The idea of a synthesis of the arts, a marriage between painting and music, color and sound, and with it the idea of a fusion of the different senses has found musical expression in various attempts to render the visible to a certain extent audible, or to enrich the audible with visual elements. Compositions created with that intent often are inspired by pictorial artworks, by color, light, or other visual impressions. Or possibly their creators were guided by synesthetical dispositions.
While first pieces of music inspired by paintings can be dated back to the 19th century, for example to Franz Liszt, color and light gained in importance at the beginning of the 20th century, when Alexander Scriabin experimented with color-light projections in his Prométhée.
The composer Olivier Messiaen was mainly concerned with color music in a spiritual sense. These instances represent more numerous forms of an audio-visual music, the possibilities of which are constantly redefined.
While the history of color-sound correspondences dates back to pre-Christianity, repeatedly occupying theorists and practitioners, scientists and artists, and while their studies experienced an early summit in the 18th century with the inventions and ideas of the Jesuit priest Louis-Bertrand Castel[1], it is only in the 19th century that composers started to relate music and image to each other and to use paintings as models for musical compositions. Although there had been much earlier attempts to represent visual impressions and events (such as flames, lightning, trembling) in a symbolic musical form (tone painting) or—inaudible to the listener—by blackening the notes accompanying words such as night or death in the score (eye music), it was only with the development of program music as a new form of instrumental music that artists turned to entire paintings as a subject for their musical works. The objective of these programmatic compositions was to stir specific imaginations and to consciously guide the listener’s fantasy through the chosen content.[2]
The first composer who was inspired to translate pictures and sculptures into music was Franz Liszt. In 1839, he created the piano pieces Lo Sposalizio and Il Penseroso after works by Raphael and Michelangelo (in Années de Pèlerinage, Deuxième Année: Italie). Later, he also took paintings as basis for his orchestral works, as, for example in his symphonic poem Hunnenschlacht (The battle of the Huns, 1857), which was inspired by a monumental painting by Wilhelm von Kaulbach. Many other composers such as Modest Mussorgsky, Gustav Mahler, Claude Debussy and Gabriel Fauré also attempted to translate works of fine art into music.
Of these musical interpretations, Modest Mussorgsky’s piano cycle Pictures at an Exhibition (1874) became particularly popular.[3] During the visit of a memorial exhibition dedicated to the painter and architect Victor Hartmann, Mussorgsky was inspired to start this work, and he chose ten watercolors and drawings as models for his cycle. He translated these into music by processing scenic aspects and their corresponding elements of motion, transforming them into independent musical images, whose relation to the model could no longer be immediately understood.[4]
Indeed, in many compositions based on a relationship between painting and music, the connections are not actually compelling or really conclusive. Often, such relationships remain vague and are based purely on association. The musical solutions found for the interpretation of paintings usually turn out very differently. Still, all these attempts were united in the idea to cross the boundaries between painting and music. This corresponded to romanticism’s idea of a fusion of different art forms, as, for example, in Universalpoesie (universal poetry) or the Gesamtkunstwerk.
The desire for a synthesis of the arts was linked to a desire to intensify the encounter with an artwork. The aesthetic sensation was to be increased to reach an all-encompassing sensory experience. Set against the background of the idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk (Richard Wagner), multimedial productions were staged by the end of the 19th century. The intended synthesis was no longer a matter of the imagination, but it could be experienced in a simultaneous stimulation of the different senses.[5]
The Russian composer Alexander Scriabin also dreamed of a combination of all art forms and sensory perceptions. In his project Mysterium, he aimed to combine words, sounds, colors, movements, taste and touch in many different ways. From 1908 onwards, he made first attempts to realize this multimedial concept in his symphony Prométhée—Le Poème du feu, where he was the first major composer to experiment with color light.
Scriabin experienced certain color-sound correspondences. He assigned specific colors to specific tones, or keys and sounds.[6] When visiting a concert in Paris, he exchanged ideas about this with a compatriot of his, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who also had concrete ideas about color and sound which influenced his composing. In his magic opera ballet Mlada (1889/90), he even translated his associations into corresponding color instructions for stage lighting. However, the analogy systems of both artists differed substantially,[7] which in itself is symptomatic for color-tone correspondences as they individually turn out to be very different. For example, Ivan Wyschnegradsky’s list has no matches with Scriabin’s scale except for the correspondence C = red, although he was influenced by the other’s ideas and continued to develop them in his own Temple of Light project. By illuminating a temple’s dome, Wyschnegradsky intended to achieve a synthesis of colors, light, music, and movement.[8]
Roughly at the same time as Scriabin, Arnold Schönberg was also on a quest for new means of artistic expression. In his one-act opera Die glückliche Hand (1910–1913), he wanted to make music not only with sounds, but also with color and light, lending a further important example of an unconventional combination of auditory and visual elements.[9] Both composers led the way for the development of color-light music as a new art form, the history of which culminated in the 1920s and early 1930s, accompanied by a multitude of color-light musical experiments, performances, and the design of various color pianos and organs. However, this controversial art form remained unsuccessful in the end and, with the beginning of World War II, sank into oblivion. The idea of a synthesis of optical and acoustic phenomena, however, has lived on and has continued to inspire composers until today.
More often than not, color plays the outstanding role in the translation of visual impressions into music. While, in 1922, Sir Arthur Bliss had already been inspired by the symbolic meaning of different colors in heraldry when composing his Color Symphony,[10] the colors were of particular importance throughout Olivier Messiaen’s complete oeuvre. The French composer was a synesthete and associated complex color visions with equally complex sounds. Throughout his life, he wanted to write a Musique colorée and composed works such as Couleurs de la Cité céleste (Colors of the Celestial City), which already indicated the link of color and sound in their title. However, Messiaen never thought of an optical representation of his visual perceptions, he was composing for an inner vision.
This is also true for composers of a younger generation such as, for example, Michael Torke and Rebecca Saunders. The US-American Torke has various forms of synesthesia, which do not only affect the eye and ear, but also the sense of touch. Influenced by this, mainly in the 1980s he created works that were named after colors, for instance the orchestral compositions Ecstatic Orange and Bright Blue Music. Later, Torke refrained from expressing his color sensations in titles, as he feared, and still fears, that imagining colors might distract the listener from the complexity of his music.[11] The British Rebecca Saunders, on the other hand, is inspired by colors without having a synesthetic predisposition. To her, there is a link between the sensuality of instrumental sounds and that of colors, and in her quest for a metaphor for her musical thinking, color associations can highlight the physical presence of instrumental sounds.[12] Saunders creates sounds which seem to glow, and compositions like cinnabar (1999) or Blue and Gray (2005) emphasize her particular affinity to colors.
Just like color, light continues to fascinate composers and musicians alike. There are numerous works inspired by apparitions and impressions of light, even if they do not contain any actual visual component. Experiments with the use of light following Scriabin’s tradition are rare. In 1990, the Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina, for example, wrote the piece Alleluja for a choir, boy’s solo, organ, orchestra, and color piano ad libitum. Here, she did not want to use colors in analogy to tones, they were to provide a rhythm.[13] Wolfgang Rihm and Georg Friedrich Haas also worked with light as a rhythmical element. Whereas the former only integrated Das Licht as an autonomous part in one passage of his opera Die Eroberung von Mexico,[14] the latter made an important step forward in his concert for light and orchestra titled Hyperion: he assigned the part of a virtuoso solo instrument to the light medium, which also acts as control element for the musicians of the orchestra and replaces the conductor during performances.
Apart from these experiments with colors and light, there still were models of musical compositions inspired by visual artworks. From the 1960s to the 1980s, a greater number of composers were interested in music after painting. Like their forebear Liszt, they were inspired by individual works of fine art (this is particularly true for Walter Steffens and Michael Denhoff) or by the entire artistic creation of a specific painter (as Morton Feldman with De Kooning or For Philip Guston) and tried to achieve a close connection or a freer and more abstract interpretation.[15] Their compositions are part of the many-faceted attempts to integrate visual elements into music, and an expression of the still inspiring idea of a synthesis of different arts and the senses. Still again, new chances have opened to realize this idea, since developments in computer technology and the new media make many things possible nowadays, which the precursors of audiovisual music projects could only dream of. Thus, acoustic impulses can be transformed into graphical forms through media technology or digital parameter mapping, a framework creating conditions which allow for the simultaneous composition of sounds and images.
[1] Detailed information in: Jörg Jewanski, Ist C = Rot? Eine Kultur- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte zum Problem der wechselseitigen Beziehung zwischen Ton und Farbe. Von Aristoteles bis Goethe, Doctoral Thesis Berlin 1996, (Berliner Musik Studien, vol. 17), Sinzig 1999.
[2] Contents could also be, for example, literary works or incidents. Cf. register of works in: Klaus Schneider, Lexikon Programmusik, 2 volumes, Kassel inter alia: Bärenreiter, 1999–2000.
[3] The fame of this work is also due to the many existing orchestral arrangements (by Maurice Ravel, Leopold Stokowski a.o.) as well as the rock version by Emerson, Lake & Palmer.
[4] Helga de la Motte-Haber, Musik und Bildende Kunst. Von der Tonmalerei zur Klangskulptur, Laaber 1990, 140.
[5] Cf. La Motte-Haber, Musik und Bildende Kunst, 1990, 134–137.
[6] Cf. Barbara Kienscherf, Das Auge hört mit. Die Idee der Farblichtmusik und ihre Problematik—beispielhaft dargestellt an Werken von Alexander Skrjabin und Arnold Schönberg, Doctoral Thesis. Münster 1995; Frankfurt/Main a.o: P. Lang, 1996, chapter 3.2.3.
[7] Cf. Dorothee Eberlein, Russische Musikanschauung um 1900—von 9 russischen Komponisten dargestellt aus Briefen, Selbstzeugnissen, Erinnerungen und Kritiken (Studien zur Musikgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts, vol. 52), Regensburg: G. Bosse, 1978, 34.
[8] Cf. Gottfried Eberle, “Mysterium und Lichttempel. Alexander Skrjabin und Ivan Wyschnegradsky—zwei multimediale Konzepte”, in: Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk. Europäische Utopien seit 1800, catalogue supplement Berlin, Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD (Berlin artists’ program of the German Academic Exchange Service) (ed.), Berlin 1983, 48–52.
[9] Cf. Kienscherf, Das Auge hört mit, 1996, chapter 4.3.
[10] The individual movements of the symphony are titled: I. Purple, II. Red, III. Blue, IV. Green.
[11] Cf. Patricia Duffy, Jeder blaue Buchstabe duftet nach Zimt. Wie Synästhetiker die Welt erleben, Munich: Goldmann, 2003, 137 (Blue cats and chartreuse kittens. How Synethetes color their world, New York, Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 2001).
[12] Michael Struck-Schloen, “Klang in Rot, Blau, Grau. Composer in residence am Konzerthaus Dortmund: Rebecca Saunders”, in: K.WEST—Das Feuilleton für NRW, February 2006, Online-publication at http://k-west.net/.
[13] Further information in: “Pinsel und Ton. Gemalte Musik”, in: SIKORSKI magazine (quarterly magazine of Sikorski Musikverlage), Hamburg 2, 2006, 6.
[14] This work by the German composer was created during the years 1987–1991.
[15] The database Musik nach Bildern of the Institut für Musikwissenschaft der Universität Innsbruck contains indications of in total more than 1.000 image-related compositions which have been created since 1839. It can be gathered from additional statistics that Paul Klee is the painter whose works have been most frequently set to music and that Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica is the single work of art which has been most often set to music. Cf. Homepage http://www.musiknachbildern.at/.
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