Ut Musica Poesis: An Approach to the Dialogue between Literature and Music

Abstract

[Abstract] The pervasive presence of music in contemporary fiction parallels the crucial role played by painting in novels and short stories since the late 1990s. Such a parallel, however, has not had a correspondence in the field of interart poetics, since the growing interest in the critical assessment of the literature-painting interface cannot be matched by the scarce attention paid to the dialogue between literature and music nowadays. This unequal reception of the interaction of the sister arts emerges as the area of enquiry of the present paper, which examines the appraisal of the relationship of literature and music in comparison with that of literature and painting. Moreover, and in an attempt to sketch a theoretical framework reflecting the current relevance of the musico-literary conversation, the paper explores a revised version of the classical strategy of ekphrasis, and suggests a new variant of the traditional ut pictura poesis maxim.