MUSIC TO SEE

The now common practice of trying to please museum visitors' ears as well as their eyes was pioneered by the Toledo (Ohio) Museum of Art, which began combining concerts with art exhibitions back in 1914. Last week Toledo pioneered again, by staging the first comprehensive show of illuminated music manuscripts ever held in the U.S. One of its finest items (lent by the Cleveland Museum of Art) is reproduced on the following page. Below the figure of Christ enthroned in a huge capital A is the opening of a hymn which begins, "Aspiciens alonge, ecce, video dei potentiam" (As I look from afar, behold, I see the power of God). The square music notation is a style still used for Gregorian chant.

Among Toledo's more out-of-the-way exhibits were an illustrated treatise on music by the 6th century Roman Boethius (better known for his Consolations of Philosophy), and an early Coptic manuscript which appears to indicate a tune by different colored notes rather than by their positioning. But most of the 103 items on view are leaves from Roman Catholic choir books, illuminated over long years of cloistered devotion by medieval and renaissance monks. They echo Byzantine mosaics and foreshadow modern art. The monks' forte was to make flat, ingenious patterns of a few brilliant colors;school-of-Paris painters do the same.

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