When I started reading this article, what came to my mind was the concept of program music that I learned in “Introduction to the History of Western Music”. In this context, program music refers to music that carries some extramusical meaning, some “program” of literary idea, legend, and scenic Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” Violin Concerto, for example, describes the four seasons as indicated in its title. When you listen to “Winter”, you can literally sense the cold wind blowing around you. This is also due to the rapidity of the violin playing in the piece. Anyway, what I want to point out here is that there was this kind of sense of combining music with graphics (scenes) during the classical music period, even though at first the graphics were often abstract and even did not exist in physical form (in people’s imagination).

As I read further, I found this interesting quote that says “the point was not to link different arts with one another but to find an appropriate means of expression for a particular idea, to test concepts in another field, or simply to extend one’s own radius of effect”. As we can see from the examples given in the article, the artists are not making cross-disciplinary art for the sake of making cross-disciplinary art. Instead, they conceptualized in their minds what ideas they wanted to realize before making cross-disciplinary art, and then tried to express their ideas in the form of cross-disciplinary art creation. This kind of creation is obviously experimental and highly groundbreaking.

At the end of the article, we can see that “the dual profession of artist-musician/musician-artist is no longer anything of note”, rather, “PR strategies demonstrate how an artist or musician’s own cultural product can benefit from the adaptation of the respective other systems”. I’m curious if this being tied up with commercial capital is an indication that the trend of cross-disciplinary art-making has become so popular that people have become accustomed to it, or if it is an indication that it is difficult to make commercial value that people are transitioning to art content that can make money for them.