| Unit name | Audio-Visual Culture |
|---|---|
| Unit code | HARTM0027 |
| Credit points | 20 |
| Level of study | M/7 |
| Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 1 (weeks 1 - 12) |
| Unit director | Professor. Shaw-Miller |
| Open unit status | Open |
| Pre-requisites |
None |
| Co-requisites |
None |
| School/department | Department of History of Art (Historical Studies) |
| Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
Although art and music are often thought of as separate and opposite art forms, one visible, one invisible, one silent, one noisy, one temporal and one spatial, they have in fact constantly interacted in rich and productive ways. This unit looks critically at the interdisciplinary interaction between the practices of art and music during the long twentieth century (c.1850-1999). It contrasts the early years of the twentieth century and ideas around the development of abstraction in painting with the latter years of the century and the development of a multi media sensibility. Artist and musicians considered might include, Klee, Kandinsky, Wagner, Cage, Marclay and Anderson, and art movements explored could range from Futurism to Fluxus. The exact disposition of topics will in part be negotiated with the students. The course seeks to interrogate such concepts as the Gesamtkunstwerk, intermediality, sensory-specificity, and musical ekphrasis.
• On successful completion of this unit students will (1) have developed a detailed knowledge and in-depth critical understanding of key aspects of audio-visual culture in the long twentieth century (2) be able to evaluate extracts from key pieces of audio-visual culture from the period (3) be able to identify and evaluate pertinent evidence/data in order to illustrate/demonstrate a cogent argument. (4) display high level skills in evaluating, analysing, synthesising and critiquing images, texts and ideas.
10 x 2 hour seminars
One summative coursework essay of 5,000 words, assessing ILOs 1-4.
• D. Kahn, Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (MIT, 1999) • P. Dayan, Art as Music, Music as Poetry, Poetry as Art, from Whistler to Stravinsky and Beyond (Ashgate, 2010) • M. Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (Columbia, 1994) • N. Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia (Oxford, 1998) • S. Shaw-Miller, Visible Deeds of Music: Art and Music from Wagner to Cage (Yale, 2002) • Christopher Butler, Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe 1900-1916 (Clarendon, Oxford, 1994)
