Musical Ekphrasis: Composers Responding to Poetry and Painting (review)

Musical Ekphrasis: Composers Responding to Poetry and Painting. By Siglind Bruhn. (Interplay, 2.) Hillsdale, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 2000. [xxi, 667 p. ISBN 1-57642-036-9. $46.]

Siglind Bruhn's subject inhabits a conceptual universe that is at the present moment almost completely self-referential. A survey of the current literature on musical ekphrasis and of recent conferences where it was the subject of special sessions reveals that this topic has been introduced into the academic discourse chiefly by virtue of Bruhn's sustained effort. Although ekphrasis has existed as an aesthetic category and poetic genre for centuries, it has not yet entered musicological discourse. The most recent editions of two major reference works (The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2d ed. [New York: Grove, 2001] and Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 2d ed. [Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1994-]) have nothing to say on the subject, and one would be hard pressed to find a sustained theoretical discussion or practical application of musical ekphrasis in contemporary analytical prose. Given these circumstances, the book under review inevitably raises more expectations than if it were simply a new study or reinterpretation of an established topic. Its ultimate task, then, would be to convince the musicological community of the validity of musical ekphrasis as a distinct interpretative concept.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines "ecphrasis" (an alternative spelling for the same concept) as "a plain declaration or interpretation of a thing" (Oxford English Dictionary, dictionary.oed.com, accessed 8 December 2001); in literary criticism and theoretical studies, the "thing" which is interpreted is often a work of visual art. Thus, James Heffernan's definition seems apt: "[ekphrasis] is the verbal representation of visual representation" (James Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993], 3). Central to the concept of ekphrasis is the interplay between the denotative and connotative components of language by which it can effect both its representational and interpretative powers. Music lacks denotative capabilities, which means that it cannot represent, but only suggest. The manner in which it does so is investigated through the eight analytical essays that form the central portion of this book, framed by two theoretical sections.

The concept of musical ekphrasis has--and probably will continue to have--a hard time disentangling itself from the idea of program music and the analytical discourse that grew around it. The author attempts a distinction by suggesting that, while program music "narrates or paints, suggests or represents scenes or stories that may or may not exist out there but enter the music from the composer's own mind" (p. 28), ekphrastic music "narrates or paints a fictional reality created by an artist other than the composer of the music" (p. 29). For this, the author coined the term "transmedialization," or the refashioning of an artistic object and its message into another medium. The analyses through which this process is demonstrated are perceptive and illuminating in many ways, but as one reads them the question that inevitably arises is whether these insights could result only from a methodology based on the concept of musical ekphrasis, or could they be produced by applying a discourse related to program music. It is, indeed, difficult to see the distinction. Given the high stakes placed on the correspondence between the composer's vision and that of the artists whose works are "transmedialized," one would need many more musical examples than are provided. Some comments on the techniques of motivic development, musical signifiers, associative keys, and other devices, are in essence no different from perceptive essays on program music found throughout the literature. Perhaps these analyses could best be appreciated without attempting to square them off against methodological premises which need more grounding and clarification. We may ask at this juncture whether we even need the concept of musical ekphrasis or whether it really exists as a distinct phenomenon. The interdisciplinary framework that has informed musicological discourse...