Music, Art and Emotion: Depictions of the Night Inspired by Romantic Art Song is published by AOSIS Scholarly Books.

This book explores the ways in which four visual artists make sense of referentialism and emotion in music. By listening to five art songs by Schubert, Strauss, Fauré and Berlioz they were inspired to create new artworks as a result of their understanding of the meaning of the art songs. This was done without an understanding of the text, and the artists had to rely on referential meaning in music as well as the perceived or evoked emotions elicited by listening to the art songs.

The artworks created as a result of this project were exhibited at the Aardklop National Arts Festival, entitled Nagmusiek. This was a multi-modal exhibition featuring music, art and text. This book employs Artistic Research and Phenomenology in order to understand this phenomenon, as I explored the artists’ creative processes, experiences and the tacit knowledge embedded in their artefacts. This book would provide readers access to 20 new artworks, each created as a result of the artists’ interpretation of the meaning they ascribed to art song. Their creative process is also examined and synthesised with existing literature on emotion and referentialism in music.

Copyright (c) 2022 Conroy Cupido (Volume editor)

Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research has made significant contributions to the scientific community, as this kind of research promotes the understanding of complex phenomena by providing rich, in-depth new insights from multiple perspectives. In this research the phenomenon of ascribing meaning to music,
specifically music emotion induction, was explored through the process of making visual art. This scholarly book focuses on how four artists, 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 without
an understanding of the French and German Text. Besides empirical data, several original artworks are also included in this book that represent art songs sung by Ian Bostridge, Kiri te Kanawa, Renée Fleming, Susan Graham and Jessye Norman. The target audience for this research includes scholars interested in the creation of visual
art, the experiences of artists, art song and its interpretation, the ability of music to evoke emotion in listeners, interdisciplinary research and ways of developing artistic research. This study not only contributes new knowledge about the experiences of artists and their practice, as well as ascribing meaning to music, but it also contributes to the discourse surrounding the innovation and development of artistic research as a method, specifically using a pluralistic approach.