Music, Art and Emotion: Depictions of the Night Inspired by Romantic Art Song

Abstract

Peer review declarationThe publisher (AOSIS) endorses the South African 'National Scholarly Book Publishers Forum Best Practice for Peer Review of Scholarly Books'. The manuscript underwent an evaluation to compare the level of originality with other published works and was subjected to rigorous two-step peer review before publication, with the identities of the reviewers not revealed to the editor(s) or author(s). The reviewers were independent of the publisher, editor(s), and author(s). The publisher shared feedback on the similarity report and the inputs with the manuscript's editor(s) or author(s) to improve the manuscript. Where the reviewers recommended revision and improvements, the editor(s) or author(s) responded adequately to such recommendations. The reviewers commented positively on the scholarly merits of the manuscript and recommended that the book be published.v Research justificationThis scholarly book focuses on how four artists, namely Marna de Wet, Kevin du Plessis, Jean Lampen and Elna Venter, ascribed meaning to songs of the Romantic era by Franz Schubert, Hector Berlioz, Gabriel Fauré and Richard Strauss. It demonstrates the need for interdisciplinary research on how people ascribe meaning to referentialism in music, including music emotion induction. The target audience for this research includes scholars interested in the creation of visual art, the experiences of artists, art song and their interpretation, the ability of music to evoke emotion in listeners, interdisciplinary research and ways of developing artistic research. In Chapters 1-5, the authors contextualised the main concepts of music and art relevant to this study, and Chapters 6-11 reflect empirical data.This study aimed to explore the phenomenon of how visual artists ascribe meaning to music during their artistic practice. This was done using a pluralistic methodological approach employing artistic research and phenomenology. As a result, new understandings of the relationship between music, emotion and imagery reflected in the art are revealed. According to Chrysostomou ( 2004), interdisciplinary research should only be attempted when the disciplines find common ground in their subject matter and when the method adopted for inquiry can extract data from both fields. In music and art, common elements link them both in content and how a method can be utilised. This study not only contributes new knowledge about the experiences of artists and their practice, as well as ascribing meaning to music, but also contributes to the discourse surrounding the innovation and development of artistic research as a method, specifically using a pluralistic approach. In accordance with the Department of Higher Education and Training requirements, this book contains more than 50% original content not published before, and no part of this work has been plagiarised.