Conference Agenda

Georgia O’Keeffe’s early music paintings, such as Music: Pink and Blue No. 2 (1918) and Blue and Green Music (1921), reflect her engagement with absolute music as a conceptual framework for making abstract art. She described the undulating, translucent folds of color in these paintings as “musical” because they were purely abstract, detached from representation and external narrative. For O'Keeffe, the idea of autonomous music was not a system of formal constraints but a fluid, intuitive means of exploring spiritual ideas. In her words, abstraction in music and painting disclosed fundamental truths about the universe, and she evoked its force against materialist views of nature through “music that makes holes in the sky.”

By the early 20th century, the idea of absolute music—once central to feisty 19th-century debates over instrumental music’s supposed autonomy—had expanded beyond medium-specific boundaries, becoming a conceptual model for avant-garde artists like O'Keeffe who explored nonrepresentational abstraction. As Mark Evan Bonds explains, instrumental music’s associations with purity and self-referentiality shaped both modernist painting and musical modernism, the latter advancing so-called “hard” formalism, an aesthetic emphasizing self-contained structure over expression. While the idea of pure music informed a range of modernist practices, its influence was neither uniform nor confined to rigid formalist perspectives. Attention to O'Keeffe's work challenges the assumption that this music-aesthetic concept follows a teleological narrative leading to the austerity of high-modernist composition. This paper argues that O’Keeffe’s music paintings provide a significant counterexample to the legacy of absolute music in musical modernism, showing how she reimagined the concept as a model for expansive, embodied abstraction over structural determinism.

Drawing on scholarship about the intellectual history of absolute music (Bonds, 2014; Pederson, 2009), ineffability (Gallope, 2017), and feminist approaches to formalism (Hisama, 2001; McClary, 1993), this presentation situates O'Keeffe's work within debates about the enduring idea of absolute music in modernist aesthetics. Contrasting with masculine-coded notions of formalism as a mechanism of control, her conception of pure music emphasizes ambiguity, intuition, and spiritual resonance. Recognizing this distinction expands how abstraction figures in musicological discourses and helps clarify O'Keeffe's resistance to sexual projections and gendered interpretations of her abstractions.

Wassily Kandinsky's legacy as a founding father of modernism is undisputed by history. Revered for reaching towards the abstract, his paintings connect the interior and psychological to the discard of representation in art; inspiring a crowd of creatives in the early 1910's to join a collective named after one of his prized works: Der Blaue Reiter [The Blue Rider] (1903). Despite this dominance in the visual realm, Kandinsky's written works received less attention from the wider public than his paintings, resigned to the niche of modernist thought once the movement itself expired.

Far too often, Kandinsky is treated by musicologists as the trusty ideological sidekick of the revolutionary Arnold Schoenberg, written as a mirror image of the composer reflected onto visual art. The alleged partnership of the two is assumed to be a vital inspiration for Schoenberg's early 'Expressionist' works; as a result, Kandinsky remains a muse in the background of Schoenberg's artistic diorama. This placement dismisses Kandinsky's unique contributions to the development of abstraction in not only painting, but music as well: the artist is due a re-examination as a music theorist in his own right. While some art historians and musicologists have seized upon Kandinsky's musical leanings (Dabrowski, 1995; Ashmore, 1977; Baldassarre, 2004), he is still largely portrayed as a painter who primarily engaged with music as an outsider, enamored with music's proximity to abstraction.

In this paper, I present Kandinsky's theoretical writings, with his early 'Stage Compositions' as ancillary evidence, as containing just as much material for the advancement of musical modernism as his professionally-wedded musical contemporaries. Kandinsky's theories of color-tones coordinating between sight and sound in such publications as his main treatise, Über Das Geistige in Der Kunst [On the Spiritual in Art] (1912), rival concepts of color and music by such distant contemporaries as Scriabin in their depth and intellectual rigor. And his early works for stage, most notably Der Gelbe Klang [The Yellow Sound] (1909), display an intense desire to genuinely compose music that emphasizes the crux of this paper: Kandinsky's potential as a figure in the advancement of musical modernism cannot be ignored.

The only known source of Fanny Hensel’s Notturno Napolitano is not her autograph manuscript, but a scribal copy produced by someone in her circle between 1840 and 1850. This Notturno is more than a piano work with lyrical qualities in imitation of the voice. It shows clear connections to Hensel’s two musical albums: the reference to Naples, Italy, in its title evokes the “Reise-Album”, and the theme of the Notturno unmistakably recalls the introduction to the Serenade from the first version of “Juni” in Das Jahr. This paper explores the Notturno Napolitano as an imagined musical vista that reflects a mode of artistic integration developed in Hensel’s earlier works: the “Reise-Album”, a private memory album from her 1839–40 Italian journey comprising piano pieces, Lieder, and part-songs inspired by the sights and sounds of Italy; and Das Jahr, a sophisticated piano cycle devoted to each month of the year, composed in 1841. These two musical albums represent artistic collaborations between Hensel and her painter-illustrator husband Wilhelm Hensel. Hensel composed the music, Wilhelm contributed the vignettes for each piece, and the poetry or epigrams were drawn from various poets.

I argue that echoes of this artistic integration resonate in the Notturno Napolitano, a solo piano work that engages poetry and visual art even in the absence of accompanying texts or imagery. This reading, grounded in the work’s implicit recollection of Italian landscapes and in dialogue with Das Jahr, expands the interpretive framework of extra-musical meaning in Hensel’s instrumental music (Wilson Kimber 2008). It positions the Notturno in relation to Hensel’s sensitivity to poetry and its rhythm (Rodgers 2021), as well as beyond the commonly drawn parallels between her instrumental music and song (Todd 2011). My analysis demonstrates that Hensel was a composer for whom music, poetry, and art were intricately connected. Ultimately, situating the Notturno within Hensel’s rich artistic milieu reveals the far-reaching effects of her artistic cultivation and how they extend beyond the album collections, thereby inviting consideration of how the integration of artforms inspired Hensel’s musical imagination.