Simon Shaw-Miller

'Eye hEar The Visual in Music' employs the concept of the visual in proximate relation to music, producing a tension: 'is it not the case that there is a gulf between painting and music, between the visible and the audible? One is full of colour and light yet silent; one is invisible and marvellously noisy.' Such a belief, this book argues, betrays an ideological constraint on music, desiccating it to sound, and art to vision. The starting point of this study is more hybrid (and hydrating): that music is never employed without numerous and complex intersections with the visual. By involving the concept of synaesthesia, the book evokes music?s multi-sensory nature, stops it from sounding alone, and offers music as a subject for art historians. Music bleeds into art and visuality, in its graphic depiction in notation, in the theatre of performance, its sights and sites. This book looks at music in its absolute guise as a model for art; at notation and the conductor as the silent visual fulcra around which music circulates; at the music and image of Erik Satie; at the concert hall as white cube; at the symphonic film '2001: A Space Odyssey'; and at the liminality of John Cage and Andy Warhol.

Eye hEar The Visual in Music

Simon Miller

This thoughtful and provocative book explores the relationship between music and the visual arts in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on the modernist period. Reassessing the work of composers and artists such as Richard Wagner, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Josef Matthias Hauer, and John Cage, Simon Shaw-Miller argues that despite modernism's advocacy of media purity and separation, the boundaries between art and music were permeable at this time, as they have been throughout history. Shaw-Miller begins by discussing the place of Wagner's music and ideas at the time of the birth of modernism, presenting Wagner's aesthetic of the Gesamtkunstwerk as an alternative paradigm for modernist art. He goes on to analyze Picasso's use of musical subjects in his cubist works and Klee's adoption of music and the issue of temporality in his paintings and drawings. He concludes with the radical aesthetic of Cage, the silencing of sound, and the promotion of intermediality in the work of Fluxus artists. Through these fascinating examples, Shaw-Miller raises questions about both art and music history that will be of interest to students of both disciplines.

Art and Music from Wagner to Cage

Visible Deeds of Music

Tag Gronberg

Charlotte Ashby

The Viennese café was a key site of urban modernity around 1900. In the rapidly growing city it functioned simultaneously as home and workplace, affording opportunities for both leisure and intellectual exchange. This volume explores the nature and function of the coffeehouse in the social, cultural, and political world of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Just as the café served as a creative meeting place within the city, so this volume initiates conversations between different disciplines focusing on Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century. Contributions are drawn from the fields of social and cultural history, literary studies, Jewish studies and art, and architectural and design history. A fresh perspective is also provided by a selection of comparative articles exploring coffeehouse culture elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

Simon Shaw-Miller

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