Volume 121, Issue 7, July 2014, Pages 1480–1485
Original article
Vision Loss and Hearing Loss in Painting and Musical Composition
This
article considers the impact of vision and hearing loss on great
painters and musical composers. The visual work of Mary Cassatt, Georgia
O'Keeffe, Edgar Degas, and Claude Monet all showed alterations as their
vision failed. In contrast, Gabriel Fauré, Bedřich Smetana, and Ludwig
von Beethoven wrote many of their best compositions while totally deaf,
and Georg Friedrich Handel and Frederick Delius struggled to compose
late in life when they lost their vision (although their hearing
remained excellent). There are 2 major distinctions between the role of
vision and hearing for these artistic disciplines. First, there is a
surrogate means of “hearing” music, through the musical score, which
allows composers to write and edit music while totally deaf. The
greatest problem with deafness for a skilled composer is interference
from internal noise (tinnitus). There is no surrogate for vision to
allow a painter to work when the subject is a blur or the colors on the
canvas cannot be distinguished. Second, although the appreciation of art
is visual and that of music is auditory, the transcription of both art
and musical composition is visual. Thus, visual loss does pose a problem
for a composer accustomed to working with good sight, because it
disrupts habitual methods of writing and editing music.
Copyright © 2014 American Academy of Ophthalmology. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.