Sound & Vision: Intermediality and American Music

The medium of music represents a pioneering force of crossing boundaries on cultural, ethnic, racial, and national levels. Building on the work of American Studies scholars such as Astrid Böger, Christoph Decker, Winfried Fluck, Udo Hebel, Wilfried Raussert, and Gabriele Rippl, who investigate the complex dialogues of textual studies with visual studies, the conference participants intend to expand current intermedial theoretical approaches by emphasizing the musical dimension in visual media. We want to rethink the nature of sound, the practice of listening, as well as the function and use of music in the interaction with the arts in transnational and transcultural contexts. We thereby hope to refine current discussions on intermediality, remediation, transmediality, and multimodality (as found in, for instance, the 2015 Handbook of Intermediality: Literature, Image, Sound, Music edited by Gabriele Rippl). In five original presentations, the novel approach to the exploration of sound and vision takes its first cue from American music to investigate the interdependencies, overlappings, and interactions between music and other media: photography – Johannes Voelz (Frankfurt), graphic novels – Lukas Etter (Siegen), film – Marc Priewe (Stuttgart), popular performing arts – Johanna Hartmann (Augsburg), visual space/museums – Wilfried Raussert (Bielefeld), and interviews of jazz musicians – Wolfgang Lorenz (Köln).

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