This edited volume explores the dialogue between art and music with that of mystical currents at the turn of the twentieth century.
The volume draws on the most current research from both art historians and musicologists to present an interdisciplinary approach to the study of mysticisms historical importance. The chapters in this edited volume gauge the scope of different interpretations of mysticism and illuminate how an exchange between the sister arts unveil an underlying stream of metaphysical, supernatural, and spiritual ideas over the course of the century. Case studies include Charles Tournemire, Joseph Péladan, Erik Satie, Hilma af Klint, Jean Sibelius, Frantiek Kupka, and Wassily Kandinsky. The contributors unique theoretical perspectives and disciplinary methodologies offer expert insight on both the rewards and inevitable aesthetic complications that arise when one artform meets another.
The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, musicology, visual culture, and mysticism.
Introduction: Aspiring Towards the Absolute Setting the Stage: A
Symbolist Prelude
1. Music and Aesthetic Liturgy in Symbolist Art Salons: The
Cases of Joséphin Péladan and Jean Delville
2. Deathbed Conversions,
Troglodytes, and Baths for the Brain: Mysticism in the Fin-de-sičcle
Historical Imagination
3. En blanc et immobile: Erik Satie, Mysticism and
Whiteness 4.Josephin Sār Péladan, Charles Tournemire, and Apocalyptic
Mysticism Synaesthesia in Scandinavia
5. Musical Interaction with Finnish
Visual Arts: The Composer Jean Sibelius, and Artists Akseli Gallen-Kallela,
Oscar Parviainen and Ellen Thesleff
6. Sexing Parsifal: Gendered Synaesthesia
and Transpositions in Hilma af Klints Abstraction Vibrations, Abstraction,
and Tonality: Giving Sound Form
7. George Frederic Wattss Mesmeric Dolls:
Music and Theosophy in the Painters Late Works
8. Composing Symmorphies:
Chromatism, Astral Vision and Music of the Spheres in Frantiek Kupkas
Cosmological Modernism
9. Ringing Cosmos, Returning Souls: Expressions of the
Beyond in Weberns Five Pieces for Orchestra Op. 10 and Kandinskys All
Saints Day Paintings
10. Music as Key to the Beyond: Steiner and Kandinskys
Scenic Compositions against Materialism
11. Tonality and (the) Beyond:
Elgars Gerontius and String Quartet Piacevole
Corrinne Chong, PhD, is Assistant Curator at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, USA.
Michelle Foot, PhD, is Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Art at the University of Edinburgh.
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