Musical Ekphrasis in Concert: Case Study of Alexey Khevelev’s Chagall Vitraux

Piano cycle Chagall Vitraux by Russian composer Alexey Khevelev was written in 1994, inspired by Mark Chagall’s stained-glass masterpiece Jerusalem Windows (1962). Khevelev’s work consists of twelve movements, each named after one of the twelve windows by Chagall, and could be analyzed as an ekphrastic composition. The term musical ekphrasis was introduced in the musicological discourse around two decades ago to describe compositions based on works from the sister arts. The aesthetic category of ekphrasis has existed for centuries and has its roots in Plato’s discussion of the Ideal Form and its consequent representations. As a musical phenomenon the concept was pioneered by German musicologist and pianist Siglind Bruhn, who argues the independence of the genre of musical ekphrasis from the broader concept of program music. However, the concept of musical ekphrasis is still underdeveloped and lacks a strong theoretical foundation. I demonstrate how an analysis of a musical composition inspired by a work created in another artistic medium benefits from the use of the models of image-music interrelationships developed in the field of multimedia studies. I argue that such musical compositions can be coupled with their original referential sources during a live performance, enabling a performer to construct a multimedia presentation