Seeing Wilde Songs: Charles T. Griffes’s Synaesthesiaic Musical Settings of Oscar Wilde’s Poetry, Zan Cammack, Utah Valley University
Charles T. Griffes (1884–1920), America’s first Impressionistic composer, was deeply inspired by Oscar Wilde’s (1854–1900) poetry. The composer drew out the latent musicality and highlighted color-based thematic developments in Wilde’s works by interlacing written images with tonal references. And Griffes’s synaesthesia, or color-hearing, plays a particular role in yellow/gold tonal and impressionistic intertextuality. This presentation will emphasize an ongoing digital humanities project that enables a multimodal interaction with Griffes and Wilde’s works and also demonstrates, in a small sense, what it might have been for Griffes to see Wilde songs.
Respondent: Priyanka Jacob, Loyola University Chicago