Incidental music to “Tiny Desk Concert”

Encore! Encore! If you dismissed -- or relished -- "Tiny Desk Concert" as just one more of Kelly Mo's whimsical wonders, you have a surprise in store. It's actually the overture to some little known byways in art history.

I hadn't realized this myself until, setting up for "TDC", I gave some thought to the figures on my mother's ceramic pitcher. I'd used this pitcher before in a 2003 painting called "Melon Jug and Carnival Squash" ...

...but never until working on "Tiny Desk Concert" had I closely considered its musicians and their instruments:

Okay. This looks like an archaic Greek scene. Were there actual  ancient Greek instruments like those on the jug?  Let's start with the triangle, that standby of elementary school music performances. 

There is an ancient triangular Greek instrument, the "trigono" -- but it's a string instrument, rather like a balalaika. However, the Percussive Arts Society gives the familiar metal triangle its due and claims it as a Turkish instrument from the Middle Ages.

Peter Lastman, one of Rembrandt's students, makes a Greek connection in his early-1600s painting "Orestes and Pylades Disputing at the Altar."

Now, how about that long-necked lute-type instrument on the jug? It looks like this is what's variously called a pandouris or tambouras -- the first known fretted instrument with just three strings, its credentials going back to a 4th century BC scene on marble in the Athens Archaeological Museum.

I'm sure its pedigree is more than adequately explained on the website that's the source of this mural -- but it's all Greek to me.

This is heady stuff -- and it gets headier and, yes, bewhiskered, as our analysis continues with my painting's rackety, er, melodious cats.

I'd just finished painting "Tiny Desk Concert" when I happened to see an ad in the paper from Early Music Vancouver.

Why, it's....another Tiny Desk Concert of singing cats! It wasn't an easy internet search, but eventually I found the original -- "The Concert of Cats," by 17th-century Flemish painter David Teniers theYounger (son of David Teniers the Elder; does this surprise you?).

On my way to this particular concert, I discovered that there are plenty of genre paintings from the same period in the same vein. Here are more musical cats from the Lombard School, about 1700 -- "Cats being instructed in mouse-catching by an owl."

 I also came across a totally weird guy from the late 1600s, Cornelis Saftleven.  He, too, has his singing felines, "A concert of cats, owls, a magpie, and a monkey in a barn."

 
Did I hear someone say, "This is not my monkey"?  Click here and scroll down slowly through about ten rows and you'll see a number of Saftleven simians.

His animals don't just concertize -- they do a whole lot of other stuff.  No wonder this painting needs two alternate titles.  Sometimes it's called "The College of Animals" and sometimes "An interior with a goat eating an oyster, a donkey at a school desk, a cat playing tric-trac and other mythical creatures." 

Having established that my modest "Tiny Desk Concert" is continuing two great traditions in Western music and painting, let's conclude on a harmonious note. From the same period, here's Dutch artist Melchior d'Hondecoeter's "Birds Singing from a Music Book." (Who said owls and ducks weren't melodious??)