Visualising music: synesthesia in imaginary

p. 267-275

Abstract

It is well known that the idea of visualising music has been advanced since the 18û century, and many machines to perform colour music have been proposed. There can be no doubt that Castel's Harpsichord was certainly begun, but it had not termination. In spite of this, Père Castel's experiments were directly responsible for other theories and instruments developed later, for example the Baranov-Rossine's Octophon. Composers as Messiaen had also splendidly used their synesthesia to give us the best musical moments. Russian composer Scriabin is considered to be the pioneer of light-music. He was the first composer to include a part for light in a musical score. Relation between colours and sounds, music and painting, fascinated Kandinsky so much, that this secret correspondence between arts becomes the postulate of his artistic conception. “Why should not we take a risk to arrange, in our days, a 'meeting' between Scriabin and Kandinsky ?” said Bulat Galeyev and Irina Vanechkina. In a Jubilee concert dedicated to 50-th anniversary of the Kazan Conservatory the artists proposed their own idea of directing Prometheus. Along the music of Scriabin they projected painting of Kandinsky, synthesis of two creativity, collision of two universes, the kind of "earth-orbital docking" of two like-minded persons. An art work is also an act of communication. So it is a resultant complex function of the interaction of three archetypal actions between semantic, technical and pragmatic natures. This refers also to the anthropologic structure of imaginary. Prometheus is a concrete illustration of the archetype: Light, essential picture giving a substance to the scheme: Elevation.

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References

Bibliographical reference

Michel Naranjo, « Visualising music: synesthesia in imaginary », CASYS, 4 | 1999, 267-275.

Electronic reference

Michel Naranjo, « Visualising music: synesthesia in imaginary », CASYS [Online], 4 | 1999, Online since 07 October 2024, connection on 10 November 2024. URL : http://popups.lib.uliege.be/1373-5411/index.php?id=1564

Author

Michel Naranjo

LASMEA, CNRS UMR 6602, Blaise Pascal University of Clermont-Ferrand

Copyright

CC BY-SA 4.0 Deed