Music from Film and Film from Music, rather than Music for Film and Film for Music
- A very broad course, involving links between the arts in general;
- Primarily to do with the perceived divide between the senses and the intellect - between intuition and cognition, between perception and meaning.
- Music, the visual arts (plastic arts), text, gustation (taste) and olfaction (smell).
- So, a primary source of interest and information is research on Synaesthesia - experiencing two (or more) senses in union - so coloured hearing, coloured taste, or coloured reading (words or more usually letters). Synaesthesia as a topic was only really 'discovered' in the 1880s - at about the same time as (it's now recognised) that psychology itself became accepted as an individual area of study.
- In addition, there's a longer, more vague and more illusive area to do with artist's general use of combinations of art forms. In these forms, multiple senses are stimulated in order to achieve a hightened result - opera, theatre, film, heterophony, diffusion and others might be seen as examples of this.
- Descartes' mind/body distinction - the cinema of the mind, the ghost in the machine.
- So, Metaform and Metaforming is a good introduction - the idea of crossing boundaries to create meaning.
- This, in turn, has significant links to Synaesthesia, although the latter is an automatic state that effects certain individuals. Where a non-synaesthete might take pleasure from making an analogy between the sound of a piece of music and the appearance of a stained-glass window, a synaesthete would make the connection automatically and, by many accounts, permanently.
- The history of western art is one of analogy and metaphor - frequently the subjects and styles of art are themselves metaphorical: for instance Van Gogh's intense brushwork or Jackson Pollock's random drips - the emphasis on 'perfection' of Renaissance music or the ardent melodic striving of the late romantics. The difficulty here is knowing where style ends and metaphor begins. It almost seems trivial to suggest that the physicality of Van Gogh or (those who have to play) Mahler is indicative of the emotional states intended to be triggered by the art, but is this not the case?
- We'll look at a wide variety of art - visual art influenced by musical ideas (or vice versa)...