Scriabin's Colour?

I've heard that Alexander Scriabin was able to use a kind of... colour coding system for when he composed music. To be perfectly honest most of the sources I've gone too are quite hard to understand. Would anybody be able to explain it to me in relatively simple terms, and possibly tell me if it is even possible to use it in composition?

Thanks,

Synesthesia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Scriabin was... to be kind.. a bit screwy.

Great composer, went nuts as he got older.

Had all sorts of weird mystical ideas.

He didn't really use colour when composing. He had ideas about using displays of colour to go with musical performance.

And yes, he was nuts at the end of his life... his magnum opus (incomplete) was to be called Mysterium, and would have involved towers of incense visible to the whole world, and bells hanging from clouds (yeah, I'd like to see that). He went a tiny bit overboard. /sarcasm off

Messaien too!

Yeah, there's a record of a rehearsal of one of Messaien's pieces (I'm pretty sure it was turangalila).

Anyway, at the end of one section of the piece, being the composer he was asked if he had any comments/instructions to the orchestra. His response was "Yes, the brass need to play more orange." (!)

Anyway, at the end of one section of the piece, being the composer he was asked if he had any comments/instructions to the orchestra. His response was "Yes, the brass need to play more orange." (!)

Many people, many pedagogs, use colours as a [lazy(IMO)] way of conveying certain emotional reaction to music: using colours to describe a piece. For example, I'm sure most people would not regard Mozart's Requiem or Mahler 6 to be Pink, Avocado, or peach; rather, Metallic Grey, Deep Red or similar colour schemes. Through social norms, certain colours have emotional reactions, often because of physical objects that bear the colour (Obviously, Red and Blood; Black and storms, night time, racism*)

*Though this could actually be a result of the colour, not a reason for it – among other reasons.

ok thanks for the replies, :)

So basically the bottom line is its difficult to compose with colours unless i have synesthesia, and if i do its merely as a way of describing the piece, not actually a technical skill? (forgive me if i have misunderstood)

Oh, and Scriabin's a nut job ;) lol

Yeah, from what I understand its more a mood thing. My choir director in high school taught it to us and it became a very simple way to make us change our tone. Instead of telling us to sing with a brighter tone, more forward on our pallets with more use of head voice he could simply say sing more blue and we instantly knew what he wanted.

I've heard that Alexander Scriabin was able to use a kind of... colour coding system for when he composed music. To be perfectly honest most of the sources I've gone too are quite hard to understand. Would anybody be able to explain it to me in relatively simple terms, and possibly tell me if it is even possible to use it in composition?

Thanks,

Easy . . . LSD. :wacko:

Easy . . . LSD. :wacko:

lol :P

That Scriabin was synesthetic is a widely circulated rumor which is false...however it is true that Rimsky-Korsakov and Messiaen did have strong forms of it

My understanding is that he assigned a colour to each key like this (not distinguishing between major and minor):

May i ask how he combined the different keys to make new colours, or was that just something he was able to do in his own head (with or without the aid of synesthesia)?

I believe it was more "key centres" that were colourised, as opposed to individual notes. I think the colour organ in Prometheus was used to show the range of keys the music was travelling through. It's not music I know intimately, but with the abundance of artificial chords and scales, and (albeit, tonal) chromaticism, I'm puzzled how scriabin could define a key in chromatic passages. As far as I know the piece is rarely performed with a colour organ these days.

L.

'm not a scholar in neurophysiology, but loved to study philosophy of mind. and somehow i came to the idea, that neurons- let's say in the visual cortex - trigger (or may do that) neurons in other areas responsible for audio or even taste experiences. while it is more or less obvious with audio/visual case (because of so much visual information, audio being second one),i don't rule out the possibility that smell could be described (and experienced) in terms of visual or sound experiences. i think of a brain being very intermingled - like a little butterfly wing move in africa causing hurricane in america. so i think it more natural than an oddity to experience sound in colors and vice versa.

that's my humble opinion on such a great topic.

and - i presume - one could have direct/one to one note/colour relation or/and sound pattern-chord-any sound sequence/colour/s relation.

maybe even more.

The keyboard Scriabin used in his Prometheus: the poem of fire doesn't have much to do with synaesthesia. That keyboard was simply a keyboard that "played" (projected, rather) the particular colour on a screen in the concert hall of the performance.

Synaesthesia is associated with perfect pitch. People who have synaesthesia, when they hear a sound, a particular colour is enhanced or they get the impression of that colour more vividly. Messiaen had synaesthesia, and there is a teacher here who studied with Messiaen and he'd go over to Messiaen and play him like, loads of chords and ask him what colours he sees, and Messiaen would reply with very detailed descriptions of colours, like "a very dark blue with a shade of green" or something like that. There are books which write down how Messiaen described his association with colours, and he said that the higher the octave, the lighter the colour, while the lower the octave, the darker the colour.

But anyway, I don't have synaesthesia, and I guess the experience is different among people who have it, so I can't really tell how it feels like :P Although I wish I had synaesthesia, it must be really fun :P