Music and images, seeing and hearing have always been inextricably linked. Even when more autonomous concepts of music developed at various times through the centuries, they arguably served to keep at bay the ever-present visual dimensions of the act of listening. When we listen to music, do we just listen? When we see a painting, or anything else, do we just watch?

The last few decades, however, have witnessed the advent of an ever more pervasive visuality. From the development of technology to social media to special effects, seeing is foregrounded like never before. What does this mean for music? How do music’s materialities answer to the materialities of visual objects and arts? Do these new developments affect our listening and performance experiences? What categories are particularly useful to explain the connections between musical and visual domains? How are different musical traditions, from “classical” music and opera to jazz, popular and folk music being re- envisaged?

The aim of the conference Re-envisaging Music: Listening in the Visual Age is to explore the new scenarios created by these questions and how they inevitably change the dimension of spectatorship, the way we associate music with sites of performance, how the bodies of the performers act, the act of listening, and how we understand traditions and moving images.