Dalí’s Eccentric Imagination: Impact of Audiovisual Culture in Roberto Sierra’s Sch

Abstract

From the appearance of sound film in the late 1920s to the spread of media outlets such as television and personal computers to today's video-enabled mobile phones, the immediacy of audiovisual culture has changed the way people navigate and manipulate content. Visual images often instinctively induce aural and musical associations, and vice versa. Yet musical analysis in audiovisual culture often presumes the constraint of the visual on the musical (i.e., the primacy of a visual product over its accompanying music). In this paper, I take a diverging approach. I present Roberto Sierra's Sch. as a case study for the effects of multimedia technology in a twenty-first-century composer's creative process and product, which conjures up the imagination in historical and contemporary ways. This investigation complements research in music analysis, film music, and music pedagogy in relation to audiovisual culture by highlighting the mutually influential effects of musical and visual cultures.