Colour Organs

[James_H]

Gives a whole new meaning to chromaticism in music...

Probably first conceived by an 18th Century French mathematician, Louis Bertrand Castel. I'll quote from wikipedia:

Louis Bertrand Castel (5 November 1688 – 11 January 1757) was a French mathematician born in Montpellier, who entered the order of the Jesuits in 1703. Having studied literature, he afterwards devoted himself entirely to mathematics and natural philosophy.

[...]

Early on, Castel illustrated his optical theories with a proposal for a Clavecin pour les yeux (Ocular Harpsichord, 1725). A new series of articles, published in the Mercure de France in 1735, gave his idea wider currency. In 1739 the German composer Telemann went to France to see Castel's Ocular Harpsichord for himself. He ended up composing several pieces for it, as well as writing a description of it.

The ocular harpsichord had sixty small coloured glass panes, each with a curtain that opened when a key was struck. A second, improved model of the harpsichord was demonstrated for a small audience in December 1754. Pressing a key caused a small shaft to open, in turn allowing light to shine through a piece of stained glass. Castel thought of colour-music as akin to the lost language of paradise, where all men spoke alike, and he claimed that thanks to his instrument's capacity to paint sounds, even a deaf listener could enjoy music.

Castel was not the last! He's a list of colour organs.

Notable is synaesthete (was he?) composer Scriabin's Clavière à lumières, designed for his Prometheus: A Poem of Fire. Only one was ever constructed.

EDIT: I mistakenly thought this pictured showed Scriabin's instrument: actually it is the English painter A. Wallace Rimington with his own colour organ.

 

[JamesWhitehead]

Only one was ever constructed.

Youtube has this 2010 documentary and performance of Prometheus, using modern lighting techniques!

Prometheus was relatively modest in its requirements. At the time of his death, Scriabin was occupied with a piece to be called Mysterium:

"There will not be a single spectator. All will be participants. The work requires special people, special artists and a completely new culture. The cast of performers includes an orchestra, a large mixed choir, an instrument with visual effects, dancers, a procession, incense, and rhythmic textural articulation. The cathedral in which it will take place will not be of one single type of stone but will continually change with the atmosphere and motion of the Mysterium. This will be done with the aid of mists and lights, which will modify the architectural contours."
Scriabin intended the performance to be in the foothills of the Himalayas in India, a week-long event that would be followed by the end of the world and the replacement of the human race with "nobler beings".

From the Wikipedia page on Mysterium.

Perhaps it is just as well that it remained unfinished, though there have been some attempts to realise the fragments, notably by Alexander Nemtin, who is said to have spent 28 years on the task!


Now I see that a 2 hour 40 minute version of Mysterium has been posted on Youtube, under Ashkenazy, no less!

 

[James_H]

Scriabin was very Fortean, and deserves a thread of his own really. He was a keen theosophist, IIRC. The video you posted of Prometheus is fantastic, I just watched a bit of it so far.