Music, Art and Performance from Liszt to Riot Grrrl: The Musicalization of Art

Description

Opening with an account of print portraiture facilitating Franz Liszt's celebrity status and concluding with Riot Grrrl's noisy politics of feminism and performance, this interdisciplinary anthology charts the interaction between music and the visual arts from late Romanticism through to the birth of modernism and emergence of postmodernism, while crossing from Western art to the Middle East. Focusing on music as a central experience of art and life, the essays in this volume scrutinize the musicalization of art focusing on the visual and performing arts and detailing significant instances of intra-art relations between c. 1840 and the present day. Essays reflect on the aesthetic relationships of music to painting, performance and installation, sound-and-silence and time-and-space. The insistent influence of Wagner is considered as well as the work and ideas of Manet, Satie and Cage, Thomas Wilfred, La Monte Young and Eliasson. What distinguishes these studies are the convictions that music is never alone and that a full understanding of the "isms" of the last two hundred years is best achieved when music's influential presence in the visual arts is acknowledged and interrogated.

Diane V. Silverthorne is an art historian and a 'Vienna 1900' scholar, with research interests in the synchronicity of music and the visual arts from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. She has published in several anthologies including Music and Modernism 1849-1950 (2012), The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture (2013) and Music and Transcendence (2015). She holds a post in cultural studies at the University of the Arts London, UK and is working on a monograph about Vienna Secessionist and stage designer Alfred Roller (1864-1932) and the aesthetics of the Gesamtkunstwerk.

Through musical example, the volume directs its readers to process-oriented subjects in visual art that are too often overlooked. [...] The authors invite us to re-perceive the visual world according to durational aesthetics. [...] Silverthorne's volume joins its predecessors in the task to move interart scholarship from the periphery to the centre of critical engagement. * The Wagner Journal * Silverthorne brings together a bold and diverse collection of essays that summarise modern and contemporary themes in the field and offer many innovative insights. Highly recommended. * Simon Shaw-Miller, author of Eye Hear The Visual in Music (2013), Professor and Chair in History of Art, University of Bristol, UK *