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In the disastrous years before and during the Second World War, when confidence in a harmonious future was as difficult as it was crucial for spiritual survival, two German artists in exile wrote what would become their late masterpieces. The composer Paul Hindemith conceived an opera on the famous astronomer Johannes Kepler's mature life and theories, The Harmony of the World; the poet and novelist Hermann Hesse wrote a complex literary collage, i>The Glass Bead Game. Both works address the topic of universal harmony in the fabric of creation and culture, as well as the urgent problem of how such harmony can heal the spiritual, mental, and emotional developments of individuals and of societ...
With increasing frequency, composers of instrumental music claim to be specifically inspired by a poem or painting, a drama or sculpture, transforming the essence of this art work's features and message into their own medium, the musical language. How does the knowledge of such a transformation from one medium into the other inform our understanding of the musical work? In this round-breaking study, Siglind Bruhn makes a case for a musical genre hitherto hidden under the term program music. She defines her subject matter in relation to the term, ekphrasis, which is used by literary scholars for poems responding to works of visual art. Bruhn develops a clear methodology and a precise set of criteria, which she employs to situate musical ekphrasis within the aesthetics discourse.
First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
In our visually-oriented society, music appears to stand apart from other arts. Yet just as a poet can write a poem whose focus is a painting, so musicians have composed scores based on poems, paintings, and other non-musical art forms. In instrumental music such reinterpretations are especially intriguing as the verbal or visual stimulus does not appear in performance but is rendered in musical form. In this study, Siglind Bruhn investigates how three French composers of the twentieth century, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Olivier Messiaen, express extra-musical subtexts in their piano works. She shows how the relation between the subtexts and the musical works can be broadly catagorized in terms of pictoriality and interiority. In all cases, Bruhn analyzes each musical piece and each source text in its entirety and in depth, drawing on her broad background in both literary and musical interpretation of the twentieth century. For pianists who seek to better understand an individual work, for scholars in the growing field of musical hermeneutics, and for lovers of music in general, this volume explores and makes explicit connections between music and other arts.
Focuses on the five-tiered representational structure in which the hermit's conflict and vindication present themselves through Hindemith's opera. Bruhn argues that the opera presents something akin to a confession of the composer's inner conflicts and his decision not to become involved in the Nazi confrontation. Three sections discuss: the dilemma of social responsibility vs. the eremitic quest in the lives of Saint Antony of Egypt, the fictional painter Mathis, and Paul Hindemith; hermits, anchorites, and ascetics as portrayed in literature, art, and music; and the form, content, and interpretation of Mathis der Maler. Appendices include synopses and translations of several operas by Hindemith. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Three of Olivier Messiaen's later works, La Transfiguration de Notre-Seigneur Jésus-Christ, Méditations sur le mystère de la Sainte Trinité, and Saint François d'Assise, are linked by the fact that the composer refers to and quotes from Thomas Aquinas. The composer's reception of Thomistic texts is one of the principles guiding the interpretations in this study. On the one hand, Messiaen had been pondering Thomas's thoughts on the role of music in the life of a Christian and on music's possible spiritual content all through his professional life; on the other hand, the oratorio, the organ meditations, and the opera are the only works in which Messiaen quotes extensive Thomistic sentence...
A new interdisciplinary exploration of Debussy's compositional development from the perspective of the artistic and poetic soirées of Stephane Mallarmé at the time of fin-de- siècle Paris.
This interdisciplinary volume explores, analyzes, and celebrates intermedial processes. It investigates the dynamic relations between media in contemporary artistic productions such as digitalized poetry and installations or musical scores by Walter Steffens and Hugh Davies; in texts like Dieter Roth’s diaries, Ror Wolf’s guidebooks, Charles Baudelaire’s art criticism, or Lewis Carroll’s Alice books; and in inherently intermedial pieces like Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés and Augusto de Campos’s poetry. Through distinct and diverse methodological approaches to intermedial inquiry, the contributors probe multiple forms of interaction between media: adaptation, appropriation...