Conclusion

Abstract

At the outset of this book I asserted the need for an assessment of the visual music film that takes into account its expressly musical qualities. These qualities of the visual music film have frequently been overlooked or, if alluded to, not critically engaged with as fully as they might have been. This is not to say that writers and critics have not been aware of these musical properties. The very term visual music asserts that the opposite is, in fact, true. There is an explicit recognition that music is fundamental to this body of work, which makes it all the more unusual that it is the visual aspect of it that has, until recently, been foregrounded in critical appraisals. This inquiry is, of course, not the only valid or necessary approach to engaging with visual music, but this book addresses what I have seen as the traditional visual and art-historical bias in the field of visual music research.