Look & Listen: Whistler and Music, Brian Ganz, piano, with Kerry Roeder

Explore the deep links between the American expatriate artist James McNeill Whistler and the French composer Claude Debussy, who was known in the late nineteenth century as “the Whistler of music.”   
 
Take a fresh look at Whistler’s famous nocturnes and The Balcony, and listen to Debussy’s Estampes, all inspired by the Japanese woodblock prints both Whistler and Debussy collected. See how Whistler’s radical ideas about art—published in English and French in the 1880s—influenced his paintings and were adopted by Debussy to forge a new kind of music later incorporated into jazz. Learn how Whistler used musical terms for his work and how Debussy deployed the vocabulary of the visual arts for his compositions. In addition to Debussy’s Estampes, pianist Brian Ganz will perform selections from his Preludes and Images.
    
Brian Ganz was a top prizewinner at two of the world’s most prestigious piano competitions (the Marguerite Long Jacques Thibaud and the Queen Elisabeth of Belgium) and has since appeared with the St. Louis Symphony; the Baltimore Symphony; the National Symphony Orchestra; and the City of London Sinfonia under conductors Leonard Slatkin, Marin Alsop, Mstislav Rostropovich, and Piotr Gajewski.   
 
Kerry Roeder is the curatorial research fellow for American art at the Freer and Sackler.