Abstract
Although music has been conceived as an art of pure emotions and devoid of concepts, it has always gained its significance in intermedial contexts. The sense and impact of music are inevitably articulated through a medial transfer since music contains much more than its sonic aspect. Intermediality, however, that occurs in the interplay of music and its surrounding verbal discourses, remains routine-like or largely unnoticed within institutionalized forms such as music criticism, music history, and the like. By contrast, other intermedial effects of music become highly pronounced when the interplay of musical and linguistic medium is enriched by the involvement of other media, primarily visual ones. If, for example, music becomes the object of the depiction in a painting, we won’t necessarily approach the visual work in the same way as if the depiction was a mere commentary on a preexisting music phenomenon. “You’ll never look at music the same way again!” – as the slogan put it, back in the early days of Music Television. Although music videos provide an ample repository of visually hijacked, exploited, or intensified musical experiences, their medial dynamics cannot be held as novelties, at least as far as cultural modernity is concerned. This chapter searches for much earlier examples of the audiovisual experience. At the same time, it explores its aesthetic and historical preconditions and the workings of intermediality concerning several eighteenth- and nineteenth-century musical pictures.
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Notes
- 1.
Ludwig Pfeiffer relies on Dewey’s aesthetics, noting that “the question looming and lingering in Dewey’s aesthetics […] is [the] one of culturally and therefore also personally significant and attractive media configurations” (2002, xviii).
- 2.
This preference for experiencing artworks is eminently present in Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1972) as well, another defining thinker of modern aesthetics. Winckelmann was concerned, however, less with issues of medialities in arts, thus – along with Hegel, Schopenhauer, and others – he contributed indirectly to the fact that the medial conditions of the arts were brought to light only much later, in the twentieth century.
- 3.
Some analysts believe that it shows the Beethoven bust of 1821 by Anton Dietrich (1799–1872), while Alessandra Comini claims it is Danhauser’s own work, as he had the possibility to make Beethoven’s death mask and made several busts from it (Comini 2008, 208).
- 4.
Paris as the supposed location of the painting was indeed the defining scene of Liszt’s life in the 1830s, but this location is in a somewhat contradicting relation to the aforementioned 1839 Vienna concerts series, which provides the direct cause of the work’s creation.
- 5.
Regarding the music Liszt is supposedly playing for the company, cf. Kovács (2014, 122).
- 6.
The hookah at the bottom left, in spatial opposition to that of the Beethovenian shrine, is a telling motif, which might be further discussed in another study.
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Veres, B. (2024). Picturing Music in the Nineteenth Century. In: Bruhn, J., Azcárate, A.LV., de Paiva Vieira, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Intermediality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28322-2_33
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