How do we decide what to value as music, or as poetry, or as art? For at least a century, since we were first told that noise might be music, and since Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Kurt Schwitters, and Marcel Duchamp began to stick found objects in art galleries, critics have been increasingly suspicious of this question. The essays in this volume show, however, that an indirect but unexpectedly powerful answer is given by the very writers, composers and painters who are generally thought to have turned art into an infinitely problematic category. Art in each medium quietly tells us that it has a hidden source in another medium. Poetry is, in an arcane way, really music, or it is dance, or it is visual; music is (equally arcanely) poetry, or dance, or visual art; and so on. Each art draws its strength from roots that pass through an unknowable space between the arts.
Peter Dayan is Professor of Word and Music Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Music Writing Literature, Art as Music, Music as Poetry, Poetry as Art, and The Music of Dada. In these essays, he charts the intermedial source of art as we know and love it. His investigations open up the nature of creativity, and reveal how we maintain our faith in the arts.