His characters’ ambiguous gesture and expression confound storytelling or the pointing of morals, just as the numinous objects in his paintings often mock the simple correspondences of proverbs and emblem books which modern interpreters try to impose on them. Under his light the figures waver in unstable significance between one viewing and the next; sometimes psychologically complex individuals prompting the fantasy of a novelist, at others, humanity made still-life. Dutch painting is more a document of its culture than any art before photography but when we come to Vermeer something rebels at using him as a prosaic witness of everyday life. Simon Schama in his teeming exploration of the seventeenth-century Dutch social world, The Embarrassment of Riches, draws on every imaginable source but uses no Vermeer painting, nor is he mentioned, even though the first mental picture of the culture Schama is recreating will be, for many, one of those luminous rooms in Delft.
Roger North, a younger English contemporary of the painter, wrote in his philosophical speculations on music: ‘Now our composer wants intirely the helps the painter hath, being furnished onely with Sound and Time’. Vermeer is as constrained as North’s composer of ‘absolute’ music, almost ignoring myth, story or symbol, and furnishes himself only with light and space. Of the figurative old masters, he is one of those most often seen as a spiritual ancestor of would-be transcendent and objective abstract art—a tradition that has often invoked music as its ideal.
Music in Delft
Actual music, and other sounds, drifting in at Vermeer’s massive leaded casements standing ajar, are often omitted from histories and evocations of the age and its culture. Some painters have an obvious ‘soundtrack’, but after Sweelinck (1562 - 1621), the northern Low Countries lack a musical household name and, until recently, the choice of music matched to his paintings on film or video was very much a free association across time and frontiers—anything from Monteverdi to Satie. These choices can be illuminating about the mystery of our intuitive associations but it is worth challenging them with music of his time and place. The most recent exhibition, Vermeer and the Delft School, when shown in London had an excellent small sample of contemporary music—pieces by Boesset, Gaultier, Chambonnières, Froberger, Huygens and others on CD (Metronome MET CD 1051)—a novel complement to yet another paving-stone catalogue. But Huygens is the only Dutchman on the record and if you wish to delve more deeply into the repertory the recordings by Camerata Trajectina on Globe of composers such as Padbru, Schuyt, Maria Tesselschade, Jacob van Eyck and others are well worth exploring.
Something like the musical instruments in Vermeer’s paintings have been heard again thanks to the early music movement but one sound needed no revival; a carillon in Delft and most Dutch towns, less altered even than the human singing voice, sounds unchanged as the crossing wind which swells and fades the bell notes. When you hear the clattering chime spell out Mijn junges Leben hat ein End, or Wilhelmus (which has a claim to be Europe’s oldest national anthem), the tunes themselves, the bell’s timbre and the expressively intractable machine that sounds them suggest a fascinatingly remote musical aesthetic. The forthright melody, and its irrevocable tuning, were much in the ‘mind’s ear’ of players and instrument makers in both the Dutch Republic and the Spanish Netherlands. The carilloneur of Vermeer’s time was also the organist and he was employed by the municipality, not the church, to play regular recitals on both instruments; those gloriously productive years of organ-building were also the responsibility of the town councils. More modestly in 1649 the carilloneur and composer Jacob van Eyck received a pay rise provided: ‘he now and then in the evening entertained people strolling in the churchyard with the sound of his little flute’. This civic patronage of music helped to fill the gap left by the absence of other kinds. The Reformed Calvinist church, far more suspicious of elaborate musical settings and the organ than other Protestant churches in Britain or the Lutheran German states, used only the simplest choral psalm settings, and the small presidential court of the stadthouder could not subsidize the ambitious musical ventures of monarchical and aristocratic regimes, such as masque and opera.
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