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

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 a 'Vienna 1900' scholar and Research Lecturer in Cultural Studies, University of the Arts, London, UK.