Music and Visual Culture (541-0-1)
Instructors
Linda P Austern
847/491-5705
l-austern@northwestern.edu
Office Hours: E-mail instructor to arrange a meeting.
Specialist in Renaissance and baroque musical-cultural relations, gender and feminist theory, European iconography, music as related to visual art and the early history of science. Recipient of major fellowships and research grants, including American Council of Learned Societies, British Academy, Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute (Radcliffe College/Harvard University), and National Endowment for the Humanities. Author, Music in English Children's Drama of the Later Renaissance (Gordon and Breach, 1992), Music in English Life and Thought 1550-1650 (forthcoming); editor, Music, Sensation and Sensuality (Routledge, 2002), editor, Music and the Sirens (Indiana University Press, 2006). Author of numerous articles and reviews in books and such journals as Journal of the American Musicological Society, Modern Philology, Music and Letters, and Renaissance Quarterly.
Meeting Info
RCMA Lower Level 111: Wed 2:00PM - 4:50PM
Overview of class
This course considers the ways in which music interacts with aspects of Western culture that have been expressed in visual form, especially during eras in which the sense of sight and visual imagery have been considered more powerful and immediate than the sense of hearing and music: the early modern, Romantic, modern, and post-modern periods. We will begin with ideas of the senses, proceed to aesthetics and methodologies for analyzing works created for the senses of sight and hearing, and spend most of the course considering specific case studies in which music borrows from visual domains, visual works that evoke the sense of hearing, and multi-media creations that involve both sound and imagery.
Class Materials (Required)
Alberto Ausoni's Music in Art: Guide to Images. $20 ISBN#0892369655
https://www.amazon.com/Music-Guide-Imagery-Alberto-Ausoni/dp/0892369655
Class Materials (Suggested)
All other required materials will be on reserve in the Library or will be available through the course Canvas site.
Students may want their own copies of:
Richard Leppert's The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation and the History of the Body
Tim Shepherd and Anne Leonard's The Toutledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture.