Music and Cats / Book of Abstracts - Catalog - Page 11
Abstracts
Panel 1: Feline Symbolism
11:05 - 11:20
Cats and Codices:
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Unveiling the Symbolic Role of Felines in Historical
Music Manuscripts
Madlen Poguntke / University of Music and Theatre Munich, Seoul
National University
„There are two means of refuge from the miseries
of life: Music and Cats“ (Albert Schweitzer)
This widely quoted statement refers to a profound
cultural intertwining of auditory experience and
feline symbolism. Though both cats and music
have been researched as objects of affective
investment, deification, and artistic endeavor,
their intersection in visual depiction — especially
in historical music manuscripts — is largely
unexamined. The paper examines the occurrence
of cat imagery in medieval and early modern music
codices, particularly in marginal illustrations,
ornamental figures, and visual interjections in
otherwise highly codified musical texts. Instead of
dismissing such images as doodles or capricious
intrusions, the study offers a culture-semiotic and
music-iconographic
interpretation:
cats
are
explored as symbolic figures working at the
boundary between order and disruption, sacred
and profane, learned transmission and playful
commentary.
Employing
carefully
chosen
facsimiles and manuscript sources – ranging from
monastic, scholastic, and courtly traditions – this
paper examines how images of felines quietly
portray and reinterpret the status of music in their
respective cultures. Are they silent witnesses,
mocking onlookers, or symbolic agents of
disorder? In what ways do they intersect with
the structure and transmission of music in
notation? By drawing on cultural semiotics,
visual studies, and the history of musical
notation development, this article contends
that such marginalia might be interpreted as
independent visual-musical commentaries. In
this scenario, the cat is not just represented as
a domesticated pet, but also as a strong force
in music's cultural history — challenging one
to rethink the margins of the musical page as
sites of multiplicity of knowledge, humor,
creativity and imagination.
Book of Hours, England, end of the 13th century. Walters Manuscript W.102, fol. 78v. Walters Art Museum Illuminated Manuscripts.
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