilaterals and a circle in primary colors and black on a white
background (Figure 3.4). Even Malevich’s title indicates that he and his
Suprematist style are equivalent.28
More unusual is Ligeti’s depiction of his own style in combination with
pastiche evocations of the techniques of other composers. A visual analogy
can be found in David Hockney’s etching and aquatint “Artist and Model”
(1973–1974), created shortly after the death of Picasso, with Picasso’s
frequent collaborator, the printmaker Aldo Crommelynck. The study of
Picasso’s works was pivotal for Hockney’s development, as he sought to
break free of naturalism and explore new representational techniques.29
Hockney stages an imaginary meeting with the artist, in which they sit
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Figure 3.4: Kazimir Malevich, “Suprematism: Self-Portrait in Two Dimensions,” 1915, oil on
canvas, 31-1/2 x 24-3/8 inches. Stedelijk Museum. Art Resource, NY.
across from one another at a table, each depicted using a different method of
printmaking, Hockney in hard-ground etching and Picasso in a technique
using a brush.30 Hockney represents himself naked; he is the artist’s model,
and the artist his role model. The image refers in its detail and positioning
of the two figures to both Robert Doisneau’s iconic 1952 photograph “Les
Pains de Picasso” and Picasso’s depictions of artists and their models in his
Vollard Suite (1930–1937), a series of etchings partly inspired by Honoré
de Balzac’s story Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu (The Unknown Masterpiece,
1831), about an old master obsessed by the task of capturing life on canvas
in a portrait of a beautiful young woman.31 Like Ligeti, Hockney portrays
artistic influence as deriving from a complex relationship between himself
and his predecessor, as they face one another, mutually playing the roles of
both artist and model.
In his program notes for “Selbstportrait,” Ligeti describes the work as a
playful, ironic image of the four composers that represents them through
the use of compositional techniques associated with their music. He writes
that he created supersaturated canons and superimposed grids as tropes
to depict himself; phase shifting to evoke the music of Reich; pattern
93
transformation to stand for Riley; and, toward the end of the movement, a
parody of the melodic and rhythmic patterns of the Presto from Chopin’s B♭
minor Sonata, Op. 35 (1839).32 His notes explain that while the final move-
ment of the Drei Stücke für zwei Klaviere includes allusions to the roman-
ticism of Brahms and Schumann, the piece as a whole related to older
musical traditions by paying tribute to the idiomatic piano writing of com-
posers Scarlatti, Schumann, and Chopin.33 “Selbstportrait” is constructed
of a perpetual motion of arpeggiated patterns, following the precedent set
by Chopin for continuously moving, fast-paced virtuosic finger work on
the piano. The analysis of the piece reveals how Ligeti’s composition oper-
ates as a group portrait by combining references to all four composers in a
complex musical texture.
In section one, Ligeti employs a number of techniques that he had devel-
oped since the 1960s, while he also experiments with new compositional
methods. Many visual artists have viewed self-portraiture as offering a rich
opportunity for technical experimentation, and in his foray in the genre
Ligeti likewise initiates a new compositional procedure, the blocked-key
technique, whereby the left hand in each piano part silently depresses a
set of keys while the right hand plays constant patterns of eighth notes
in descending scalar units and rising and falling groupings in the contour
of a sine wave.34 Because some of the same keys are blocked by the left
hand, only a few of the notes make a sound. In the score, audible pitches
are depicted with larger note heads and silent pitches with smaller ones;
Ligeti asks the pianists to play continuously and evenly, allowing the place-
ment of the left hand to determine the melodic and rhythmic content of
each piano part, producing a sonic illusion that the pianists are playing
complex arpeggiated rhythmic figurations, rather than constantly fluctu-
ating upward and downward runs. Ligeti attributes the concept behind
this technique to the music theorist Henning Siedentopf and the organ-
ist Karl-Erik Welin, with whom he worked on the organ solo “Volumina”
(1961–1962).35
The continuous undulating cells in the right-hand parts in both pianos
are composed in what Jane Piper Clendinning has called Ligeti’s “pattern-
meccanico” style.36 Ligeti builds melodic lines of perpetually repeating
fragments that change minimally and gradually as the piece progresses, in
a manner evocative of broken machinery. He first experimented with the
ideas behind his pattern-meccanico music in the “Poème symphonique” for
one hundred metronomes (1962), but developed the technique in earnest
in “Continuum,” the String Quartet No. 2, and elsewhere. He associated his
pattern-meccanico writing with a childhood memory of reading a story by
Hungarian author Gyula Krúdy about a widow who lives alone in a house
full of ticking clocks. This haunting image, and a later experience of watch-
ing Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, in which Chaplin’s character works in
94
a factory and is at one point swallowed into the gears of a machine, inspired
a lifelong fixation on the noises of functioning and broken machinery.37 In
light of its deeply personal resonances, the pattern-meccanico technique
serves as a potent signifier of Ligeti’s artistic identity in his self-portrait.
In the first section, Ligeti layers two lines of pattern-meccanico writing
into a texture that he has referred to as micropolyphony in discussions of
other similarly constructed works.38 In such compositions the structural
techniques guiding the polyphony are inaudible, as unexpected rhythmic
groupings, pulsations, and harmonic structures emerge as though through
lattice-works in performance.39 In a manner he had developed since the
late 1960s, Ligeti delineates the thick washes of sound with moments of
greater stability and clarity in which the texture reduces to narrow intervals
that he called “signals.”40 He compared this juxtaposition of clear and dense
textures with the traditional evocations of tension and resolution in har-
monic and melodic structures of earlier Western music.41 “Selbstportrait”
opens with the repetition of a narrow signal, a half step between E𝄫 (ini-
tially spelled as D♮) and D♭ in the first piano, with the unison E𝄫 in second
piano. The texture gradually fills out into a dense mist by way of accretion, a
process that Ligeti commonly employs for broadening his texture between
signals, involving the addition of new pitches outside of the space of the
initial boundary interval.42 First, Ligeti adds a C to the second piano part
(measure N), producing the interval of a whole step with the E𝄫, and a lay-
ered pair of half steps across both voices. Next, B♮ enters in the same voice
(measure Q), followed by A♯ in the first piano (measure R), and so on, until
four discrete pitches are sounding in each voice.43 The texture subsequently
thins again (from measure “b”) with the removal of pitches in each voice,
until both pianos are playing only a major second of E and D, an interval
Ligeti has called a “typical Ligeti signal.”44 The section closes with a sus-
tained trill on these pitches in both pianos (at “m”).
Ligeti had been unaware that Reich and Riley also employed continu-
ously repeated patterns that incorporate gradual changes during the same
period, and was surprised to learn of such shared compositional tech-
niques between his works and those of his contemporaries when he first
heard their music. In addition to using this shared technical innovation in
“Selbstportrait,” Ligeti also experiments with new compositional principals
that he learned from Reich and Riley, phase shifting and the relinquishing
of authorial control by offering the performer an element of choice. Reich
developed phase shifting in “It’s Gonna Rain,” “Violin Phase,” and “Piano
Phase” (1967), in which multiple musicians or prerecorded tracks play the
same melodic material in unison and one gradually accelerates or deceler-
ates while the other remains at tempo. Riley incorporated performer choice
into compositions including “In C,” constructed of fifty-three brief modules
95
that the musicians are permitted play any number of times before moving
on to the next.
In “Selbstportrait” a form of phase shifting occurs not because the pia-
nists play at gradually different tempos, as in Reich’s works, but because
they perform continuous groupings of different quantities of eighth notes,
returning at the start of each set to E𝄫 (until “X,” at which point the group-
ings begin on F♭ or E, first in piano two, followed by piano one at “Z”). As
a result they oscillate between playing unison pitches together and apart.
After each new pattern of pitches, Ligeti writes a repeat symbol and indi-
cates the number of times the pianist is to reiterate the same grouping. In
the instructions at the start of the score, he explains that when the num-
ber of repetitions exceeds eight the pianist need not be entirely precise in
counting; when it is between twelve and eighteen, “a deviation of 1–2 in
either direction is tolerated”; and when it is above eighteen the quantity is
only approximate. Ligeti’s leniency offers the pianists considerable choice,
and their communication in the performance is therefore critical: they each
have to estimate the number of repetitions played by the other and signal to
one another before continuing on to subsequent pattern groupings. In this
way, Ligeti creates his group self-portrait by combining his own pattern-
meccanico and latticework processes with Reich’s phase shifting, while fol-
lowing Riley in relinquishing some control over the work’s structure to the
performer, merging their stylistic developments in a piece whose idiomatic
pianism he has attributed to the influence of Chopin.
Ligeti frequently stated that he conceived of strong correlations between
musical and visual forms of representation. Since childhood, he had expe-
rienced synaesthetic associations between sound and color.45 His composi-
tions were influenced by the works of painters he admired, including Pieter
Bruegel the Elder, Hieronymous Bosch, and René Magritte, and he viewed
similarities between his pattern-meccanico processes and the gradually
transforming tessellations of M. C. Escher.46 Furthermore, Ligeti described
his own works by analogy to visual techniques: he characterized the “acous-
tical illusions” in “Continuum” as resembling optical illusions, and con-
sidered some of his works to collapse the perception of time, unfolding
as though over an area of space in a frozen instant, positing a notion of a
temporal plane that resembles Morton Feldman’s similar concept of “time
canvases,” described in c hapter 2.47 Given this deep-seated correspond-
ence between the aural and the visual in Ligeti’s perception, it is perhaps
unsurprising that he would make a foray into portraiture, an artistic genre
typically associated with visual media, as a mode in which to merge his
compositional innovations with those of his American contemporaries.
A typical self-portrait represents not merely the artist’s likeness, but
also what he comes to understand about himself when he considers his
96
appearance. By representing his conception of his musical and creative self

in “Selbstportrait,” Ligeti offers his audience the opportunity to listen in on
what he hears when he contemplates to his own music and compares it with
the work of contemporary and past composers. This act of self-hearing to
which the audience gains access constitutes Ligeti’s exploration of his own
identity as a composer. In “Selbstportrait,” the musical notes and techni-
cal guidelines in the score operate as more than simply instructions for a
performer and signs of the sounds of this individual piece; they also stand
more broadly for the body of works of Ligeti, Reich, Riley, and Chopin,
and in doing so serve as a representation of the four composers’ musical
identities.
PETER ABLINGER’S SELF-P ORTRAIT IN THE

CIT Y, “QUADRATUREN IV: ‘SELBSTPORTRAIT
MIT BERLIN’ ”
In John Baldessari’s 2007 sculptural portrait “Beethoven’s Trumpet (With

Ear) Opus # 133,” a large bronze ear trumpet, modeled after one held
in the Beethoven House museum in Bonn, emerges from an oversize
white ear on a gallery wall (Figure 3.5).48 Rather than conforming to the
long history of painted, printed, and sculptural likenesses of Beethoven,
Figure 3.5: John Baldessari, “Beethoven’s Trumpet (With Ear) Opus # 133,” 2007, foam, resin,
aluminum, cold bronze, and electronics, 84 x 120 x 84 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Marian
Goodman Gallery.
97
Baldessari’s portrait represents its subject by evoking not the composer’s

appearance—the wild hair and intense gaze that became so widely rec-
ognized in portraits—but the way that he managed to perceive the world
around him through sound in spite of his famously thwarted sense of hear-
ing. When the viewer of this sculptural portrait of the composer speaks or
sings into Beethoven’s ear through the trumpet, a portion of Beethoven’s
late String Quartet Op. 133, the “Große Fuge” (Great Fugue), composed
at a time when Beethoven suffered from advanced deafness, plays back out-
ward in reply.49 The portrait explores a question that has fascinated gen-
erations of listeners: how was Beethoven, who was almost entirely unable
to hear sounds and music late in his life, still capable of communicating
through compositions that would contribute such a rich musical legacy?
Baldessari seems to suggest that Beethoven interacted with the world
through an individual sense of hearing that translated his experiences into
an internal music. In this work the composer is represented principally
through an evocation of his unique perception of his surroundings, in an
attempt to reach past the external likeness that is the material of traditional
portraiture, to access something about the subject that is otherwise funda-
mentally personal to him and unavailable to others.
While Ligeti’s musical self-portrait also explores a composer’s interac-
tions with sound by evoking his perception of his own music, the self-portrait
of Peter Ablinger, like Baldessari’s multimedia portrait of Beethoven, rep-
resents his unique relationship to and experience of the sense of hearing
more generally. Ablinger depicts himself through a juxtaposition of the
mundane ambient sounds that characterize his environment, in the form of
a compact disc that plays back field recordings of Berlin’s city streets, with
a musical translation of those sounds for an instrumental ensemble that
plays simultaneously with the CD. This pairing offers the listener an idea of
how Ablinger himself interprets the sounds of his city as he moves through
it: like Beethoven’s trumpet, which plays back a musical response as though
to echo how Beethoven “hears” the spectator’s voice, Ablinger’s work offers
his audience the representation of his own perception of the noises that sur-
round him. What emerges is a particularly intimate work of self-portraiture
in which the composer proposes an understanding of the self as an object
of its own perception.50
Throughout his compositions, Ablinger has frequently considered the
relationship between vision and hearing, manipulating sounds as well
as images to bring to light the ways these perceptual processes overlap.
Ablinger was initially trained in the graphic arts, but he was also active as
a jazz pianist, and he decided to enter the field of music instead of visual
art when it occurred to him that “I was constantly translating everything
I learned about visual sensitization into its equivalent in sound.”51 He has
98
explained, nevertheless, that he has found greater aesthetic inspiration

in the work of late nineteenth-and twentieth-century visual artists than
among his compositional predecessors and peers, naming Claude Monet,
Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, Barnett Newman, and Ad Reinhardt as
particularly influential to his music.52 Indeed Ablinger considers himself a
painter in music: in his essay “Metaphern” about metaphorical associations
between hearing and seeing, which reads as a sort of artistic manifesto, he
declares, “Ich BIN ein Maler!”53
Ablinger’s development of a vocabulary of visual metaphors to illustrate
his conception of music can be traced throughout many of his writings and
interviews. Characterizing his creative process, he has explained, “When
I first think about a composition, I try to compose something pictorial on
a piece of paper—it’s a drawing, not a score that is composed from left to
right.”54 Ablinger’s descriptions of his music have often relied on analogies
to elements of vision, and the titles of his works frequently refer to color,
painting techniques, and other aspects of the visual arts, for example his
series Weiss/Weisslich (White/W hitish) and his composition “Grisailles.”
He has also presented his compositions in art galleries, notably in his 2008
solo exhibition Hören hören (translated as “Hearing Listening”) at the Haus
am Wandsee in Berlin.
The relationship between seeing and listening, which Ablinger conceives
as closely knit processes through which we take in and interpret the world
around us, is an important factor in the development of his compositions,
and his multimedia works frequently involve a strong visual component.
In his electroacoustic series IEAOV (1995–2001), for example, Ablinger
explores how the temporal aspect of music can be understood through
spatial metaphors. He does so by manipulating and layering recordings of
sound in a process he explains as the “verticalization or condensation of
successive events within the simultaneousness of a spectrum.”55 He also
considers the texture of sound in this work in relation to representational
paintings that, like portraits, feature a principal element positioned in the
foreground before a more intricate backdrop; for Ablinger, in IEAOV white
noise serves as the “background” to the composition’s main “image,” its
more salient individual sounds.56 Ablinger pushes the boundaries of the
metaphorical connections between music and the visual even further in his
series Seeing and Hearing (1994–2004), a set of photographs taken while
the camera is in motion or on an extended exposure setting. The viewer of
these photographs is asked to consider them as works of music, to allow
the images to conjure in the “mind’s ear” an individual, imaginary melody
or sound.57
Ablinger has proposed that the self emerges from the sense of hear-
ing: he writes, “Listening is something that brings myself into being.”58 It
9
is in particular the din produced by the sounds that surround us on a daily

basis, which Ablinger refers to with the German word Rauschen and the
English terms “white noise” and “static noise,” that, he argues, offer us the
opportunity to look inwardly and explore who we are.59 The sounds of a
waterfall or of a city street corner, to him, “are as far as possible devoid of
meaningful information yet they act like a mirror, they throw something
back upon ourselves insofar as we read something into them, turn them
into something which is anchored only in ourselves. Hence in such situa-
tions we experience ourselves.”60
Ablinger locates the origins of his interest in white noise in an experi-
ence he had that served as a sort of paradigm shift in his thinking about
both art and his personal sense of self: when taking a walk through a field of
grains in the Austrian countryside in 1986, he suddenly experienced a kind
of epiphany, a “jerking open of perception” that allowed him to hear the
noises created by the nature around him in a heightened way.61 With this
moment of elevated sensory sensitivity, “Before and after were categorically
separated, had nothing more to do with each other.”62 Most of the composi-
tions Ablinger has written since this date have dealt in one way or another
with the act of listening and how it relates to and defines the conception of
the self.63 For Ablinger, listening is never passive; it is an active form of per-
ception that “continuously reconstructs” ourselves and our surroundings
rather than “simply record[ing] what is happening ‘out there.’ ”64 In much
of his music, Ablinger explores this mode of perception by inviting audi-
ences to interact with the sorts of “white noise” they are typically prone to
filter out, to listen deeply to the droning sounds of daily life, and in doing so
to reflect on how identity is formed through hearing. In this way, Ablinger
views his compositions as “a research project; research into perception.
And about how perception creates us!”65
Ablinger’s notions of the self as defined by perception through listen-
ing, and of listening as closely intersecting with seeing, are manifested in
the composer’s ongoing series of compositions Voices and Piano (begun in
1998). In each of these works, Ablinger pairs a CD recording of the voice of
a celebrated figure in art and politics, including Jorge Luis Borges, Bertolt
Brecht, Marcel Duchamp, Mao Tse-tung, Morton Feldman, and Gertrude
Stein, with a part for live solo pianist playing what Ablinger calls a musi-
cal “analysis” of the voice. The piano part is designed on the foundation
of a temporal and spectral scan of the recording, producing what Ablinger
describes as “something like a coarse gridded photograph.”66 Notes are then
assigned to the piano on the basis of this computerized output, to create a
kind of musical translation of the voice.
Ablinger has characterized these works as portraits of their subjects, and
on the page of his website dedicated to the series he includes a photographic
100
portrait of each person whose voice he has used to create this set of compo-
sitions.67 More frequently, however, Ablinger has said that rather than func-
tioning as individual portraits, the works in his Voices series come together
to form a single large-scale self-portrait. Adopting a contemporary concep-
tion of the self as polyvocal, mutable, and perpetually under construction,
he explains that the works together represent “a large encounter of voices
‘in me.’ ”68 If the individual’s identity is always created discursively through
interactions with the voices of others, the series Voices and Piano will con-
tinually expand and change as Ablinger encounters new voices that help
him to reconceive his identity and incorporates these one by one into new
arrangements that join the others in a growing self-portrait.
The genre and aims of self-portraiture have influenced Ablinger’s creative
method more generally as he has attempted to develop compositional tech-
niques that reflect his understanding of the self as the product of perception,
and particularly of the sense of hearing. Expressing the common view that
audiences have the opportunity to learn about and develop their own iden-
tities in contemplating a work of music, Ablinger has written that, in taking
in a piece of music, the listener encounters his self-image through the act of
perceiving the sounds, which serve as a kind of mirror. Ablinger describes
this process in idiosyncratic terms, adapting the language of Renaissance
theories of perspective, as Willem de Kooning and Morton Feldman do in
their discussions of art spectatorship described in chapter 2. He writes that
this process requires “inverse perspective,” in which, rather than the spec-
tator occupying the vantage point and looking toward the vanishing point
represented in the work of art, the listener instead becomes both vantage
and vanishing point as he looks back at himself as he is reflected in the artis-
tic representation he contemplates.69 Like the viewer of Atget’s “Coiffeur,
Palais Royale,” who might see his own portrait in the glossy surface of the
photograph that features its own reflected image, or the listener Boulez
describes in his discussion of Pli selon pli who perceives himself reflected
in the music (see c hapter 2), the audience member, according to Ablinger,
will notice his own faint likeness peering—or listening—back in a reflec-
tion on the surface of the art object he contemplates. Ablinger invokes por-
traiture as a metaphor for all art, characterizing it as a genre that reverses the
direction spectatorship: “Sound, music, becomes a portrait of its individual
perceivers. . . . Sound is what hears us, what scrutinizes us. Then and only
then when sound itself is still and absolutely ‘attentive’ can it seize us,
we the inattentive, we in motion, only then can it ‘portray’ us.”70 Though
Ablinger’s explanations of what happens when we perceive a work of art
can seem rather speculative and even eccentric at their most abstract,
his basic point is that through active listening we are able to learn more
about ourselves, and in this way music and sound act as a looking glass in
10
which we can contemplate the image of ourselves as we would in preparing

to create a self-portrait.
In “Selbstportrait mit Berlin,” Ablinger’s first work to be explicitly iden-
tified as a self-portrait, the composer experiments with the technique of
pairing recordings with their instrumental imitation as a mode of exploring
how his identity might be defined by the sounds that surround him. This
piece is the fourth installment of his Quadraturen, an ongoing series begun
in 1997 that to date includes five works. In the Quadraturen, Ablinger
experiments with what he calls “phonorealism,” the realist representation
of sounds he has captured in recordings that he calls “phonographs,” sonic
photographs. This method is a musical analogue to photorealism in paint-
ing, a movement that originated in the late 1960s in the works of artists
including Robert Bechtle and Chuck Close (who has nevertheless resisted
the use of this term to describe his early paintings) and involved the use of
the traditional means of painting to create detailed canvases that resemble
the precision of photographic representation.71
Ablinger describes his creative process in the Quadraturen series as
involving three principal steps:
(1) The first step is always an acoustic photograph (“phonograph”). This

can be a recording of anything: speech, street noise, music.
(2) Time and frequency of the chosen “phonograph” are dissolved into
a grid of small “squares” whose format may, for example, be 1 second
(time) to 1 second (interval).
(3) The resulting grid is the score, which is then to be reproduced in differ-
ent media: on traditional instruments, computer controlled piano, or
in white noise.72
The resulting juxtaposition of actual sounds with their musical depictions

offers Ablinger the opportunity to explore how musical representation
might be construed as a form of perception. In these works, for Ablinger,
“the music operates here as an observer: music observes reality. And it is
precisely the limits of this approximation which afford us some insights
into the instrument of observation. Music, the cultural creation, becomes
a metaphor for perception.”73 His association of perception with the for-
mation of identity and with the genre of portraiture is woven throughout
the works in the Quadraturen series; in addition to his self-portrait, the first
piece in the series is called “Stadtportrait Graz” (City Portrait Graz), and
the third incorporates musical portraits of his parents.
Ablinger has explained that with “Selbstportrait mit Berlin,” he continues
to link perception to the construction of the self, and to consider music as a
mirror that reverses the typical perspective of artworks, so they reflect back
102
on the identity of the audience. He writes that in this work, “it’s not how
people see me, but what I see (and hear) that forms the subject of the piece.
In other words the portrait reveals the view of the observer rather than the
observer himself.”74 He creates this effect in the pairing of “real” sounds,
which consist of recordings of ambient noises captured on six microphones
set up in Berlin and played through loudspeakers onstage, with a musical
composition devised on the basis of the computer analysis of these record-
ings created using Ablinger’s temporal and spectral scanning software.
The ensemble arrangement of the white noise of Berlin’s city streets,
composed for flute, two clarinets, two violins, viola, two cellos, and three
keyboards (pianos or a combination of pianos and electronic keyboards),
suggests a representation of how Ablinger, with his particular aesthetic sub-
jectivity, perceives the sounds recorded objectively by the microphones. As
Ablinger puts it, “the music becomes an observer of reality”; the composi-
tion, with its inversion of perspective, doubles for Ablinger himself as the
subject hearing the world around him.75 In other words, “if I bring together
street noises and classical instruments, the first one functions as the uncom-
prehensive, surrounding everything, and the second as our given cultural
reaction to it.”76 This cultural reaction is the perceptual process through
which identity is constructed.
“Selbstportrait mit Berlin” consists of six brief movements of nearly
equal length, between two and three minutes. The first movement opens
with the ensemble playing together, and the recording follows soon after.
The ensemble plays staccato block chords at a regular pulse; the music
leaves little room for expression, though slides in the clarinet add a touch
of whimsical coloration. In the score, timings are marked to the fraction of
a second to keep the performers on cue with the recording, and the meter
changes regularly. This sense of repetition and the regularity of the chordal
ostinato pattern suggest the effects of the grid-like representation of the
ambient sound recordings that Ablinger creates using the computer’s spec-
tral analytical software. The CD recording, which enters soon after the play-
ers begin to perform, contributes a constant drone of white noise within
which it is generally impossible to differentiate one sound or source from
the other, though the attentive listener can make out the occasional noise,
such as the fragment of a voice or of a squeak from the wheels of a vehicle.
As the movement progresses, the ensemble’s part changes gradually: the
tempo slows and the musical texture thins as several instruments drop out,
only expanding in forces again in a crescendo in the last moments of the
section.
The remaining movements of the work are constituted similarly of the
ensemble playing regular pulsing chords alongside recordings of the city
noises that merge into a sound resembling radio static. Occasional changes
103
in texture and structure stand out in the work; for example, the end of the
fourth movement involves greater rhythmic variation, with the instruments
playing together in a sequence of irregular durations. And at times the
sounds in the recordings change and become easier to identify. In move-
ments 5 and 6 the CD seems to capture the din of an interior space, per-
haps a restaurant or cafeteria, in which the white noise involves numerous
human voices and the sporadic clinking of glasses or dinnerware. In these
movements the rhythmic language also becomes increasingly rapid and
complicated; toward the end of the final movement, the music has grown
more and more chaotic, far from the homophony that characterized it at
the start.
In “Selbstportrait mit Berlin,” by playing back the “phonographic” sounds
of the city and writing music for ensemble that represents a musical transla-
tion of these sounds, Ablinger posits a conception of identity as constantly
in flux and based on the experience of the surrounding world, a view that
accords with the social constructionist approach to the self that considers
human identity to be changeable, fragmented, and polyvocal. But because
the principal subject of his work is the process of perception, implying that
how we hear (as evoked by the ensemble) supersedes in importance what
we hear (as captured on the CD in the drone of white noise), he appears at
the same time to suggest an understanding of identity as encapsulated in
the inborn, elemental ability to take in, discern, and make sense of sound
through hearing. This is a view that seems to accord with a more traditional
notion of identity as embedded within us rather than constructed in an
external social and discursive space, as embodied in and tied up with our
inborn physiologies. In this self-portrait, in other words, Ablinger refuses
to cast his lot entirely with either the postmodern social constructionist or
the more traditional essentialist view of the self; rather, he finds a way to
bring these theories together, using perception and the physical senses as
the bond between our surroundings and our bodies that helps us determine
who we are.
But Ablinger’s self-portrait, constructed using microphones and ana-
lytic computer software and performed by a combination of live musi-
cians and a stereo system, also leaves the listener with the potentially
unsettling question of the extent to which identities are formed by con-
temporary technologies. The work is ostensibly about Ablinger’s simplest
and most natural interaction with his surroundings through hearing—a
sense that cannot be avoided or shut off as easily as can sight, touch, taste,
and smell, and that offers a source of constant input throughout the day—
and through his personal and individual aesthetic sensibility, depicted
in his hermeneutic transformation of unedited recordings of ambient
sounds into musical notes. But as this depiction of human perception is
104
in fact largely devised by inanimate computers and performed by sound

recording playback systems, it seems that Ablinger’s self-portrait may
imply, after all, that the senses through which we take in our surroundings
involve perceptual processes that are inherently mechanical and auto-
matic. Or perhaps he indicates that our contemporary selves are so tightly
interwoven with today’s technologies that the construction of identity is
no longer mediated so much by society as it is by machine.
CONCLUSION
In Philip Roth’s 1974 novel My Life as a Man, the narrator, a novelist named
Peter Tarnopol, pictures a conversation with a psychologist who has seen
him in therapy and then written an article called “Creativity: The Narcissism
of the Artist,” in which he disguises Tarnopol’s identity to describe their
sessions. Among his imagined retorts to the therapist’s characterization of
him, the chagrined Tarnopol exclaims:
And if I may, sir—his self is to many a novelist what his own physiognomy is to a painter of
portraits: the closest subject at hand demanding scrutiny, a problem for his art to solve—
given the enormous obstacles to truthfulness, the artistic problem. He is not simply look-
ing into the mirror because he is transfixed by what he sees. Rather, the artist’s success
depends as much as anything on his powers of detachment, on denarcissizing himself.
That’s where the excitement comes in. That hard conscious work that makes it art!77
Like the novelist as Tarnopol describes him, Ligeti and Ablinger take the
opportunity in their self-portraits to propose answers to the questions of
what constitutes the self, and of what role the composer’s creative tech-
niques and his means of perceiving and contemplating his surroundings
play in the development of his identity. These composers offer their audi-
ences an opportunity to learn what they hear when they listen to their
own music, and, moreover, when they consider how the sense of hear-
ing constructs their personal identities. In “Selbstportrait mit Reich und
Riley (und Chopin ist auch dabei)” and “Quadraturen IV: ‘Selbstportrait
mit Berlin,’ ” these composers listen deeply, with the focus of an artist or
author looking closely in the mirror to prepare to paint a self-portrait or to
write an autobiographical novel, and then they treat what they hear with
sufficient detachment to analyze it thoroughly. It is these analyses—of the
technical characteristics of and influences on Ligeti’s music, of the sounds
of Ablinger’s environment and the way he perceives them—that ultimately
form the material for the composers’ representations of their individual
selves.
105
NOTES
1. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1908), 12.
2. See James Hall, The Self-Portrait: A Cultural History (London: Thames and Hudson, 2014), 25.
3. For a history of this technique in the Italian Renaissance, see Joanna Woods-Marsden,
Renaissance Self-Portraiture: The Visual Construction of Identity and the Social Status of the
Artist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 43–62.
4. Omar Calabrese, Artists’ Self-Portraits, trans. Marguerite Shore (London: Abbeville Press
Publishers, 2006), 33.
5. See Christopher Segall, “Klingende Buchstaben: Principles of Alfred Schnittke’s Monogram
Technique,” Journal of Musicology 30.2 (Spring 2013): 252–86.
6. Some compositions may also be interpreted as self-portraits though they lack titles that
explicitly identify them as such. For example, Michael J. Puri sees Maurice Ravel’s ballet
“Daphnis et Chloé” as involving an element of self-portraiture. See Michael J. Puri, “Dandy,
Interrupted: Sublimation, Repression, and Self-Portraiture in Maurice Ravel’s Daphnis et
Chloé (1909–1912),” Journal of the American Musicological Society 60.2 (Summer 2007):
317–72.
7. On this concept in art history, see Joanna Woodall, “‘Every Painter Paints Himself ’: Self-
Portraiture and Creativity,” in Anthony Bond and Joanna Woodall (eds.), Self-
Portrait: Renaissance to Contemporary (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2005), 17.
8. Nicholas Cook, Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993), 27, 70–3.
9. On self-portraiture in Bach’s “L’Aly Rupalich,” see Joshua S. Walden, “Composing Character
in Musical Portraits: Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and L’Aly Rupalich,” Musical Quarterly
91.2 (Fall-Winter 2008): 379–411; Joshua S. Walden, “What’s in a Name?: C. P. E. Bach
and the Genres of the Character Piece and Musical Portrait,” in Anthony DelDonna (ed.),
Genre in Eighteenth-Century Music (Ann Arbor, MI: Steglein, 2008), 111–38; Annette
Richards, “Picturing the Moment in Sound: C. P. E. Bach and the Musical Portrait,” in
Thomas Donahue (ed.), Essays in Honor of Christopher Hogwood: The Maestro’s Direction
(Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2011), 57–89.
10. Anthony Bond, “Performing the Self?” in Bond and Woodall, Self-Portrait, 31. On the genre’s
origins, see also James Hall’s suggestion that the roots of the genre can be found in the middle
ages, earlier than the typical attribution of the late fifteenth century. See Hall, Self-Portrait, 8–9.
11. Hall, Self-Portrait, 49–51.
12. Hall, Self-Portrait, 234. See also Wendy Wick Reaves, “Reflections/Refractions: Self-
Portraiture in the Twentieth Century,” in Wendy Wick Reaves (ed.), Reflections/
Refractions: Self-Portraiture in the Twentieth Century (Washington, DC: Smithsonian
Institution Scholarly Press; Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 4.
13. Calabrese, Artists’ Self-Portraits, 161, 183.
14. John Adams, Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2008), 229.
15. John Adams, liner notes to The Dharma at Big Sur; My Father Knew Charles Ives, BBC
Symphony Orchestra, Nonesuch 79857-2, 2006, compact disc.
16. Adams, liner notes to The Dharma at Big Sur; My Father Knew Charles Ives.
17. Hal Foster, “The Hamilton Test,” in Mark Godfrey, Paul Schimmel, and Vicente Todolí
(eds.), Richard Hamilton (London: Tate, 2014), 178, fn. 33.
18. Richard Hamilton, “Talk at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, 1971,” in Godfrey,
Schimmel, and Todolí, Richard Hamilton, 201–7 (204).
19. T. J. Clark, “Gross David with the Swoln Cheek: An Essay on Self-Portraiture,” in Michael
S. Roth (ed.), Rediscovering History: Culture, Politics, and the Psyche (Redwood City,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 280.
20. Clark, “Gross David,” 296.
21. Clark, “Gross David,” 297.
22. John Berger, Portraits: John Berger on Artists, ed. Tom Overton (London: Verso, 2015),
151. See also Richard Leppert, Art and the Committed Eye: The Cultural Functions of Imagery
(Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996), 163. Leppert writes that in the case of self-portraiture,
106
the viewer is made “almost, but never quite, irrelevant,” as the genre involves primarily a
gaze between the painter and his self-image.
23. Reaves, “Reflections/Refractions,” 3.
24. Richard Steinitz, György Ligeti: Music of the Imagination (London: Faber and Faber,
2003), 207–8.
25. Steinitz, György Ligeti, 206.
26. Constantin Floros interprets the work as a series of four consecutive musical portraits,
representing Ligeti, Reich, Riley, and Chopin, respectively. This description is insight-
ful and supported by a rich analysis, but it overlooks the complex ways Ligeti merges
the techniques of all four composers throughout the piece. Constantin Floros, György
Ligeti: Jenseits von Avantgarde und Postmoderne (Vienna: Lafite, 1996), 131.
27. Joseph Leo Koerner, “Self-Portraiture Direct and Oblique,” in Bond and Woodall,
Self-Portrait, 68.
28. Calabrese, Artists’ Self-Portraits, 358, 370.
29. Kay Heymer, “Mirror Images,” in Marco Livingstone and Kay Heymer (eds.), Hockney’s
Portraits and People (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003), 28; Barbara Stern Shapiro,
“Hockney Works on Paper,” in Sarah Howgate and Barbara Stern Shapiro (eds.), David
Hockney Portraits (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; London: National Portrait
Gallery, 2006), 65.
30. Marco Livingstone, David Hockney (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981), 166.
31. Reaves, Reflections/Refractions, 125. The depiction in self-portraiture of the younger artist in
the presence of a teacher or role model can be found in early works in the genre as well. In one
compelling example, Sofonisba Anguissola’s “Self-Portrait with Bernardino Campi” (1550),
Anguissola depicts herself as the creation of her painting master Campi: her likeness appears
as an image on a canvas resting on a easel, before which Campi stands with paintbrush and
mahl stick, as though in the act of creating her portrait. Bond, “Performing the Self?” 36.
32. The program notes are reproduced in Stephen Ferguson, György Ligetis Drei Stücke für
zwei Klaviere: Eine Gesamtanalyse (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1994), 265–6.
33. Ferguson, György Ligetis Drei Stücke, 265–6. See Ligeti’s discussion of his predeces-
sors’ idiomatic writing for piano as a model for his work, in György Ligeti, Péter Várnai,
Josef Häusler, and Claude Samuel, György Ligeti in Conversation (London: Eulenberg,
1983), 23.
34. Ligeti returned to the blocked-key technique in the third piece of his Études, Book 1
(1985). Jeffrey Perry proposes that Ligeti might have derived the idea for this procedure
from Cage’s works for prepared piano. See Jeffrey Perry, “Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for
Prepared Piano: Performance, Hearing and Analysis,” Music Theory Spectrum 27.1 (Spring
2005): 55, fn. 19.
35. György Ligeti, “Performance Instructions,” in Monument-Selbstportrait-Bewegung
(Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne, 1976).
36. Jane Piper Clendinning, “The Pattern- Meccanico Compositions of György Ligeti,”
Perspectives of New Music 31.1 (Winter 1993): 192–243.
37. Ligeti, Várnai, Häusler, and Samuel, György Ligeti in Conversation, 17.
38. Ligeti, Várnai, Häusler, and Samuel, György Ligeti in Conversation, 14–15. For a discussion
of Ligeti’s micropolyphony, see Jonathan W. Bernard, “Voice Leading as a Spatial Function
in the Music of Ligeti,” Music Analysis 13.2/3 ( July–October 1994): 227–53.
39. Bernard, “Voice Leading as a Spatial Function,” 15.
40. Bernard, “Voice Leading as a Spatial Function,” 28–9, 31. See also Jonathan W. Bernard,
“Ligeti’s Restoration of Interval and Its Significance for His Later Works,” Music Theory
Spectrum 21.1 (Spring 1999): 2.
41. Ligeti, Várnai, Häusler, and Samuel, György Ligeti in Conversation, 60.
42. Michael Hicks, “Interval and Form in Ligeti’s Continuum and Coulée,” Perspectives of New
Music 31.1 (Winter 1993): 174.
43. For a discussion of this technique, see Michael Hicks, “Interval and Form,” 174.
44. Ligeti, György Ligeti in Conversation, 29.
45. Ligeti, György Ligeti in Conversation, 58.
46. Steinitz, György Ligeti, 206.
107
47. On “acoustical illusions,” see Herman Sabbe, “György Ligeti—Illusions et Allusions,”

Interface 8.1 (1979): 30. On Ligeti’s conception of time and space, see Jonathan W. Bernard,
“Inaudible Structures, Audible Music: Ligeti’s Problem, and His Solution,” Music Analysis
6.3 (October 1987): 210. For a discussion of the challenges involved in the translation
of the German-language metaphors Ligeti employs in discussing music in relation to the
senses of sight and touch, see Mark Shuttleworth, “Difficulty in Translation: Grappling
with Ligeti’s Musical Metaphors,” in Helen Julia Minors (ed.), Music, Text and Translation
(London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 175–86.
48. Stefan Gronert and Christina Végh (eds.), John Baldessari: Music (Cologne: Verlag der
Buchhandlung Walther König, 2007), 127.
49. There are six versions of this work, each named for the opus number of one of Beethoven’s
late string quartets and featuring the sound of that piece.
50. Ablinger has composed one additional self- portrait, the 2009 multimedia work
“Selbstportrait mit Mittersill” (Mittersill is the name of an Austrian city). In this “sketch
in three sections,” the first part is scored for four children, one teenager, and red, blue, and
yellow helium balloons; in the second a sound recording is played from the stage; and the
third is for a solo performer who rubs twelve objects across the surface of a table to create
a succession of noises.
51. Peter Ablinger and Chiyoko Szlavnics, “Two Composers’ Talk,” 2007, http://ablinger.
mur.at/txt_2_talk.html.
52. G. Douglas Barrett, “Between Noise and Language: The Sound Installations and Music of
Peter Ablinger,” Mosaic 42.4 (December 2009): 148; Peter Ablinger, “Metaphern (Wenn
die Klänge die Klänge wären),” in Sabine Sanio and Christian Scheib (eds.), Übertragung—
Transfer—Metapher: Kulturtechniken, ihre Visionen und Obsessionen (Bielefeld: Kerber,
2004), http://ablinger.mur.at/docu14.html.
53. Ablinger, “Metaphern.”
54. Ablinger and Szlavincs, “Two Composers’ Talk.”
55. Sergio Bové, “Beyond the Boundaries of Music: Some Connections in Peter Ablinger’s
Work,” 2013, http://ablinger.mur.at/docs/bove_beyond.pdf.
56. Bové, “Beyond the Boundaries.”
57. Bové, “Beyond the Boundaries.”
58. Katja Blomberg, Forward to Katja Blomberg, Chico Mello, Christian Scheib, and Trond
Reinholdtsen (eds.), Peter Ablinger: HÖREN hören/hearing LISTENING (Berlin: Kehrer,
2008), 18.
59. On Ablinger’s conception of noise, see also Jennie Gottschalk, Experimental Music since
1970 (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 155–7.
60. Peter Ablinger and Trond Olav Reinholdtsen, “The Sounds Do Not Interest Me,” 2005,
http://ablinger.mur.at/engl.html.
61. Peter Ablinger, “Peter Ablinger—English Texts,” trans. Bill Dietz, accessed February 15,
2016, http://ablinger.mur.at/engl.html.
62. Ablinger, “Peter Ablinger—English Texts.”
63. Ablinger, “Peter Ablinger—English Texts.”
64. Ablinger and Reinholdtsen, “Sounds Do Not Interest Me.”
65. Carlos Bermejo, “Seven Projections in the Music of Peter Ablinger,” accessed June 21,
2016, http://ablinger.mur.at/docs/CarlosBermejo_7Projections.pdf. Originally pub-
lished as Carlos Bermejo Martín, “Siete proyecciones en la música de Peter Ablinger,”
Revista Europea de Investigación en Arquitectura 1 (2013): 15–24.
66. Peter Ablinger and Anny Ballardini, “About Voices and Piano,” ed. Rita Duckworth,
accessed June 21, 2016, http://ablinger.mur.at/voices_and_piano.html. The statement
on this web page is taken from a 2004 interview with Anny Ballardini. The computer anal-
ysis of the vocal recordings is conducted using software Ablinger created in collabora-
tion with Thomas Musil at the Institute of Electronic Music in Graz. Peter Ablinger and
Stéphane Ginsburgh, “Peter Ablinger: Voices and Piano,” 2011, http://ablinger.mur.at/
docs/v+p_ginsburgh.pdf.
67. Ablinger and Szlavincs, “Two Composers’ Talk”; Ablinger and Ballardini, “About Voices
and Piano.”
108
68. Ablinger and Ginsburgh, “Peter Ablinger: Voices and Piano.”

69. Peter Ablinger, “Inverse Perspective,” trans. Bill Dietz, 1995, http://ablinger.mur.at/
engl.html. The idea that the viewer of a work of art sees himself in a kind of inverse per-
spective also underlies Philippe Halsman’s whimsical artwork Mona Dalì: What Dalì Sees
When He Looks at Mona Lisa (1954), in which the Mona Lisa is reproduced, but with the
eyes, mustache, and hands of Salvador Dalì. This painting is discussed in Wendy Steiner,
“Postmodern Portraits,” Art Journal 46.3 (Autumn 1987): 174.
70. Ablinger, “Inverse Perspective.”
71. Ablinger, “Metaphern.”
72. Peter Ablinger, “Quadraturen,” trans. Bill Dietz, accessed June 21, 2016, http://ablinger.
mur.at/docu11.html. In describing this process, which he developed at the Institute of
Electronic Music in Graz, he elaborates: “First, a semitone filter was constructed, one that
allowed intervallic sizes to be varied at will. Then, the concept of temporal screening—in
the sense of a series of more or less rapid static analyses—was developed for the entire
sound spectrum. At the beginning of 1997 the first two-dimensional screenings in real
time became possible.”
73. Ablinger and Reinholdtsen, “Sounds Do Not Interest Me.”
74. Ablinger, “Quadraturen.”
77. Philip Roth, My Life as a Man, in Philip Roth, Novels 1973–1977 (New York: Library of
America, 2006, orig. 1974), 597.
109
CH A P T E R 4
Celebrity, Music, and

the Multimedia Portrait
The pictures that I am known for are not really my image, they’re always the photographer’s vision
of me. I can look a hundred different ways, but what people see of me in pictures is not really
my image.
—Kate Moss1
A s the prior chapters of this book have explored, composers and artists
often turn to the genre of portraiture to reveal the invisible attributes
of identity that they perceive in the individuals they choose to represent,
and in some cases also to portray their understandings of themselves.
A portrait is accordingly considered successful when it conveys some-
thing truthful about its subject’s identity beyond simply mirroring physi-
cal appearance. But in the epigraph to this chapter the British supermodel
Kate Moss, the subject of thousands of portraits since she began her career
in the late 1980s, describes her ubiquitous likeness as inadequate to the
depiction of her true self. Moss suggests that the images of her that have
appeared in news, magazines, and tabloids, on billboards, and in adver-
tising media accomplish the opposite of the goal that commentators have
associated with portraiture for many centuries: in idealizing her likeness
and employing it toward commercial ends, they hide her personal identity.
Contemporary celebrity portraiture generally involves the idealization of
physical appearance, often, arguably, at the expense of conveying true char-
acter, and Moss’s statement offers a reminder that the portrait always con-
structs a circumscribed interpretation or impression of its subject’s identity,
one carefully devised by the artist. This remark might provoke us to reflect
on how we can account for the aspects of a person’s character that may be
omitted from a portrait, as well as how we should determine whether we
110
can trust the artist’s representation to show a truthful and comprehensive

representation of its subject.
Portraits of military and national leaders, like those of celebrity actors
and models, have also historically tended toward idealization and exagger-
ation. Such depictions, in the forms of paintings, coins, and statuary, typi-
cally idealize attributes of strength, resolve, and virtue, while underplaying
or entirely eclipsing any aspects of the subject that can be perceived as defi-
ciencies of physical appearance or character.2 The capacity of a portrait’s
representation to be opaque, to frame a person’s likeness in a manner that
highlights or even invents particular aspects of character while blocking
others from view, has been the subject of commentary on the genre at least
since Aristotle, who advised poets, in describing noble characters, to follow
the example of portrait painters who represent their subjects faithfully but
at the same time improve upon them in their paintings, creating perfected
imitations of what is found in life and revealing only certain attributes of
character while occluding others.3
The potentially deceptive quality of the portrait that idealizes or oth-
erwise constructs a limited interpretation of its subject is dramatized in
the dreamlike third act of John Adams’s opera Nixon in China (1987).
In this closing section of the opera, the iconic portrait of Mao that hung
above Tiananmen gate in Beijing until the late 1960s (it was subsequently
replaced by another portrait) and that was reproduced numerous times
on colorful silkscreens by Andy Warhol, looms over the other characters
from the back of the stage. This painting is a visual encomium to Mao, who
exhibits the attributes of a leader: he appears resolute and strong, as well
as inaccessible and larger than life. But Adams and his collaborators, the
librettist Alice Goodman and director Peter Sellars, suggest that this aus-
tere, glorifying representation might have obscured from public view an
identity that was more melancholy and introspective, a character reflected
in the line Mao sings as he appears from behind a panel at the mouth of the
portrait, “I am alone.” Madame Mao turns to him and sings, “Come down,
give me your hand, old man.” And down he comes, emerging from his por-
trait to join his wife and sing an intimate duet in which they reminisce about
the time they met and danced together years before. Mao is now agile and
articulate, in contrast with the physical weakness and verbal opacity that
marked his appearances before his American visitors in earlier scenes,4
and his behavior reveals a nostalgic private nature that is not depicted by
the idealizing strength of his most famous representation. This contrast
is reflected by a shift in his music, which, choppy and aggressive in prior
scenes, now mimics the smooth, syncopated timbres of American swing.
This sequence demonstrates the opera creators’ notion that the famous
portrait, by which the world had come to perceive Mao, obscures more
1
C e l e b r i t y, M u s i c , a n d t h e M u lt im e d i a P o rt r a i t ( 111 )
than it reveals, constructing a highly limited sense of his identity and hid-
ing complexities of character behind the idealized likeness. On the other
hand, as the sympathetic musical portrait of Mao in this scene sheds no
light on the aspects of his character that contributed to the hardships of his
governing policies, the cruelties of the Cultural Revolution, and the death
and suffering of so many of his subjects, it could be said that Adams’s por-
trait of Mao, too, is far more opaque than it is revelatory.
As an artistic construction of identity—in painting, literature, music, or
any other medium or combination of media—portraiture can be as illu-
sory as it is revelatory.5 But as Adams’s animation of the painting of Mao
may be understood to indicate, the portrait’s deceptions are not necessarily
entirely persuasive to the viewer who exercises the hermeneutic capacity
to look beyond the image, constructing a more complex conception of its
subject’s identity than the image seems to convey on its own. The American
stage director and visual artist Robert Wilson’s extensive and varied body
of work in the genre offers an especially compelling opportunity to explore
this conflict of representation between the ways the portrait can heighten
certain aspects of identity, obscure others, or even entirely mislead view-
ers with fabrications of character, and the expansive possibility it can still
provide for rich interpretation. Wilson’s portraits highlight this aspect of
the genre in large part because they tend to focus on the representation of
widely recognized contemporary celebrities, including actors, singers, and
political icons, figures who have already been the subjects of numerous por-
traits in genres such as fashion photography and magazine profiles that tend
to idealize identity and appearance—or, at times, to aim for the opposite
effect. In addition to depicting such sitters, Wilson’s portraits often recy-
cle, reframe, or distort the very representational techniques characteristic
of such forms of popular portraiture.
In an interview Wilson conducted for Greek television, broadcast to
advertise an Athens exhibition of his set of multimedia portraits of the
pop singer Lady Gaga created in 2013, he offers a bodily metaphor to con-
vey the relationship between outer appearance and inner character: “You
have the skin of the material and you have the meat of the material and
you have the bone. The skin is what is attractive, but it’s what’s beneath
the skin that makes the surface interesting.”6 Elsewhere Wilson has used
an overlapping metaphor to express his ideal style of theater as combin-
ing aesthetic features that are easily accessible with others that are more
dense and profound: “The surface remains simple but beneath that it can
be very complex. The surface must be about one thing, but underneath it
can be about many things.”7 Following this guiding concept, Wilson’s set
of twenty-two high-definition video portraits of Lady Gaga that combine
music, text, and image in stylized multimedia creations may offer little in
112
the way of a definitive revelation of her identity, but they entice viewers
to appreciate the “surface,” and then invite them to interpret on their own
“what’s beneath the skin,” the complex dimensions of the singer’s interior
self, an entity she too explored, in preparation for posing for these portraits,
by peering at her reflection in a mirror.8
This chapter turns to the portrait in multimedia and operatic forms,
with focus on the works in the genre that Wilson has created in collabo-
ration with composers, choreographers, actors, and other well-known cul-
tural figures, to examine the ways that portraiture can obscure, rather than
clarify, its sitters’ interior identities. Through an exploration of Wilson’s
portraits, this discussion suggests that, perhaps unintuitively, such render-
ing invisible permits the viewer to engage in an especially active mode of
interpretation that can ultimately offer the potential for the development
of a uniquely multidimensional and intimate conception of the subject’s
identity. Wilson’s portraits operate in a manner that accords with Umberto
Eco’s notion of the “open work”: they are pieces of art whose apparent gaps
and discontinuities require a particularly creative form of contemplation
on the part of the spectator, who performs the role of cocreator by assign-
ing new personal meanings to the artist’s finished work.9 In an interview he
conducted of Wilson, Eco observed that in the portrait opera Einstein on the
Beach and other works by the director, “It seems that you foresee an audi-
ence able to complete your work. I have written a book, The Open Work,
in which the same ideas were used for literature.”10 Indeed, Wilson himself
has averred, “The fact is, I don’t really understand my own stuff,” and it is
likely in part his works’ openness to the interpretation of the spectator, who
collaborates by determining potential meanings, that provoked the surreal-
ist artist Louis Aragon to describe Wilson’s early theatrical work Deafman
Glance in 1971 as “an extraordinary freedom machine.”11
For Wilson, “My responsibility as an artist is to create, not to inter-
pret. . . . I think interpretation is for the public, not for the performer or
the director or the author. We create a work for the public and we must
allow them the freedom to make their own interpretations and draw their
own conclusions.”12 In highlighting the limits of portraiture, its capacity for
deception, and the creative, participatory role a portrait’s spectator must
play in interpreting works in the genre, Wilson posits a notion of iden-
tity as socially derived, according to which the portrait is incomplete as a
form of representation in and of itself, but its vast potential lies in the way
it makes possible any number of individual constructions of the subject’s
self. Wilson’s depictions of individuals, in his portraits of the pop singer
Lady Gaga, his Voom Portraits series, and his cocreation with Philip Glass
Einstein on the Beach, therefore reveal both the ways postmodern imagery
of celebrities often eschews a deep engagement with personal identity, and
13
how the emphasis on surface detail can in fact open up the potential for the
spectator to develop a particularly personal but no less rich understanding
of the contemporary self.
ROBERT WILSON’S VOOM PORTRAITS AND

THE REPRESENTATION OF
CONTEMPORARY CELEBRIT Y
Wilson conveys an understanding of contemporary portraiture’s poten-

tial for clarity and opacity, its ability at once to reveal and obscure the self,
in his Voom Portraits, a series of multimedia likenesses that he initiated in
2004 on a commission as part of his installation as artist-in-residence for
the company Voom HD Networks, which produced high-definition televi-
sion stations between 2004 and 2009.13 The portraits have been displayed
in gallery exhibitions around the world, and were also broadcast on mas-
sive screens over New York’s Times Square each night for one month in
2012.14 For his videos in this series, which vary in length but are edited to
be shown repeatedly on seamless loops, Wilson directs his subjects to pose
before the camera and to move only minimally in choreographed gestures,
or not at all. The austerity that characterizes the faces of most of his sit-
ters in these portraits reflects his instruction that they “think of nothing”
as they pose for the camera.15 These works can be witty, as in the portrait
of Sumo wrestler Byambajav Ulambayar with a bright smile in front of a
cotton-candy-pink curtain; dripping in old-Hollywood glamor, like the
video of actress Isabelle Huppert with her hands at the sides of her face,
mimicking the famous photograph of Greta Garbo by Edward Steichen; or
eerie and sardonic, as exemplified in the portrait of actor Steve Buscemi in
pale makeup, black lipstick, and a stained butcher’s apron, chewing gum as
he stands before a bloody carcass.
In his description of celebrity portraiture in the essay “The Face of
Garbo,” Roland Barthes writes that the famous photographs of Garbo (such
as the one Wilson mimics in his Voom Portrait of Huppert) “represented
a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor
renounced,” and offered the “Platonic Idea of the human creature.”16 Her
face appears as a mask-like image, but rather than fixed and plastic, her like-
ness marks a transition in celebrity portraiture from a notion of beauty as
defined in the “archetype of the human face” toward the understanding that
beauty is related to something unique and individual: photographs of the
actress indicate a moment “when the archetype leans towards the fascina-
tion of mortal faces.”17 This description of the celebrity portrait as teeter-
ing between the archetype and the individual may help illuminate how
114
Wilson’s multimedia representations of famous contemporary and histori-

cal figures work. Occupying a space between the austerely impersonal and
the intimate and human, Wilson’s portraits of twentieth-and twenty-first-
century icons require the spectator to complete that transition between the
mask and the self that Barthes sees as having begun with images of Garbo’s
face. In this way, his works in the genre imply that contemporary identity is
a mystery that can be unlocked through interpretive and discursive interac-
tions with and about art.
Each of Wilson’s Voom Portraits is set to a musical soundtrack; some-
times this is written specifically for the portrait—a number were pro-
vided by Wilson’s long-time collaborator Michael Galasso—and in other
instances Wilson uses pre-existing music by composers as diverse as J. S.
Bach, Richard Wagner, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Nino Rota, and the
band Mogwai. In these works, music plays an important role not only in
the representation of the sitter but also in destabilizing the spectator’s expe-
rience of time. The painted and musical portrait differ in that the former
typically represents an isolated moment snatched out of time and captured
for posterity, while the latter often relies on the organization of time to pro-
duce a narrative construction of identity. Wilson’s portraits, in combining
nearly still likenesses with music, confront the viewer with both an immu-
table image and an emerging narrative. The fixed pose or, at most, mini-
mal movement of his sitters evokes an isolated moment whose duration has
been stretched out beyond how time is naturally experienced, as though
to expose an instant under a microscope; but the soundtracks of these
portraits divide their durations into regular units of time through tempo,
phrasing, and other structural means that, in general, do not come across as
particularly slow or extended. The result of this juxtaposition of conflicting
visual and aural representations of the passage of time is that the drawn-out
moment of the subject’s life that they appear to depict is experienced not as
slow motion—as it might be in a film—but instead as a heightened, almost
hallucinatory experience of the split second. Wilson has stated that “the
time of my theatre is the time of interior reflection,” and indeed this audi-
ovisual manipulation of time becomes the means by which he permits the
viewer to reflect on and interpret his sitters’ interior subjectivities.18
Wilson has called his Voom Portraits “personal, poetic statements of dif-
ferent personalities,” and said, “the still life is a real life.”19 When one of his
sitters, Farah Pahlavi, the Empress of Iran, viewed Wilson’s portrait of her
from 2006, a black-and-white video in profile in which she slowly moves
her hand down from and back up to her face, set to ambient music by the
German electronic band Popol Vuh, she began to cry and insisted, “All my life
is right there.”20 Nevertheless, in their exaggerations of posture and glamor,
their mixture of earnest sincerity and tongue-in-cheek humor, their often
15
bracing juxtapositions of sound and image, and their transformation of the

sitter’s pose into a theatrical performance captured on film, as well as in the
crisp, clinical precision of the HD video technology, these portraits can also
be remote and cryptic, demanding a richly interpretive form of spectator-
ship before they give anything away. And in many of the portraits Wilson
takes advantage of the representational capacities of his innovative merg-
ing of the newest multimedia technologies with centuries-old techniques
of painted and musical portraiture to explore the role of images and sound
in the making of contemporary celebrity, and in creating or bridging the
often cavernous space between the public and private construction of self.
Wilson has stated that his earliest work in portraiture, which dates to the
mid-1970s when he created a set of portraits under the title Video 50, was
inspired by the influential series Screen Tests produced by Andy Warhol and
his assistant Gerard Malanga between 1964 and 1966.21 Inspired by both
criminal mugshots and Hollywood glamor photography, and of course the
film industry audition screen tests that lent the series its name, these artists
would usher visitors at Warhol’s storied art and living space in New York,
known as the Factory, to a corner where they were asked to sit as still as
possible and without blinking before a sixteen-millimeter Bolex camera, for
about three minutes, until 100 feet of film had spooled through the reel.22
Warhol reportedly stated that the discomfort and insecurity this brought
out in his sitters—captured in Malanga’s description of the Screen Tests as
“studies in subtle sadism”23—made it possible to “catch people being them-
selves. It’s better to act naturally than to set up a scene and act like someone
else. You get a better picture of people being themselves instead of trying to
act like they’re themselves.”24
In spite of this observation, much of the power of the Screen Tests resides
in the fact that they can seem as inert as the portrait genres that inspired
them, the mugshot, which aims at producing a detached and objective like-
ness, and the Hollywood glamor shot, whose goals often involve idealizing
physical appearance and advertising films and other commodities. With
his Screen Tests, Warhol reveals the opacity of the contemporary popular
portraiture of cinematic stills and celebrity photography, characterized by
their careful calibration of a likeness that avoids the suggestion of anything
definitive about the subject’s internal identity, or that projects an impres-
sion of the celebrity’s self that may not correspond to the way he truly sees
himself. The modern celebrity image is a highly regulated form of portrai-
ture, whose creation involves the hands of publicists, advertisers, trainers,
film studio representatives, and fashion, hair, and makeup stylists, and as a
result, a chasm often emerges between the internal self and its public rep-
resentation, one implied by Cary Grant’s winking comment, “Everybody
wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.”25
116
The Screen Tests and the Voom Portraits demonstrate that while celebrity
photography has vastly expanded the scope of and audience for portraiture,
so that the genre has become a feature of everyday life, it has also empha-
sized interpretive challenges in the contested relationship between the
representation of a person’s visible façade and his identity or self.26 To the
extent that the modern media likeness can be said to betray the self beyond
the surface, this requires a particularly creative interpretive act on the part
of the viewer, who must construct an impression of the private self that is
concealed in the celebrity portrait.27 And indeed Factory regulars viewed
these Screen Tests, which Ronald Tavel called “breathing, living portraits,”
as offering an opportunity to construct an understanding of the visitors’
true selves.28 For example, Warhol collaborator Mary Woronov explained,
“Like medieval inquisitors, we proclaimed them tests of the soul and we
rated everybody. . . . What appealed most of all to us, the Factory devotees
. . . was the game, the cruelty of trapping the ego in a little fifteen minute
cage for scrutiny.”29
The critic Lee Siegel uses a macabre metaphor to describe the way
Warhol’s Screen Tests challenge contemporary modes of portraiture in pop-
ular media: he writes that Warhol “took the close-up off the screen and put
it on the dissecting table. It was like going into the kitchen of a fancy restau-
rant and seeing the bloody mess out of which an exquisite meal is made.”30
This notion of a bloody deconstruction of celebrity photography is made
visible in Wilson’s Voom Portrait of the actor Robert Downey Jr., who is
shown lying on his back, nude and partly covered by a sheet, on a dissecting
table, the skin of his forearm sliced open to reveal the musculature under-
neath, which is being prodded by a scientist in black whose head cannot be
seen above the upper edge of the image (Figure 4.1).31 Green lighting cre-
ates an antiseptic but sickly atmosphere, and the disembodied hand holds
tweezers and wears an antiquated ruffled sleeve that confirms the basis of
the image on Rembrandt’s group portrait “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr.
Nicolaes Tulp” (1632), in which a crowd of men surround a scientist as
he performs a pedagogical dissection of the arm and hand of a cadaver. In
this visual reference, Wilson draws an analogy between the surgical the-
aters of the seventeenth century in which bodies—often those of notorious
criminals following execution—were cut open before crowds of studious
pupils and gawking visitors, and the public arena in which the contem-
porary media scrutinizes and dissects the lives of its celebrities.32 Where
Rembrandt’s specimen is a pale corpse, however, Downey is revealed over
the course of the video portrait to be alive: he repeatedly and almost imper-
ceptibly turns his head from diagonally upward with eyes closed to look-
ing toward the camera with eyes open and locked in an exchange with the
viewer’s gaze.
17
Figure 4.1: Robert Wilson and Tom Waits, “Robert Downey Jr.,” 2004, video. Courtesy RW
Work Ltd.
Downey started acting in film as a child and has consistently remained in

the public eye since his youth, famous for both his steady sequence of prom-
inent roles in blockbusters and television series and his well-publicized
struggles with substance abuse, which brought him at various points to
stints in rehabilitation clinics, hospitals, and state prison. This is a celebrity
whose likeness is as widely recognized from magazine fashion shoots and
film posters as it is from mugshots and courtroom photographs. In Wilson’s
portrait, the imagery of the dissecting table appears to symbolize the way
Downey has been laid bare before the glare of the cameras and scrutinized
by the media. In staring with an enigmatic glance out toward the camera,
Downey stages a confrontation, challenging the notion that the thousands
of portraits by which he is known could ever reveal what lies behind the
eyes that repeatedly make and break contact with the viewer’s.
The portrait is set to a looped recording of a song from Tom Waits’s 1992
album Bone Machine, “The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me.” Waits recites, “The
ocean doesn’t want me today /But I’ll be back tomorrow to play.” Then he
will go “down deep in [the] brine,” submerged by the dark waters, where
“the rip tide is raging,” for “I’d love to go drowning /And to stay and to
stay.” In writing this song, Waits was inspired by a pair of photographs he
had seen of a woman before and after she committed suicide by drowning
in the ocean, and the song seems to be about the haunted thoughts that pro-
voked her to end her life.33 In the context of the video portrait, these lyrics
serve as a metaphor for celebrity image-making, suggesting the challenge of
the celebrity’s relationship with the portraitists—photographers, filmmak-
ers, columnists—who repeatedly create his likeness. A period of obscurity
118
in which the fickle audience turns its attention away promises unsatisfy-
ing safety, and the opportunity to plunge back into fame brings a danger of
drowning again.
The lyrics’ musical setting creates a sonic representation of the murky
expanses of the ocean. There is no sense of progression in the music, no
harmonic direction, build-up of the ensemble, or consistent metric pulse.
Waits recites the text in heightened speech rather than singing, and his
voice is processed to sound muffled, as though it is heard through water.
The words are accompanied by percussion instruments and the quiet, inter-
mittent droning of sustained tones from an electronic synthesizer, indis-
tinct sounds that float through the musical arrangement like flotsam in
the ocean. The lack of teleology in the music provides a sense of perpetual
sameness, as though to convey either the slow, interminable descent into
the oblivion of the ocean’s depths described in the text, or, in the context
of celebrity portraiture, the tedium of constant surveillance and represen-
tation. This depiction of Downey brings musical, verbal, and visual media
together with a reference to an iconic group portrait from the past to depict
the way the camera’s clinical gaze dissects the modern celebrity, whose par-
ticipation brings a vulnerability to drowning in the public scrutiny but fails
ever to reveal the depths of the self.
A similar focus on the austerity of representation in celebrity likenesses
is found in Wilson’s 2004 portrait of the actress Winona Ryder, with music
by Michael Galasso (Figure 4.2).34 In this video Ryder is visible only from
the neck up, the rest of her body submerged in a grassy mound. She wears
a colorful crown of flowers on her head, and looks outward, her eyes
Figure 4.2: Robert Wilson and Michael Galasso, “Winona Ryder,” 2004, video. Courtesy RW
Work Ltd.
19
seemingly locked with the viewer’s, and her face still, betraying no partic-
ular emotion.35 At first the sky behind Ryder is dark blue, the color of early
dawn, and the hill is in silhouette, with spotlights showing three objects
that surround her on the hillside, a revolver, a toothbrush, and a handbag.
Over the course of the video, which is about ten minutes long, the light
gradually changes to create the effect of the rising and setting of the sun;
at the conclusion, Ryder turns her head to the right and closes her eyes, as
though for sleep.
Wilson’s image of Ryder is modeled after the central character of Samuel
Beckett’s play Happy Days (1961), a woman named Winnie (the fact that
this could be a nickname for Winona can be no accident on Wilson’s part)
who is buried up to her waist, in Act I, and then her neck, in Act II, in a hill
exposed to the hot sunlight.36 Winnie’s day is marked by a bell that awak-
ens her in the morning and restrains her from nodding off until night. She
keeps herself active throughout the repetitive cycle of her days (“Never any
change,” she says)37 by talking to herself and her husband Willie, who basks
in the sun behind her and only occasionally barks replies to her questions,
and by inspecting the objects in her handbag, especially her toothbrush,
revolver, and parasol. Rather than allow herself to whither under the pene-
trating light, Winnie makes herself presentable each morning through a ser-
ies of rituals including brushing her teeth, applying makeup, and protecting
herself from the sun with her parasol. In Wilson’s portrait, Winnie’s story
becomes an allegory of Ryder’s experience of celebrity. An actress since her
teenage years, Ryder’s image became known not only through film stills and
magazine shots, but also in the much-publicized surveillance pictures that
showed her arrest for shoplifting in the Beverly Hills Saks Fifth Avenue in
2001, followed by courtroom photographs taken as she received her verdict
of guilt. Like Winnie, Winona was unable to escape the “blazing light” (in
the words of Beckett’s stage direction) that fixed her image in place.38
In Happy Days Winnie expresses herself frequently through half-remem-
bered quotes from classical theater and poetry by Shakespeare, Dante,
Milton, Keats, Yeats, and others.39 In this way she is an apt model for a
portrait of a popular actress who is known largely through her recitation
of the words of film and television screenwriters and her impersonation of
fictional characters. Through this pairing of Winona and Winnie, Wilson’s
portrait highlights the conception of identity as a polyvocal construc-
tion of texts, descriptions, and images. The multiple voices of Winnie and
Ryder represent the self as perpetually constructed of texts that overlap
and interrupt one another, a notion conveyed in Beckett’s description of
Winnie to the actress Billie Whitelaw, who played the character in 1979:
“She’s constantly being interrupted or interrupting herself. She’s an inter-
rupted being.”40 The association with Winnie represents Ryder (who,
120
in a compelling coincidence, played a starring role in the 1999 film “Girl,

Interrupted,” about a young woman in a mental hospital after a possible
suicide attempt) as an interrupted self, her identity buffeted by celebrity
and constructed in part by the steady stream of other people’s words. But
despite the stasis of Winnie’s condition, which keeps her in the bright light
each day, like the cameras that perpetually capture Ryder through the good
and the bad, Beckett suggests that this is an ever-changing identity. Winnie
states, “I used to say, Winnie, you are changeless, there is never any differ-
ence between one fraction of a second and the next.”41 She realizes that she
was incorrect in believing this; the cyclical nature of her life does not fix her
identity, and she continues to grow, and to learn and forget things, even as
her daily experiences repeat. In this way Beckett and Wilson offer portraits
of identity as socially constructed, intertextual, and interchanging.
The daily pattern of alarm bells, rituals, and the shifting of the earth to
which Winnie is subjected conveys Beckett’s interest in the theory of eter-
nal recurrence, and the play’s sense of cyclical repetition is invoked in the
portrait of Ryder by the changing light as well as by Galasso’s music.42 The
score, for violins playing predominantly harmonics with some whispered
passages at full tone and other motifs for plucked strings, evokes birdsong
and the occasional fragment of an imagined fiddle tune, in an unmetered,
pastoral composition that creates a sense of timelessness and the possibil-
ity of eternity through its repetition and variation of brief musical gestures.
The music seems to imply that this in an ordinary day within a perpetual
cycle of celebrity image-making, in which a figure such as Ryder is never
far from the cameras’ glare and the staring eyes of the public. The effect of
birdsong also reflects a prominent theme in Beckett’s play, in which Winnie
discusses singing as an authentic form of self-expression: “One cannot sing
just to please someone, . . . song must come from the heart, that is what I
always say, pour out from the inmost, like a thrush, . . . with no thought of
benefit, to oneself or anyone else.”43 For Winnie, singing is essential and
spontaneous, a truthful display of emotion through performance, and that
sense of authenticity and purity makes its way into the portrait in the spar-
kling birdsong in Galasso’s violins, paired with Ryder’s unpretentious gaze.
In contemplating Ryder as Winnie, it is not difficult to hear echoes of
Winnie’s approach to remaining positive despite her plight—she opens her
morning with the words “Another heavenly day” and repeatedly declares,
“Oh this is going to be another happy day!”44—in Ryder’s later descriptions
of her embarrassing public arrest as “a blessing” and “the best thing that
could have happened to me.”45 Winnie must work so hard to keep positive
because her partial burial results in her subjection to cruel treatment by
others: Willie neglects her, and the occasional passers-by gape and stare.
Although Winnie spends much of the play attempting to attract Willie’s
12
attention, she also describes the pain of being looked at. She recalls a cou-
ple that once encountered her on a stroll and embarrassed her with their
conversation:
Can’t have been a bad bosom, he says, in its day. (Pause.) Seen worse shoulders, he says,
in my time. (Pause.) Does she feel her legs? he says. (Pause.) Is there any life in her legs?
he says. (Pause.) Has she anything on underneath? he says. (Pause.) Ask her, he says, I’m
shy. (Pause.) Ask her what? she says. (Pause.) Is there any life in her legs. (Pause.) Has
she anything on underneath. (Pause.) Ask her yourself, she says. (Pause. With sudden
violence.) Let go of me for Christ sake and drop! (Pause. Do.) Drop dead! (Smile.) But
no. (Smile broader.) No no. (Smile off.) I watch them recede.46
In the context of Wilson’s portrait, this memory amounts to a condem-

nation of the gawking onlookers who have consumed and coolly assessed
the thousands of images of Ryder. The related theme of the proliferation of
celebrity portraiture as a form of suicide that makes its way into the portrait
of Downey through Waits’s music also arises in this portrait of Ryder, both
in the presence of the rifle and, more obliquely, for those who remember
the play, in the recollection of moments in Winnie’s monologue when she
hints at waiting for death. For example, she remarks on “the happy day to
come when flesh melts,” an echo of Hamlet’s “Oh that this too, too solid
flesh would melt”; and she calls Willie’s gift of sound sleep a “marvelous gift
. . . wish I had it,” recalling the metaphor “To die: to sleep,” from Hamlet’s
famous monologue.47
Yet Winnie does not shy away from attention; to the contrary, she thrives
on it, like the singer in Waits’s lyrics who comes back to try again after rejec-
tion, and even the thought of being watched and listened to helps sustain
her. She says to Willie that she is relieved that “I may say at all times, even
when you do not answer and perhaps hear nothing, Something of this is
being heard, I am not merely talking to myself, that is . . . a thing I could
never bear to do. . . . That is what enables me to go on, go on talking that
is.”48 In a line that presages the feeling conveyed by Wilson’s portrait, with
its oscillation of light and dark and its looped display, Winnie describes an
existence in which she feels alone, unable to see others, but has a “Strange
feeling that someone is looking at me. I am clear, then dim, then gone, then
dim again, then clear again, and so on, back and forth, in and out of some-
one’s eye.”49
For the interpreter of Wilson’s portrait, Willie comes across as an ana-
logue to the audience for Ryder’s numerous photographic portraits, and it
is his relationship with Winnie at the end of the play that allows Wilson
to characterize the connection between Ryder and her public as ulti-
mately positive and affectionate, an association less confrontational than
122
that implied by Downey’s bloody dissection. In the last moments of Act II

of Happy Days, Willie emerges from behind the mound wearing a dinner
jacket with top hat and white gloves. He faces Winnie and attempts to climb
up to her. He continues to falter and never reaches her, but looks up from
below, on hands and knees. At the sight of this, Winnie declares gleefully,
“That’s right, Willie, look at me. (Pause.) Feast your old eyes, Willie.”50 She
then sings to him “I Love You So,” from the operetta by Franz Lehár The
Merry Widow, a song whose final lines celebrate the joyous feeling of being
loved: “Every touch of fingers /Tells me what I know, /Says for you, /It’s
true, it’s true, /You love me so!”51
Before the light goes out, Willie and Winnie look at one another, locking
eye contact like Ryder with the viewer of her portrait; and indeed the spec-
tator familiar with Happy Days may feel that his intimate glance with Ryder,
from below, places him together with the actress in the position of Willie
with Winnie in the brief moment between the conclusion of her song and
the fading light that marks the end of the play. It adds poignant context to
recall the likely coincidence that one of Ryder’s most iconic roles, as Lydia
in the comedy Beetlejuice (1988), concludes in much the same musical way
as Winnie’s story. Where Winnie has been half-buried atop a mound by
unknown forces, Lydia, possessed by friendly ghosts, levitates toward the
ceiling of her haunted home and, positioned in the middle of the frame
like Beckett’s character midstage and Ryder in Wilson’s portrait, dances in
place and moves her lips to the voice and words of Harry Belafonte’s 1961
recording of the love song “Jump in the Line” (“Senora dances Calypso /
Left to right is the tempo /And when she gets the sensation/She go up in
the air, come down in slow motion”).52 Lydia began the film as an alienated
girl trapped in an inattentive family; she considers suicide to join the ghosts
she has befriended, but by the end she is happy, and the audience, in the
position of Willie, watches her from below as she smiles and sings sponta-
neously and authentically about the joy of being admired, like Winnie, and
like a bird.
By conveying celebrity images as superficially focused on likeness, and
celebrity itself as a condition that commits the individual to public dissec-
tion or a life fixed in place under bright light, Wilson’s multimedia portraits
“Robert Downey Jr.” and “Winona Ryder” suggest that the contemporary
portraitist finds himself in a predicament conveyed in a famous line from
Beckett’s Three Dialogues (1949): “The expression that there is nothing to
express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express,
no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to
express.”53 Wilson appears to create his portraits through a sense of obli-
gation toward artistic representation, but unlike other portraitists who
have traditionally sought to evoke a particular conception of the sitter’s
123
character, he conveys in these works the belief that it is not in the capacity
of the artist to construct identity. He can only design a work of portraiture
and then leave it to spectators to establish their own personal interpreta-
tions of the sitter’s character.54
When Winnie recollects the cruel words of the passing couple, she attri-
butes a particularly wounding question to the man, who wonders why she
is buried in the ground: “What does it mean? he says—W hat’s it meant to
mean?”55 This question, considered in relation to Wilson’s portrait, aptly
expresses a critical view of celebrity portraits as superficial and lacking
in deeper meaning, focusing as so many do on likeness and beauty over
the revelation of the interior self. In order to take something away from
Wilson’s portraits, the viewer cannot simply respond like the man who
asked “What’s it meant to mean?” because Wilson did not intend them to
mean anything in particular. In his portraits, in all their austerity, the private
selves of his subjects become available to the imagination and interpreta-
tion of the viewer who is willing to engage actively with these open works.
And this will prove a particularly important principle in relation to Wilson
and Glass’s depiction of Albert Einstein in their opera Einstein on the Beach.
RELATIVIT Y AND THE PORTRAIT OPERA

EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH
Einstein on the Beach was the first of Glass’s trilogy of what he has called por-
trait operas, joined in the following decade by Satyagraha (about Gandhi,
1980) and Akhnaten (1983).56 Glass has written that he conceived this set
of operas as a study of “the transformation of society through the power of
ideas and not through the force of arms.”57 He persisted in working in the
genre after completing these three operas, later producing Galileo Galilei
(2002) and Kepler (2009). Wilson had also experimented with theatrical
portraiture prior to Einstein on the Beach, in works including The King of
Spain (1969), The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud (1969), The Life and
Times of Joseph Stalin (1973), and A Letter for Queen Victoria (1974). Later,
he would continue to work in this form, creating Edison (1979) and The Life
and Death of Marina Abramović (2011).
The portrait opera typically represents its sitter by weaving a narrative
about a period in the life of the central character, but in devising Einstein
on the Beach, Wilson, Glass, and their collaborators were not interested
in recreating a biographical narrative about Einstein, because, as Wilson
explained, “We know stories about him and we come to the theater sharing
something together. And in a sense there was no need to tell a story because
we already had a story: How this man who was a pacifist also contributed to
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the splitting of the atom.”58 By choosing to represent a subject whose story

was well known, the creators could therefore rely on the audience to enter
with their own understandings of this “god of our time,”59 and to use their
preconceptions as the basis for interpreting the operatic portrait. Glass sim-
ilarly stated that an ability to rely on the audience’s prior knowledge allowed
the artists to create a portrait that could offer a deep but abstract and there-
fore aesthetically open representation of Einstein in the form of a “poetic
vision,”60 in which “the person replaces the idea of plot, of story. In other
words the character of the person becomes what the piece is about. The
more you know about the person the better.”61 As Glass stated elsewhere,
“Fundamental to our approach was the assumption that the audience itself
completed the work.”62 Composer Wim Mertens has therefore argued that
Einstein on the Beach has two protagonists, one onstage and one off: the
ensemble’s violinist, who is dressed as Einstein and plays extended solos in
multiple scenes—a reminder that Einstein was an avid amateur violinist—
and the individual spectator.63
A forerunner to the Voom Portraits, Einstein on the Beach, the musical
and theatrical portrait that would prove a landmark accomplishment in the
flourishing of Glass’s and Wilson’s careers, suggests that contemporary por-
traiture is at once an opaque art form that reveals little on its own of a sitter’s
character, and a uniquely effective medium through which to explore the
subject of identity. The portrait may not independently give anything away,
but because it is open-ended and abstract, it invites the viewer to engage in
an interpretive act of spectatorship that permits an individual understand-
ing of Einstein, and of the self more generally. Robert Stearns describes
Wilson’s approach to depicting identity in multimedia music theater
through abstract representational means as akin to “peering, staring into a
being as if to discover and reveal its essence. . . . We will never learn more
about” Einstein and other subjects of Wilson’s works “if we expect Wilson
to tell us about them. But we might come to see and feel their impenetrable
presence.”64 In this way Einstein on the Beach reflects the goal of Gertrude
Stein’s and Virgil Thomson’s works of literary and musical portraiture, with
their use of abstract representational means to capture their sitters’ ineffa-
ble presence or essence.
Einstein on the Beach engages with and reinterprets the principle with
which Einstein is most readily identified, the theory of relativity, and in par-
ticular Einstein’s famous equation E = mc2. Roland Barthes described this
apparently simple but historic equation as “the pure idea of a key, bare, lin-
ear, made of one metal, opening with a wholly magical ease a door which
had resisted the desperate efforts of centuries,”65 and in the case of Einstein
on the Beach, the equation becomes a potent metaphor that operates as a
sort of key to understanding how art forms coalesce in opera, how people
125
relate to one another and construct their own and each other’s identities,
and how individual selves seem continually to collide with and split from
one another.66 As in Boulez’s portrait of Mallarmé in Pli selon pli, in this
work multiple expressive media merge, fold according to fold, to offer a pro-
found study of contemporary identity. Spectators of the opera, in coming to
understand what Einstein means to them, can also take the opportunity to
explore how the portrait might reflect their own identities as well, by inter-
preting what it reveals of the relationships and interactions among people
and artistic forms.
FORM, MEDIA, AND MEANING IN EINSTEIN ON

THE BEACH
Wilson and Glass practiced their art within the same artistic commun-
ity of downtown New York in the early 1970s, and it was in 1973 that
they would meet for the first time, after the final performance of Wilson’s
twelve-hour work The Life and Times of Josef Stalin at the Brooklyn
Academy of Music. Glass admired the production, and recognized that he
and Wilson shared an interest in experimenting with time in theater and
music by extending form and development; Glass was working at the time
on his six-hour Music in Twelve Parts (completed in 1974).67 At the cast
party at Wilson’s Spring Street loft, Wilson and Glass agreed to discuss a
possible collaboration, and they met regularly over the course of the next
year, slowly developing the structure, content, and thematic material that
would eventually form Einstein on the Beach.68 The pair knew they wanted
to create a portrait of a famous figure, discussing Charlie Chaplin, Hitler,
and Gandhi before settling on Einstein.69 The premiere of Einstein on
the Beach, which they created together with the choreographer Lucinda
Childs, took place at the Avignon Festival in 1976. Performances con-
tinued that year across Europe and finally over two consecutive Sundays
to full houses at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The opera was
revived in 1984 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; in a 1992 touring
production; and again on an international tour that ran between 2012
and 2014.70
In recalling the choice to create an opera about Albert Einstein, Glass
later wrote of the scientist:
[When I was] a child, Einstein had been one of my heroes. Growing up just after World
War II, as I had, it was impossible not to know who he was. The emphatic, if catastrophic,
beginning of the nuclear age had made atomic energy the most widely discussed issue
of the day, and the gentle, almost saintlike originator of the theory of relativity had
126
achieved the 1940s version of superstar status. . . . For a time I, like many others of my
generation, had been swept up in the Einstein craze. Perhaps Bob, growing up in Waco,
Texas, had been too.71
In fact these artists took different approaches to research. Wilson once

stated to Glass, “I don’t want to know any more than what everyone knows
about Einstein. I just want to know what the man in the street knows
because that’s what they’ll be bringing to the work.”72 But for Glass, study
was important: he explained, “In order for me to do a portrait of a person
. . . I have to totally immerse myself in their work and life and at a certain
moment I form a subjective image of the person which has a musical con-
text. Then I can write the piece.”73
As the two continued to work on the opera, Wilson created drawings,
which later came together in a full storyboard, or “visual book,” his pre-
ferred method for designing his stage works, and he showed these drawings
regularly to Glass.74 They chose the title quickly, first settling on Einstein on
the Beach on Wall Street before shortening that by removing the last three
words, but they never discussed this change, nor indeed did they estab-
lish the meaning of the title, and this obscurity contributes to the work’s
abstraction and the burden it places on the audience to interpret how it
operates as a representation of Einstein.75 Glass has said,
What Einstein on the Beach might mean to people is very much connected to the associa-
tions they bring to it. . . . I am sure that the absence of direct connotative “meaning” made
it all the easier for the spectator to personalize the experience by supplying his own special
“meaning” out of his own experience, while the work itself remained resolutely abstract.76
In spite of the abstraction that permeated every stage of the creation of

the opera, it was always important to Glass that he was creating a work
of portraiture, a concept that served both as the genre of the work and
as a metaphor to describe the relation between his music and Wilson’s
art. When he began composing partway through the collaboration, he
explained, he put Wilson’s sketches “on the piano and composed each
section like a portrait of the drawing before me.”77 Glass’s use of this met-
aphor is cryptic: it is not immediately evident how his repeated sound
patterns create a musical portrait likeness of Wilson’s sketches. But com-
prehending portraiture in the manner in which it is developed in a work
like Einstein on the Beach itself, one might take Glass to mean that his
music provides a highly personal—and ekphrastic—interpretation of the
character or identity of Wilson’s visual creations. According to this read-
ing, the music is a “portrait” of the visual element, and both together form
a portrait of Einstein.
127
The form of the opera involves a deep integration of theatrical, musical,

and choreographic techniques. Wilson explained that his goal was to work
with the musical genre of theme and variations, and he chose three themes
to begin with: the Train (theme A), the Trial (theme B), and the Spaceship
(theme C).78 He then paired these themes in every possible combination,
allowing each to repeat three times across the four acts. Act 1 featured
themes A and B; Act 2 featured C and A; Act 3 featured B and C; and Act
4, at three scenes long, reassembled themes A, B, and C. Glass explained,
“What we’re doing [in the first three acts] is taking two three-part struc-
tures and spreading them over three two-part structures.”79 In other words,
the sequence of themes A, B, and C are distributed across three acts of two
scenes each like a musical hemiola of three-note patterns in duple meter,
and this is followed by a final act that offers a recapitulation of each theme.
These themes are also considerably varied in their reiterations. For exam-
ple, the Train, in its third instance, takes the form of a large building. And
in its first two appearances the Spaceship theme is introduced as a “Field,”
a brightly lit stage across which a large group of dancers performs Childs’s
choreography (in the original production, the choreography was by Andy
de Groat). These extended dances serve as what Glass called “pillars” that
evenly divide the opera into thirds.80 In between the acts are transitional
scenes that Glass and Wilson referred to as Knee Plays, because they serve
as joints between the material that precedes and follows them. As Glass
explained, the opera’s form is “a musical idea that works as a dramatic
idea.”81 Further augmenting this coherence between artistic forms, all three
of the principal collaborators performed in Einstein on the Beach: Glass led
his ensemble from the pit while Childs played several dramatic and dancing
roles and Wilson also performed a solo dance, in the final Spaceship scene.
Glass composed the score for his Philip Glass ensemble, featuring two
electronic keyboards, three wind players on saxophones, flute, piccolo,
and bass clarinet, and the solo violin part played by a musician dressed in
a full Einstein costume, including makeup, wig, and mustache, and seated
in a number of scenes on a chair at the front of the stage, between the pit
ensemble and the actors and dancers.82 The score also includes some addi-
tional parts for solo voices. In his music for the opera, Glass explored ways
of generating musical form through extended rhythmic structures, a project
he had been working on since at least 1965, when he composed the score
for Beckett’s Play. He was inspired in this effort by his studies of Indian
musical form with sitarist Ravi Shankar and tabla player Alla Rakha.83
This experimentation found its way into his compositions Music in Twelve
Parts (1971–1974) and Another Look at Harmony, Parts 1 and 2 (1975),
and Glass adapted the latter pieces into Einstein on the Beach, incorporat-
ing Part 1 into Act 1, scene 1, and Part 2 into the first “Field” dance.84 As
128
part of his study of rhythmic-derived form, Glass developed two devices

that he used at length in the opera: additive process, in which a pattern is
repeated and gradually lengthened or shortened by small increments, and
superimposed musical cycles, in which patterns of different lengths are lay-
ered and repeated, creating perpetually changing rhythmic interactions.85
Wilson and Glass’s layering of three dramatic themes across two-scene acts
can be understood as a structural instance of this technique of superim-
posed cycles.
Einstein on the Beach replaces the customary components of opera—a
narrative scenario conveyed by a coherent libretto and populated by well-
drawn characters—with an abstract assortment of images, texts, chore-
ography, and lighting effects, some of which relate directly to aspects of
Einstein’s life and career, but most of which seem to be highly imaginative
extrapolations from his biography, or even wholly unrelated to the subject
of their portrait. Among the visual motifs that recur in the opera and refer
to Einstein’s reputation are the costumes: all of the actors and chorus mem-
bers are dressed as Einstein, in baggy pants, white shirt, and suspenders.
Wilson designed this costume on the basis of a photographic portrait he
looked at frequently in conceiving the production; he felt the clothes made
Einstein “easy to identify,” and moreover, “He seemed a sort of Everyman.
. . . He always said, ‘I’m not extraordinary. I’m just an ordinary man!’ ”86
The two principal actors, the choreographer Childs and long-time Wilson
collaborator Sheryl Sutton, who were featured in each Knee Play and else-
where throughout the opera, also dressed as Einstein. (Additionally, mul-
tiple projected images represent photographs of Einstein at different ages.)
And many of the objects onstage are implicitly connected with Einstein’s
biography, including watches, clocks, and compasses. Certain physical
movements similarly offer points of reference, such as a recurring gesture
mimicking the writing of equations on a chalkboard and a visual gag that
closes Knee Play 4: all of the members of the chorus mimic the act of brush-
ing their teeth rapidly as they sing; they then look toward the audience with
broad smiles and stick out their tongues, in a reference to the famous pho-
tograph of Einstein doing the same. Wilson also constructs some of the
furnishings out of pipes, in reference to Einstein’s suggestion that if he had
the choice to begin a new career once more as a young man, he would be
a plumber rather than a scientist.87 Trains arise frequently in pedagogical
explanations and illustrations of Einstein’s theory of relativity; the space-
ship of course refers to Einstein’s work in this field as well; and the bright
lights toward the end of the opera imply the explosion of an atomic bomb,
a reference to Einstein’s discoveries leading to the splitting of the atom.88
Other images, on the other hand, seem entirely unrelated to Einstein.
The scientist was never on trial, making the courtroom scenes entirely
129
fanciful. And the bed in these sequences is not more than tangentially con-
nected with Einstein’s biography: Wilson has called Einstein a “dreamer,”
but it seems to serve equally as a pun on the French term for courtroom,
“lit-de-justice” (literally, bed of justice).89 Also unrelated is the Witness’s
rapid costume changes that dramatize the story of the kidnapped heiress
Patty Hearst, a series of events that, rather than overlapping with Einstein’s
life, was in the news during the time Wilson and Glass were constructing
the opera.90
During rehearsals, Glass had his sixteen-member chorus practice using
a text comprised only of numbers—counting out rhythmic measure-
ments—and the solfège syllables associated with the pitches they sang,
to help them learn the challenging patterns he had composed for them.
This was meant to be temporary, but when Wilson heard a rehearsal, he
decided to retain this simple “libretto,” and nothing more was written for
the vocal ensemble.91 The other texts in the opera, which are spoken, rather
than sung, by members of the cast, came about through collaboration as
well. Several were written by Christopher Knowles, a disabled young man
Wilson befriended and with whom he had worked on several previous pro-
ductions. One of the most prominent of Knowles’s texts in Einstein on the
Beach offers a stream-of-consciousness litany of potential answers to the
question Wilson posed to Knowles in asking him to write the monologue,
“Who is Einstein?”:92 “It could be Franky it could be Franky it could be very
fresh and clean. /It could be a balloon. /Oh these are the days my friends
and these are the days my friends. /It could get some wind for the sailboat.
/And it could get for it is. /It could get the railroad for these workers.”93
The actor Samuel M. Johnson, who played the role of the judge in the trial
scenes, wrote a pair of humorous texts for his character in the original and
1984 productions in which he starred, the first about the city of Paris and
the second about the women’s liberation movement.94 And Childs wrote a
speech to recite in her role as the Witness in the trial, a short text that she
repeats multiple times about a visit to the swimming accessories aisle of
a super market: “There were all these bathing caps that you could buy /
which had these kind of Fourth of July plumes on them /they were red
and yellow and blue /I wasn’t tempted to buy one /but I was reminded of
the fact that I had been avoiding the beach.”95 This reference to avoiding—
not visiting—the beach is the opera’s only allusion to the beach outside of
its title, and serves to emphasize the obscurity and abstraction the opera
aims at as a work of portraiture.
To the extent that these texts offer insight into Einstein, it is only indi-
rectly. Indeed, the associations between Einstein’s identity and the individual
textual, visual, musical, and choreographic elements of the work are either
extremely obvious (for example in the modeling of the costumes after his
130
typical dress) or highly attenuated. But despite the disparate nature of the
opera’s constituent parts, it is always also stylistically coherent. This charac-
ter, marked by a sort of unity in variety, permits the work to coalesce into
an open representation of an individual self, albeit in postmodern terms.
Knowles’s monologue suggests a spontaneous poetic rumination on
Einstein’s identity in the manner of Gertrude Stein’s abstract literary por-
traits. Johnson’s and Childs’s may trigger the listener’s imagination in the
manner that juxtaposed images in a visual collage inspire the viewer to
draw connections between disparate people, places, and things. Robert
Rauschenberg’s oil and silkscreen portrait of John F. Kennedy Retroactive
II (1964), for example, represents its subject by grouping disparate pho-
tographs of Kennedy, an astronaut, a depiction of a woman peering in a
mirror taken from an Old Master painting, and the wheels of a truck. Most
of the texts in Einstein on the Beach also share a structure that involves
gradually changing, repeated phrases, resembling Glass’s use of additive
processes and incrementally modified rhythmic and harmonic patterns.
Together the texts and score recall Stein’s technique of poetic “insistence,”
the altered repetition that she argued help to represent a subject’s essence
in poetry. The libretto of the opera, brought together by Glass’s stylistically
consistent musical score and the formalist choral text of rhythmic counting
and solfège pitch names, merge to present a view of the self as cohesive but
polyvocal and open to infinitely varied interpretations and constructions,
a multiplicity further depicted onstage by the principal actors and choir
members all dressed as Einstein.96
In writing a portrait opera in so obscure and abstract a style, the cre-
ators of Einstein on the Beach developed a work that explores how identity
emerges out of the mixture of engaged social discourse and inward self-
examination. Wilson has stated, “The reason we make theatre is to ask ‘What
is it?’ That’s why we invite an audience. To have a forum. We want to leave
it open-ended. As soon as you say what it is, it’s closed, it’s finished.”97 The
opera’s performers, too, have described Wilson’s staging and Glass’s music
as providing a time and space onstage for exploring the self. Characterizing
her experience of working with Wilson, Sutton explained, “We felt we were
working as much on the self as on the work. . . . We started with movement
to learn to listen with the body. . . . We were doing research on perception
and communication.”98 The actress Isabelle Huppert, who has performed
in Wilson’s theatrical works in addition to posing for a Voom Portrait, has
written, similarly: “With him, the theater becomes an exploration of one’s
self, a gamble of one’s entire being, an affirmation of one’s joys, pains, fears,
dreams, unattainable and yet so close.”99
Wilson once described Einstein on the Beach by drawing an analogy
between his staging and human anatomy. According to his metaphor, the
13
scenes that take place primarily at the back of the stage evoke a person’s
bones, those at mid-stage are the flesh, and the action in the foreground
is the skin.100 Considered in this way, Einstein on the Beach, taken as a
whole, offers a portrait of Einstein in three-dimensions, in the manner of
a Renaissance book of anatomical engravings such as Johann Remmelin’s
1619 Catoptrum microcosmicum, with flaps that can be opened to show
the layered parts of the body, or the twentieth-century anatomical model
Visible Man, first produced by Renwal Products in 1958, with a clear plas-
tic casing that forms a skin that can be opened to provide access to the
flesh, organs, and bones underneath. Like both Remmelin’s book and the
Visible Man, Einstein on the Beach requires audience participation to reveal
the full scope of its representation, to disassemble and reassemble its rich
portrayal of Einstein. Wilson, Glass, and their collaborators explore the
contemporary notion of the self in Einstein on the Beach, and by working
in a style that presents no easily discernible meanings, they provoke audi-
ences to enter into this open work, to join in the process of interpreting the
nature of identity.
THE KNEE PLAYS, BY WAY OF CONCLUSION
In addition to the analogy he draws to human anatomy, Wilson has

described his staging in Einstein on the Beach in relation to three principal
genres of painting: the Field and Spaceship scenes, which are predomi-
nantly at the rear of the stage, are landscapes; the Trial scenes, with their
action in the middle of the stage, are still lifes; and the Knee Plays, which
take place at the front of the stage, are portraits.101 Understood in this way,
each Knee Play functions as a mise en abyme, a miniature portrait within the
larger portrait opera.102 The first four of the five Knee Plays are performed
in front of a lowered backdrop, with the chorus visible in the pit and the
two principals on a small lit area at the far right (Figure 4.3). This space is
in the shape of a square and projects partly beyond the front of the stage.
The Knee Plays are musically coherent, with particularly close associations
in the scoring of the outer two and the inner three sections. Glass incor-
porates two main themes in the Knee Plays, a low cadential chaconne pro-
gression on the pitches A–G–C descending in the organ in numbers 1 and
5 (Example 4.1), and, in numbers 2, 3, and 4, a cadential melodic theme
in which a pivot chord in the middle of the phrase alters the progression
from what is expected, resulting in a resolution that seems one half-step too
low (Example 4.2). Both of these simple patterns are repeated and modi-
fied rhythmically by way of additive processes throughout the Knee Plays
in which they are heard.103
132
Figure 4.3: Robert Wilson and Philip Glass, “Knee Play 1” from Einstein on the Beach, 2012–2014
revival production. Courtesy of BAM Hamm Archives and the Robert Wilson Archives and the Byrd
Hoffman Water Mill Foundation. © Lucie Jansch.
Example 4.1: Philip Glass, “Knee Play 1,” from Einstein on the Beach, premiered 1976, organ 1 part,
first measure.
Example 4.2: Philip Glass, “Knee Play 2,” from Einstein on the Beach, premiered 1976, solo violin
part, rehearsal 3.
The first Knee Play begins before the audience is permitted into the thea-
ter, to produce the impression that the portrait, like the identity it represents,
is already in progress. At first no one is onstage; the square space is lit to show
a pair of desks, another light shines on a chair elsewhere at the front of the
stage that will be the seat for the violinist dressed as Einstein, and the organ
can be heard playing the cadential chaconne line. Several minutes later the
two principals enter and sit at the desks; they gradually begin to raise their
arms, moving their hands as though operating machinery, and they recite
13
numbers and fragments of the texts by Knowles that will later be heard in full.
One by one the chorus members also enter, filling the pit in front of the smaller
stage, and when they are all assembled, they begin to sing rhythmic numbers
and then solfège pitch names above the three-note organ bass pattern.
The following three Knee Plays are similar to the first, with slight varia-
tion. In the second, for example, the violinist plays a solo part in the chair
off to the left, and at the conclusion, a projection appears on the backdrop
showing a photograph of Einstein and the words “Bern. 1905,” a reference
to the place and year in which the scientist, at the age of twenty-six, pro-
duced a series of path-breaking articles introducing the theory of special
relativity and his famous equation E = mc2.104 In the third Knee Play, in
which the violinist performs again, the principal actors stand with their
backs to the audience and gesture as though making calculations on a
chalkboard. And in the fourth, they lie on plexiglass tables and move as
though floating, an obscure visual reference to an early scientific experi-
ment measuring the speed of light using liquid mercury.105
The fifth Knee Play of Einstein on the Beach, the final section of the
opera, occupies the entire stage, linking foreground, middleground, and
background as though to conclude the work with a single image that puts
a portrait of Einstein in a larger context of still life and landscape, or to
produce a final three-dimensional sculpture of Einstein depicting skin,
flesh, and bones (Figure 4.4). The two principal actors sit on a park bench,
the lighting indicating nighttime, repeating numbers and lines from the
Figure 4.4: Robert Wilson and Philip Glass, “Knee Play 5” from Einstein on the Beach, 2012–2014
revival production. Courtesy of BAM Hamm Archives and the Robert Wilson Archives and the Byrd
Hoffman Water Mill Foundation. © Lucie Jansch.
134
texts by Knowles recited earlier in the opera. The audience hears excerpts
including “Oh these are the days my friend” and “Do you remember Hans
the bus driver?” as a stage flat in the form of a bus slowly enters from
the right. The music in this scene looks back to the earlier Knee Plays,
incorporating the cadential bass line and choral singing from Knee Play
1 and a violin theme from Knee Play 4. The bus driver (is it Hans?), also
played by Samuel M. Johnson in the premiere and first revival, recites a
text Johnson wrote for the opera; it is “the old, old story of love,” and
recounts an evening conversation between a man and a woman.106 This
final Knee Play, which relates to what came before while also featuring
a new text and a rare emphasis on coherent narrative, offers concluding
thoughts on Einstein, identity, and the relativity that binds art forms and
individuals together.107
The bus driver begins his story by setting the scene: “Two lovers sat on
a park bench, with their bodies touching each other, holding hands in the
moonlight.”108 The woman asks her beau how much he loves her, and he
responds with a series of metaphors: “Count the stars in the sky. Measure
the waters of the oceans with a teaspoon.”109 Toward the conclusion of this
conversation, in which the woman’s anxieties and the man’s profession of
unbounded love recall the emotional extremes of a couple’s relationship in
“Transfigured Night” (Verklärte Nacht), the 1896 poem by Richard Dehmel
that inspired Arnold Schoenberg’s expressionist string sextet of 1899, the
man tells his beloved, “Everything must have an ending except my love for
you.”110 This suggestion of eternity and cyclicality finds its match in the
opera’s form, the repetitive physical movements of its choreography, the
recurrence of its principal imagery, and the reiterated musical themes. It also
echoes the sentiment of Knowles’s line “Oh these are the days my friends
and these are the days my friends,” with its duplicative wording and refer-
ence to the refrain of the Mary Hopkin song “Those Were the Days” (1969),
“Those were the days my friend /We thought they’d never end /We’d sing
and dance forever and a day.” But the reference to eternity also implies the
apparently arbitrary quality of the end of this portrait of Einstein; in a man-
ner that resembles the abrupt endings of Glass’s later portrait of Chuck Close
and Thomson’s of Buffie Johnson and recalls the decision to start the opera
before the audience has assembled in the theater, this line might imply that
as long as people persist in thinking and talking about Einstein, his identity
will remain in construction and continue to develop.
The bus driver concludes his story with the words, “Once more her voice
was heard. ‘Kiss me, John,’ she implored. And leaning over, he pressed his
lips warmly to hers in fervent osculation.”111 In the most immediate sense,
the word “osculation” here denotes the act of kissing, the display of the
affection that relates these two lovers. But osculation also has a meaning in
135
the field of geometry, in which it describes the contact between two curved
lines or surfaces at a shared tangent. Taken this way, “osculation” might
imply the point of intersection of two sets of train tracks or the orbits of two
spaceships like those represented in the opera’s earlier scenes. It might also
connote the bending of rays of light in a gravitational field and the curve of
spacetime in Einstein’s theory of relativity. The final word of this portrait
opera could furthermore be taken to indicate, more abstractly, an aesthetic
and social theory of relativity, a meeting at a shared tangent point between
both the multiple art forms that combine in this opera, and the identities
of the audience members with those of the people with whom they have
spent the foregoing four or five hours, Einstein, Wilson, Glass, and Childs.
This view of relativity as the intersecting of the orbits of individuals’ lives
permits the two women onstage, one white and one black, to represent
at the same time Einstein himself, the pair of young lovers the bus driver
describes, and the Everyman figure Wilson mentioned in characterizing his
costume design.
The director and playwright Richard Foreman has described Wilson’s
theater as offering its audiences the opportunity to contemplate their own
reflections:
Wilson is one of a small number of artists who seem to have applied a very different
aesthetic to theatre—one current among advanced painters, musicians, dancers, and
filmmakers—a non-manipulative aesthetic which would see art create a “field” situation
within which the spectator can examine himself (as perceptor) in relation to the “discov-
eries” the artist has made within his medium.112
In similar but vaguer terms, the literary and cultural critic Julia Kristeva
has also described how Wilson’s art allows the spectator to explore his
own sense of self and how it relates to the content of the work and to
Wilson’s identity, particularly in the way Wilson borrows from and
merges multiple media in his creations. As a member of the commit-
tee that awarded him a prize for sculpture at 1993 Venice Biennale,
Kristeva wrote:
Clearly the traditional categories—painting, sculpture, stagecraft, etc.—no longer cor-

respond to reality. Personally, I think this is due to the crisis in our psychic space and the
borders that separate the object and the subject. In the same way that there is a breaking
down of the boundaries between objects, there is an intrication of the roles of the artist
and the spectator, erasing the borders between the self and the other. This lack of differ-
entiation can have a dramatic effect on some people: loss of self, hallucinations, etc. But
it can also give rise to jubilation, because it creates a sense of osmosis with Being, the
Absolute.113
136
Wilson enacts this “breaking down of boundaries” among art forms,

between artist and viewer, and between self and other in works that bring
ordinary spectators of art face-to-face with arresting images of cultural and
intellectual icons of the past century, as though to propose a theory of rel-
ativity that associates disparate people and different aesthetic media. The
portraits’ lack of representational specificity—their nature as open works
of art—invites audiences to discover the points at which their own selves
intersect with and orbit past those of people whose ubiquitous and austere
likenesses they see every day but whom they are not liable to encounter in
person.
When pressed to explain what his work means, Wilson has said, “You
can look at a portrait by Rembrandt and be overwhelmed by its meaning-
fulness and not be able to tell what it means. The conviction of meaningful-
ness is all that was necessary for me. . . . It’s not a question of what Einstein
means, it’s that it’s meaningful.”114 The full implications of the representa-
tion of a celebrity in a work of portraiture may remain obscure, much as the
precise meanings of the terms on either side of the equal sign in E = mc2
are likely to be unknown to the average viewer. But in Einstein’s famous
equation it is nevertheless evident that an important equivalency has been
expressed, an identity forged, and the same is true of the portrait, no matter
how abstract its terms.
NOTES
1. Quoted in Sandra Kemp, Future Face: Image, Identity, Innovation (London: Profile,
2004), 124.
2. Stephen K. Scher, in a deft layering of puns, calls Renaissance portrait medals “the cur-
rency of fame” in the title of his book on the subject, and argues that for those who coveted
fame during the era, the portrait medal seemed an ideal form of representation, as it was
thought to portray “a wealth of information” about its subject in a reproducible and dura-
ble form that rendered lasting fame and recognition. Stephen K. Scher (ed.), The Currency
of Fame: Portrait Medals of the Renaissance (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 13.
3. Aristotle, The Poetics of Aristotle, trans. Preston H. Epps (Chapel Hill, NC: University of
North Carolina Press, 1970), Book XV, 30–1.
4. Up to this point, the character Mao Tse-tung has come across as physically and mentally
hobbled by age, requiring the assistance of a trio of aides to help him move in and out of
rooms and to clarify his abstruse statements. Meanwhile Mao’s wife Jiang Qing, known as
Madame Mao, has assumed her husband’s mantle in his frailty: “I am the wife of Mao Tse-
Tung. . . . When I appear the people hang upon my words.”
5. The conflicting capacities of portraiture to both reveal and obscure character is the central
subject of Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). In Wilde’s narrative, the
painted likeness of the attractive young Gray appears to age—and, more significantly, to
take on the signs of his poverty of character—while he himself remains fresh-faced as the
years pass, as though the portrait contains the real life while the man has become nothing
more than his own idealized representation, a likeness that depicts no sign of the cruelty,
137
selfishness, and evil that develop within his soul. At one stage Gray looks at his face in a
hand-mirror and, distraught at the torment he has brought to his acquaintances, reacts
with violence against the looking glass that shows only his physical perfection and
obscures his cruel character: “Then he loathed his own beauty, and flinging the mirror
on the floor crushed it into silver splinters beneath his heel” Oscar Wilde, The Picture
of Dorian Gray [(Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz)], 282. Gray’s act of cracking the mirror
offered the only way to make its representation of his unchanging appearance reveal the
fractures within his soul. At the end of the novel, however, Gray takes a reverse tack, and
attempts to stab the painting and destroy what it reveals about his interior self; but he is
subsequently found deceased, his body old and decrepit, beside his portrait, which now
depicts him in his dashing youth, putting right the inversion of the subject and its repre-
sentation but also unveiling an idealized depiction that shows only its subject’s exagger-
ated beauty and betrays nothing of his immorality. See the discussion of the function of
portraiture in this novel in Michal Peled Ginsburg, Portrait Stories (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2015), 97–108; A. S. Byatt, Portraits in Fiction (London: Chatto and
Windus, 2001), 56–64.
6. Robert Wilson, “Interview about Lady Gaga and Her Portraits,” YouTube, April 4, 2015,
video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=an3OAM_fAHA.
7. Robert Wilson and Umberto Eco, “Robert Wilson and Umberto Eco: A Conversation,”
Performing Arts Journal, 15.1 ( January 1993): 91. Wilson has also described the distinc-
tion between appearance and identity as relating to a person’s “exterior screen,” the aspect
of a person that one sees, and “interior screen,” the realm in which an individual pro-
cesses external reality through perception, dreams, and intuition. Arthur Holmberg, The
Theatre of Robert Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 156; Laurence
Shyer, Robert Wilson and His Collaborators (New York: Theatre Communications Group,
1989), 76.
8. Wilson, “Interview about Lady Gaga.” Most of the multimedia portraits in this set are
based on iconic painted portraits, Andrea Solari’s “The Head of St. John Baptist” (1507),
Jacques-Louis David’s “The Death of Marat” (1793), and Jean-Auguste-Dominique
Ingres’s “Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière” (1870). An additional portrait, not based on an
earlier model, depicts Lady Gaga naked, bound, and hanging upside down. Peter Weibel
relates Wilson’s video portraits based on famous paintings to the tradition of tableaux
vivants, the eighteenth-century traditional of creating “living images” in which people
reenacted the poses of paintings and sculptures. Peter Weibel, “Robert Wilson’s Video
Portraits,” in Peter Weibel, Harald Falckenberg, and Matthew Shattuck (eds.), Robert
Wilson: Video Portraits (Cologne: Walther König, 2011), 118–23.
9. Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1989), 4, 21.
10. Wilson and Eco, “Robert Wilson and Umberto Eco,” 87.
11. Shyer, Robert Wilson and His Collaborators, xix, xviii.
12. Wilson and Eco, “Robert Wilson and Umberto Eco,” 89–90.
13. Jonathan Kalb, “Robert Wilson, Beckett and a Celebrity from the Neck Up,” New York
Times, January 30, 2007. Wilson created a number of his portraits of celebrities accord-
ing to the arrangement that he would provide one copy to the subject in exchange
for permission to sell another two. He has made others on commission, for a fee of
$150,000. Bob Colacello, “The Subject as Star,” Vanity Fair, November 6, 2006. For dis-
cussion of Wilson’s collaboration with Voom HD Networks, see Ali Hossaini, “New-
Definition Television: Robert Wilson’s Video Portraits,” in Weibel, Falckenberg, and
Shattuck, Robert Wilson: Video Portraits, 174–85; Matthew Shattuck, “Interview with
Noah Khoshbin,” in Weibel, Falckenberg, and Shattuck, Robert Wilson: Video Portraits,
188–93.
14. Tom Chen and Kyle Chayka, “Robert Wilson on Bringing Robert Downey Jr. and Boris
the Porcupine to Times Square’s Jumbotrons,” Blouin ARTINFO, May 21, 2012, video,
www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/805671/v ideo-robert-w ilson-on-bringing-robert-
downey-jr-and-boris-the-porcupine-to-times-squares-jumbotrons.
138
15. Colacello, “Subject as Star.”

16. Roland Barthes, “The Face of Garbo,” in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1972, orig. 1957), 56, 57. Huppert has said, “the portrait is a tribute to a time
when actresses fabricated their faces with a high degree of self-consciousness.” Isabelle
Huppert, “The Time between Fixity and Motion,” trans. Alexandra Schwartz, in Margery
Arent Safir (ed.), Robert Wilson from Within (Paris: Arts Arena, 2011), 85.
17. Barthes, “The Face of Garbo,” 57.
18. Christopher Innes and Maria Shevtsova, The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Directing
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 161.
19. Robert Wilson, “A Still Life is a Real Life,” in Weibel, Falckenberg, and Shattuck, Robert
Wilson: Video Portraits, 9.
22. Debra Miller, “Screen Tests: A History,” in Patrick Remy and Marc Parent (eds.),
Gerard Malanga: Screen Tests, Portraits, Nudes 1964–1996 (Göttingen: Steidl, 2000),
25; J. J. Murphy, The Black Hole of the Camera: The Films of Andy Warhol (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2012), 2. Around five hundred films were made for the
Screen Tests series; among the more famed subjects were Susan Sontag, Dennis Hopper,
Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, and Salvador Dalí. A comprehensive catalogue of these
works has been assembled in Callie Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy
Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, vol. I (New York: Harry N. Abrams and Whitney Museum
of Art, 2006). Malanga also wrote poems to accompany a number of the Screen Tests.
These operate in the manner of abstract literary portraits. Fifty-four of the poems are
published beside stills from their corresponding films, in Gerard Malanga and Andy
Warhol, Screen Tests/A Diary (New York: Kulchur Press, 1967). A broader survey of
portraiture and self-portraiture in art cinema, including discussion of Warhol’s Screen
Tests, can be found in Paul Young, Art Cinema, ed. Paul Duncan (Cologne: Taschen,
2009), 149–64.
23. Miller, “Screen Tests,” 25.
24. Warhol’s words were recalled by Gene Youngblood. Joseph D. Ketner, II, “Image
Machine: Andy Warhol & Photography,” in Joseph D. Ketner, II (ed.), Image Machine: Andy
Warhol & Photography (Cincinnati: Contemporary Arts Center; Nürnberg: Verlag für
Moderne Kunst; New York: Andy Warhol Foundation, 2012), 49.
25. Fred Inglis, A Short History of Celebrity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010),
187. On the contrast between public constructions of celebrity identities and the private
sense of self, see also Chris Rojek, Celebrity (London: Reaktion, 2001), 10–11; Richard
Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2004, orig.
1986), 4; Graeme Turner, Understanding Celebrity, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage,
2014, orig. 2004), 10, 44–5. On the central role of photography in celebrity portraiture
since the age of the Daguerreotype, see Rojek, Celebrity, 125–8.
26. For a study of the way Warhol and other pop artists handle this perceived distinction in
portraiture, see Paul Moorhouse, Pop Art Portraits (London: National Portrait Gallery,
2007), 97–9, 106.
27. Lee Siegel, “On the Face of It,” in Donna Gustafson and Susan Sidlauskas (eds.), Striking
Resemblance: The Changing Art of Portraiture (New Brunswick, NJ: Zimmerli Art Museum
at Rutgers University; London: Prestel, 2014), 65.
28. Ketner, II, “Image Machine,” 49.
29. Murphy, Black Hole of the Camera, 2–3.
30. Siegel, “On the Face of It,” 64.
31. Robert Wilson and Tom Waits, “Robert Downey Jr.,” Dissident Industries Inc., 2004, video
www.dissidentusa.com/robert-wilson/subjects/robert-downey-jr/.
32. On Rembrandt’s painting and the practice of anatomical dissections, see Anthony Bailey,
Rembrandt’s House: Exploring the World of the Great Master (London: Tauris Parke, 2014;
orig. Boston: Houghton Mifflin; London: J. M. Dent, 1978), 88–103. Nicola Suthor
observes that Downey’s pose and loincloth also recreate those in Hans Holbein’s “The
Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb” (1521), a resemblance that makes Downey into a
139
kind of Christ figure, sacrificed for the sins of the participants in modern-day celebrity cul-
ture. Nicola Suthor, “Role Models,” in Weibel, Falckenberg, and Shattuck, Robert Wilson:
Video Portraits, 164–5.
33. Jay S. Jacobs, Wild Years: The Music and Myth of Tom Waits (Toronto: ECW Press,
2000), 198–9.
34. Robert Wilson and Michael Galasso, “Winona Ryder,” Dissident Industries Inc., 2004,
video, www.dissidentusa.com/robert-wilson/subjects/winona-r yder/. When exhibited
at the Paul Cooper Gallery in New York, the portrait of Winona Ryder was displayed in
monumental form, at fifteen by twenty-seven feet. Kalb, “Robert Wilson.”
35. Weibel interprets the inexpressive stares of Wilson’s subjects in the context of Denis
Diderot’s 1773 treatise The Paradox of the Actor, in Weibel, “Robert Wilson’s Video Portraits,”
128–31.
36. Wilson has always admired Beckett’s theater, and at an early stage in his career seriously con-
sidered putting on a production of Happy Days, though he did not follow through at the time.
Holmberg, Theatre of Robert Wilson, 68. He did later stage the play—his first time directing
Beckett—in 2008, in a French-language production at the Grand Théâtre de Luxembourg
starring Adriana Asti. He also directed Beckett’s one-man play Krapp’s Last Tape in 2009.
37. Samuel Beckett, Happy Days: A Play in Two Acts (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 45.
38. Beckett, Happy Days, 7.
39. On Winnie’s literary references, see S. E. Gontarski, Beckett’s Happy Days: A Manuscript
Study (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Libraries, 1977), 62–73.
40. Katharine Worth, Waiting for Godot and Happy Days: Text and Performance (Houndmills,
UK, and London: Macmillan, 1990), 44.
42. For a discussion of Beckett’s notion of eternal recurrence as it influenced Happy Days, see
Worth, Waiting for Godot and Happy Days, 50–1.
44. Beckett, Happy Days, 8, 15.
45. See, for example, Stephen M. Silverman, “Winona Ryder Finally Speaks Out About Her
Arrest,” People, July 17, 2007; Chelsea White, “Why My Shoplifting Arrest Was the Best
Thing that Could Have Happened to Me,” Daily Mail, May 17, 2013.
47. Beckett, Happy Days, 18, 10; Gontarski, Beckett’s Happy Days, 63.
51. Beckett, Happy Days, 64. In light of the connection between Winnie and Ryder and more
broadly between Happy Days and the contemporary condition of celebrity, these lyrics
bring to mind actress Sally Field’s elation as she collected the Academy Award in 1984,
declaring, “You like me! You really like me!”
52. For a discussion of authenticity of expression and the use of lip-sync to familiar voices in
film and television, see Joshua S. Walden, “Lip-Sync in Lipstick: 1950s Popular Songs in
a Television Series by Dennis Potter,” Journal of Musicological Research 27.2 (April 2008):
169–95.
53. Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues, ed. Georges Duthuit (London: John Calder,
1965), 103. Originally published as Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit, “Three
Dialogues: Tal Coat—Masson—Van Velde,” Transition 49.5 (December 1949): 97–103.
54. Wilson has stated, “For me, interpretation is not the responsibility of the author or the
director: it is the public’s responsibility.” Katharina Otto-Bernstein, Absolute Wilson: The
Biography (London: Prestel, 2006), 159.
56. Other twentieth-and twenty-first-century works in the genre of the portrait opera include Hans
Pfitzner’s Palestrina (premiered 1917), Paul Hindemith’s Mathis der Mahler (1933–1934),
Peter Maxwell Davies’s Taverner (1962–1968, rev. 1970), Olivier Messiaen’s Saint François
d’Assise (1975–1983), Kaija Saariaho’s Émilie (about Émilie du Châtelet, 2008), and Osvaldo
Golijov’s Ainadamar (about the Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, 2003).
140
57. Philip Glass, Words without Music (London: Liveright, 2015), 372.
58. Katharina Otto- Bernstein (dir.), Absolute Wilson, HBO Documentary Films
(New York: New Yorker Video, 2007), DVD.
59. Otto-Bernstein (dir.), Absolute Wilson. On the notion of Einstein as a “mythic god who is
known generally by the man on the street,” see also Mark Obenhaus (dir.), Einstein on the
Beach: The Changing Image of Opera, Brooklyn Academy of Music (Los Angeles: Direct
Cinema, 1987), video.
60. Philip Glass, Music by Philip Glass, ed. Robert T. Jones (New York: Da Capo, 1987), 32.
61. Obenhaus (dir.), Einstein on the Beach.
62. Glass, Music by Philip Glass, 35. Glass’s interest in creating open works of theater was
inspired by his experience with the texts of Samuel Beckett, which he encountered when
he was invited to write music for a production of Beckett’s Play by the Mabou Mines the-
ater in Paris. See Glass, Music by Philip Glass, 35–7.
63. Wim Mertens, American Minimal Music: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip
Glass, trans. J. Hautekiet (London: Kahn and Averill; White Plains, NY: Pro/Am Music
Resources, 1983), 81.
64. Robert Stearns, “Robert Wilson: From a Theater of Images,” in Contemporary Arts Center
(Cincinnati, Ohio) and Byrd Hoffman Foundation, Robert Wilson: The Theater of Images
(New York: Harper, 1984), 43.
65. Roland Barthes, “The Brain of Einstein,” in Mythologies, 69.
66. Arthur Holmberg also associates Einstein on the Beach with a metaphorical conception of
Einstein’s theory of relativity, in Holmberg, Theatre of Robert Wilson, 11. Katharina Otto-
Bernstein relates the new ways of understanding time provoked by Einstein’s theory of
relativity to Wilson’s innovative manipulation of the experience of time in his stage shows.
Otto-Bernstein, Absolute Wilson, 146.
67. Glass, Music by Philip Glass, 27–8. On the creation of the work, see also Shyer, Robert
Wilson and His Collaborators, 213–27; Glass, Words without Music, 283–8.
68. Glass, Music By Philip Glass, 28–9.
69. Glass, Music By Philip Glass, 29.
70. For a detailed discussion of this performance history, see Maria Shevtsova, Robert Wilson
(New York: Routledge, 2007), 83–8; Glass, Words without Music, 292–301; Glass, Music
by Philip Glass, 40–56.
71. Glass, Music By Philip Glass, 29.
72. Shyer, Robert Wilson and His Collaborators, 215.
73. Shyer, Robert Wilson and His Collaborators, 215. Glass has described his portrait operas as
based in part on his undergraduate studies in the Great Books curriculum at the University
of Chicago. See Glass, Words without Music, 33–4.
74. Glass, Music by Philip Glass, 29. On Wilson’s visual books, see Shevtsova, Robert Wilson, 42.
75. The title is likely a reference to the futuristic 1957 novel On the Beach, by Nevil Shute, set
in Australia following a nuclear apocalypse caused by World War III. Glass, Words without
Music, 286.
76. Glass, Music by Philip Glass, 30, 33.
78. Otto-Bernstein, Absolute Wilson, 146.
82. On the music for the opera, see Glass, Music by Philip Glass, 57–62; Keith Potter, Four
Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), 326–38. For a detailed discussion of the electronic
organs used in the premiere of Einstein on the Beach and its recordings and revivals, see
Rob Haskins, “Philip Glass and Michael Riesman: Two Interviews,” Musical Quarterly
86.3 (Autumn 2002): 520–4.
83. Glass, Music by Philip Glass, 28; Potter, Four Musical Minimalists, 258–60. On Glass’s stud-
ies with Shankar and Rakha, see William Duckworth, Talking Music: Conversations with
14
John Cage, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, and Five Generations of American Experimental
Composers (New York: Schirmer, 1995), 330–1.
84. Glass, Music by Philip Glass, 38.
85. Glass, Music by Philip Glass, 58–9. For further discussion by Glass, see Glass, Words with-
out Music, 288–9.
86. Stefan Brecht, The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978),
370–1. Wilson also modeled the position of the fingers of many of his actors after the way
Einstein holds his hands in this photograph. The image is reproduced, with a descriptive
blurb by Wilson, in Robert Wilson, “From Within,” in Safir, Robert Wilson from Within, 313.
87. Holmberg, Theatre of Robert Wilson, 11.
88. David Cunningham, “Einstein on the Beach (1977),” in Richard Kostelanetz (ed.),
Writings on Glass: Essays, Interviews, Criticism (New York: Schirmer, 1997), 152–3, 158.
Cunningham interprets the Field as a reference not to a field of grass or grains but to the
metaphorical use of the word field to describe an area of science.
89. Cunningham, “Einstein on the Beach (1977),” 163.
90. Shyer, Robert Wilson and His Collaborators, 227. Other elements of the drama appear to
refer to aspects of Wilson’s own life. His sister Suzanne Wilson suggests that the judge’s
glance at his watch is a memory of their father, a lawyer who was always punctual, and that
the multiple scenes in which women sit in chairs recall their mother, who frequently sat in
silence in their home. She also interprets the shaking head of one of the actors as a refer-
ence to their mother’s palsy. Otto-Bernstein, Absolute Wilson, 146.
91. Wilson and Glass associated this formalist use of numbers and pitch names as choral text
with the work of contemporary artists like Jasper Johns, for whom, in Glass’s words, “the
painting is not the depiction of the thing, the painting is the thing.” Shyer, Robert Wilson
and His Collaborators, 227.
92. Wilson recalls this interaction in Obenhaus (dir.), Einstein on the Beach.
94. Glass, Music by Philip Glass, 68–70.
95. Glass, Music by Philip Glass, 74–5.
96. Frederik J. Ruf writes that the overlapping abstract texts that make up the opera’s libretto
“present a consistent model for the self.” Frederik J. Ruf, Entangled Voices: Genre and the
Religious Construction of the Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 67.
97. Ruf, Entangled Voices, 72–3. For a similar statement, see Wilson, “From Within,” 317.
98. Holmberg, Theatre of Robert Wilson, 4.
99. Huppert, “Time between Fixity and Motion,” 75.
100. Cunningham, “Einstein on the Beach (1977),” 153.
101. Glass, Music by Philip Glass, 33; Cunningham, “Einstein on the Beach (1977),” 153.
102. The term mise en abyme refers to the technique by which works of art turn their focus
back on themselves, reproducing within their structures a miniature version of their sub-
ject matter or form. Examples include the convex mirror in Jan van Eyck’s “The Arnolfini
Portrait” (1434) that offers a different perspective on the room depicted in the painting;
the tragic drama “The Murder of Gonzago” performed by the players in Shakespeare’s
Hamlet, Act 3, scene 2 (c. 1599–1601) that reflects elements of Hamlet’s plot; and the
operatic scenes staged in the revised version of Paul Hindemith’s opera Cardillac (1952,
orig. 1926). Meaning “placed into abyss,” the French phrase originates in heraldry, in
which context it referred to the duplication within a shield of a small representation of a
second shield with the same image. André Gide introduced the concept into art criticism
in 1893. On mise en abyme, see Lucien Dällenbach, The Mirror in the Text, trans. Jeremy
Whiteley and Emma Hughes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 7–19. On the
use of the technique in Cardillac, see Hermann Danuser, “Self-Representation in Music:
The Case of Hindemith’s Meta-Opera Cardillac,” trans. J. Bradford Robinson, in Joshua S.
Walden (ed.), Representation in Western Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2013), 224–46. In the case of Einstein on the Beach, the use of the term in this context
refers to the Knee Plays as a series of miniature portraits of Einstein within the larger por-
trait of Einstein produced by the opera as a whole.
142
103. Glass, Music by Philip Glass, 60–1. Glass published a more detailed analysis in the Winter
1978 issue of Performing Arts Journal. This is reprinted in part in Brecht, Theatre of Visions,
317–18.
104. In the revivals, the projection read, “Bern, Switzerland. 1905.” The image of Einstein play-
ing violin alongside references to the scientific calculations that would contribute to the
splitting of the atom also recalls Bob Dylan’s lyrics about Einstein: “Now you would not
think to look at him/But he was famous long ago/For playing the electric violin/On
Desolation Row.” To take the analogy a step further, the score of simple counting and
solfège syllables sung by a chorus dressed as Einstein resonates with Dylan’s image of an
“immaculately frightful” Einstein “reciting the alphabet.” Bob Dylan, “Desolation Row,” in
Highway 61 Revisited, Warner Bros. Inc., 1965; renewed Special Rider Music, 1993.
105. Brecht, Theatre of Visions, 353. Wilson’s description of this experiment in an interview
about Einstein on the Beach is vague; he might be referring to the work in the late nine-
teenth century of Edward Morley and Albert Michelson, whose findings, some have
argued, were influential to Einstein in developing his theory of special relativity.
107. For the full text of Knee Play 5, see Glass, Music by Philip Glass, 78–9.
112. Shyer, Robert Wilson and His Collaborators, xviii.
113. Shevtsova, Robert Wilson, 3.
143
Epilogue
Musical Portraiture, the Posthumous,
and the Posthuman
I wonder whether one oftener learns to love real objects through their representations, or the rep-
resentations through the real objects.
—George Eliot, Daniel Deronda1
T his book has addressed works of musical portraiture written since

the middle of the twentieth century, viewing how composers have
experimented in the genre as a means of exploring the capacity of music
to operate as a representational medium, and the ways music can be used
to portray the abstract elements of human identity that are understood to
form a person’s individual self. In the portraits considered in the foregoing
chapters, composers depict their friends and colleagues, they pay homage
to important figures who came before them and to contemporary celebri-
ties, and they also represent themselves. As portraits of painters, compos-
ers, writers, actors, and celebrities, these works depend on metaphors that
forge intersections between modes of representation in music and in other
aesthetic media including literature and painting, and also demonstrate
how art forms merge together to operate in multimedia representations.
In depicting the identities of the individuals named or suggested in
their titles, musical portraits and self-portraits may help guide us closer
to an understanding of the seemingly ineffable but forceful bond between
music and the human self. This epilogue brings this study to its conclu-
sion by examining how musical portraiture has been used to represent
people after death, in depictions of posthumous identities, and how it has
operated in a realm beyond the human, in ways that involve what have
144
been called posthuman subjectivities, including those that entail a living

body that has undergone significant technological modification. In the
case of the former, the musical portrait is used to depict and even reani-
mate the deceased in a way that might recall Leon Battista Alberti’s state-
ment on portraiture and immortality, quoted in the introduction to this
book: “Painting contains a divine force which not only makes absent men
present . . . but moreover makes the dead seem almost alive.”2 In the case
of the latter, the self that the posthuman portraitist represents is an entity
that has lost the independence that characterized it in humanist thought.
According to critical theorist N. Katherine Hayles, “The posthuman sub-
ject is an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components . . . whose
boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction.”3 Andy
Clark views this contemporary self as “a rough-and-tumble, control-sharing
coalition of processes—some neural, some bodily, some technological—
and an ongoing drive to tell a story, to paint a picture in which ‘I’ am the
central player.”4 The posthuman musical portrait represents an identity as
embedded in a network of tightly knit but perpetually changing relation-
ships with humans, other species, machines, and the nonliving, and the
stark division previously understood to separate the self and the other has
lost its fixity and become permeable.5
To investigate how the musical portrait has been used to represent post-
humous and posthuman selves, the epilogue explores two case studies in
contrasting media. It first examines the music of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958
movie Vertigo, to consider how Bernard Herrmann’s soundtrack operates
as a musical portrait of a person seemingly possessed by the spirit of a
deceased woman.6 It then turns to a more recent instance of musical por-
traiture, grounded in the relationship of the living not with the dead but
with machines, by addressing the sound portraits created by the artist Neil
Harbisson, a man who identifies himself as a cyborg and produces sonic
constructions of people he encounters with the aid of a sensory antenna
that extends from the back of his skull.7
Listening to musical portraits that bring together human, posthumous,
and posthuman identities, and considering what these portraits might
reveal about how we employ music to portray the identities of the dead, as
well as how we let machines depict us through music, offers a final oppor-
tunity to enrich our understanding of the ways music operates as a medium
of portraiture. In both of these unusual instances of musical portraiture,
the visual sense is suggested to be a faulty mode of determining identity
because of its capacity to mislead the viewer, or even to fail altogether to
produce a complete and reliable image. It is finally sound and hearing that
are proposed as replacements for visual representation and sight in the con-
struction of the contemporary self.
145
Epilo g u e ( 145 )
“CAN’T YOU SEE?”
Hitchcock’s Vertigo is a multimedia study of portraiture and the social and

aesthetic construction of the identities of the living and the dead in text,
image, and music. The first half of the film follows the story of a retired
police detective, Scottie ( James Stewart), as he accepts a commission from
his old friend Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) to follow Madeleine (Kim
Novak), a mysterious blonde Scottie believes to be Elster’s wife. Something
is wrong with Madeleine’s sense of self: her identity has evidently become
possessed by the spirit of her deceased great-grandmother Carlotta Valdes.
(It is later revealed that this is, of course, a trick, and the gullible Scottie is
being set up to witness Elster’s murder of another woman who is actually
his wife, but to think that he has instead seen Madeleine’s suicide.)
Scottie follows Madeleine through the streets and alleys of San Francisco;
she leads him on a detour to the dead woman’s grave in the cemetery gar-
dens of Mission Dolores, and finally to the Palace of the Legion of Honor,
an art museum located in a neoclassical temple perched on a hillside over-
looking the bay. There she settles onto a bench in front of a grand portrait of
a woman in a lilac dress, her hair in a chignon, who holds a bouquet of roses
and wears a large gold and ruby necklace. The portrait depicts Carlotta
Valdes (Figure E.1).
Scottie notes that Madeleine’s hair has been arranged in the same way
as Carlotta’s, and that she has brought with her a similar bouquet. In this
scene, the score introduces new material into the soundtrack that will
return at key moments throughout the film as a leitmotif indicating the
specter of Carlotta Valdes (Example E.1). This musical passage, played by
Figure E.1: Kim Novak in Vertigo, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Paramount Pictures, 1958.
146
Example E.1: Bernard Herrmann, Carlotta’s leitmotif, from Vertigo, 1958, dir. Alfred Hitchcock.
David Cooper, Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo: A Film Score Handbook (Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 2001), 20.
a small ensemble, features the harp performing a distinctive rhythm, the

pattern associated with the habanera, the dance form named for Havana,
Cuba, and made popular in Spain. The rhythm is familiar to many listen-
ers from Georges Bizet’s incorporation of it into his aria “L’amour est un
oiseau rebelle” (Love is a Rebellious Bird) for an earlier, operatic femme
fatale, Carmen. This pattern maintains the single pitch D, serving as a pedal
tone that restrains the motif from harmonic development and instead
keeps it eerily static. Alongside the strumming, flutes play a repeating pat-
tern of oozing half steps, ascending and descending in oscillation to cre-
ate a ghostly impression that is compounded by the quiet resonance of the
vibraphone that plays like distant cemetery bells and the muffled violins
performed with the bow over the fingerboard, a technique that creates an
effect that recalls a whistling draft of wind.8 A G♯ in the melodic flute pat-
terns, the raised fourth scale degree above the pedal D, gestures toward fla-
menco scales and combines with the habanera pattern to paint a picture of
Carlotta’s Hispanic origins and exotic, seductive eroticism. But the motif ’s
spare melodic material also bears a striking resemblance to the swooningly
romantic leitmotif introduced earlier in the film to refer to Madeleine, and
the harp’s pulsing mimics a simpler repeated rhythmic pattern used previ-
ously to create suspense as Scottie followed Madeleine in his car. In this way
the leitmotif for Carlotta links the two women together, as a sort of com-
posite musical portrait that depicts both characters as sharing one identity.9
In the second half of the movie, Scottie believes Madeleine has suffered
a sudden and violent death. He had fallen in love with her in the interven-
ing scenes, and he now laments her loss to the point of distraction, until
147
Epilo g u e ( 147 )
he encounters a young brunette named Judy Barton (also Kim Novak).

Taking Judy to a department store and beauty parlor, he dresses her in a
suit like Madeleine’s and has her hair dyed blonde and put up in a chignon,
transforming her so that she will adopt the appearance of the woman he
loved, and thereby, he hopes, somehow embody that woman’s identity.10
Scottie’s behavior recalls Alberti’s dictum on portraiture: he wants to
bring the dead back to life by making Judy into a kind of living portrait
of Madeleine, much as Madeleine had once seemingly given new life to
Carlotta’s identity by treating herself as a canvas upon which to recreate
the woman’s likeness.
Standing before a vanity mirror to prepare to go out to dine on the eve-
ning of her makeover as Madeleine, Judy asks for Scottie’s help with the
clasp of her necklace. He obliges, fumbling; but when he looks up and wit-
nesses her likeness in the mirror’s reflection, he recognizes the necklace as a
reproduction of the one Carlotta wears in her portrait. Suddenly, the audi-
ence hears a return of the Carlotta leitmotif, characterized by its strummed
habanera rhythm, and sees a montage of the two visual representations that
Scottie has put together in his mind’s eye, the portrait of Carlotta that he
recalls from the first day he saw Madeleine, and the mirror image of Judy he
stands in front of.11
The last words Scottie heard Judy say before his discovery were: “Can’t
you see?” Judy was asking if he could see how to work the clasp, but she was
also articulating what many in the audience might by this point have been
attempting to shout at Scottie through the screen for several minutes: can’t
you see that Judy and Madeleine are the same woman? And one might just
as effectively have asked “Can’t you hear?” because the leitmotif acts as a
musical portrait that makes order out of the chaos of visual likenesses pil-
ing upon one another in the narrative and in Scottie’s consciousness. The
habanera rhythm demonstrates that what has seemed to be three women
was in fact a trio of visual representations obscuring a single individual
self: Madeleine, who was sometimes Carlotta, was in fact always Judy. And
here Judy, by foolishly selecting Carlotta’s necklace to wear to dinner, has
given up the game.12
In George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, the eponymous protagonist asks, in a
line quoted in the epigraph to this chapter, “I wonder whether one oftener
learns to love real objects through their representations, or the representa-
tions through the real objects.” As the return of the strummed habanera in
the soundtrack finally shows, Scottie has learned to love both a real object
through its representation and the representation through its real object.
He thought he loved Madeleine as she portrayed Carlotta, and then as she
was portrayed by Judy. But then it was revealed to him that Madeleine was
always only a representation, a dramatic portrait, embodied and enacted
148
by Judy, of a woman possessed by a painted portrait of someone from the

past. It is only through comparing the three likenesses that he finally alights
on the identity of the figure he has fallen in love with, the one invoked by
Herrmann’s slippery leitmotif: the object of his desire is in fact Carlotta
Valdes, the woman depicted in the old painting that predates all of these
characters, and whom Scottie only ever knew in the form of a representa-
tion, the portrait that inspired the convoluted plot laid by Elster to kill his
wife.
This conclusion, that the music shows us that the figure Scottie loves is
neither Madeleine nor Judy but in fact the representation of the deceased
Carlotta, is confirmed by his earlier irritated dismissal of yet another por-
trait, one painted by his friend Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes). In an attempt
to coax Scottie’s amorous attention away from Madeleine and onto herself,
Midge paints a self-portrait as Carlotta Valdes, a pastiche of the original
painting onto which she has added her own smiling face. Scottie responds
by expressing disgust and disappointment that she has made light of
Madeleine’s apparent plight and of the force of Carlotta’s posthumous iden-
tity. The soundtrack confirms Midge’s inability to embody Carlotta’s spirit,
by remaining silent: no ghostly sonorities or habanera rhythms play in the
background in the form of the Carlotta leitmotif; all that can be heard are
the faint sounds of the street traffic out the window.
In Vertigo, Hitchcock and Herrmann have created a complex multi-
media depiction of the persuasive power of portraiture, in which visual
and dramatic portraits construct identities that mislead the film’s cen-
tral character, while musical portraiture, in the form of a motivic sound-
track, offers the audience the only clear perspective on this muddle of
identities, and thus provides the key to understanding the protagonist’s
true feelings. Robert Wilson later borrowed Carlotta’s musical portrait
from its place in Herrmann’s soundtrack to Vertigo, reusing it in his 2006
video portrait of Princess Caroline of Monaco (Figure E.2).13 The leit-
motif, repeated in a continuous loop, is heard for the duration of the
video, as Princess Caroline stands starkly still, her back to the viewer
and her face visible only in a partial profile. Princess Caroline’s pose is in
part a reference to John Singer Sargent’s full-length portrait “Madame X
(Madame Pierre Gautreau)” (1883–1884), as though spied from behind,
a reminder of the theme of peeping at people who are unaware of being
watched in another Hitchcock classic, Rear Window (1954), which again
starred James Stewart, this time along with the Princess’s mother, Grace
Kelly.14 But as the music helps to emphasize, Princess Caroline’s hair is
up in a chignon like Carlotta’s, and the position of her head also recalls
Madeleine’s, the way it appeared to Scottie from behind, as she sat staring
at the portrait in the museum.
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Epilo g u e ( 149 )
Figure E.2: Robert Wilson and Bernard Herrmann, “Princess Caroline,” 2006, video. Courtesy RW
Work Ltd.
Wilson has captured Princess Caroline’s image in black and white, and
the only aspect that changes over the course of the seven and a half minutes
of the portrait’s duration is the lighting, which gradually brightens, moves,
and dims, so that the subject, at the start and end seen entirely in a black sil-
houette, is at times lit from certain angles that brighten the space between
her shoulder blades, her hands—held behind her back in a reference to a
scene from Rear Window15—and the edge of her face, which appears like
the sliver of sunlight on a crescent moon. In this portrait, Princess Caroline,
half-invisible in the shadows, is a spectral apparition, and the musical
soundtrack associates her with posthumous and nonhuman presences: the
persistent spirit of the dead Carlotta and the obscure identity of Madeleine,
a woman who first appeared to be possessed by a ghost, and was eventually
150
revealed never to have existed at all. With this portrait, Wilson effectively
answers Judy’s question at the climactic moment in Vertigo, “Can’t you see?”
We expect portraiture to make a subject’s appearance and identity available
to the visual sense, but in its combination of the Carlotta motif and the
darkness that enshrouds Princess Caroline, the portrait suggests that what
we hear might in fact reveal just how little about a person we are able to see.
MUSICAL PORTRAITS AND THE DIGITAL SENSES
The sound artist Neil Harbisson might also have to answer Judy’s question
“Can’t you see?” in the negative. He is entirely colorblind, suffering from
a condition called achromatopsia, a visual impairment that prevents him
from registering the appearance of the people he encounters in as full and
rich a way as he would like through sight alone.16 He has sought to remedy
this effect of his condition by experimenting with the ways sound can be
used to supplement or stand in for visual representation, and hearing can
take the place of sight, to construct likenesses of the individuals he meets.
Harbisson has turned to the genre of musical portraiture, creating a ser-
ies of extremely brief works that depict his subjects in tones and harmo-
nies that derive from the colors of the light that reflects from their faces.
For Harbisson, music brings clarity in portraiture, because it can fill in the
gaps with sound where vision fails. The resulting balance between sight
and sound recalls the moment in Vertigo in which it is the musical portrait
embedded in Herrmann’s leitmotif that finally clarifies the single identity
behind the confusing handful of visual likenesses Scottie has encountered
and fallen in love with.
Harbisson has had a device created that converts the colors of the
objects in front of him into corresponding sounds; this machine, which
Harbisson calls an “eyeborg,” has been implanted in the back of his skull
and curves over and above his cranium like a metal antenna that operates
for Harbisson as a third eye and ear.17 This dual organ produces a new sen-
sory connection to the world around him. It detects visible colors, as well
as infrared and ultraviolet light waves, and transmits these from the cam-
era at the tip of the antenna to a chip at the back of Harbisson’s skull. This
chip translates the hues that are detected into associated pitch frequencies
that Harbisson experiences through bone conduction. Donna Haraway’s
“Cyborg Manifesto” argues that contemporary technologies “have made
thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial . . . and
many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines,”18
and indeed Harbisson explains that this machine is more than a prosthesis,
it is a part of his body: “I don’t feel like I’m using technology, or wearing
15
Epilo g u e ( 151 )
technology. I feel like I am technology. I don’t think of my antenna as a

device—it’s a body part.”‘19
The tones that Harbisson experiences by way of his antenna signify the
colors of light according to a system of sonic and visual analogues through
which Harbisson comprehends the appearance of people and things. For
Harbisson, then, vision and hearing have merged into a single hybrid
sense. Harbisson therefore states that he listens to paintings: “I like listen-
ing to Warhol and Rothko because their paintings produce clear notes,” he
explains. “I can’t listen to Da Vinci or Velázquez because they use closely
related tones—they sound like the soundtrack for a horror film.”20 And
when he dresses in the morning, he sometimes chooses to reproduce a
sonority to suit his mood; on a happy day, he might wear C major—a com-
bination of items in pink, yellow, and blue.21 Harbisson has also described
the impact of his new sensory organ on his perception of beauty: “When
I look at someone, I hear their face, so someone might look very beautiful
but sound terrible.”22
Harbisson has used his eyeborg to create a series of Sound Portraits of
celebrities, musicians, actors, artists, and political figures, including Daniel
Radcliffe, Gael García Bernal, Prince Charles, Woody Allen, Leonardo Da
Caprio, Nicole Kidman, and Tracey Emin. He also sometimes approaches
strangers on the street and offers to produce their portraits, sending them
MP3s of their likenesses when he is finished.23 The individual portraits are
short, at only about three seconds each, and many of them can be listened
to in a series that Harbisson has made available online in a video in which
the sound of each portrait is accompanied by a name in white type over a
black background indicating its subject. Each portrait takes the form of a
chord produced by the layering of multiple static tones. The pitches in these
portraits represent the colors of the eyes, lips, skin, and hair of Harbisson’s
subjects. The timbre of each portrait is the same, an electronic sound qual-
ity that is not made to resemble any instrument or voice but might instead
call to mind the sounds of electronic machinery.
Harbisson’s Sound Portraits announce their posthuman derivation in a
number of obvious ways. They are produced not by a creative act of com-
position but by the use of a programmed machine that implements a set of
preordained correspondences between light and color. Their timbres, addi-
tionally, are clearly technologically generated, and this renders largely uni-
form the sequence of people of varied backgrounds and professions that the
portraits represent, like a series of smartphones of the same model but dif-
ferent colors lined up on a shop display table. Furthermore, the portraits,
in the manner of a checkpoint retina scan, capture only the details of phys
ical appearance, but not the “internal” characteristics of identity. And the
portraits do not allow for human performance, apart from pressing “play”
152
on an interactive website like YouTube.24 This means that they will always
sound more or less the same, and they leave no room for a performer’s inter-
pretation or for the sort of meanings produced for an audience member by
watching a human performer. Instead, they reach the listener directly and
with minimal mediation, much as the sounds of Harbisson’s implanted
chip transmits tones straight into his head without human interpretive
intervention.
The posthuman artist arguably requires new modes of representation to
interpret and portray the posthuman self. According to theories of cyborg
subjectivity, this new form of representation could also demand an altered
conception of the relationship between the artist and the tools he employs
in the creation of a portrait. Andy Clark and David Chalmers write that
the “coupled process” of cognition, in which “the human organism is
linked with an external entity in a two-way interaction . . . counts equally
well as a cognitive process, whether or not it is wholly in the head.”25 In
this analysis, the painter’s paintbrush and the composer’s pen or notation
software, no less than the implanted eyeborg, can be considered integral
parts of the artist’s cognitive process, despite their existence beyond the
physical boundaries of the body. And Clark and Chalmers conclude on the
basis of this argument that the notion of extension also applies to person-
hood: “The extended mind impl[ies] an extended self.”26 Clark later devel-
ops this reasoning about extended cognition and the self, in Natural-Born
Cyborgs, to argue that we are all cyborgs, in the sense that we are “human-
technology symbionts: thinking and reasoning systems whose minds and
selves are spread across biological brain and nonbiological circuitry,” a
notion with “roots in some of the most basic and characteristic facts about
human nature.”27 In Harbisson’s portraits, both artist and sitter are cyborgs.
Harbisson is a cyborg because he observes and represents others’ selves
through a process of extended cognition using his technological implant.
His subjects are cyborgs, too, because they are portrayed as automated
sonic translations of visible and invisible colors of light, that sound dis-
tinctly electronic and must be listened to and contemplated through the
use of new media devices, cybernetic cognitive extensions in the form of
Internet-enabled computers.28
Hayles argues that with the contemporary technologies that turn our
attention away from print and toward “the flickering signifiers of digital
media, visual forms, like the body, seem to lose their weighty materiality.”29
Elsewhere she writes that in cybernetic constructions of the posthuman
subject, “embodiment is not essential to human being.”30 For Harbisson,
whose own body has been technologically enhanced to transform him into
a cyborg assemblage of flesh and metal who interacts with the world by way
of organic and computerized senses, the bodies of those he encounters do
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Epilo g u e ( 153 )
indeed seem to have lost some of their physical presence and individuality
when perceived—that is, scanned—as intersecting, weightless flickers of
light. The representations in his Sound Portraits are built of digital sound
vibrations, as immaterial and intangible as the avatars that populate online
virtual worlds such as Pokémon Go or Second Life, and that interact with
other avatars as extensions of the invisible bodies and minds of the people
who construct them as alternate self-portraits.31 For this reason, this set of
musical representations brings to mind the famous line in Bernard Wolfe’s
science fiction novel Limbo, “The human skin is an artificial boundary: the
world wanders into it and the self wanders out of it, traffic is two-way and
constant.”32
MUSICAL PORTRAITURE: HUMAN,

POSTHUMOUS, POSTHUMAN
The Introduction to this book addressed the relationship between sound

and appearance, to begin considering the question of why music’s incapac-
ity to reproduce or evoke visual likeness does not curtail its use as a medium
of portraiture. Until the twentieth century, mimetic likeness was generally
considered an essential aspect of portraiture. The shift toward abstraction
in visual art and literature in the twentieth century has been accompanied
by an increase in the creation of musical portraits that perform their rep-
resentations through techniques with analogues in modern art. But musi-
cal portraits have relied on elements of abstract representation from their
inception in François Couperin’s and C. P. E. Bach’s musical portraits and
character pieces. The notion proposed in the Introduction and explored
throughout the subsequent chapters of this book is that music, which is
incapable of reproducing visible likeness (beyond gesturing obliquely
toward such attributes as a person’s size or weight or the lightness or heft
of one’s footsteps), has long been understood to be able to convey mood,
character, personality, profession, social caste, and any other of a number
of invisible factors that are typically considered integral to a rich interpre-
tation of an individual’s subjectivity or self, and that the representation of
such attributes in a musical work named for an individual is sufficient for
it to function as a work of portraiture. Indeed, by a mechanism analogous
to how musical portraits are interpreted, visual and literary portraits, even
before the twentieth century, have traditionally been considered incom-
plete if they convey likeness alone; they have been deemed successful only
when their creators provide audiences with depictions of invisible aspects
of character. In this way, and through a process that involves multiple lev-
els of metaphoric allusion, music is an apt vehicle for portraiture, and in
154
contemporary multimedia, in representations of the dead, and even in

posthuman exercises it has been combined with visual art and language to
deliver intriguing representations of identity.
Some scholars suggest that the posthuman condition, characterized in
part by common contemporary preoccupations with the subject’s relation-
ship to the body, mortality, and technology, compels us to reconsider the
nature of the self and methods of its representation. In her writings about
posthumanism, the philosopher Rosi Braidotti argues, “we need to devise
new social, ethical, and discursive schemes of subject formation to match
the profound transformations we are undergoing.” The posthuman condi-
tion, she continues, offers “an opportunity to empower the pursuit of alter-
native schemes of thought, knowledge and self-representation.”33 The two
instances of musical portraiture examined in this epilogue represent a pair
of such efforts to rethink the representation of the self through music, with
contrasting implications.
In Vertigo, Herrmann’s Carlotta leitmotif fully bypasses physical appear-
ance to serve as a representation of other aspects of Carlotta’s identity. The
habanera rhythmic pattern gives an impression of the cultural origin that is
implied by her name but rarely discussed in the film, and it also implies her
seductive nature, while the eeriness of the subtly shifting sustained tones
and whispering timbres implies her ghostly manifestation—a virtual pres-
ence made poignant by her actual absence. The way the motif is used, more-
over, suggests that sound holds a position of priority over image, because
its clarifying role indicates that the narrative’s instances of visual portraiture
have been misleading, that the various likenesses Scottie has encountered
have thoroughly confused him and can ultimately lead only to the undoing
of the film’s two leading characters.
Harbisson’s Sound Portraits, on the other hand, immediately seem
to take a different approach to representing the self than do Herrmann’s
soundtrack and the multiple musical portraits considered throughout this
book. As brief sonic objects constructed of layered pitches in the form of
a single chord, Harbisson’s works are essentially musical likenesses. Hayles
describes “the deconstruction of the liberal humanist subject in cybernet-
ics,”34 and writes of the contemporary self, “We are the medium, and the
medium is us.”35 By automatically translating the light rays that reflect off
their subjects’ faces into corresponding tones, these portraits produce a
direct sonic analogue to physical appearance. They thereby engage a form
of musical mimesis that offers a direct translation of the way one appears
into sound—albeit in a rarified musical language that only Harbisson pos-
sesses the expertise to interpret effectively—and in this manner they pur-
port to tighten the bond between language (in the portraits’ titles), hearing,
and sight to allow sound to reproduce appearance.
15
Epilo g u e ( 155 )
Of course, in their omission of any attributes of profession, artistic style,

character, mood, or personality, these Sound Portraits, despite their inge-
nuity, open themselves to the criticism that they ultimately reveal too lit-
tle about their subjects beyond appearance, recalling the age-old argument
that likeness alone is insufficient to represent an individual self in portrai-
ture. What Harbisson’s attempt to devise a new method for creating phys-
ical likeness in sound might therefore unwittingly accomplish, for some
listeners, is to emphasize the differences, rather than the overlaps, between
modes of representation in music and those in other artistic media. Despite
the basis of this genre on the precedent of portraiture in the visual arts and
literature, musical portraiture seems ultimately to be most effective not
when it relies solely on outward appearance, or the reflection of light off the
face, but rather when it evokes, through modes of metaphoric allusion, and
with the title mediating the listener’s interpretive process, the more abstract
and intangible attributes that make up our identities.
In spite of their unique focus only on mimetic likeness, and their resulting
arguable deficiency as portraits because they fail to depict character, how-
ever, Harbisson’s series reveals striking intersections with the much more
complex musical portraits examined to this point. For example, Harbisson
has found a novel way of fulfilling the goal set out by Gertrude Stein and
Virgil Thomson of developing a technique of portraiture that directly and
immediately portrays something akin to the subject’s “existence” (to use
Stein’s term) or “presence” (to use Thomson’s). Like Thomson, Harbisson
creates his compositions in front of his sitters, in a spontaneous act of per-
ception and representation that produces an abstract musical portrait of
a person’s presence in a given instance. And in the manner of Boulez’s Pli
selon pli, Harbisson’s “Sound Portraits” depend on a rich conception of the
overlapping relationships between art forms and the senses. Boulez bases
his musical structures on an increasingly deep reading of Mallarmé’s son-
net form, to find an artistic space in which music and poetry overlay one
another, “fold according to fold.” Harbisson is also preoccupied with inter-
sensory associations, and has said of sight and sound, “There is no differ-
ence for me between composing music or painting, it’s all the same.”36 In
his portraits he finds a direct musical analogue to appearance; he also uses
musical form to explore aesthetic experience, in this case employing brev-
ity and homophony to reproduce the structure of a momentary glance at
an individual’s face.
Harbisson’s approach to using sound as a representational medium to
relate directly to the role of color in visual representation and his state-
ments about the equivalency between composing and painting also recall
the ekphrastic character of the musical portraits that Morton Feldman and
Philip Glass composed of Willem de Kooning and Chuck Close. Where
156
their musical formulations directly correlate to their subjects’ painterly tech-

niques, Harbisson’s Sound Portraits reenact in tones the reflections of light
off the structure of the face that are processed visually to form the mental
representation of physical appearance. Harbisson’s discussions of hearing
faces and listening to paintings also reflects the way Feldman characterized
composition according to metaphors of painting, including his concepts of
the “surface aural plane”37 and the “plastic possibilities of musical shape.”38
Harbisson’s portraits furthermore call to mind aspects of Ligeti’s and
Ablinger’s musical self-portraits. Ligeti and Harbisson engaged techniques
that, in conveying the individuality of multiple subjects at once, also draw
attention to their similarities: Ligeti highlights correlations between the
distinct compositional techniques of the four composers depicted in
his group portrait, while Harbisson’s portraits, generally listened to in
sequence, all share the same simple form, brief duration, and electronic
timbre, but point to their sitters’ differences in appearance through con-
trasting harmonic structures. In addition, both Ablinger and Harbisson
are concerned with the relationship between perception and selfhood,
and the notion that it is through the senses of hearing and sight that peo-
ple construct their own and others’ identities. Thus Ablinger writes that
composition, for him, is “a research project; research into perception. And
about how perception creates us!”;39 Harbisson expresses an overlapping
view of art, identity, and perception, in stating, “Art . . . lies in the crea-
tion of our own senses.”40 Furthermore, Harbisson brings to its extreme
the mechanization already incipient in Ablinger’s work, which is both
created and “performed” largely by inert technologies rather than human
creativity. Ablinger used his recording device to collect the Berlin city
sounds, and developed computer software to analyze it, and the music is
played back through speakers, to the accompaniment of the ensemble of
live musicians. In this way, in Harbisson’s and Ablinger’s portraits, both
composition and performance involve automation in a way that challenges
assumptions about the role of thought, decision-making, and interpreta-
tion in the development of the self and the creation of art, and raises the
question of how both artist and sitter might be considered hybrid, cyborg
subjects.
Finally, Harbisson’s portraits call to mind certain key aspects of the Voom
Portraits of Robert Wilson, as well as of Einstein on the Beach. Like the Voom
Portraits, Harbisson’s sound structures involve a return to the centuries-
old genre of portraiture, to remind us how the portrait can be used to mis-
lead the viewer or to obscure rather than reveal the self in depictions of the
identities of contemporary celebrities: Harbisson’s works focus on external
form and obstruct other aspects of character from view, in a reminder of
the way Wilson’s video portrait of Winona Ryder shows more about how
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Epilo g u e ( 157 )
she constructs and maintains a façade mediated by celebrity culture than

it does about her identity. But this absence of revelation necessarily leaves
more up to the interpretation of the individual spectator or listener, and the
listener to Harbisson’s Sound Portraits, like the audience for Einstein on the
Beach, must take in the works’ isolated clues about their subjects, offered
as a set of signifiers never fully explained by their creators, and engage in a
highly individual and creative hermeneutic reading in order to construct an
impression of the identities represented in sounds, language, and images.
This epilogue’s musical portraits, which imply doubts about whether the
human self controls or is controlled by its deceased antecedents and by its
nonhuman tools and environments, remind us that the genre has always
been preoccupied with the human self as a mutable and constructed entity
associated with processes of perception and somehow existing apart from
the visual signs of its embodiment. The musical portraits considered in this
book raise the question observed in the line from George Eliot’s Daniel
Deronda in the epigraph to this chapter, about the ambiguity of the hier-
archy of our perceptions of real and represented subjects. In some cases, a
listener may find a musical representation convincing because it confirms
what he knows to be true about its subject; in others, a listener may appreci-
ate that a musical representation proposes something new that was not pre-
viously evident, and that may or may not “in fact” be true. Music conveys
information about the objects of its representations through the metaphors
that guide its interpretation. But metaphors in music can also persuade us
to change our conception of reality. Perhaps this is why musical portraits
can be so powerful: they bypass portraiture’s typical dependency on visual
likeness and its fraught relationship with the depiction of the invisible attri-
butes that make up our sense of the self, and in doing so they offer us the
chance to close our eyes and listen closely for those seemingly inaccessible
abstractions of identity that lie beyond the surface.
NOTES
1. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1876), ii: 27.
2. Lorenzo Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. John R. Spencer (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1956, rev. ed. 1966), 63.
3. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature,
and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 3.
4. Andy Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence
(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 138.
5. Jennifer Thweatt-Bates, “Posthuman Selves: Bodies, Cognitive Processes, and Technologies,”
in J. Wentzel van Huyssteen and Erik P. Wiebe (eds.), In Search of Self: Interdisciplinary
Perspectives on Personhood (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2011), 247.
158
6. On music and the relationship between the living and dead, particularly in the
context of popular music production, see Jason Stanyek and Benjamin Piekut,
“Deadness: Technologies of the Intermundane,” TDR/The Drama Review 54.1 (Spring
2010): 14–38.
7. For definitions of multiple strands of posthumanism, see David Roden, Posthuman
Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human (New York: Routledge, 2015), 20–32. On the
“posthuman” merging of human and technology in music production and consumption,
see Joseph Auner, “‘Sing It for Me’: Posthuman Ventriloquism in Recent Popular Music,”
Journal of the Royal Musical Association 128.1 (2003): 98–122. On the cyborg and its his-
torical link to the fields of cybernetics and artificial intelligence, see Stefano Franchi and
Güven Güzeldere, “Machinations of the Mind: Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence
from Automata to Cyborgs,” in Stefano Franchi and Güven Güzeldere (eds.), Mechanical
Bodies, Computational Minds: Artificial Intelligence from Automata to Cyborgs (Cambridge,
MA: The MIT Press, 2005), 114–23.
8. See Jack Sullivan, Hitchcock’s Music (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 229.
9. David Cooper, Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo: A Film Score Handbook (Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 20, 98–100.
10. As the band Harvey Danger puts it in their 1997 song about the mysterious woman in the
painting, “Carlotta Valdes: I will make you her.”
11. Hitchcock had dealt with similar themes previously, in Rebecca (1940), a film based on
a novel by Daphne du Maurier in which a young newlywed ( Joan Fontaine) is taken to
reside in the mansion where her husband (Laurence Olivier) had lived previously with his
now-deceased first wife Rebecca. This young woman feels haunted by Rebecca’s presence,
and at one point the housekeeper Mrs. Danvers ( Judith Anderson), still loyal to Rebecca’s
memory, misleads her into wearing a dress for a costume party based on a portrait that
hangs in the hall. This turns out to be a depiction of Rebecca from the year before, and the
emulation and reanimation of the portrait provokes a confrontation in which Olivier’s char-
acter is enraged and Fontaine’s is humiliated. In his soundtrack, Franz Waxman created a
leitmotif to depict “the overshadowing spirit of the dead Rebecca” that features heavy chro-
maticism like Herrmann’s later Carlotta leitmotif. This was performed by what Waxman
dubbed a “ghost orchestra” of electric organ and a pair of novachords, a new innovation of
the era that created an eerie timbre using radio tubes and that he said “has a peculiar sound
of unreality—of something that you cannot define.” David Neumeyer and Nathan Platte,
Franz Waxman’s Rebecca: A Film Score Guide (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2012), 115–16.
12. On the uses of portraiture in Vertigo, see Nickolas Pappas, “Magic and Art in Vertigo,” in
Katalin Makkai (ed.), Vertigo (New York: Routledge, 2013), 18–44.
13. Robert Wilson and Bernard Herrmann, “Princess Caroline,” Dissident Industries Inc., 2006,
video, www.dissidentusa.com/robert-wilson/subjects/princess-caroline/.
14. Bob Colacello, “The Subject as Star,” Vanity Fair, November 6, 2006. The reference to Rear
Window also suggests a pun on the traditional notion of the work of art as a window onto
an alternate reality (see Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the
Creative Eye (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 239). Further along these
lines, Wilson has said that when his Voom Portraits are hung in people’s homes, “they can
be like a window—a window that shows us another world.” “Voom Portraits by Robert
Wilson Opens Next Week in Valladolid,” http://artdaily.com/news/29769/Voom-
Portraits-by-Robert-Wilson-Opens-Next-Week-in-Valladolid#.VzTuUWNWLiM, March
29, 2009.
15. Noah Khoshbin and Matthew Shattuck, “Overview,” Dissident Industries Inc., accessed
June 21, 2016, www.dissidentusa.com/robert-wilson/overview/.
16. Stuart Jeffries, “Neil Harbisson: The World’s First Cyborg Artist,” The Guardian,
May 6, 2014, www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/may/06/neil-harbisson-worlds-
first-cyborg-artist.
17. See a detailed description of this machine at Harbisson’s professional website. Neil
Harbisson, accessed June 21, 2016, www.harbisson.com.
18. Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism
in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The
159
Epilo g u e ( 159 )
Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 152. On the posthuman merging of
human bodies and technology, see also Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 3.
19. Jeffries, “Neil Harbisson: The World’s First Cyborg Artist.”
20. Jeffries, “Neil Harbisson: The World’s First Cyborg Artist.”
21. Paul Ivan Harris, “Neil Harbisson: The Man Who Hears Colour,” BBC News, November
11, 2014, video, www.bbc.com/news/technology-29992577.
22. Neil Harbisson, “What’s It Like to Hear Color?” TED Radio Hour, March 7, 2014, video,
www.npr.org/2014/03/07/283441986/what-s-it-like-to-hear-color.
23. Harris, “Neil Harbisson: The Man Who Hears Colour.”
24. Neil Harbisson, “Sound Portraits,” YouTube, May 7, 2010, video, https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=JDqL-PUZ148.
25. Andy Clark and David Chalmers, “The Extended Mind,” Analysis 58.1 ( January
1998): 8–9.
26. Clark and Chalmers, “Extended Mind,” 18.
27. Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs, 3.
28. A discussion of the impact of new digital technologies on visual portraiture and the ways
this has influenced the conception of the individual during the contemporary era appears
in Michael Desmond, Present Tense: An Imagined Grammar of Portraiture in the Digital Age
(Canberra: National Portrait Gallery, 2010), 2–11.
29. N. Katherine Hayles, “Visualizing the Posthuman,” Art Journal 59.3 (Fall 2000): 51.
Hayles remains supportive, nevertheless, of an embodied view of subjectivity, and opposes
approaches to the posthuman subject that seek to separate the self from the physical body.
30. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 4.
31. See Lee Siegel, “On the Face of It,” in Donna Gustafson and Susan Sidlauskas (eds.),
Striking Resemblance: The Changing Art of Portraiture (New Brunswick, NJ: Zimmerli
Art Museum at Rutgers University; London: Prestel, 2014), 78; Sandra Kemp, Future
Face: Image, Identity, Innovation (London: Profile, 2004), 135–6.
32. Bernard Wolfe, Limbo (London: Gollancz, 2016, orig. 1952), 131. Quoted as an epigraph
in Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs. Kim Toffoletti shows that depictions of posthuman bod-
ies in popular visual culture, especially those created with the aid of new technologies
of representation, often indicate ambivalence about the individuality of identity, about
the boundaries that separate self from other and reality from virtuality, and in this way
they offer the potential to alter our understanding of the nature of the self. Kim Toffoletti,
Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls: Feminism, Popular Culture and the Posthuman Body (London: I.
B. Tauris, 2007), 5–6.
33. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 12.
34. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 4.
35. Hayles, “Visualizing the Posthuman,” 54.
36. Harris, “Neil Harbisson: The Man Who Hears Colour.”
37. Morton Feldman, “Between Categories,” The Composer 1.2 (Sept 1969): 73–7, reprinted
in B. H. Friedman (ed.), Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton
Feldman (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 2000), 84.
38. Juan Manuel Bonet, “I Learned More from Painters than I Learned from Composers,”
trans. Jonathan Brennan, in Seán Kissane (ed.), Vertical Thoughts: Morton Feldman and the
Visual Arts (Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 9.
39. Carlos Bermejo, “Seven Projections in the Music of Peter Ablinger,” accessed June 21,
2016, http://ablinger.mur.at/docs/CarlosBermejo_7Projections.pdf.
40. Harbisson, accessed June 21, 2016, www.harbisson.com.
160
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17
I N DE X
Ablinger, Peter, 16, 85, 87, 90, 96–104, 156 Atget, Eugène, 83–4, 100
“Grisailles,” 98 “Coiffure, Palais Royale,” 83, 100
Hören hören, 98 Augenmusik, 65–6
IEAOV, 98 autobiography, 25–6, 30, 38, 87
“Metaphern,” 98 Avedon, Richard, 86
Quadraturen, 101 “Self-Portrait,” 86
“Quadraturen IV: ‘Selbstportrait mit
Berlin,’ ” 16, 85, 87, 96–104, 156 Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel, 3, 24, 55,
Seeing and Hearing, 98 86, 153
“Selbstportrait mit Mittersill,” 107n50 “L’Aly Rupalich” (“La Bach”), 86
“Stadtportrait Graz,” 101 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 83, 114
Voices and Piano, 99, 100 The Art of Fugue, 83
Weiss/Weisslich, 98 Bacon, Francis, 6, 47, 88
abstract expressionism, 59–60, 62, 68, 78n18 “Self-Portrait,” 88
abstraction, 6–9, 13–17, 24, 27, 29–30, 32, Baker, Josephine, 49n15
43, 45, 47, 58–60, 62–3, 68, 72, 76, Baldessari, John, 96–7
78n38, 91, 100, 124, 126, 128–30, “Beethoven’s Trumpet (With Ear)
135–6, 138n22, 141n96, 153, 155, 157 Opus # 133,” 96–7
Adams, John, 24, 87–9, 110–11 Balzac, Honoré de, 92
My Father Knew Charles Ives, 24, 87–9 Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu, 92
Nixon in China, 110–11 Barthes, Roland, 11–12, 39, 113–14, 124
“Short Ride in a Fast Machine,” 88 “The Death of the Author,” 39
additive process, 128, 130 “The Face of Garbo,” 113–14
Aeolian harp, 42 Bartók, Béla, 36
Akiba ben Joseph, 78n17 Bechtle, Robert, 101
Alberti bass, 74 Beckett, Samuel, 58, 119–23, 127, 139n36,
Alberti, Leon Battista, 4, 144, 147 139n51, 140n62
On Painting, 4 Happy Days, 119–23, 139n36, 139n51
Alexander the Great, 4 Play, 127, 140n62
Allen, Woody, 151 Three Dialogues, 122
Anderson, Judith, 158n11 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 74, 84–6, 97
Anguissola, Sofonisba, 106 deafness, 96–7
“Self-Portrait with Bernardino “Moonlight” Sonata, 74
Campi,” 106 String Quartet Op. 133, 96–7
Aragon, Louis, 112 Symphony No. 9, 85–6
architecture, 45, 55 Beetlejuice, 122
Aristotle, 23, 110 Belafonte, Harry, 122
Assetto, Franco, 32 “Jump in the Line,” 122
178
( 178 ) Index
Berg, Alban, 84 Childs, Lucinda, 16, 125, 127, 129–30, 135

Lyric Suite, 84 Chopin, Frédéric, 15, 85, 90–1, 93, 95–6
Berger, John, 13, 89 Piano Sonata Op. 35, 93
Bernal, Gael García, 151 choreography, 16, 127–9, 134
Bernard, Jonathan W., 66–7 Christian X, King of Denmark, 78n17
biography, 6, 10, 13–16, 22–3, 25–6, 30, Clark, Andy, 144, 152
38–40, 58, 72–4, 78n15, 85, 87, Natural-Born Cyborgs, 152
123, 128–9 Clark, T. J., 89
body, 5, 7–10, 16, 19n27, 19n29, 21n48, Clendinning, Jane Piper, 93
23, 56, 68, 130–1, 144, 151–2, Close, Chuck, 15, 32, 56–7, 69–77, 101,
154, 159n29 134, 155
Borges, Jorge Luis, 98 Big Heads, 69–70
Bosch, Hieronymous, 95 “Phil” (1969), 69–70
Boulez, Pierre, 15, 24, 35–48, 73, 100, 124, 157 “Phil” (2011–2012), 72–3
cummings ist der Dichter, 36 “Phil, State I,” 70
Notations, No. 5, 47 Couperin, François, 3, 23, 86, 153
Notations, No. 9, 47 “La Couperin,” 86
Piano Sonata No. 3, 36 Couperin, Louis, 23
Pli selon pli: portrait de Mallarmé, 15, 24, Crommelynck, Aldo, 91
35–48, 73, 100, 124, 157 Cubism, 6, 27
“Sonate, Que me Veux-tu?,” 36, 38–9 Cultural Revolution, 111
“Strophes,” 47 cyborgs, 144, 150, 152, 156
Brahms, Johannes, 93
Braidotti, Rosi, 154 daguerreotype, 70
Breatnach, Mary, 41, 45 Dalí, Salvador, 108n69, 138n22
Brecht, Bertolt, 98 Dante Alighieri, 119
Britten, Benjamin, 87 Da Ponte, Lorenzo, 1
“E. B. B.,” 87 David, Jacques-Louis, 137n8
Two Portraits, 87 “The Death of Marat,” 137n8
Brooklyn Academy of Music, 125 Davies, Peter Maxwell, 139n56
Brother Rufillus of Weissenau, 81, 84 Taverner, 139n56
Bruegel the Elder, Pieter, 95 Debussy, Claude, 25, 36
Buscemi, Steve, 113 Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, 25
Byatt, A. S., 22–3 de Groat, Andy, 127
Dehmel, Richard, 134
Cage, John, 58–9 “Verklärte Nacht,” 134
canon, 33, 41 de Kooning, Willem, 15, 32, 56, 58–9, 63–8,
Caroline, Princess of Monaco, 148–50 76, 100, 155
Catoptrum microcosmicum, 131 “Woman, I,” 66–8
celebrity, 6, 109–23, 137n13 Woman series, 58
Cézanne, Paul, 59, 76 della Francesca, Piero, 59
Chalmers, David, 152 de Man, Paul, 38
Chaplin, Charlie, 93–4, 125 Demuth, Charles, 6–7, 9, 50n29
Modern Times, 93–4 “The Figure 5 in Gold, ” 6–7, 50n29
character, 2–11, 13–14, 17, 22–4, 28, 32, “Love Love Love,” 50n29
36, 49n6, 50n30, 55–6, 63, 71–4, Doisneau, Robert, 92
85–6, 109–11, 123–4, 126, 137n5, “Les Pains de Picasso,” 92
151, 153–6 Downey Jr., Robert, 116–18, 121–2, 138n32
character pieces, 23, 153 Dreier, Katherine, 6, 8, 9
character types, 23, 28, 49n6, 50n30 “Abstract Portrait of Marcel Duchamp,”
Charles, Prince of Wales, 151 6, 8, 9
179
Index ( 179 )
Duchamp, Marcel, 6–7, 9, 99 Freud, Lucian, 86–7

du Maurier, Daphne, 158n11 “Painter Working, Reflection,” 86–7
Dutch Golden Age, 5 Fröhlich, Franz Joseph, 85
Dylan, Bob, 138n22, 142n104
“Desolation Row,” 142n104 Galasso, Michael, 16, 114, 117, 120
Gandhi, Mahatma, 123, 125
Eco, Umberto, 112 Garbo, Greta, 113
Einstein, Albert, 16, 123–36 Geddes, Barbara Bel, 148
ekphrasis, 56, 59, 63, 69, 75, 126 Gena, Peter, 49n15
Eliot, George, 5–6, 22, 28, 143, 147, 157 Gergen, Kenneth, 12
Adam Bede, 5–6 Ginsberg, Allen, 138n22
Daniel Deronda, 22, 28, 143, 147, 157 “Girl, Interrupted,” 120
Emin, Tracy, 151 Glass, Philip, 15–16, 32, 56, 69–77, 112, 155
emotion, 9, 13, 17, 26, 28, 30, 44, 55, 69, 71, Akhnaten, 123
74, 85, 119–20, 134 Another Look at Harmony, 127
Ernst, Max, 20n33 Einstein on the Beach, 16, 71, 112, 123–36,
Escher, M. C., 95 156–7
expressionism, 32, 134. See also abstract Galileo Galilei, 123
expressionism Kepler, 123
“A Musical Portrait of Chuck Close,” 15,
Falkenberg, Paul, 58 32, 56, 69–77, 134, 155
Fantin-Latour, Henri, 55 “Music in Similar Motion,” 71
Feldman, Morton, 15, 32, 56–68, 76, 78n15, Music in Twelve Parts, 71, 125, 127
95, 99, 100, 155–6 Play, incidental music for, 127, 140n62
“Between Categories,” 60 Satyagraha, 123
“Christian Wolff in Cambridge,” 58 “Two Pages,” 71
“Coptic Light,” 59 Golijov, Osvaldo, 139n56
“Crippled Symmetry,” 59 Gombrich, E. H., 21n51
“de Kooning,” 15, 32, 56–68, 76, 155 Goodman, Alice, 110
Durations, 59 Gorky, Maxim, 49n7
“For Frank O’Hara,” 58 Gósol Madonna, 26
“For Franz Klein,” 58 Grant, Cary, 115
“For John Cage,” 58 Graves, Nancy, 69
“For Philip Guston,” 58 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 51n51
“For Samuel Beckett,” 58 Guston, Philip, 58–60
“For Stefan Wolpe,” 58
“Illusions,” 59 habanera, 146–8, 154
“The King of Denmark,” 59, 78n17 Hall, James, 86
notation of, 60–8 Halsman, Philippe, 108n69
Patterns in a Chromatic Field, 59 Hamilton, Richard, 87–9
Projections, 59–60 “A Portrait of the Artist by Francis
“Rabbi Akiba,” 59, 78n17 Bacon,” 88–9
“Rothko Chapel,” 58–9, 78n15 Haraway, Donna, 150
“Two Pianos,” 60 “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 150
“vertical thought,” 57–8 Harbisson, Neil, 16–17, 144, 150–7
Vertical Thoughts, 59 Sound Portraits, 17, 144, 150–7
Field, Sally, 139n51 Harvey Danger, 158
film, 29, 55–6, 58, 93–4, 145–50 Hayles, N. Katherine, 144, 154
Fischinger, Oskar, 55–6 Helmore, Tom, 145
Fontaine, Joan, 158n11 Herrmann, Bernard, 16, 144, 148, 154,
Foreman, Richard, 135 158n11
180
( 180 ) Index
Hindemith, Paul, 139n56, 141n102 Kanne, Friedrich, 85

Cardillac, 141n102 Keats, John, 119
Mathis der Mahler, 139n56 Kelly, Grace, 148
Hitchcock, Alfred, 16, 144–6, 148, 158n11. Kennedy, John F., 130
See also Rear Window; Rebecca; Vertigo keyboard miniatures, 3
Hockney, David, 91–2 Kidman, Nicole, 151
“Artist and Model,” 91–2 Kierkegaard, Søren, 20n38
Hogarth, William, 8–9 Klangfarbenmelodie, 64
The Analysis of Beauty, 8–9 Klee, Paul, 5
Holbein, Hans, 138n32 Kline, Franz, 58–9
“The Body of the Dead Christ in the Knowles, Christopher, 129–30, 134
Tomb,” 138n32 Kontarsky, Alfons, 90
Homer, 43 Kontarsky, Aloys, 90
Hopkin, Mary, 134 Krasnow, Janice, 49n12
“Those Were the Days,” 134 Kremer, Gidon, 84
Hopper, Dennis, 138n22 Kristeva, Julia, 135
humors, 8–9 Krúdy, Gyula, 93
Huppert, Isabelle, 113, 130, 138n16
Hylton, Wil S., 72 Lady Gaga, 111, 137n8
Lakoff, George, 19
idealization, 4–7, 109–11, 115, 136n2, 136n5 Lasso, Orlando di, 84
identity, 2–17, 20n33, 20n39, 21n48, 25, 28, le Brun, Charles, 8–9
30, 33, 35, 38–9, 49, 55–6, 58, 61–3, Lehár, Franz, 122
71–6, 86, 88, 90, 94, 96, 99–104, The Merry Widow, 122
109–16, 119–20, 123–6, 129–36, Leiber, Jerry, 114
137n7, 143–51, 154, 156–7 leitmotif, 145–8, 150, 154, 158n11
illumination, 81–2, 84 Leonardo da Vinci, 151
Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 137n8 Leppert, Richard, 7–8
“Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière,” 137n8 Levingston, Bruce, 69, 75
interpretation, 2–3, 6, 9, 11–12, 14–15, 17, LeWitt, Sol, 69, 71
21n51, 24, 30, 35, 37–8, 43, 45, 47, Ligeti, György, 15–16, 85, 87, 90–6, 104,
51n52, 59, 62–3, 68, 71–2, 74–6, 156
85–6, 97–8, 109–12, 114–16, 121, “Continuum,” 90, 93, 95
123–6, 130–1, 152–7 “Coulée,” 90
Ives, Charles, 24, 87–9 Drei Stücke für zwei Klaviere, 15,
Three Places in New England, 88 90, 93
“The Unanswered Question,” 88 Études, 106n34
“In zart fließender Bewegung,” 90
James, Henry, 49n7 “Monument,” 90
The Portrait of a Lady, 49n7 pattern-meccanico technique, 93–5
James, William, 28 “Poème symphonique,” 93
The Principles of Psychology, 28 “Selbstportrait mit Reich und Riley
Jiang Qing (Madame Mao), 110, 136n4 (und Chopin ist auch dabei),” 15–16,
Johnson, Buffie, 15, 24, 32–5, 37, 48, 134 85, 87, 90–6, 104, 156
“Portrait of Virgil Thomson,” 32–3 String Quartet No. 2, 90, 93
Johnson, Mark, 19 “Volumina,” 93
Johnson, Samuel M., 129–30, 134 likeness, 4–7, 9–10, 17, 20n33, 24, 26, 30, 32,
Joyce, James, 32, 36, 47, 49n7 34, 38–9, 47, 49n12, 56, 58, 68, 71–2,
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 49n7 76, 81, 83, 86, 88–91, 95–7, 100,
Ulysses, 32 106n31, 109–18, 122–3, 126, 136n5,
Judd, Donald, 71 147–8, 150–3, 155, 157
18
Index ( 181 )
literary portraiture, 15, 22–48, 49n7, 49n8, Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 1–2
49n10, 49n12, 49n29, 51n62, 124, Così fan tutte, 1–2
130, 138n22, 153 mugshots, 115, 117
literature, 2–3, 6–7, 14, 16–17, 22–48, multimedia, 3, 6, 14, 16, 49n15, 97–8,
53n121, 111–12, 143, 153, 155 107n50, 109, 111–15, 122, 124,
Lysippos, 4 137n8, 143, 145, 148, 154
Mabou Mines, 140n62 Namuth, Hans, 58

Madame Tussaud’s, 57, 63 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 48
Magritte, René, 95 narrative, 2, 4, 6, 10, 13–14, 21n48, 23, 25,
Malanga, Gerard, 115, 138n22 28, 39–40, 47, 69, 74–5, 86–7, 114,
Malevich, Kazimir, 91 123, 128, 134
“Suprematism: Self-Portrait in Two narrative self, 13
Dimensions,” 91 neoclassicism, 33
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 15, 25, 35–48, 73, Newman, Barnett, 98
124, 155 “New York School.” See abstract
“A la nue accablante tu,” 36, 43 expressionism
“Don du poëme,” 36, 40–4 notation, 60–8
“L’après-midi d’un faune,” 25 Novak, Kim, 145, 147
Le livre, 37
“Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui,” objectivity, 2, 26, 71–2, 102, 115
36, 42, 44 O’Doherty, 61–2, 65, 68
“Remémoration d’amis belges,” 44–5, Odysseus, 43
73 O’Hara, Frank, 58, 62
“Tombeau de Verlaine,” 36, 40, 43 Olivier, Laurence, 158n11
“Une dentelle s’abolit,” 36, 42, 44 open form, 37
mandola, 42 open work, 112, 136
Mao Tse-tung, 99, 110–11, 136n4 opera, 1–3, 14, 16, 25, 110, 112, 123–36,
McCalla, James, 46 139n56, 140n73, 141n102
Mertens, Wim, 124
Messiaen, Olivier, 139n56 Pahlavi, Farah, 114
Saint François d’Assise, 139n56 painting, 3, 6, 9–11, 14, 16, 22–4, 26–7,
metaphor, 2, 4, 7–10, 12–15, 17, 18n23, 47–8, 49n11, 55–77, 77n13, 78n15,
19n24, 23, 30, 38, 40–1, 47, 53n108, 81–3, 86, 88–90, 95, 98, 101, 106n31,
55–66, 68, 74–6, 89, 98, 100–1, 110–11, 130–1, 135, 137n5, 137n8,
107n47, 111, 116–17, 121, 124, 126, 138n32, 141n91, 141n102, 143–4,
130, 134, 140n66, 141n88, 143, 148, 151–2, 155–6
153, 155–7 paratexts, 24
Metropolitan Opera, 125 passions, 8–9
Michelson, Albert, 142n105 pastiche, 12, 87–8, 90–1, 148
Milton, John, 119 perception, 2, 10–11, 15, 28, 34–5, 58,
mimesis, 3, 6, 17, 91, 154 61, 72–3, 95, 97, 99–101, 103, 130,
minimalism, 71 137n7, 151, 155–7
mise en abyme, 131, 141 performance, 3, 11–15, 19n27, 30, 37, 51n52,
modernism, 15, 24, 27, 39, 47, 50n29 61, 63, 65–6, 68–9, 75, 91, 94–5, 115,
Mogwai, 114 120, 151–2, 156
Monet, Claude, 70, 98 personality, 3–4, 7
monograms, 83–4 perspective, 100–2, 108n69
Morley, Edward, 142n105 Pfitzner, Hans, 139n56
Moss, Kate, 109 Palestrina, 139n56
Motherwell, Robert, 59, 61, 78n18 phase shifting, 92, 95
182
( 182 ) Index
photography, 6, 83, 88, 98–100, 111, Rembrandt van Rijn, 86, 116, 136
115–16 “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes
photorealism, 71, 101 Tulp,” 116
Picasso, Pablo, 6, 26–7, 35, 59, 91 “Portrait of the Artist at His Easel,” 86
“Gertrude Stein,” 26–7 Remmelin, Johann, 131
“Les demoiselles d’Avignon,” 26 Reynolds, Joshua, 22
“Self-Portrait,” 91 Richter, Gerhard, 98
Vollard Suite, 92 Riley, Terry, 15, 85, 90–1, 93–6
pièces de caractère. See character pieces “In C,” 90, 94–5
Plutarch, 4 Rockwell, Norman, 86
Poe, Edgar Allen, 4 “Triple Self-Portrait,” 86
“The Oval Portrait,” 4 Rota, Nino, 114
poetry, 2, 6, 24–48, 110, 134, 138n22 Roth, Philip, 104
Pokémon Go, 153 My Life as a Man, 104
Pollock, Jackson, 60–1 Rothko, Mark, 58–9, 151
Popol Vuh, 114 Ryder, Winona, 117–23, 157
portrait medals, 136n2
portrait miniatures, 1–2 Saariaho, Kaija, 139n56
portrait opera, 3, 14–16, 112, 123–36, Émilie, 139n56
139n56, 140n73 Sargent, John Singer, 148
posthumanism, 16–17, 143–4, 150–7 “Madame X (Madame Pierre
posthumous representation, 16, 143–50 Gautreau),” 148
postmodernism, 11–13, 20n39, 103, Sarup, Madan, 11
112, 130 Scarlatti, Domenico, 93
presence, 19n28, 30, 32, 34, 48, 155 Schapiro, Meyer, 62
process, 70–1, 75, 128, 130 Schechtman, Marya, 13
program, 14, 74 Schérer, Jacques, 37
prosopopeia, 38–9, 48 Schnittke, Alfred, 84
Proust, Marcel, 37, 87 Concerto Grosso No. 3, 84
String Quartet No. 3, 84
Quintilian, 38 Violin Concerto No. 4, 84
Schoenberg, Arnold, 36, 134
Radcliffe, Daniel, 151 “Verklärte Nacht,” 134
Rakha, Alla, 127 Schrag, Calvin O., 12–13
Rankine, Claudia, 49n15 Schumann, Robert, 23–4, 93
Raphael, 82 Carnaval, 24
“The School of Athens,” 82 sculpture, 3, 4, 8, 26, 57–8, 63, 96–7, 133,
Rauschenberg, Robert, 130 135, 137n8
“Retroactive II,” 130 Second Life, 153
Ravel, Maurice, 105n6 Seigel, Jerrold, 11
“Daphnis et Chloé,” 105n6 self, 1, 3–4, 7, 9, 11–14, 17, 20n38, 20n39,
Ray, Man, 20n33 22, 28, 35, 48, 56, 61–2, 68, 84, 89,
realism, 5 97–101, 103–4, 113–14, 116, 118–19,
Rear Window, 148–9 124, 129–31, 135, 144, 152–4, 156–7,
Rebecca, 158n11 159n29, 159n32
Reich, Steve, 15, 85, 90–2, 94–6 self-portraiture, 3, 14–16, 20n33, 24, 34,
“It’s Gonna Rain,” 90, 94 37, 46–8, 51n62, 54n121, 56, 58, 63,
“Piano Phase,” 94 76, 81–104, 105n6, 105n22, 106n31,
“Violin Phase,” 90, 94 107n50, 143, 148, 153, 156
Reinhardt, Ad, 98 Sellars, Peter, 110
relativity, 123–5, 128, 133, 135–6 Serra, Richard, 69
183
Index ( 183 )
Shakespeare, William, 12, 76, 119, 141n102 “Buffie Johnson: Drawing Virgil
Hamlet, 76, 121, 141n102 Thomson in Charcoal,” 15, 24, 32–5,
Shankar, Ravi, 127 47–8, 134
Shostakovich, Dmitri, 84 “Capital Capitals”, 25
String Quartet No. 8, 84 Eight Portraits for Violin Alone, 31
Siedentopf, Henning, 93 essays, 25
Siegel, Lee, 116 Four Saints in Three Acts, 25
Smith, Olav Bryant, 12 “Miss Gertrude Stein as a Young Girl,” 30–1
Socrates, 8 The Mother of Us All, 25
Solari, Andrea, 137n8 Nineteen Portraits for Piano, 32
“The Head of St. John the “Preciocilla,” 25, 28
Baptist,” 137n8 “Susie Asado,” 25, 28
sonnet, 36, 40–1, 43, 45–6, 155 titles, 3, 7, 14, 24–5, 30–1, 35–6, 40, 44, 48,
Sontag, Susan, 9, 138n22 56–60, 62–3, 69, 73, 78n17, 85–7,
Sorey, Tyshawn, 49n15 89–91, 98, 105n6, 126, 129, 140n75,
soul, 7–9, 55, 81, 86, 116, 137n5 143, 154–5
Steichen, Edward, 113 Toklas, Alice B., 25
Stein, Gertrude, 15, 24–35, 50n29, 50n30, transcendentalist philosophers, 87
50n40, 75, 99, 124, 130, 155 tropes, 1–2, 9, 33–4, 92
Capital Capitals, 25 Turk, Gavin, 53n121
Four Saints in Three Acts, 25
“If I Told Him,” 35 Ulambayar, Byambajav, 113
The Making of Americans, 50n30
Valéry, Paul, 41
The Mother of Us All, 25
van Eyck, Jan, 81–2, 141n102
“Portraits and Repetition,” 28–9
“The Arnolfini Portrait,” 141n102
“Preciocilla,” 25, 28
Ghent Altarpiece, 81–2
“Susie Asado,” 25, 28
Velázquez, Diego, 86, 151
“Virgil Thomson,” 30–2
“Las Meninas,” 86
Stein, Leo, 26
Venice Biennale, 135
Stewart, James, 145, 148
Verlaine, Paul, 39
still life, 90, 114, 131, 133 Vertigo, 16, 144–50, 154
Stoller, Mike, 114 Visible Man, 131
Strachey, Lytton, 49n7 visual art, 2–4, 6–7, 10, 15, 17, 19n24,
Sturm und Drang, 1 19n25, 19n30, 22–4, 26–8, 30, 32–3,
subjectivity, 5, 12, 55, 57–8, 61–2, 67–8, 102, 37–8, 47–8, 50n29, 55–77, 85–7, 93,
152–3, 159n29 95, 97–8, 153–5
Sulzer, Johann Georg, 55 visual portraiture, 3–7, 9, 13, 22–4, 28,
Suprematism, 91 32–3, 55–77, 86, 104, 109–36, 145,
surgical theaters, 116 147–51, 154
Sutton, Sheryl, 128, 130 Voom HD Networks, 113
tapestry, 70 Wagner, Richard, 85, 114
Tavel, Ronald, 116 Waits, Tom, 16, 117, 121
theater, 16, 111–12, 114, 116, 119, 123–36, Bone Machine, 117
139n36, 140n62 “The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me,”
Theophrastus, 23, 49n6 117–18, 121
Characters, 23 Warhol, Andy, 98, 110, 115–16, 138n22, 151
theory of relativity. See relativity Screen Tests, 115–16, 138n22
Thomson, Virgil, 15, 24–35, 38, 47–8, 124, Waxman, Franz, 158n11
134, 155 wax sculpture, 57–8, 63
184
( 184 ) Index
Webern, Anton, 36, 41, 52n90, 64–5 The Life and Times of Sigmund
“Five Pieces for String Quartet,” 52n90 Freud, 123
Welin, Karl-Erik, 93 “Princess Caroline,” 148–50
Whitehead, Alfred North, 20n38 “Robert Downey Jr.,” 116–18,
Whitelaw, Billie, 119 121–2, 138n32
Wilde, Oscar, 81, 136n5 Video 50, 115
The Picture of Dorian Gray, 81, 136n5 Voom Portraits, 16, 112–24, 130, 137n13,
Williams, Bernard, 5 148, 157, 158n11
Williams, William Carlos, 6, 50n29 “Winona Ryder,” 117–23
Wilson, Robert, 16, 111–36, 138n32, Wolfe, Bernard, 153
139n36, 148, 157, 158n11 Limbo, 153
Deafman Glance, 112 Wolpe, Stefan, 59–60
Edison, 123 Woolf, Virginia, 49n7
Einstein on the Beach (see Glass, Philip) Woronov, Mary, 116
“Isabelle Huppert,” 113, 130 Wright, John, 32
The King of Spain, 123
Lady Gaga portraits, 111, 137n8 Xenophon, 8
A Letter for Queen Victoria, 123 The Memorabilia, 8
The Life and Death of Marina
Abramović, 123 Yeats, William Butler, 119
The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, 123, 125 YouTube, 152
185
186

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i

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

To Judy Schelly, Mike Walden, and Danny Walden

I drew men’s faces on my copy-​books,

Introduction: Portraiture as a Musical Genre 1

I.1 Charles Demuth, “The Figure 5 in Gold,” 1928, oil on cardboard,

( x ) List of Figures

3.2 Eugène Atget, “Coiffeur, Palais Royal,” 1927, albumen silver print

1.1 Virgil Thomson, “Miss Gertrude Stein as a Young Girl,” 1928,

I am thankful to Alessandra Aquilanti, Andrea Bohlman, Christopher Doll,

“A h guarda, sorella,” sings the love-​struck Fiordiligi to her sister

( 2 ) Musical Portraits

beyond plain view, but it can additionally convince us of attributes of iden-

written in a variety of forms, from the eighteenth-​century keyboard mini-

( 4 ) Musical Portraits

of visual and musical portraiture and a discussion of modes of represen-

LIKENESS, IDENTIT Y, AND METAPHOR

Portraiture in the visual arts typically assumes the representation of phys-

Identity is thus viewed as related to but not defined by the body; as

( 6 ) Musical Portraits

music. These portraits call attention to analogies between musical and

( 8 ) Musical Portraits

Leppert writes, “Challenged to make identity visible . . . portraits must

of facial expression, according to le Brun and Hogarth, makes apparent the

( 10 ) Musical Portraits

biography, in a manner that depends in part on the metaphors of both

CONSTRUCTING THE CONTEMPORARY SELF

( 12 ) Musical Portraits

For Barthes, this performance, however superficial it might seem in its

Though Schechtman is writing primarily about the way individuals con-

( 14 ) Musical Portraits

It has become a common observation among sociologists of music and

THE CONTENTS OF THIS STUDY

Musical Portraits views works in the genre of musical portraiture composed

in which music takes center stage in the representation of an individual

( 16 ) Musical Portraits

of their compositional techniques. In the second case study, “Quadraturen

visual likeness in his series of Sound Portraits. Harbisson has produced

( 18 ) Musical Portraits

Laurence Dreyfus, “Christopher Peacocke’s ‘The Perception of Music,’” British Journal of

( 20 ) Musical Portraits

Musical and Literary Portraiture

( 24 ) Musical Portraits

tranquil—​found their musical representation in individual movements of

THE MUSICAL PORTRAITS OF VIRGIL THOMSON AND

Virgil Thomson dedicated himself to experimenting with musical portrai-

( 26 ) Musical Portraits

inspired him to “put those texts to music with a minimum of temptation

Setting Stein’s poetry to music proved to be an early turning point for

this proved a critical breakthrough for Picasso in his stylistic development

( 28 ) Musical Portraits

In “Portraits and Repetition,” Stein explains why portraiture was so

( 30 ) Musical Portraits

presence. This led me toward seeking ways to keep my work spontaneous,

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

I drew men’s faces on my copy-books,

I.1 Charles Demuth, “The Figure 5 in Gold,” 1928, oil on cardboard,

3.2 Eugène Atget, “Coiffeur, Palais Royal,” 1927, albumen silver print

1.1 Virgil Thomson, “Miss Gertrude Stein as a Young Girl,” 1928,

“A h guarda, sorella,” sings the love-struck Fiordiligi to her sister

written in a variety of forms, from the eighteenth-century keyboard mini-

tranquil—found their musical representation in individual movements of

It is a particular sort of formal self-awareness that Boulez finds in the

The mandola is a round-backed stringed instrument that is strummed and can

5. Byatt, Portraits in Fiction, 91–2.

O’Doherty’s reference to “figure-ground” relationships recalls Feldman’s

to face. Close’s quasi-objective distance forces the viewer to be especially