Art as Music, Music as Poetry, Poetry as Art, from Whistler to Stravinsky and Beyond

Peter Dayan is Professor of Word and Music Studies at the University of Edinburgh, UK. His influential book Music Writing Literature, from Sand via Debussy to Derrida (Ashgate, 2006) showed how, since the time of the Romantics, poetry has been creating a space which music needs, and vice versa. All his more recent work, on 20th-century writers, painters and composers from Julio Cortazar to Igor Stravinsky, has revolved around the question of why art in any given medium so compulsively defines itself as if it were in a different medium - and how this intermedial round actually provides a surprisingly resilient definition of art itself.