Word Painting Research Articles

John Ruskin’s word paintings in the context of his principle of clear vision as well as the biblical and rhetorical tradition

John Ruskin’s word paintings in the context of his principle of clear vision as well as the biblical and rhetorical tradition

Magritte: attempting the impossible

ongoing relevance of Belgian painter Rene Magritte may lie in the semiotic character of his work and its ability to create chasms between the world, its surfaces and the signs we use to occupy it. Magrittes paintings offer a space for the viewer to contemplate the emptiness of signs and to locate that emptiness in a world we recognize indeed, the artist relies on the props of normalcy in order to upend, invert and collapse them into the terra incognita where life leaves off and art begins. mind loves the unknown, he avowed, it loves images whose meaning is unknown, since the meaning of the mind itself is unknown. In Attempting the Impossible we have a new definitive Magritte monograph. Featuring more than 300 works, it contains much unpublished material and includes chapters covering Magrittes photography, drawings and influence on German and American contemporary art. Each chapter opens with a close reading of a key work such as The Treachery of Images (This is not a pipe) of 1928-29 and a reconstruction of its intellectual and historical contexts. Art historian Siegfried Gohr examines Magrittes marriage and friendships, the phases of his work (from his sunlit Renoir period and his periode vache to his bright and visually arresting postwar work, which had such an influence on the advertising industry), the Belgian roots of his wit and sensibility and his word paintings and investigations into the paradoxes of representation.

A Collision of Noble Goals: Protecting Human Subjects, Improving Health Care, and a Research Agenda for Political Science

Atul Gawande is a surgeon who began creating vivid word paintings of the performance of the American health care system in The New Yorker's pages while he was still a resident. Those of us who are immersed in, and charged with measuring, that system—as I have been for the last decade—find his “Annals of Medicine” column's evocations of heroic system successes and frightening system failures true to the processes we more prosaically try to analyze and evaluate. In December 2007 Gawande published a New Yorker essay called “The Checklist,” followed just days later by an op-ed piece in the New York Times (Gawande 2007a; 2007b).

Reflections on Liszt (review)

Reflections on Liszt. By Alan Walker. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. [xii, 277 p. ISBN 0-801-44366-6. $39.95.] Illustrations, music examples, bibliography, index. Few scholars can be given more credit for reinvigorating a critical investigation of the life and music of Franz Liszt than Alan Walker. For almost forty years he has been the most vocal exponent of a more nuanced -even sympathetic-consideration of the composer and pianist. When the final volume of his three-part Franz Liszt (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987-1996) appeared, it brought to conclusion an immense project that encompassed more than 1,600 compellingly detailed pages, incorporating overlooked and entirely unknown primary-source material that radically altered the inherited notions of just who and what Liszt was to himself and his contemporaries. Walker's account has become the starting point for today's Liszt scholars from walks of life who previously had to rely on the fulsome yet highly problematic studies by Lina Ramann (Franz Liszt. Als Kunstler und Mensch [Leipzig: Breitkopf und Hartel, 1880-1894]) and Peter Raabe (Franz Liszt. 2d rev. ed. [Tutzing: H. Schneider, 1968]) for biographical and analytical insight. But even Walker's comprehensive treatment of Liszt and his world was far from exhaustive, with the author admitting as much in the prologue to his new Reflections on Liszt: were some things that could be mentioned only in passing, and others not at all (p. xiii). Like Liszt, who seemed irresistibly drawn to his compositions long after they were published, Walker revises and expands upon material previously published in Music & Letters, the Musical Quarterly, and the Hungarian Quarterly to help flesh out his picture of one of the nineteenth century's most cosmopolitan characters; he similarly draws judiciously from passages first penned for his massive biography. Indeed, the overlap in tone and content makes this collection of ten essays and an epilogue most effective when read in tandem with Walker's earlier three volumes. Although some of these revisions-which at times simply consist of longer quotations or more music examples-add little to the overall argument (as in chapters 1-4 and 10), there is much new material here. Walker is at his most comfortable as a story-teller, and his vignettes of Carl Tausig, Hans von Bulow, and Walter Bache in chapter 5 shed much light on the state of the virtuoso world in the second half of the century, a world which Liszt had helped make possible during his concert years in the 1830s and 1840s. Although Liszt still hovers in the background of Walker's narratives, pulling strings for or coming to the aid of his students whenever possible, he remains an essentially peripheral character. That being said, however, readers might be tempted to interpret each of Walker's three excellent character studies as projections of an individual facet of Liszt's own artistic personality: Tausig is sketched as the pianist's (p. 78), Bulow the thinking man's (p. 87), and Bache the pianist of missionary zeal (pp. 108, 115).As Walker argued indefatigably throughout his biography, Liszt's life can be read as a perennial struggle to balance his chief vocations as musical executant, savant, and evangelist (see, for example, p. 254), and Tausig, Bulow, and Bache eagerly extended the ideals of their master into the next generation. Chapters 7-9 further develop these three pursuits by examining Liszt's lieder, his role as editor, and his posthumously-published (1983 in their complete form) Technical Studies, respectively. With the exception of, say, Ich mochte hingehn and Die Lorelei, which have been sparring for years with the opening measures of Tristan und Isolde for the right to lay claim to the eponymous sonority, most of Liszt's almost eighty songs have suffered serious neglect from both scholars and performers. Walker hears many of Liszt's essays in musical poetry as anticipating Mahler, with affective tonal ambiguities, clever enharmonic modulations, and thoughtful moments of word painting enriching the German song landscape considerably. …

A Conversation with Yusef Komunyakaa

Conversations with Yusef Komunyakaa brings together over two decades of interviews and profiles with one of America's most prolific and acclaimed contemporary poets. Yusef Komunyakaa (b. 1947) describes his work alternately as word paintings and as and his affinity with the visual and aural arts is amply displayed in these conversations. The volume also addresses the diversity and magnitude of Komunyakaa's literary output. His collaborations with artists in a variety of genres, including music, dance, drama, opera, and painting have produced groundbreaking performance pieces. Throughout the collection, Komunyakaa's interest in finding and creating poetry across the artistic spectrum is made manifest. For his collection Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems, 1977-1989, Komunyakaa became the first African American male to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Through his work he provides keen insight into life's mysteries from seemingly inconsequential and insignificant life forms (Ode to the Maggot) to some of the most compelling historical and life-altering events of our time, such as the Vietnam War (Facing It). Influenced strongly by jazz, blues, and folklore, as well as the classical poetic tradition, his poetry comprises a riveting chronicle of the African American experience.

Interview With Rebecca McClanahan

Essayist, poet, and short story writer Rebecca McClanahan is the author of three volumes of poetry and a recent book of essays, The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings (2002), a book thatthe Georgia Review praised for its "imagistic prose." Of The Riddle Song, its reviewer wrote, "McClanahan writes about the ways that lives intertwine, quilt-like, if you will, in ways that are the stuff of song-like celebration." Her many essays have appeared in literary journals like Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Boulevard, Quarterly West, and Georgia Review. The essay "Book Marks" was selected for The Best American Essays 2001 and for the new college edition of The Best American Essays. "The Van Angels" was awarded the Carter Prize from Shenandoah for the best essay of 2002. McClanahan recently received a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has also published two writing texts, Word Painting: A Guide to Writing More Descriptively (1999) and Write Your Heart Out (2000), both commissioned and published by Book Digest.

« Divinest transports mingle with the sense » : Haendel et le débat sur l’imitation et l’expression

The purpose of this paper is to place the assessments of Handel’s music made by his contemporaries and by music historians of the later XVIIIth century in the context of the decisive shift that affected the way the relationship between word and music was then perceived. Some contemporary testimonies about the adequacy and potency of Handel ’s word painting will be quoted and set against the later writings of music theorists, who came to blame the composer for his occasionally naive and superficial word setting, in spite of the admiration they had for him. This change must be explained in terms of the replacement of the aesthetic ideal of imitation by the new canon of expression ; according to the former, music was supposed to transform words into sound, whereas according to the latter, notes tended to be emancipated from texts and to become autonomous. To a certain extent, it might be said that Handel ’s typically baroque vocal music fell victim to this aesthetic shift, but his status as a towering national, and potentially mythical, figure guaranteed his privileged position in the British musical pantheon.

Die kleur van vers en verf: Antjie Krog in gesprek met Marlene Dumas

The colours of poem and paint: Antjie Krog in conversation with Marlene Dumas Antjie Krog engages South African born painter Marlene Dumas in an intertextual dialogue in her most recent anthology Kleur kom nooit alleen nie. This series of poems is titled “skilderysonnette” (sonnets of a painting). Six of the nine of Krog’s “word paintings” are eponymous with Dumas’s paintings and therefore almost require an examination of the interplay of the respective texts. This article examines the relationship between the relevant poems and paintings. The specific conversation between Krog’s word texts and Dumas’s paintings within the context of Krog’s anthology ultimately indicates intriguing similarities. It includes, inter alia, the struggle of both artists with the problem of “belonging” – Krog from an African perspective and Dumas from a European angle. Both are also concerned with the politics of colour. The politics of sex also figures in both their oeuvres in the third instance. The complexity of sexuality, eroticism and love is examined in the work of both these artists and is ultimately expressed in the voice/vision of the emancipated woman.

Word Painting

Word Painting

The ethics of entrepreneurial medicine

To present this lecture in place of Dr Francis D Moore is a great privilege. My sense of privilege calls to mind Dr Moore’s splendid autobiography, A Miracle and a Privilege. In that book he set out a fascinating account of his life in clinical surgery, research, teaching, and administration. Dr Moore developed at Harvard and its hospitals an uncommonly favorable climate for biologic investigation so that his own work and the work of many other investigators flourished. The results of that research facilitated a new era of surgical biology, noted by a cover story about Dr Moore in a national weekly news magazine. The thrust of the cover story indicated that surgical operations had already been made safe for the patient, and in this new, biologic phase of surgical science we were aiming to make the patient safe for the surgical operation. During the American College of Surgeons meeting in San Francisco 9 years ago, we heard the exciting news of the Nobel Prize award to Joseph E Murray, FACS, a member of Dr Moore’s department and another exemplar of the productive fusion of bench research, clinical investigation, and compassionate patient care, all subsumed under an individual ethic that puts the patient in first place. Now we have come to an era of overarching technology, juxtaposed with a phase of commercialization, consolidation, and merger mania in our daily lives, and mutatis mutandis in the field of medical care. Underlying these radical changes is the bedrock of our moral foundation, which Dr John J Conley wisely and generously recognized by his support of this ethics and philosophy lectureship and by many other philanthropic endeavors related to ethics during more than half a century as a Fellow of this College. At the time of his recent death, Dr Conley was emeritus professor of otorhinolaryngology at Columbia Presbyterian in New York and a poet of substantial accomplishment. His books of poetry entitled Word Paintings underscore his emphasis on the liberal arts. He inspired a host of admirers by his generosity and his professional achievements. The title of Dr Moore’s projected lecture, “Ethics: From Percival to G.B.S.,” implies that many physicians are aware of Thomas Percival and his assignment by the trustees of the Manchester Infirmary in England to draw up guidelines for the conduct of the Infirmary’s physicians in the late 18th century. Percival admonished staff physicians to behave politely so as not to bring discredit on the medical profession by fighting over hospital privileges. The Infirmary’s services had been seriously strained by an overload of patients incident to an epidemic of what was probably typhoid fever, and hospital authorities increased the staff roster with practitioners whose capacities the established staff considered inferior in quality to their own. Percival was not writing originally about ethics in the present sense but rather about etiquette among physicians. The word ethics did not appear in his initial presentation, and a concern about patients was not a focus of his original stipulations. Early ethical pronouncements of the American Medical Association borrowed heavily and even explicitly from Percival’s early formulation, so that we had for many years a confusing mix of ethics and Based on an Ethics and Philosophy Lecture delivered at the Clinical Congress of the American College of Surgeons in San Francisco, October 13, 1999.

Monstrous Opera: Rameau and the Tragic Tradition, and: English Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London: Stephen Storace at Drury Lane (review)

Reviewed by: Monstrous Opera: Rameau and the Tragic Tradition, and: English Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London: Stephen Storace at Drury Lane William Weber Charles Dill. Monstrous Opera: Rameau and the Tragic Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). Pp. xx + 197. $39.95 cloth. Jane Girdham. English Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London: Stephen Storace at Drury Lane (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). Pp. xiv + 272. $89.00 cloth. These two studies have more in common than one might suppose. Rameau and Storace may seem apples and oranges, but Charles Gill and Jane Girdham each studies an opera composer in reference to larger social contexts, and generally to good effect. And they both approach the music in intelligent critical terms, trying to establish what was better and worse in the musician’s work. Charles Dill’s Monstrous Opera is a broad, original, and very interesting work. Its main goal is to study the relationship of Jean-Philippe Rameau to his public, starting from Jeffrey Kallberg’s conceptualization of the contract between composer and listeners. “What makes Rameau’s operas significant is at least in part that they serve as a ground upon which the composer [End Page 157] and his audiences contested the issues related to authorship” (xv). He begins with the puzzle of what Rameau’s omission of recitative from the edition of Les Indes Galantes had to do with his interaction with the public; he ends up concluding that, “however entertaining it might have been, Rameau’s work represented the failure of the generic contract between composer and public, the failure of the circuit through which artist and audience communicated” (138). Dill’s argument is that Rameau began his work on tragédie en musique with a dramatic approach that went far beyond its origins in the productions of Jean-Baptiste Lully and that challenged his audiences to listen on an unusually serious plane. But when he made revisions to these works he drew back from that goal, providing either simple word painting or light divertissement. Dill quotes Friedrich Melchior Grimm in arguing that the 1756 version of the 1748 Zoroastre amounted to a “trivialization” of the story by Cahusac (119). What that involved was the tension between music and poetry in the French context, the pressures to keep music in a subservient position to the drama. Dill makes a lucid discussion of the problem, showing the complexities by which Voltaire approached opera. The problem with this thesis, however, is that it draws a terribly exaggerated dichotomy between tragedy and what Dill persists in calling mere “entertainment.” In using that term he draws upon the extreme cultural values of our massified society; he makes Rameau’s revised scores serve virtually as background music. He does not go so far as to say that people did not listen, and indeed illustrates the vitality of the audience’s engagement with what it heard. But he fails to grasp how vague and contradictory eighteenth-century people were in defining the more casual or serious genres and cultural experiences. Dill neglects to draw upon work by historians on the public, indeed the public sphere. My article on revivals of old works at the Opera, for example, published in the Journal of Modern History in 1984 (not cited), shows that after the 1750s Rameau’s works were performed far more impressively than he suggests. Nor are any of the important publications by the musicologist Elisabeth Bartlet named. Jane Girdham makes a marvelous contribution in studying the career in the London theatre made by Stephen Storace, a still much too little-known composer of significance. She does not approach her subject with quite the imagination that Charles Dill displays, but she accomplishes her tasks with great care and discernment. She starts from the premise that composing for the musical theater was by definition a collective effort for which one cannot ask too much idealism. She defines nicely just how Storace conducted his business, with whom, and under what practical circumstances. The book is a handy guide to the important details one might want to know about how English opera institutions operated. One of the more current issues Girdham takes up is borrowing—how Storace inserted...

Word Painting in the Music of William Billings

William Billings was fascinated by words. He was concerned not only with their meanings but also with their sound, texture, and rhythm. In the prefaces of his tunebooks, particularly The Singing Master's Assistant,' he gives evidence of this fascination by word plays, parodies, and verbal fantasies that depend for their effect as much on the sounds and rhythmic positions of the words as on their meaning. For example, concluding his An Historical Account of G. Gamut, Billings is both eloquent and poetic in his use of words:

Structural Meaning and Music Education

In music education, the search for the good inevitably comes around to discussions of musical meaning and aesthetic validity. Such inquiry is essential to a clarification of both musical and educational purposes. Conceived broadly, we can distinguish three approaches to musical meaning pictorial, associative, and structural. The pictorial is imageconnotative, depending largely on word painting, e.g., frogs and flies in Handel's Israel in Egypt, the spring-river in Smetana's Moldau. Associative meanings, derived from the doctrine of affections, evoke metaphorical or allegorical connotations, e.g., fate music in Carmen, Scarpia's motif in Tosca, chromatic weeping in the Crucifixis of Bach's B Minor Mass and in Dido's Lament of Purcell's Dido and

The Three-Cornered World

The Three Cornered World is the novelistic expression of the contrast between the Western ethical view of reality and the Eastern ethical view by one of Japan's most beloved authors. Natsume Soseki tells of an artist who retreats to a country resort and becomes involved in a series of mysterious encounters with the owner's daughter. Intricately interwoven with the author's reflections on art and nature, conversations with Zen monks and writers of haiku, are a plethora of unique Japanese characters offering the reader an exquisite word painting.

Wallace Stevens: Some Relations between Poetry and Painting

VWj 1 HETHER the influence of on poetry is desirable is an old question and possibly an otiose one. With the advent of impressionism and succeeding schools, the poetic principles underlying art have become more visible; less word painting (in the awkward sense of much eighteenth-century description and Parnassian verse for art's sake) has been taking place, and more sharing in the imaginative metamorphosis wrought upon nature by the painter's brush. Many modern poets, in whose rank I muster at random Baudelaire, Mallarme, Rilke, Apollinaire, John Peale Bishop, and Wallace Stevens, have acknowledged their debt to painters or sculptors and their poetry has grown the richer by that debt. point no longer is xwhether the critics should compare poetry and painting, but how they can do so without being laoco6nized. This risk may be taken the more cheerfully since Stevens himself showed the way in his critical writing. He was-like Valery, another poet with a painter's eye and a refined mental museum-extremely conscious of the processes of creation. We can avail ourselves of a paper entitled The Relations Between Poetry and Painting, which Stevens read at the Museum of Modern Art in 1951, and in which he defined four main areas of influence: sensibility, subject matter, technique, and aesthetics. He did not cite his own work as illustration, but he was so careful to keep to the craftsman's viewNpoint, discarding any mysterious Zeitgeist, that his words bear the sigil of self-analysis. He said, in effect, that a poet can learn his trade by reading what painters

Early Hindi and Urdu Poetry.No. IV.

Banārsī dās of Jaunpūr belonged to the Jain community and was born in 1586. The following charming extracts are taken from his most famous work, Arddh Kathānak, an autobiography completed in 1641.His wonderful power of word painting is exemplified in these passages. The first describes the commotion in Jaunpūr when the news of Akbar's death was received in 1605. We feel the spell of the description, and tremble with the frightened populace. This picture should be compared with Zaṭallī's account of the turmoil after the death of Aurangzeb. (See below.)The second tells of the Black Death, bubonic plague, in Agra during 1616, the first time the city was visited by that pestilence. Anyone who has been in India during a plague epidemic will realize the force of his words, the rats dying, the spread of the disease among the people, the glandular swellings, the sudden deaths, the mortality among the physicians, the despair and flight of the townsfolk afraid even to partake of food.

Dr. Pascal. Zola.

This is a novel written “for a purpose,” the purpose being the exposition of heredity. We are suspicious of such productions for the reason that it is impossible to blend dry scientific facts with the ordinary attributes of popular reading in such a way as to prevent imagination overcoming accuracy. This work, though interesting in many ways, cannot be said to successfully dress science in a popular garb, while it contains many elements of danger to ordinary novelreaders. As to technique, we need hardly say that word structure and word painting are masterly. The plot may be described as a weaving of horrors, psychological, moral, and physical, into a tale of rural and domestic life, the latter being just of that easy and natural character which does so much to promote, whether for good or evil, the intaking of the more active incidents.