Bernd Alois Zimmermann: Photoptosis (Incidence of Light) Created for the celebrations for the 100th anniversary of the Gelsenkirchen town bank, Bernd Alois Zimmerman’s 1968 work Photoptosis (Incidence of Light) looked to the gigantic paintings created by French artist Yves Klein

Judith Bingham: Roman Conversions In her 2017 organ work, Roman Conversions, British composer Judith Bingham looks at ‘five metamorphoses’ that happened in Rome, beginning in ancient times and concluding in the Baroque. Her first movement describes the setting: San Clemente:

Pietro Mascagni: Visione lirica In 1921, Italian composer Pietro Mascagni (1863-1945), having finished his latest verismo opera, Il piccolo Marat, he shut himself away to fight the modernism that seemed to be taking over opera. He stopped writing almost entirely

George Antheil: The Golden Bird Slimmed down to just a shadow of a profile, the Golden Bird launches itself upward. Its feet and tail are streamlined down to just minimal forms and the bird is topped with an upturned beak,

Most composers who look to art for inspiration look to paintings. A few, however, look to sculpture and one composer who look at four very different artists for a similar theme was Virko Baley (b. 1938). This Ukrainian-American composer began

“Work like a slave; command like a king; create like a god” The majority of photographs taken of French-Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși (1876-1957) show a kind of Grizzly Adams, a man with unkempt hair, long beard, a deeply lined face

American sculptor Alexander Calder (1898-1976) was known not only for his distinctive mobiles but also his ‘stabiles,’ non-moving sculptures. One of his best-known ‘stabiles’ is Cirque Calder (Calder’s Circus), a collection of over 70 miniature figures and animals with over

Thomas Mann (1875-1955) won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929 for his highly symbolic, ironic and epic novels and novellas. A determined social critic, his writings provide biting insights into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual within