EPTA. Ljubljana Conservatory of Music and Ballet.
Dr. Žiga Stanič
In 2015, we commemorated the 100th anniversary of the death of the Russian composer, the versatile Alexander Nikolaevich Scriabin, and at the same time the first performance of his final symphonic work Prometheus with added lighting effects. Scriabin’s score for Prometheus, Poem of Fire, contains, in addition to the instrumental ensemble, a part called luce, which represents a set of colored lights. To perform this part, the composer designed a musical instrument called a luminous piano, clavier à lumières, tastiéra per luce, which some musicologists also call a color organ, at the time of composition. This device had a piano keyboard, and the keys were actually switches for colored lights. When a specific key was touched, a specific colored light lit up, and it had to light up synchronously with the appropriate musical pattern.
The colors that Scriabin assigned to the twelve tones of the chromatic scale are arranged in the order of the frequencies of the color spectrum, from the lowest frequency, red, to the highest, violet. The composer did not arrange the color frequencies in the order of the tones of the chromatic scale (f, f#, g, g#,…), but rather in the order of the tones of the circle of fifths (f-c-g-d-a-…). Starting with the tone f, we can also follow the sequence of fifths within the context of the display on the piano keyboard. At a lecture in the hall of the Ljubljana Conservatory of Music and Ballet on 27 November 2015, we analyzed the circumstances that led Scriabin to the idea of a composition that contained simultaneous visual information. Let us summarize them again.
In some of his piano compositions, Scriabin tried to conjure up the idea of fire, burning, and combustion. The most outstanding are the Piano Sonata No. 5 and “Vers la flamme” and “Flammes sombres”, whose program titles already hint at an attempt at a sound effect. The symphonic work Prometheus, Poem of Fire, Op. 60, for orchestra, piano, organ, choir and luminous piano, completed in 1910, attempted to follow the idea of fire with added visual effects and thus became one of the pioneering multimedia works of the 20th century. The first performance of the composition in Moscow in 1911 did not yet take into account the lighting part due to technological problems, and so it was the first “color” performance in New York’s Carnegie Hall in 1915. The composer, who died a month later, did not attend this performance. Prometheus was rarely performed with lights on world stages in the 20th century, for example in England for the first time only in 1972. With the advancement of technology, light performances of Prometheus began to appear more frequently at the end of the millennium, but each was subject to its own unique directing concept. Namely, apart from individual notes found in the so-called Paris score, the composer did not leave any specific instructions on how the colored lights in the space should work and affect the audience. Partly probably due to technical obstacles in the electrical installation, which were not yet fully overcome at that time, partly due to his impulsive way of creating without sketches and extensive documented preparations. The score does not state how two different colors should be presented simultaneously during the musical performance, nor does it state how the concert hall should be lit; whether these lights should illuminate a darkened stage or whether rays of light should flash around the hall, or whether the entire hall should be bathed in color.
The part for the luminous piano “luce” is in treble clef at the top of the score and is “two-voiced”. One voice changes with the harmonic progression and always represents the fundamental pitch of the harmony that is dominant in a given section. Thus, it gives the light that Scriabin intended for a certain tonality or pitch. The second “color” voice is formed by much longer notes that last several bars. This voice is not connected to the harmonic progression or to the first, upper voice, but rather rises in the sequence of the whole-pitch scale with some exceptions. The pitches of the second voice change every few pages of the score, i.e. a minute or two apart. The approximate duration of the piece is 20 minutes. One of the special features of the second voice is a light that lights up when you press the F sharp key. It burns at the beginning and end of the piece, for a total of 232 bars, and represents the golden ratio in relation to the entire length of the piece (606 bars).
The reason that the duration of the light fis describes the ratio of the golden ratio is certainly not accidental. Scriabin flirted with philosophy (Plato, Hegel, Neitzsche), theosophy, symbolism, the occult, and in the last period of his life he wanted to go beyond the musical framework with his music. As an idealist, he wanted his music to influence the ethical rebirth of listeners and even more broadly, of humanity. He conceived an extensive mass, the Mystery, which was also to incorporate lighting effects, and scents were added. Prometheus reflects many of the composer’s acquired philosophical and theosophical views, including the so-called Promethean chord (c-f#-b flat-e-a-d), also called the mystical chord. Scriabin composed Prometheus between 1908 and 1910, when he lived in Brussels and socialized intensively with a group of artists, philosophers, and theosophists. A member of this group, the Belgian symbolist, painter, poet, polemicist, teacher and theosophist Jean Delville, is the author of the title page of the score.
Scriabin’s luminous piano was not, however, a completely new invention in itself. As early as 1725, without the aid of electricity, the French mathematician and Jesuit Louis Bertrand Castel had built a harpsichord for the eyes, also called an ocular organ. The instrument had 64 colored glass panes, covered with a curtain; when a key was pressed, certain curtains opened. In 1739, the German composer Georg Philipp Telemann went to France, saw this instrument and then wrote several pieces for it. The picture shows a caricature of Louis Bertrand Castel from his time. The English artist and inventor Bainbridge Bishop patented his colored organ in 1877. He made three examples, all of which were destroyed in fires. The instruments were ordinary organs, supplemented by lights that could project colored light simultaneously with the music. In 1893, the English painter Alexander Wallace Rimington invented and patented the Clavier a lumières, or color organ, which even Richard Wagner was interested in. The common claim that Rimington’s color organ was used in the New York color premiere of Prometheus in 1915 is incorrect. The device called the chromola, which accompanied the first color performance, was made by Preston S. Millar. After Scriabin’s luminous piano, many other so-called light instruments followed in the 20th century before the rise of the computer age, including the optophonic piano (1916), the Clavilux (1920), the Chromopiano (1921), the Illumovox (1922, its author is the famous Leon Theremin), the Lumigraf (1950) and so on.
Although Scriabin’s concept of the luminous piano is one of the most popular examples of the connection between sounds and colors, it is far from the first in historical terms. The oldest known theoretical connections between these two physical phenomena date back to the time of ancient Greece, and the first Chinese records of symbolic connections were made as early as 2000 BC. Ideas about the connections between musical and light information, on which composers relied with their artistic concepts, can be divided into two important groups. Physical, which refers to the physical laws of optics and acoustics, and psychological, which refers to the subjective simultaneous experience of colors and pitches and is understood within the framework of the concept of empathy, with a stranger, synesthesia. Let’s look at the latter first. Synesthesia (synaithesis < syn – connection + aesthesis – feeling, synaisthánomai – I perceive together) is a neurological phenomenon in which the stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to an automatic, involuntary experience in another sensory or cognitive pathway (psychological research has shown different behavioral reactions or brain activity, including with the help of MRI). People with such experiences are called synesthetes, and they differ from each other in the number and strength of synesthetic sympathies. Colored letter and number signs are an example of how a synesthete can perceive (but not “see”) certain letters and numbers. Synesthetes see signs the same as everyone else (in whatever color the signs are displayed), but at the same time they perceive colors in connection with them or the colors that a particular sign evokes in their thinking. One of the most common and most studied is grapheme-color synesthesia. To illustrate chromesthesia, color hearing, Scriabin’s colored piano keyboard, presented at the beginning of the article, may best serve.
The testimonies of musicians with the ability to experience synaesthesia differ from each other, so we do not have a universal codebook that could always determine the same pitch for a particular color. Is pitch g blue, yellow, green, red, white, black? The representations of some musicians match each other when interpreting individual colors and pitches, while others do not. All the testimonies of synesthetes have in common only that the experiences are not captured in a physical-mathematical order, as we will present in the next paragraph. It should be understandable in itself that a musical synesthete should also have absolute pitch, since only then would he be able to easily identify any heard pitch simultaneously with a color. However, the concept of musical synesthesia is looser, and above all, it is not scientifically well analyzed or recorded. For example, we can take the notes of the composer György Ligeti, who did not have absolute pitch, but considered himself a musical synesthete. He connected pitches with colors indirectly through their names, i.e. in the sense of grapheme-color synesthesia. Each pitch is basically defined by a specific frequency. The oscillation of a pitch is indicated and measured with the unit hertz (Hz) and according to ISO standard 16, we have a1 as the starting chamber pitch determined as 440 hertz. The acoustic phenomenon of the octave interval, with which we define the next higher pitch a, is represented as twice the frequency, i.e. 880 Hz. If we multiply this frequency further using the same procedure, we will always get the nominally same pitch a, but a few octaves higher. Even when the frequency of a pitch escapes the human auditory spectrum due to its pitch, it will theoretically still represent the corresponding pitch. Although sound is a mechanical wave and light is electromagnetic, some important scientists of the past tried to symbolically connect these two waves to each other. When we multiply the frequency of any pitch long enough and in doing so we rise far above the audible range with octaves, we finally reach the color spectrum with the nth octave and find the color frequency corresponding to the fundamental pitch. However, we can only make an authoritative mapping with certainty in the 20th century, when the individual frequencies were precisely defined. Before the concert pitch a1 was defined as 440 Hz by the International Organization for Standardization in 1955, its pitch was many different things, such as 430 Hz or 466, and the multiplication of these frequencies could result in a different color frequency than today.
The findings of scientists and thinkers before the 20th century regarding the associative connections between sounds and colors generally differ, as they do not have the same mathematical basis or are completely subjective in nature. Scriabin distributed his color set among the twelve pitches of the chromatic scale differently than the synesthetes did in documented testimonies. All synesthetes have one thing in common, the subjectivity of experience and a deviation from the ordered mathematical-physical parallels between colors and pitches, which were presented in the paragraph above. In the colors for Prometheus, Scriabin relied on the ideas of Isaac Newton and arranged the color sequence in a circle of fifths. For this reason, a hundred years after his death, we consider him a pseudo-synesthete.