Music, art and performance from Liszt to Riot Grrrl: the musicalization of art

Abstract

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 relationship between music and the visual arts from late Romanticism and the birth of modernism to postmodernism, while crossing from Western art to the Middle East. Music and 'the musical' - a term that emerged in the Romantic period to denote the expressive capacities of all the arts - is inextricably engaged with the visual world. Avowedly focused on music and the audial as a central experience of art and life, the assembled essays scrutinize the permeable boundaries between the visual and performing arts, detailing significant instances of intra-art relations between ca.1840 and the present day, and reflecting on the aesthetic relationships of music to painting, textiles, and other visual arts. Topics range from Satie, Manet, and contemporary Iranian art to Symbolism, Minimalism, and Turkish carpets.