Silent Music and Static Motion
Holly B. Rogers · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2013
This chapter unpacks the hypothesis that early video was used by artist-composers to bring together the separate but related histories of music and art. Starting in the early modern era, it identifies an emerging audiovisual culture that ran through visual music, audible art, audio-visual instruments, colour-sound synaesthesia and experimental film. With reference to the theories of Gotthold Lessing, Daniel Albright, Richard Leppert, Theodor Adorno and Nicholas Cook, musicians ranging from Wagner, Lachenmann, Nancarrow, Skryabin, Rimsky-Korsakov and Messiaen to Elvis and Britney Spears are used to explore the the physicality of music performance and the possibilities for spatialising sound: the work of artists Boccioni, Klee, Klimt and Kandinsky provide examples of temporal and synaesthetic visual work. Lastly, the experimental films of Oskar Fischinger, Norman McLaren and the Whitney Brothers provide a technological link from earlier experimentation to the birth of video art-music.