Music and Visual Art

Image: Hannah Wasileski, 4-screen video performance reconstructing Schubert's 'Death and the Maiden'. Selected for presentation at the National Review of Live Art.

If you have an interest in mixing forms and materials, if you enjoy working with different types of media, digital, analogue, high-tech, low-tech,  if your work is interdisciplinary, or you are interested in any of the following; audio visual performance, alternative-instrument making, sound sculpture, video, installations and site-specific work, then this course is probably right for you.

The Music and Visual Art BA(Hons) is situated within the subject area of Performance and Visual Art. This is a cluster of interdisciplinary courses which combine music, dance or theatre with visual art. The course offers a unique opportunity to develop your interest in music and visual art through practical and theoretical investigations. It provides a platform for experimentation in the interchangeability of sight and sound - to make visible forms audible and audible forms visible.

The Music and Visual Art BA(Hons) is a practice based course which is predominantly concerned with looking at the relationships between music and visual art.  We are looking for applicants who are dynamic, imaginative and ambitious, who are interested in new ideas and new challenges and who can work alone, as well as in groups. You will develop alongside fellow students who share a genuine interest for music and visual art as well as working with students from the theatre and dance pathways.

The course attracts candidates who wish to critically engage with the world through music and visual art, and who are curious to explore the possibilities of what music might be and to discover new ways for making visual art. You may be interested in recording the sounds of architectural spaces, re-inventing a musical instrument, creating an ensemble or music group, combining old and new technologies, using sound as a sculptural material, making an installation, producing an album or writing music for film. The course offers a platform where your own individual art practice can be developed, whilst at the same time you will also gain experience in career development such as event organisation, promoting and co-curating public performances and exhibitions, publicity, press releases and audience development.

You will examine the convergence of music and visual art during the 20th century and will explore the expanding field of sound art. The 20th century has been marked by visual artists expanding their practice to incorporate time–based media, at the same time musicians, composers and performers became interested in exploring the sculptural and visual dimensions of music. The convergence of music and visual art has its own culture and history – from the Art of Noise, by the Italian Futurist, Luigi Russolo, to William Borroughs cut-up texts, to John Cage and the development of the idea that all sounds are music, to the minimalist movement of the 60s, and punk and hip-hop of the 70s, through to the emergence of digital technologies in the 90s and the rise of the counter culture ‘glitch’ aesthetic at the start of the new millennium. 

Throughout the course you will have the opportunity to work with our top of the range sound recording studios for the development of live performance, sound spatialisation and composition skills. You will learn Logic Studio, develop skills in screen-based practices, including working with Final Cut Pro, and you will have opportunities to develop installation and site-specific practices. 

At the end of the course, you will have developed a personalised and individual art practice, which will emerge from your regular development of practical skills and your sustained interrogation of the ideas, concepts and movements which shaped contemporary art practice throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. 

The first year of study introduces various approaches to music, performance and visual art. Your study will investigate relationships between music, sound, visual art and live performance. You develop and interrogate ideas and concepts through practical experiments, which are underpinned by lectures and seminars in contextual and critical studies. These provide a broad cultural and historical mapping of music and visual art and develop cognitive skills such as analysis, argument and the synthesis of ideas.  

There will be opportunities to develop your particular interests through a variety of media, which normally include music production, sound recording, live performance, drawing, photography, video, and site specific performance. 

The course attracts ambitious and energetic students who have the capacity to work in groups as well as on their own. Students develop independent and collaborative working methods and the exploration of ways in which artists engage with audiences.

We support the development of particular technical skills, relevant to music and visual art. These normally include, an intensive series of technical inductions to performance spaces, audio-visual softwares and sound studios. 

Whereas the first year of study introduces the expansive field of music and visual art, year 2 requires a more detailed and sophisticated enquiry of your interests. We expect students to present their own work within public forums, we focus on the ‘art gallery’ as a site where the traditions of visual art and live performance converge.

Glossary

This is a short glossary which very briefly introduces key terms and concepts that crop-up in the many conversations, discussions and debates amongst students. It is certainly not an exhaustive list and the defintions themselves have been simplified, but we hope it offers some sense of the richness and diversity of subject areas covered in Music and Visual Art.

some key music terms..[1]

Acousmatic Listening – Term coined by Pierre Schaeffer to describe a listening experience in which sound has been decoupled from its source, also known as ‘reduced listening’

Acoustic Ecology:Term coined by R.Murray Schaefer to refer to research into the effects of the acoustic environment on the creatures living within it.

Ambient: A term coined by Brian Eno to describe a compositional and listening practice that strives to “tint” the acoustic environment rather than dominate it. See Structural Listening for a very different kind of listening.

Breakbeat: The portion of a track in which all the instruments drop out except drums. Using two copies of the same record, DJs often extend or loop these portions to form the rhythmic basis of new tracks. Often used to describe the variety of musics that make use of breakbeats, eg. Hiphop, triphop and drum ‘n’ bass

Dada, Dadaism: A major modernist art movement founded in Zurich and New York in 1915 and remaining active until the early 1920s. Disillusioned by the carnage of WWI, Dada artists lampooned the dominant social and aesthetic values via anarchic theatre, nonsense poems, and the production of collages, photomontages and ready-mades.

Drum ‘n’ Bass:  A genre of dance music originally known as Jungle, Drum ‘n’ Bass developed in London and Bristol in the early 1990s. Influenced by dub reggae, HipHop, and Techno, it is characterized by rapid digitized breakbeats and a slow bass groove.

Equal Temperament: The dominant tuning system of Western music since the 18^th Century in which adjacent notes of the scale are separated by logarithmically equal distances that only approximate the natural harmonic series.

Electro-acoustic: Sometimes used as a synonym for electronic music composition, the term can also describe compositions that combine the resources of electronic music with traditional acoustic instruments.

Electronica: Electronic music that arises within the context of popular rather than classical music, but that is intended for home listening rather than for the dance floor.

Experimental Music: A term coined by John Cage to designate musical acts the outcome of which are not known in advance. Composer Michael Nyman broadened the term to designate a range of compositional strategies that emphasize processes of various kinds (change, electronic, human),  delight in the unique musical moment, new attitudes toward musical time, composer/audience interaction etc.

Furniture Music: A form of ‘background’ music conceptualized by composer Erik Satie and Darius Milhaud in the early part fo the 20^th century. A precursor to Brian Eno’s Ambient music.

Glitch Music:  Refers to the work of composers and sound artists who focus on the sonic artifacts (noise, blips, and other ‘unwanted sounds’) produced in the digitization and processing of sound with computers.

Minimalism: A term coined by Michael Nymann and Tom Johnson in 1968 to refer to the early work of American counter-culture composers La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Philip Glass and Steve Reich. The term generally describes compositions that display some or all of the following features: repetition, harmonic stasis, steady pulse.

Modernity:  A broad historical term that generally encompasses Westerm history since the European Enlightenment of the 17^th and 18^th centuries.

Modernism: In short, the term refers to key tendencies in 20^th century art: abstraction, an emphasis on form rather than meaning or content, a focus on phenomenological experience rather then realism, aesthetic autonomy, utopian progressivism, antipathy to mass culture, etc. The term is often used as an umbrella term for the group of early 20^th century avant–garde art movements that includes Futurism, Cubism, Fauvism Dada, Bauhaus etc.

Musique Concrete: Music composed by editing recorded sounds. The term was coined by Pierre Schaeffer, a French radio broadcaster who pioneered the technique in the late 1940s. A precursor to sampling which emerged in the 1980s.

Plunderphonics: A term invented by Candaian composer John Oswald for his practice of sampling and humourously remixing pop music.

Postmodernism: Generally refers to a new aestheic sensibility that emerged in the 1960s, characterised by a breakdown of the boundaries between high art and mass culture, the reemergence of explicit political and social concerns in art, the often ironic juxtaposition of references to heterogeneous historical or cultural styles, the rejection of modernism’s utopian progressivism etc.

Post-rock: a term coined by critic Simon Reynolds in 1995 to describe a form of music that uses rock instrumentation – guitar, bass, drums – in a non-rock fashion: to produce timbres and textures rather than powerchords or melodies.

Scratching: A turntablist technique performed by moving a vinyl record back and forth under the stylus, creating a distinct percussive sound that has come to be associated with HipHop.

Sound art: General term for works of art that focus on sound and are often produced for gallery or museum installation.

Structural Listening: Diametrically opposed to Ambient Listening, structural listening is concerned with the overall structure of a musical work and the logical relationship among its parts. The philosopher and music theorist Theodor Adorno considered this the only fully adequate mode of listening to music.

Turntablism: A term first coined in 1995 by DJ Babu to describe a form of music in which turntables are used not merely as a device of reproduction (something with which to play recorded music) but as a device of production (something with which to manipulate sound and create music).