Visual Thinking in Music: Composing, Listening, Writing (Reflections from musical aesthetics)

Activity: Talk or presentationInvited talk

Description

In this talk, I discuss the idea of visual thinking in music using examples from the 20th century: Beat Furrer's composing of perspectives, Anthony Braxton's visual titles and graphic notation and Roland Barthes' desiring listening. The starting point is the idea that the visual and the musical are not thought of as separate aesthetic principles per se, but rather as "very diverse problems whose solutions are found in heterogeneous arts". (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, p. 300)
In the first instance, I discuss the visual in the composing of music, but furthermore I attempt to conceive of listening and writing as practices of thinking with and about music. Here I ask: To what extent do images, visualisations and metaphors shape listening to and writing about music? If there is visual thinking in music, what is musical thinking?
Period14 Jan 2025
Event titleMusik | Geschichte Visualisieren
Event typeOther
LocationBerlin, GermanyShow on map

Keywords

  • music aesthetics
  • musical thinking
  • Anthony Braxton
  • Roland Barthes
  • Beat Furrer
  • visual
  • listening