Maria Sibylla Merian…

In my last Composeher blog, I introduced you to my thoughts and processes when it comes to selecting texts for my choral works. I am now thrilled to have the opportunity to introduce you to the impetus for my new piece for the Glasgow School of Art Choir – Maria Sibylla Merian. Before I go any further, I would like to thank Lannoo Publishing, who produced the English translation of Merian’s book, Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, in partnership with the National Library of the Netherlands. This translation is available as part of a folio which includes information on her life, her scientific work, and the artistic techniques she used to document her studies, alongside reproductions of her illustrations and type plates. Lannoo Publishing graciously gave me permission to use their English translation as the text for my work.

Maria Sibylla Merian was born in Frankfurt in 1647, into a thriving family of commercial artisans. Her father was an engraver who worked with Theodor De Bry, a well-known publisher of the time who, in his books, depicted early European expeditions to the Americas. Maria’s father died when she was only three years old and her mother was remarried – to the painter, Jacob Marrel. Despite restrictions on women’s artistic pursuits at the time, Marrel likely taught Maria and her brothers a great deal about art and the integral artisanal skills of the era, such as how to grind pigment and prepare a canvas. She married at eighteen years old and subsequently moved to Nuremburg, where she taught watercolour techniques to noblewomen – one of the few acceptable artistic pursuits for women at the time. After spending time in a Labadist religious commune Maria moved to Amsterdam, the West’s capital of scientific and artistic patronage in the seventeenth century.

From a young age, she was fascinated by insects. She collected and bred many different species of caterpillars, which are among the trickiest bugs to cultivate due to their immense appetites and highly specific diets. To keep these creatures alive and to better observe their metamorphological processes, she typically started by feeding them the foliage of the plants on which she found them. She was a pioneering naturalist and among the first to make detailed, scientific written observations of the metamorphoses of insects such as butterflies and moths. In particular, she was known for her study of ‘ecological communities’ – different organisms living symbiotically with each other. She made many influential discoveries which still hold today; for instance, she wrote of the difficulty of keeping peacock butterflies alive – this species still has a survival rate of only fifteen percent in modern laboratories. She also recorded such phenomena as bird-eating tarantulas and bridges formed by ants. She published books of illustrations and descriptions of these creatures throughout her life, including her magnum opus, Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium. This book contributed a great deal towards her recognition and success during her lifetime.

When Maria was about fifty years old, she financed a voyage to Suriname through income from her previous work, with the intention of observing the plant and insect life of this part of South America, at that time colonised by the Dutch. It was a dangerous undertaking (intense storms and marauding pirates frequently attacked ships making trans-Atlantic crossings), however, she managed to take up residence in the country with her daughter for two years. They lived in a small house in Paramaribo where she observed various plants and bugs in her garden, and sometimes journeyed beyond her home to observe local plant and insect life as well. Unfortunately, the completion of the book was cut short by an illness of some kind which required her to depart Suriname in a hurry, after two years of work. Sadly, due to this illness, the resultant speed required for her to work while still having access to her materials, and jumbled boxes of specimens brought back to Amsterdam with which to continue her work, the book is not infallible.

However, the book still contains a wealth of scientific information and artistic expression. It was well-regarded and earned her widespread recognition during her lifetime. She continued to maintain correspondence and relationships with other artists and scholars until her death in 1717. Unfortunately, shoddy posthumous reproductions of her work (along with some errors, as was the case with many scientists of the time) tampered with her legacy and, as her part of the world moved towards the conservative Victorian era, she became a relatively obscure figure. As described by Kay Etheridge, an expert on Merian and the intersection of art and science, ‘Victorians started putting women in a box, and they’re still trying to crawl out of it’.

Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium features sixty copperplate illustrations, each a still-life with a central plant and examples of butterflies or moths (along with some other insects) which lived and fed on those plants. To create her illustrations she reproduced her drawings with copperplate printing, an intaglio printmaking process – the opposite of relief printing, which uses raised surfaces to print the images – that maximised the amount of detail. Many engravers worked on producing the copper plates themselves, as was typical of the art form, and Merian and her daughters adjusted the formatting of the original art works to fit the format of the book. Colours were painted onto the images with watercolour afterwards, by hand, for all copies produced at the time. Each illustration is accompanied by a thorough description of the plants and insects pictured and her observations about their behaviours and metamorphoses.

As I discussed last time, I am always on the lookout for inspirational texts from unusual sources. After learning about Merian’s work and being drawn in by her glorious technicolour illustrations, I decided to investigate Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium as a text source for my piece for the Glasgow School of Art Choir. I felt that the ideas of growth, change and metamorphosis in the natural world would make for a compelling narrative for a choral work. I also liked the idea of writing a piece about bugs for Composeher – I’d be setting the words of a pioneering female scientist, but not on the most stereotypically feminine topic. In order to produce a text that is appropriate for a ten-minute choral work, I must pick and choose a few excerpts from this large volume. So how will I choose?

Upon reading the translation, the amount of description and detail devoted to the plants in the illustrations struck me immediately. Most of the plates’ texts start with a description of the central plant in the image, followed by details of the insects which live and feed on them. I started this project assuming the text would focus almost exclusively on insects, but as I’ve learned and noted, this observance of ecological communities is one of the central pillars of Merian’s work and among her most important contributions to the scientific community. I quickly realised that I could not separate the plants from the insects as I created my excerpts. It is not just the transformations of the flora and fauna, but the relationships between different species – and the necessity of these relationships to their growth and change – which are most central here.

With this in mind, I examined all of the plates with an eye for different perspectives on metamorphosis. I chose five specific plates to excerpt, with the intention that my piece will be in five separate movements. Each description is quite detailed as the translators maintained some of the peculiarities of Merian’s language, which is now centuries out of date compared to modern Dutch. This results in a repetitive but lyrical, almost child-like quality in Merian’s descriptions of her observations when translated into modern English, lending a sense of wide-eyed discovery to the words (alongside the more methodical scientific detail also included). As an example, here is the text from the first movement, Ananas (Pineapple), taken from the first plate in the book:

‘The pineapple is the most important of all edible fruits. The small coloured leaves under the fruit are like red satin adorned with yellow spots. The small shoots on the sides keep growing when the ripe fruit has been picked. The long leaves are a light sea-green on the outside, grass-green on the inside, somewhat reddish and with sharp thorns on the edges. The peel is thick as a thumb. Its scent is lovely and strong. The crown and the shoots are planted in the earth. They become new plants again.

‘In early May, I found the caterpillar that is sitting on this pineapple. It is light green with a red and white stripe all along its entire body. On 10 May it changed into a pupa, from which a beautiful butterfly emerged.

‘The dust on the wings appears like scales. Each scale has three branches. The scales are laid out so regularly that one could count them.’

This first passage introduces the processes of change and renewal that are central throughout the work. The other movements will centre around the lush jasmine tree and its beautiful inhabitants; the thorny Carduus Spinosus plant and the beetles which eat its rotten roots; and the swift, unattainable butterflies which live on the grapefruit tree. The final movement will centre around the cocoa tree, a plant central to life in South America. Merian writes that cocoa trees thrive in Suriname, but only if they are first planted under the shade of another tree to shield them from the sun’s heat. In turn, the peels of the cocoa fruit are used as fertilizer for the land, and the beans are dried in the sun and exported. The piece will conclude and find resolution with this sense of interconnectivity.

As you can already see, there is a great deal of information throughout the text. The verbosity and detail are defining traits of this writing and its intentions as a scientific, informative document. I want to capture this precision in my composition, alongside the lush expression of the illustrations. How will I negotiate the inclusion of so much information and florid description in a limited time? How will I show the central pillars of growth and change in the music? Next time, I will dive into the musical content of the piece itself and discuss how it has grown out of these ideas.