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 113: Tues 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 evoke the sense of hearing, and multi-media creations from staged works to video games.