Jefferson and the Rights of Man

by Dumas Malone

As a coherent field of research, the field of music and visual culture has seen rapid growth in recent years. The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture serves as the first comprehensive reference on the intersection between these two areas of study, an ideal introduction for those coming to the field for the first time as well as a useful source of information for seasoned researchers. This collection of over forty entries, from musicologists and art historians from the US and UK, delineate the key concepts in the field in five parts:
Starting Points
Methodologies
Reciprocation the musical in visual culture and the visual in musical culture
Convergence in metaphor, in conception, and in practice
Hybrid Arts
This reference work speaks to the important questions concerning this burgeoning field of research what are the established approaches to studying musical and visual cultures side by side? What have been the major points of contact between these two areas and what kind of questions can this interdisciplinary research address moving forward? The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture is an indispensable guide for anyone interested in the field of music and visual culture.

523 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Dumas Malone, 1892–1986, spent thirty-eight years researching and writing Jefferson and His Time. In 1975 he received the Pulitzer Prize in history for the first five volumes. From 1923 to 1929 he taught at the University of Virginia; he left there to join the Dictionary of American Biography, bringing that work to completion as editor-in-chief. Subsequently, he served for seven years as director of the Harvard University Press. After serving on the faculties of Yale and Columbia, Malone retired to the University of Virginia in 1959 as the Jefferson Foundation Professor of History, a position he held until his retirement in 1962. He remained at the university as biographer-in-residence and finished his Jefferson biography at the University of Virginia, where it was begun.

Reviews

[Olga Nikolaeva · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very good and positive attempt to bind together two disciplines: music and visual culture, which are no matter how close always feel too far from each other when it comes to a decent academic text. The chapters differ in their methodologies, some focus on a historical development of particular issues, some focus on specific examples, some allow a certain degree of theoretical speculation. However, editors of this companion did a great job of combining works together and even if one is not interested in certain chapters due to their own professional interests non of the chapters feel completely our of place in this book. My personal favorite (guilty as charged by reading 'I'm with the band' at the same time) is 'Album Art and Posters: The Psychedelic Interplay of Rock Art and Art Rock' by Jan Butler. Short but straight to the point and rather inspiring.
As the editors of the companion wrote in the introduction part, this book does feel like a very beginning of an important collaboration and a lot of issues will develop further, will be criticized or simply become outdated. Yet, again, I have a general positive feeling about it, which of course affecting the way I feel about my own dissertation. Nice for once to think that you aren't exactly falling loudly between all the disciplines in a dark dark rift of the academic world.