# Are the lines between the art forms blurring?



## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

I've been thinking about a fuzzy topic. What are your thoughts on this piece?






In my memory we could think of music as music, painting as painting, and though you could have musical theater, acting as acting. When I was in college the idea of performance art was just becoming more en vogue. I remember in the 70s the word "happening," sounding a bit hippie trippy, was applied to events as works of art in themselves. I believe this may have evolved into the big art events we are used to seeing today by perpetrators -- I mean artists -- such as Christo and Spencer Tunick.

With the technology available today I think creative people may not need to specialize as much as they once did. Are the lines between the various art domains blurring? Should they? When does music become acting and when does visual art stop being art and become a merely a public demonstration?

On a side note, I'd be very interested to know if there is a way to blur the lines between visual art and music other than through the traditional medium of animation.


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## BurningDesire (Jul 15, 2012)

I don't think there is such a thing as a blurring between visual art and music. You can have visual art inspired by music (even in an abstract sense) or set to music, or you can have music that plays with visuals, or even compositions of music that have elements of theatrical things, visual things as part of their performance. However, they are still separate in the respects that music is art in sound, and visual art is for the eyes. However, there are some things I think involve very blurry lines. For instance, when does something being a composition of music cross over into performance art? I find this line to be very hazy because there are pieces that are musical compositions, but it feels like the concept or visual element of it is the most important aspect, that the sounds are just a bi-product of the piece being performed (I generally refer to Nam June Paik, and a fair amount of the Fluxus artists). No value judgements, and I think a fair amount of them preferred to think of themselves simply as artists, rather than specifically composers. I don't have a problem considering any sounds in music, but it just seems to me that some of those pieces aren't about sound at all, that sound wasn't really being considered by the artist.

Another blurry line I see is between music and poetry. Personally, I consider spoken word (and variants of it) to be a legitimate voice technique in music. If there is say... a composition for an ensemble with a narrator, I consider the narrator to be a musician in this context. So then what of poetry, specifically poetry in performance? In a manner of speaking, you have organized sounds, and in the best poetry (imo), there is alot of beauty and imagination in the words used, how they sound together in sequence. Poetry often follows forms very comparable to typical musical forms. There is rhythm, phrasing, and timbre is quite important. So I'm not sure. If rapping and spoken word are perfectly legitimate musical voice techniques, then wouldn't poetry not set to any instrumental backing, not accompanied by sung voices or anything, wouldn't that be a form of a capella music? And what if we take into account some modernist poetry that doesn't use real words, that is constructed purely from various phonemes, something that is purely sounds. Wouldn't that be music? I'm not sure.


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

BurningDesire said:


> Another blurry line I see is between music and poetry. Personally, I consider spoken word (and variants of it) to be a legitimate voice technique in music. If there is say... a composition for an ensemble with a narrator, I consider the narrator to be a musician in this context.


There was a genre for this in the 19th century, Melodrama, although most of those works have fallen into neglect or disrepute (Berlioz's Lelio is usually performed without its recitation, for instance). About the only way it survives today is through sprechstimme.



> So then what of poetry, specifically poetry in performance? In a manner of speaking, you have organized sounds, and in the best poetry (imo), there is alot of beauty and imagination in the words used, how they sound together in sequence. Poetry often follows forms very comparable to typical musical forms. There is rhythm, phrasing, and timbre is quite important. So I'm not sure. If rapping and spoken word are perfectly legitimate musical voice techniques, then wouldn't poetry not set to any instrumental backing, not accompanied by sung voices or anything, wouldn't that be a form of a capella music? And what if we take into account some modernist poetry that doesn't use real words, that is constructed purely from various phonemes, something that is purely sounds. Wouldn't that be music? I'm not sure.


Unsuk Chin uses phonemes broken off of words in an absurdist manner in some of her work, like Acrostichon-wortspiel.


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## Ramako (Apr 28, 2012)

Perhaps Wagner's concept of 'complete art' is the artform of the future after all...


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

Weston said:


> Are the lines between the various art domains blurring? Should they? When does music become acting and when does visual art stop being art and become a merely a public demonstration?


With the Greeks, drama was not separated from music; it was all one display of acting and music. See my blog "Dramatic Gesture in Music." The artificial separation & specialization of the arts happened after.

Visual art could be seen as part of this, in set design. Fashion, as costume design.
Painting no longer needs to function as a recorder or documentation of events, or as depiction of real events; it can be "expressive gesture" as well.


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## Guest (Feb 6, 2013)

I hate to just hop in and repeat what everyone else has said.

But I don't understand why you chose this video as the example of blurring.

The one girl is speaking, but she is obviously speaking according to musical values. Just another illustration of the truism that language is a type of music. (Yeah, I know, we often hear the opposite, which isn't true at all, but what're ya gonna do?)

Cool piece, too, just by the way!


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## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

I heard this piece on a podcast of an interview with Kate Soper, the composer/singer/speaker. (Composer Conversations No. 20, Jan. 30 2013.) It sounds quite a bit better in the podcast. YouTube distorts the various flutes and drops the quieter moments out completely. In the audio version some of the speaking came across to me as a type of histrionics or theater which is why I chose it -- and maybe I just wanted to share it too. There is also a bit of clever wordplay involved, so in a stretch we could label that as writing.

I suppose few things are more theatrical than opera so nothing very new here in that respect. It just suddenly reminded me of my lifelong interest in merging the arts, and I may have wanted it to fit into that mold. I'd be interested in better or additional examples. Or just similar pieces.


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## Guest (Feb 6, 2013)

Miguel Azguime, _Salt Itinerary._


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## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

Epic. I see there are other of his works on hand too. Much appreciated.


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## Guest (Feb 7, 2013)

Well, that did seem to me to fit your criteria pretty closely.

I saw this live, too, shortly after he had finished it. (It might even have been the second performance.)

There's a kind of sequel of sorts, a companion piece--or maybe just his next multi-media opera--which is due to be premiered in Sweden this September. The 23rd, I think. I'm hoping to be there for that. It's right in the middle of two other overlapping festivals, one in Utrecht, one in Oslo, so it might get a little tricky, but that's what airplanes are for.


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