INTERPLAY: Music in Interdisciplinary Dialogue

A book series published by
Pendragon Press
 Series Editors: Siglind Bruhn, Magnar Breivik

Brief description

This series of monographs and essay collections aims at investigating how music, as a mode of human expression, engages in interdisciplinary dialogue with the other arts as well as with philosophical and religious thought. Insofar as music can be called a 'language', the question we wish to see addressed is how music influences, or is suffused with, the other central ways in which humans articulate their thoughts and experiences, their aesthetic needs, and their quest towards transcendence.

Studies are envisaged to focus on various segments of an imagined double axis, where music interacts with, on the one axis, its sister arts, and on the other, the various paths developed in the search for spiritual truth. One of the assumed beams shows music as the center of the primary art forms, interacting with the visual and the verbal; beyond them, we also encourage studies that explore other art forms as modes of expression that relate to music in a genuinely interdisciplinary way. The other beam spans the area between the two essential approaches through which humans aim to make sense of their lives and this world: the rational and the spiritual; both terms are understood in the wider humanistic sense and embrace related quests regardless of the boundaries of today's academic disciplines.

Editorial emphasis

We envisage including in (and inviting for) this series studies that address the interdisciplinary field around music in three basic ways.

	One, which could be tagged as "Music and ...", investigates musical evolution through the lens of general cultural phenomena, or vice versa.
	Another, "Music on ..." for short, explores the ways in which music may act as an intermediary and unique interpreter of works created in other art forms.
	The third, "Music in ...," traces the ways in which music informs other modes of human expression or experience

(1) The first category will comprise studies in cross-disciplinary comparison. These will investigate the emergence of musical phenomena, understood in a larger cultural and creative context and interpreted as expression of changes in the general artistic, intellectual, or spiritual paradigm, and vice versa.

(2) The second category will be devoted to studies on music as a hermeneutically layered text bearing out extra-musical subtexts, or on music as it reflects on other modes of human expression; it will examine and interpret music about art, music about literature, music bearing spiritual testimony, music expressing thoughts, concepts, views, motivations, etc., and related questions.

(3) The third category will include studies that, exploring musical concepts in extra-musical contexts, deal with musical "rhythms," "sounds," and other parameters in representatives of the visual arts, or with musical structures, genres, compositional procedures, etc. in works of literature; with music used as a metaphor in philosophical, psychological, or literary discourse, or with music used in extra-musical contexts as a vehicle of access to transcendental reality.

INTERPLAY: MUSIC IN INTERDISCIPLINARY DIALOGUE Books published to date:
No. 1 Masqued Mysteries Unmasked: Early Modern Music Theater and Its Pythagorean Subtext by Kristin Rygg (2000)
No. 2 Musical Ekphrasis: Composers Responding to Poetry and Painting by Siglind Bruhn (2001)
No. 3 Voicing the Ineffable: Musical Representation of Religious Experience, Eleven essays edited by Siglind Bruhn (2001)
No. 4 The Musical Order of the World -- Kepler, Hesse, Hindemith by Siglind Bruhn (2005)
No. 5 Neo-Mythologism in Music - From Scriabin and Schoenberg to Schnittke and Crumb by Victoria Adamenko (2007)
No. 6 Sonic Transformations of Literary Texts. From Program Music to Musical Ekphrasis, Ten essays edited by Siglind Bruhn (2008)

 

The editors and assistants of this book series also offer and/or organize
help with translations English-to-German / German-to-English and  
help with professional manuscript formating for book publications