Eye music
Contrapuntally elaborate composition whose learnedness is visible only on the page and fails to convince the ear.
What it means
Eye music refers to features in the notated score that carry symbolic meaning without being audible in performance. It works on the eye of the reader or performer, not on the ear of the listener. A well-known example is the use of blackened noteheads for words such as "night," "darkness," or "death": the black color of the note makes no audible difference but is immediately visible on the page.
This sets eye music apart from word painting (madrigalism), where musical means represent a text both audibly and visibly, for instance a descending line on the word "fall" or a rising leap on "resurrection." Eye music, by contrast, reveals itself only to someone looking at the score, not to someone listening to it.
Musical use
The practice was common above all in vocal music from the late Middle Ages through the Baroque, where scribes and composers deliberately played with the written image. Johann Sebastian Bach, for example, repeatedly used sharp signs at textual mentions of "cross" (German Kreuz, which also means "sharp"), since the sharp's shape recalls a cross, regardless of whether a raised pitch was harmonically needed.
The term was also used in an older, second sense: in music-theoretical polemics of the early eighteenth century, "eye music" was a dismissive label for contrapuntally elaborate writing whose skill supposedly showed only on paper, while the sound itself disappointed. In 1717, for instance, Johann David Heinichen argued against Johann Mattheson that genuinely moving music required far more than such rule-bound "eye music" written for the innocent page. That judgment reflects a specific eighteenth-century aesthetic dispute — over whether sonic effect should outrank learned contrapuntal construction — and should be read as a period opinion, not as an objective verdict on contrapuntal artistry as such.
Eye music should be distinguished from the graphic notation used after 1950, where unconventional notated shapes are meant to be translated directly into sound or gesture; there, the visual element is a performance instruction, not a purely symbolic addition.
Performance practice
As a performer you are most likely to encounter eye music when studying early vocal scores: watch for unusual blackened notes or striking notational details at emotionally weighty words — they tell you something about the composer's reading of the text, even though they need not surface in the sound itself.