Direction d'ouvrage
| Résumé : | Over sixty years after the appearance of Joyce Michel’s essay on “Music and its relation to other arts” in 1959 (Criticism, Vol. 1), our Special Issue is set to explore the uneasy relationship between the realms of musical performativity and other arts such as literature, theater, visual arts, as well as critical theory. Music has a deep and intricate relationship with other arts, particularly with visual arts, literature, and dance. A telling episode here is Schopenhauer’s playful polemics with Goethe, who was famously comparing musical sounds and the plastic arts, particularly architecture. Notably, for Hermann Hesse music represented a certain metaphorical quintessence of cultural history as such. One of the most significant connections lies here naturally with visual arts. Music has often been employed as a theme in paintings, sculptures, and other visual art forms, and many artists have sought to represent music in their work. The names of Mussorgsky, Debussy, Rimsky Korsakov, Skriabin versus Čiurlionis and Kandinsky here come most readily as those important artists who transcended ‘symbolic territories’ quite easily. It is especially important to mention here the later (mid-20th century) movement of abstract expressionism which sought to capture the essence of music through visual art, with artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning drawing inspiration from the rhythms, harmonies, tonal as well as atonal melodies and compositions in their paintings. Similarly, literature has also been heavily influenced by music, with many authors drawing on musical themes and structures in their writing. For instance, Walt Whitman and T.S. Eliot used musical elements like rhythm, meter, and repetition in their verse, while James Joyce and Virginia Woolf used musical structures to shape their novels at the same time as F. Scott Fitzgerald characterized his writing in Great Gatsby as “jazz prose…”. |
