This volume, edited by Sarah Mahler Kraaz & Charlotte De Mille, brings together prominent scholars, artists, composers, and directors to present the latest interdisciplinary ideas and projects in the fields of art history, musicology and multi-media practice. Organized around ways of perceiving, experiencing and creating, the book outlines the state of the field through cutting-edge research case studies. For example, how does art-music practice / thinking communicate activist activities? How do socio-economic and environmental problems affect access to heritage? How do contemporary practitioners interpret past works and what global concerns stimulate new works? In each instance, examples of cross or inter-media works are not thought of in isolation but in a global historical context that shows our cultural existence to be complex, conflicted and entwined. A panel of contributors to the volume will introduce key themes and discuss the importance of cross-disciplinary collaboration.
Panel chair: Simon Shaw-Miller. Panel: Sarah Mahler Kraaz, Charlotte de Mille and Juliana M. Pistorius.
Professor Simon Shaw-Miller is Emeritus Chair of Art History, University of Bristol. He was previously the Professor of History of Art & Music in the School of Arts, Birkbeck College, University of London. He is an Honorary Associate of the Royal Academy of Music, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. His publications include: Visible Deeds of Music: Art & Music from Wagner to Cage (Yale, 2002, pbk, 2004), Eye hEar The Visible in Music (Ashgate, 2013, pbk. Routledge, 2016), and most recently Improvision: Orphic Art in the Age of Jazz (Bloomsbury, 2022, pbk, Nov. 2023)
Sarah Mahler Kraaz is Emerita Professor of Music, Ripon College, USA. She is editor of Music and War in the United States (2017).
Juliana M. Pistorius is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London, and the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Her research combines interests in operatic intersections between music and the visual arts in the work of William Kentridge, and the political position of Western artistic traditions in the postcolonial sphere. Her work appears in Twentieth-Century Music, Cambridge Opera Journal, Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies, Music & Letters, and in the forthcoming volumes, Music Theatre and Politics (Cambridge University Press) and The Oxford Handbook of Music Colonialism (Oxford University Press).
Charlotte de Mille is Associate Lecturer at The Courtauld Institute, and curates The Courtauld Gallery’s music programme. Her work taking visual art and music beyond academe received a St Andrews University Public Engagement with Research Award 2018 (group award for ‘Virginia Woolf and Music’ project). A recipient of a Paul Mellon Mid- Career Fellowship and Research Continuity Fellowship, she has published widely. Her latest book Bergson in Britain: Philosophy and Modernist Art 1890-1914 is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press (2023), and she is co-editor of The Bloomsbury Handbook of Music and Art which we launch this evening.
Deborah Prichard, ‘Light’, for solo violin, performed by Harriet Mackenzie (violin)
‘A new turn in humanities scholarship’.
– Simon Shaw Miller, Emeritus Chair of Art History, University of Bristol
‘an agenda for change: both for individuals, artistically and conceptually, and for the myriad collective ways that humans dwell on the planet’
– Aaron S. Allen, Director, Environment and Sustainability Program and Associate Professor of Musicology, University of North Carolina
Organised by Dr Charlotte de Mille (The Courtauld).
