Imago musicae: Imaging music from Ladybird to Wittgenstein

The essay aims to widen the purview of musical iconography as an academic (inter)discipline. It addresses musical iconography within the context of a wider visual culture of music, focusing on a shift from images of music to images of the idea of music, placing musical iconography closer to the heart of musical understanding. It does this by considering the children’s book illustration of the British artist and illustrator Martin Aitchison (b.1919), the theory of meaning as propounded in late Wittgenstein and the sensory philosophy of Michel Serres. It is argued that music is never employed without numerous and complex intersections with the visual; that music has an image and is always, to some degree, iconographic.