Art Salon: The Visual Music in Art

Join Professor Simon Shaw-Miller (University of Bristol) as we consider relationships across the musical and visual arts. This is the second of a series of illustrated talks. Tonight’s talk will focus on the ways music often tries, and fails, to demote the visual. Musicians discussed will include Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Satie and Cage.

An understanding of art, perhaps surprisingly, has much to say about music, and recognising the closeness of these two ‘sister arts’ can teach us about both. This series of Salons will explore each art form and its sensory regime (sight or hearing), and how they play with and against each other. We shall look at the aspiration of classical music to disappear, to become invisible; how some artists used musical ideas to create their paintings; how new technologies bring the two even closer together; and how synaesthesia works. So, rather than thinking of art as silent, we shall make it sound, and rather than considering music as invisible, we shall shine a light on it. In this, the differences between them will begin to converge, so that sometimes it might be hard to know if music is art or art is music!

45 minutes with time for questions and conversation.