From Sight to Sound: Musical Ekphrasis in the Long Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This thesis examines musical ekphrasis, a subgenre of program music that involves a deliberate attempt to respond to and re-present a visual artwork. The process by which art is transformed into music experienced by the viewer-listener is called transmedialisation. This project’s conceptions of musical ekphrasis and transmedialisation are adapted from Siglind Bruhn’s seminal book, Musical Ekphrasis: Composers Responding to Poetry and Painting (2000). Bruhn’s theorisation of musical ekphrasis addresses the re-presentation of subject matter but the transposition of art’s formal parameters into musical parameters remains minimally addressed. This neglect stems from musicology’s lack of nuanced dialogue with the visual arts which result in surface-level descriptions of an artwork’s content and often overlook its formal complexities. I argue that close analysis of an artwork’s formal parameters in addition to its subject matter will result in a more comprehensive understanding of the ekphrastic process.

I introduce a reconstructed model of transmedialisation that is enhanced by closer engagement with art history and visual formalism. My two-step methodology examines the content and formal elements of the original visual work and of the musical ekphrasis separately; these are then compared and contrasted to characterise the transmedialisation at play. I define four types of transmedialising functions: replication, alteration, supplementation, and exclusion. Functions act as a bridge between the original artwork and musical ekphrasis whether in the matter of content or form, permitting us to identify visuo-musical analogies such as colour to timbre, visual composition to musical structure, and visual representation to musical topics and styles. I analyse three case studies of musical ekphrasis: Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead Op. 29 (1908), Liszt’s Hunnenschlacht (1857), and Liszt’s Von der Wiege bis zum Grabe (1882).