Music and Modernism

Study day to be held at the Courtauld Institute of Art
Saturday 16 May 2009

Call for Papers

Exploring Kandinsky's contention that the 'various arts are drawing
together [.] finding in music the best teacher', Music and Modernism will
re-evaluate the significant connections between the disciplines of music
and fine art in the period covering the emergence and flowering of
Modernism, c. 1849 - 1950. During this time both music and fine art were
concerned with issues of equality, equivalence, relativity and
subjectivity - themes that have since been taken as key to the definition
of Modernism. Composers and artists repeatedly borrowed from one another,
yet their motives have seldom been explored. Did such quotation amount to a
conscious statement of their modernity, or was this merely a symptom of
shared interests? This study day will question not only what it was music
gave to fine art, or fine art music, but will ask whether we can in fact
think in terms of two opposing directions of influence in this period at
all.

Contemporary criticism adopted an overtly musical language for modernism
that had been defined in the philosophy of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and
Bergson. This was however a reflexive process in which the use of a shared
terminology in turn expanded the range of musical vocabulary. Filtered into
popular texts, the precision which distinguished analogous intent from
synonymous intent rapidly vanished, leaving scholars with an ill-defined
discourse that is too readily accepted. Critically appraising the outcome
of this richly suggestive inter-textuality, Music and Modernism will
question the value, relevance, and usage of this terminology.

The linguistic convergence of art and music in this period was itself
couched in the broader developments of psychology. Noting our innate
'susceptibility' to music, William James was one amongst many to instigate
and chart a shift in emphasis from description to emotional directness.
Re-thinking the reception of artworks in terms of the representational or
the abstract, philosophers, psychologists, and critics gave voice to an
aesthetic appreciation that was increasingly questioning of its cultural
situation. This cross-culturalism encouraged a shift from the traditional
division of the arts that had held sway since Lessing's 'Laokoon' (1766) to
embrace a melding of media and reference in the act or event of creation.

Keynote speaker: Peter Vergo (University of Essex), 'Music and the Visual
Arts: Some "Unanswered Questions"

Twenty minute papers are invited from scholars, artists, and musicians.
Topics may include, but are not restricted to:
Questions of language
Representation: writing, notation, visualisation of music, music
publishing
Creativity
Disciplinarity
Collaborative projects
Synaesthesia
Reception: association, subjectivity, polemic
Performance: issues of staging, artwork as event
* The Gesamtkunstwerk

Please send proposals (max 300 words) to Charlotte.Demillecourtauld.ac.uk
by 31 January 2009.

With the generous support of the Royal Musical Association

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Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN
tel +44 207 848 2909 web
http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/researchforum/calendar.shtml