ABSTRACT
The scholarship of Daniel Grimley, among others, has made it possible to describe with some precision the ways in which composers have rendered visual effects, most often landscape imagery, by means of music. For Grimley, “the organization of musical events in time suggests a structural parallel with the placement of landscape objects in visual space.” 1 Examples come readily to mind: the suggestion of verdant countryside in Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, sublime depths and crashing surf in Mendelssohn's Fingal's Cave overture, and the coming of the dawn in Sibelius's tone poem Nightride and Sunrise. Grimley's groundbreaking readings of Scandinavian music, in particular, have brought much-needed nuance to the discussion of the ways in which this music is visual and prompt another question for research: how have composers of Western art music used not just visual phenomena but specific paintings in their work?
