Abstracts
Abstract
Inspired by recent interdisciplinary studies of music and the visual arts, this article is broadly based on the permeable boundaries between the two that are characteristic at the fin de siècle. I concentrate on scenes of music-making depicted on two painted canvases : Pierre Puvis de Chavannes’s Le Chant du berger (1891) and Henri Matisse’s La Musique (1910). The principal aim is to suggest how these illustrations of music and musical performance, as well as critical responses to them, resonate with perspectives from some of the most prominent aesthetic and intellectual concerns of the day. An additional aim is to extend our understanding of live musical engagement, considering what it might mean to obstruct empathetic identification, deny the sensuous properties of sound, and negate aesthetic experience.
Keywords:
- visual art,
- musical engagement,
- aesthetic experience
Résumé
Inspiré par de récentes études interdisciplinaires sur la musique et les arts visuels, cet article s’appuie largement sur les frontières perméables entre les deux qui caractérisent la fin de siècle. En particulier, je me concentre sur des scènes de musique représentées sur deux toiles peintes: Le Chant du berger (1891) de Pierre Puvis de Chavannes et La Musique (1910) d’Henri Matisse. L’un de mes objectifs est de suggérer des façons dont ces illustrations de la musique et de la performance musicale, ainsi que les réponses critiques à celles-ci, résonnent avec les perspectives de certaines des préoccupations esthétiques et intellectuelles les plus importantes de l’époque. Un deuxième objectif est d’étendre notre compréhension de la performance musicale en direct, en considérant ce que cela pourrait signifier d’entraver l’identification empathique, de nier les propriétés sensuelles du son et l’expérience esthétique.
Mots-clés :
- art visuel,
- engagement musical,
- expérience esthétique
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Appendices
Biographical note
Davinia Caddy (PhD Cambridge) has taught at the Universities of Oxford, Oxford Brookes, and Auckland. Her work focuses on the cultural history of the arts in belle-époque Paris, with focus on the intersections between music, gesture, and visuals. She is the author of The Ballets Russes and Beyond: Music and Dance in Belle-Epoque Paris (Cambridge, 2012) and the general-interest guide How to Hear Classical Music (Awa, 2013). She is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to “The Rite of Spring” (2023) and the co-editor of Musicology and Dance: Historical and Critical Perspectives (Cambridge, 2020).
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