Cintia Cristia
I am a musicologist and curator, passionate about the interrelationship of arts and culture. I am the author of a ground-breaking book on the significance of music in the work of modernist painter, writer and sculptor Alejandro Xul Solar, and the editor of a critical volume on artistic migrations and convergences in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. My latest research explores multimodal aesthetics and politics of identity, nation, gender, and representation in popular song in North America (1920s) and Argentina (1960s), as well as innovative ways of performing and sharing music. I started my musical career as a guitar performer and tutor, and then moved to musicology. I lived in Paris and London, studying at the Université de Paris-Sorbonne, where I received my BMus, MMus and PhD in History of Music and Musicology. I was tenured professor in Universidad Nacional del Litoral in Santa Fe, Argentina, for a decade before moving to Canada with my family. I was Assistant Professor at Toronto Metropolitan have taught courses on popular and contemporary music and media, aesthetics, gender, technology, and culture at Toronto Metropolitan University, University of Toronto, and Wilfrid Laurier University. I currently facilitate grant proposals at OCAD University.
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Papers by Cintia Cristia
If, like Richard Wagner states in The Art Work of the Future is only in dance that « music and poetry […] become intelligible», the pictorial representation of dance could be a way of transposing music and poetry to the canvas. Based on this hypothesis, this paper offers an interpretation of five watercolors painted by the Argentinean artist Alejandro Xul Solar (1887-1963) in which music appears on iconographic, structural, plastic and symbolic levels.
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Luis Mucillo’s Piano Concerto, Hoffmanneske Geschichte: das klingende Glas, developed from a piano piece, draws its main inspiration from a painting by Paul Klee which, in turn, points to E. T. A. Hoffmann. Placed in a net of influences that includes, among others, Rilke, Schoenberg, Mozart, and Schumann, this musical work seems particularly appropriate to study the phenomenon of the correspondence between the arts. Based on some interviews with the composer, as well as on a comparative analysis of the Concerto and the pictorial and literary works that contributed to its genesis, this article focuses on the transformation of literary and pictorial elements into musical gestures, techniques and materials, offering an insight into the intertextual relationships that emerge from it.
Books by Cintia Cristia
If, like Richard Wagner states in The Art Work of the Future is only in dance that « music and poetry […] become intelligible», the pictorial representation of dance could be a way of transposing music and poetry to the canvas. Based on this hypothesis, this paper offers an interpretation of five watercolors painted by the Argentinean artist Alejandro Xul Solar (1887-1963) in which music appears on iconographic, structural, plastic and symbolic levels.
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Luis Mucillo’s Piano Concerto, Hoffmanneske Geschichte: das klingende Glas, developed from a piano piece, draws its main inspiration from a painting by Paul Klee which, in turn, points to E. T. A. Hoffmann. Placed in a net of influences that includes, among others, Rilke, Schoenberg, Mozart, and Schumann, this musical work seems particularly appropriate to study the phenomenon of the correspondence between the arts. Based on some interviews with the composer, as well as on a comparative analysis of the Concerto and the pictorial and literary works that contributed to its genesis, this article focuses on the transformation of literary and pictorial elements into musical gestures, techniques and materials, offering an insight into the intertextual relationships that emerge from it.
Acerca de las múltiples interrelaciones entre la música y la vida y la obra de Xul Solar se ha ocupado la musicóloga Cintia Cristiá. Un artículo suyo acerca de este tema fue premiado en el I Concurso Internacional Gourmet Musical de Investigación sobre música de Latinoamérica (2003), en tanto su contribución al catálogo de la exposición dedicada a este artista en el MALBA (2005) recibió el Premio Eleonora Traficante al ensayo del año, en el marco de los Premios a la Crítica 2005 entregados por la Asociación Argentina de Críticos de Arte.
Gourmet Musical Ediciones, Buenos Aires
3ra. edición, ampliada 2017 / ISBN 978-987-3823-15-2 / Páginas: 174
2da. edición 2011 / ISBN 978-987-25614-5-1 / Páginas: 152
1ra. edición 2007 / ISBN: 978-987-22664-1-7 / Páginas: 144
Abstract: The study of music in the life and work of Alejandro Xul Solar (Argentine, 1887-1963) reveals new aspects of a very particular personality. Painter, writer and linguist, but also astrologist and inventor, Xul Solar studied many subjects. The sound is integrated into a complex tissue of knowledge that finds visual form in his watercolours, drawings and oil paintings, in his puppet theatre, in his variation of chess. The invented musical notation systems, as well as the keyboards modified to allow their application, are the result of deep thought on the interrelation between the arts. His linguistic and esoteric works also show the influence of music.
In order to clarify the implications of this subject, this dissertation approaches it in three stages: Firstly, the biography of the artist is presented in three chapters, emphasizing the role that music played in his life (family heritage, studies, musical relations, influence of the milieu, musical affinities, collection, etc.). Secondly, his investigation on music related aspects, such as notation, organology and the application of the interrelation of the arts, are organised in the three following chapters. Finally, the presence of music in his pictorial work is studied in the third part, by means of the analysis, sometimes accompanied by more or less audacious interpretations, of some thirty music related paintings. Xul Solar’s figure and work are at every stage placed in the historical and aesthetic context in order to comprehend their real value.
This essay was published in the exhibition catalogue edited by Professor Patricia M. Artundo and accompanied the retrospective exhibition curated by her at MALBA and Pinacoteca do Estado de Sao Paulo.
This work was distinguished as the Best Essay of the Year 2005 by the Argentinean Association of Art Critics.