Table Of ContentExperiencing Music and Visual
Cultures
Bringing the research of musicologists, art historians, and film studies schol-
ars into dialogue, this book explores the relationships between visual art
forms and music. The chapters are organized around three core concepts –
threshold, intermediality, and synchresis – which offer ways of understand-
ing and discusssing the interplay between the arts of sounds and images.
Refuting the idea that music and visual art forms only operate in paral-
lel, the contributors instead consider how the arts of sound and vision are
entwined across a wide array of materials, genres and time periods.
Contributors explore a rich variety of topics, ranging from the art of
Renaissance Italy to the politics of opera in contemporary Los Angeles to
the popular television series Breaking Bad. Placing these chapters in conver-
sation, this volume develops a shared language for cross-disciplinary inquiry
into arts that blend music and visual components, integrates insights from
film studies with the conversation between musicology and art history, and
moves the study of music and visual culture forward.
Antonio Cascelli is Lecturer in Music at Maynooth University, Ireland.
Denis Condon is Lecturer in Film at Maynooth University, Ireland.
Music and Visual Culture
Series Editors:
Anne Leonard, Clark Art Institute, USA
Tim Shephard, University of Sheffield, UK
Music and Visual Culture is a new series of both monographs and antholo-
gies that offer original insights into musical and visual concepts or practices
in combination. Bursting the bounds of traditional iconographic studies,
research in this area draws upon a wide range of materials (visual art, objects,
ephemera, film and television, music video, multimedia installation, online
content, video games, metaphor, criticism and aesthetics, staging for opera
and dance), and springs from a broad array of disciplines (musicology, art
history, ethnomusicology, film studies, game studies, performance studies,
cultural studies). The series aims to include work representing the full span
of geographies and eras, and engaging with a variety of approaches such as
cultural history; ethnomusicology; opera, film, and performance studies;
multimedia phenomena; and music psychology or cognitive neuroscience.
The editors’ premise is that studies in music and visual culture should not be
seen as occupying a middle ground between these two disciplines, but rather
as integral to each field – participating in and helping to advance each dis-
ciplinary discourse equally.
Icons of Sound
Voice, Architecture, and Imagination in Medieval Art
Edited by Bissera V. Pentcheva
Experiencing Music and Visual Cultures
Threshold, Intermediality, Synchresis
Edited by Antonio Cascelli and Denis Condon
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.
com/Music-and-Visual-Culture/book-series/MVC
Experiencing Music and Visual
Cultures
Threshold, Intermediality, Synchresis
Edited by Antonio Cascelli
and Denis Condon
First published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
© 2021 selection and editorial matter, Antonio Cascelli and Denis
Condon individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Antonio Cascelli and Denis Condon to be identified
as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their
individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
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or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-0-367-18804-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-19836-6 (ebk)
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Contents
Notes on contributors vii
Introduction 1
ANTONIO CASCELLI AND DENIS CONDON
PART I
Setting the scene 15
1 Synch: scenes of implication 17
ALESSANDRA CAMPANA
2 Armida in-between: the translation of the affetti 33
GIOVANNI CARERI
PART II
Voice as presence and absence 51
3 La voix humaine (1959–2016) and the “epiphany” of the
performer’s identity 53
FRANCESCA PLACANICA
4 Puppets that sing or scenery that breathes:
Phelim McDermott’s Satyagraha 64
HAYLEY FENN
5 Manipulating (public) images in the contemporary music
documentary 79
JENNIFER O’MEARA
vi Contents
6 A new Carmen for a new Spain: nationalism and cinema
during the Spanish Civil War 91
LAURA MIRANDA
PART III
Beyond borders 105
7 “Uber opera”: the politics of site-specific mobile opera
in Los Angeles 107
MONICA C. CHIEFFO
8 Quel trouble me saisit?: the arrested gaze of Armide
in Poussin, Quinault and Lully 120
MICHAEL LEE
9 Music in Cuban revolutionary cinema: musical experimentation
in the service of revolutionary ideology 131
MARYSOL QUEVEDO
10 Ken Russell’s Mahler: a musical phantasmagoria 142
PASCAL VANDELANOITTE
11 There’s meth in the madness: music and incongruence
in AMC’s Breaking Bad 153
JESSICA SHINE
PART IV
From silence to sound and back 167
12 Music, painting, cosmos, chaos: flaying and playing
in Titian’s Marsyas 169
ITAY SAPIR
13 Armonia, seeing and hearing in Paolo Veronese’s
Le nozze di Cana 179
ANTONIO CASCELLI
14 Listening to space in time 193
SUSANNA PASTICCI
15 The allowable voices of silent opera films in 1910s Ireland 207
DENIS CONDON
Index 220
Notes on contributors
Alessandra Campana i s Associate Professor of Music, Film and Media
Studies at Tufts University.
Giovanni Careri is Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en
Sciences Sociales, Paris, and a Professor at Università Iuav of Venice.
Monica C. Chieffo i s a Ph.D. Candidate in Musicology at the University of
California, Los Angeles.
Hayley Fenn is completing a doctoral thesis on puppetry and music at
Harvard University
Michael Lee is an Adjunct Teaching Fellow in Music at Trinity College
Dublin.
Laura Miranda i s Lecturer in Music at the University of Oviedo.
Jennifer O’Meara is Assistant Professor in Film Studies at Trinity College
Dublin.
Susanna Pasticci i s Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of
Cassino.
Francesca Placanica i s Lecturer in Music and Director of Performance at
Maynooth University and a 2021-23 MSCA IF Artistic Research Fellow
at University of Huddersfield.
Marysol Quevedo is Assistant Professor in Musicology at the Frost School
of Music, University of Miami.
Itay Sapir is Associate Professor of Art History at the Université du Québec,
Montréal.
Jessica Shine i s Lecturer at the Department of Media Communications,
Munster Technological University.
Pascal Vandelanoitte i s Lecturer in Film Studies and Head of Audiovisual
Arts at LUCA School of Arts, Brussels.
Introduction
Antonio Cascelli and Denis Condon
The visual arts and music have often been considered as separate modes of
cultural expression or as activities in which one of them predominates thor-
oughly and appeals entirely or almost entirely to either the sense of sight
or to the sense of hearing. Music and other sound arts are often created to
be experienced as autonomous aesthetic phenomena, but they are also fre-
quently designed to be experienced with image-based media of some kind.
The relationship between music and visual cultures is the subject of this
book, which distinguishes itself from other works in this expanding field of
study by developing concepts for the ways in which looking and listening are
shaped by the particular constellation of image- and sound-based media.
The connections between these sensory modes are frequently mentioned in
work in the area, but they are seldom theorized. Drawing on a range of case
studies in music and visual cultures that date from the Renaissance to the
2010s, this book offers concepts for thinking about that relationship. Those
concepts are threshold, intermediality and synchresis.
Critics and practitioners have discussed the aesthetic power of music
and visual cultures to deeply affect their audiences throughout the period
examined here. Writing about music in the sixteenth century, for instance,
Claude Palisca has argued that “composers increasingly bent their creative
efforts toward moving the affections.”1 He refers to Nicola Vicentino who
in his L’antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica (1555) contended that
“the composer’s sole obligation is to animate the words and, with harmony,
represent their passions – now hard, now sweet, now cheerful, now sad – in
accordance with their subject matter.”2 As an example of the early reception
of sixteenth-century secular music, Palisca then reminds us how Francesco
Dalla Viola praised Adrian Willaert’s ability to “make the soul feel, at his
bidding, every affection that he proposes to move.”3 But one has only to
think of the myth of Orpheus at the basis of the development of the first
musico-theatrical events, from Angelo Poliziano’s to Iacopo Peri’s, Giulio
Caccini’s and Claudio Monteverdi’s texts. Orpheus epitomizes the power of
music, but Euridice’s too is the embodiment of the same power. In fact, in
Poliziano’s text, she is described as having the ability to change the course
of the river with her own singing.4
