After finally achieving success with his opera ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’ in 1902, Claude Debussy (1862-1918) wrote ‘L’Isle Joyeuse’ (‘The Joyous Island’), while working hard on his new composition, ‘La Mer’. His very successful artistic achievements were in stark opposition to

A recent exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum in New York paired one of Caravaggio’s paintings, ‘The Musicians’ (1595) with two other paintings, ‘Allegory of Music’ by Laurent de la Hyre (1606 -1656) and ‘The Lute Player’ (c.1626) by Valentin de

The recently released film, ‘Mr. Turner’, by Mike Leigh focuses on the last 25 years of James Turner’s (1775-1849) life, the height of Turner’s career. The film opens with a beautiful Dutch landscape scene, with the sun rising at dawn,

In my last two Interlude articles we followed the development towards abstraction in art and music in Germany and France, but interestingly, it was artists in Russia who led the movement towards total abstraction. There was of course a constant

Paul Klee (1879-1940) craved the freedom to explore radical and modernist experimentations in his paintings. In music, however, he could never come to terms with contemporary works of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. In fact, he even disliked the compositions of

After Kandinsky’s and Schoenberg ground-breaking endeavors, many artists in France, Italy and Russia started to follow different paths — all towards abstraction.

“Must we not then renounce the object altogether,throw it to the winds and instead lay bare the purely abstract?”Vasily Kandinsky, 1911 In the early years of the 20th century the relationship between the arts and music was at its closest

‘Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent…. Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent’ (As long echoes confound from afar….perfumes, colors and sounds respond to each other’) Charles Baudelaire, ‘Correspondances’ The recent exhibition at the Sackler