Visible Deeds of Music (Paperback)

Simon Shaw-Miller

ISBN 10: 0300107536 / ISBN 13: 9780300107531

Published by Yale University Press, New Haven, 2004

Paperback. This provocative book explores the cross-fertilization between music and the visual arts in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Reassessing the work of a wide range of composers and artists including Richard Wagner, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, and John Cage, Simon Shaw-Miller demonstrates how the boundaries between art and music were permeable at this time, enabling each to enrich the other. 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. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9780300107531

Synopsis:

This provocative book explores the cross-fertilization between music and the visual arts in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Reassessing the work of a wide range of composers and artists including Richard Wagner, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, and John Cage, Simon Shaw-Miller demonstrates how the boundaries between art and music were permeable at this time, enabling each to enrich the other.

Review: "A consistently stimulating account of musical-visual relations in the twentieth century. This is a significant piece of scholarship that will attract a solid readership among art historians as well as music scholars." -- Richard Leppert, author of The Sight of Sound

Bibliographic Details

Title: Visible Deeds of Music (Paperback)
Publisher: Yale University Press, New Haven
Publication Date: 2004
Binding: Paperback
Condition: new