ABSTRACT
The aesthetic interaction between image and sound is possible only because music possesses an intrinsic openness to semantic completion through the intervention of the image. To the extent that people assimilate what they see and what they hear into a composite experience, everyday reception of music constantly gives the lie to the ideology of musical autonomy, according to which the touchstone of good music is that it is aesthetically self-sufficient. The tall piers, convey the aristocratic ambience and perhaps the intrinsically aristocratic nature of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s music, while the elaborate ironwork provides an analogue of its rococo decorative quality. With the advent of recording, the enjoyment of music migrated from concert hall to sitting room, the programme note was gradually transformed into the text on the back of the record sleeve. The text on the back of record sleeves comes from a nineteenth-century tradition that aligns it with aesthetic process: its source is the descriptive or analytical programme note.
