The Art of Music

by Patrick Coleman (Editor), Simon Shaw-Miller (Contributor), Richard Leppert (Contributor)

A fascinating study of the relationship between music and visual art in a variety of media from around the world

The Art of Music is a handsomely illustrated and rich interdisciplinary look at the mutual influence between music and the visual arts across cultures and eras. The book sheds new light on more familiar artists at the intersection of the visual and the musical, such as Wassily Kandinsky and Arnold Schoenberg, and presents new scholarship on less well-known examples in the arts of Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe, from antique pottery to contemporary video and sound art. Essays consider key works and themes such as synesthesia and other formal and theoretical crossovers, motifs of musicians, and performative and ritual functions of music, musical instruments, and art. With more than 250 color images illustrating works of art in diverse traditions, The Art of Music offers enriching reading for scholars and general audiences alike.

Published in association with the San Diego Museum of Art

Exhibition San Diego Museum of Art
(09/26/15–01/06/16)

Genres: Art

318 pages, Hardcover

First published October 27, 2015

About the author

Patrick Coleman's debut novel, The Churchgoer , is a “LitHub Most Anticipated Book of Summer.” His debut poetry collection, Fire Season , was written after the birth of his first child by speaking aloud into a digital audio recorder on the long commute between the art museum where he worked and his home in a rural neighborhood that burned in the Witch Creek Fire of 2007. It won the 2015 Berkshire Prize. His other writing has appeared in Hobart, ZYZZYVA, Zócalo Public Square, the Black Warrior Review, and the Utne Reader, among others. Coleman also edited and contributed to The Art of Music, an exhibition catalogue on the relationship between visual arts and music (Yale University Press with the San Diego Museum of Art, October 27, 2015). He earned an MFA from Indiana University and a BA from the University of California Irvine. He lives in Ramona, California and works at the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram @patrickmcoleman or visit patrickcoleman.org for more information.

Reviews

[Karen]

Learned about at the Met : The Art of Music is a handsomely illustrated and rich interdisciplinary look at the mutual influence between music and the visual arts across cultures and eras. The book sheds new light on more familiar artists at the intersection of the visual and the musical, such as Wassily Kandinsky and Arnold Schoenberg, and presents new scholarship on less well-known examples in the arts of Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe, from antique pottery to contemporary video and sound art. Essays consider key works and themes such as synesthesia and other formal and theoretical crossovers, motifs of musicians, and performative and ritual functions of music, musical instruments, and art. With more than 250 color images illustrating works of art in diverse traditions, The Art of Music offers enriching reading for scholars and general audiences alike.