Music and Modern Art

This volume is an interdisciplinary study of music and modern art. It shows how modern painters have borrowed ideas from music, just as modern composers have learned from paintings. The focus throughout is on the ways that painters and composers, respectively, have taken a "foreign" artistic medium and made use of it in their own creative work. When, for instance, Piet Mondrian painted a geometric abstraction that aimed to reenact the steps of the fox-trot, or when Morton Feldman intended his instrumental pieces to be "time canvasses," each of them was striving to identify a quality intrinsic to his own art form, unique to his own materials, and yet which nonetheless manifested itself as a striking parallel with the technical functioning of the other art. It is this elusive kind of parallelism--this rich, cross-disciplinary process of mutual inspiration--that the present volume tries to pin down, in a variety of creative media and artistic movements. The historical figures examined are diverse. The musicians range from Alexander Scriabin to the jazz bandleader Paul Whiteman, and from Arnold Schoenberg to Edgard Varèse to Morton Feldman, while including as well a late nineteenth-century look back at Franz Schubert. Among the visual arts treated here, painting predominates, from Pierre-Auguste Renoir's impressionism and Gustav Klimt's Viennese decorative schemes, to Vasily Kandinsky's and Piet Mondrian's abstractions, and to abstract expressionism. Attention is also given to American film as well as to the esoteric form of the theatrical light show. Taken as a whole, this volume provides the reader with a wide-ranging yet satisfyingly specific set of introductions to the interdisciplinary study of music and modern art, opening up many fruitful lines of further inquiry.