Regardless of the subject matter, our studies are always searching for a sense of the universal in the specific. Drawing, etchings and paintings are a way of communicating ideas and emotions. The key word here is to communicate. Whether the audience sees the work as laborious or poetic depends on the creative genius of the artist. Some painters use the play of light passing through a landscape or washing over a figure to create an evocative moment that will be both timeless and transitory. The essential role of art remains what is has always been, a way of human expression. This is the role that our participants concentrate on as they discuss art as the expression of the spirit, a creative act through which the artist makes manifest what is within him. Spirit suggests the unity of feeling and thought. Avoiding broad generalities, our participants address specific areas in orchestration with music, architecture, literature and phenomenology. Profs. Souiller, Scholz, Etlin, Sweetser, Josephs show us at what point art is an intimate, profound expression and the magic of a civilization as a whole, springing from its evolving thoughts and embodying ideals, such as the Renaissance, the Baroque, Modernism and at what point it reflects the trans formation of a particular society and its mode of life.

Zusammenfassung
What is art? This perennial question is forcefully thrown open by the electronic expansion of its field and proliferation of arts. This book addresses this question with philosophical underpinnings.

Inhalt
Section One Music, Literature, History, Architecture, Staging, Painting, Decoration: Within a Symphony of the Arts.- Paradox and Metaphor: An Integrity of the Arts.- Aesthetic Symbiosis and Spiritual Quest: Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece in Hindemith's Opera Mathis der Maler.- The Ambiguity of Baroque Enchantment: Operatic Mise en Abyme.- The Musicalization of Prose: Prolegomena to the Experience of Literature in Musical Form.- Calderón's Dramatic Technique: The Orchestration of the Arts, From Drama to Opera.- Baroque Splendor: Vierzehnheiligen Church and Bach's B-Minor Mass.- Section Two Sharing in Creative and Cosmic Synergies.- Orchestration of the Universe: Reflections on Tagore's Creativity.- The Synergies of Mind and Muse: Reflections on Nineteenth-Century Thought and A Comparative Analysis of Dante Gabriel Rosetti's Poem and Painting The Blessed Damozel and Claude Debussy's La Demoiselle Elue.- The Interdependency of Literature, Architecture, Theater and Music as an Expression of Baroque Absolutism at the Hapsburg Court in Vienna.- Literature and Architecture as a Metaphor of Grandeur and Decadence.- Louis Sullivan: The Life-Enhancing Symbiosis of Music, Language, Architecture, and Ornament.- An Orchestration of the Arts in Wallace Stevens' Peter Quince at the Clavier.- Section Three the Symbiosis and the Interaction of the Arts.- The Harmonic Conceit: Music, Nature and Mind in Wordworth's Prelude.- Histoire de L'Aveugle: Matiérisme's Critique of Vision.- Images of Water and the Sea in Tristan L'Hermite's La Mer and in Painting.- Section Four Arts Interacting with Our Perception of Nature and Human Life.- Fire and Ice: Le Vrai Magique.- W. E. B. du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk as an Example of theTragic.- The Blending of Natures and the Perception of the Real.- The Symbiosis and the Interaction of the Arts: Cesário Verde, Poet / Painter.- This is Mine, and I Can Hold It: Edna St. Vincent Millay and her Music.- Section Five The Poetic Inter-Reflection of the Arts.- The Terpsichorean Poem.- A Study in Nostalgia: The Orchestration of Life in Façade. The Edith SitwellWilliam Walton Musico-Poetic Collaboration.- Interreflection of Complementary Expressive Means in Combined-Media Art Performances.- The Orchestration of the Arts in Leila Sebbar's Shérazade, 17 ans, brune, frisée, les yeux verts.- Beauty and the Dialogue of the Arts: Considerations about Gadamer.- Section Six Arts Nurturing Human Culture.- A Look at Modernism from the Keyboard: The Piano in the Parlor and Abstract Art.- Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Richard Wagner and Émile Bernard: Composition and Meaning in the Late Nineteenth Century.- The Temporal Character of Catherine Schieve's Slide Opera.- An Unfolding of Theory and Practice: From Ingarden to a Phenomenological Aesthetic for Opera.- Emotion, Metaphor, Music, and Humor.- The Cultural Milieu of Francis Poulenc (18991963) and his Musique de Tous les Jours (including a brief survey of his works for piano).- Index of Names.