The lyre on sheet music covers

Abstract

This paper examines sheet music cover art featuring musical instruments in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. The ancient lyre, the preeminent instrument of ancient Greece, is one of the most frequently depicted instruments on sheet music covers. Although it has been absent from Western practice for hundreds of years, its significance as a symbol of music, particularly vocal-instrumental, persists. Lyres appear on sheet music covers in a variety of roles, from (often inconspicuous) publishers’ logos to small decorative additions to main cover images. Conventionally, the lyre is depicted by itself or in the hands of the Muses, who are sometimes visually modernized or stylized to reference folk art. Although in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was the piano that was the most popular instrument, often featured in sheet music illustrations, it failed to achieve the same prominence in the visual field as the lyre. The ancient lyre remains a universal symbol of music. It seems, however, that the recognition of the instrument and its symbolic meaning, as well as its mythological and religious references, is declining.