The Orchestration of the Arts — A Creative Symbiosis of Existential Powers : The Vibrating Interplay of Sound, Color, Image, Gesture, Movement, Rhythm, Fragrance, Word, Touch

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.

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.