Not only poets may respond to a work of visual art with a creative act in their own medium, transposing the style and structure, the message and metaphors from the visual to the verbal. Composers, more and more frequently, are also exploring this interartistic mode of transfer. Although the musical medium is reputedly abstract, composers, just like poets, can respond in many different ways to a visual representation. They may transpose aspects of both structure and content; they may supplement, interpret, respond with associations, problematize, or play with some of the suggestive elements of the original image. This article begins with some methodological considerations regarding the musical equivalent of what literary scholars know as ekphrasis (see Spitzer []; Hagstrum ; Krieger , ; Lund []; Clüver , ; Scott , ; Mitchell , ; Heffernan ; Yacobi , ). Central questions concern the definition of musical ekphrasis in relation to ''program music'' and music's ability to narrate or portray extramusical realities, that is, to relate to them by way of mimesis or reference. In a second section I attempt to position musical ekphrasis within the grid of interartistic interactions laid out by Hans Lund and address some central issues of terminology in research on
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