Synesthesia!

[Joy]

There will be a performance by a young pianist, Bryan Wallick, here at the Scottsdale Centre for the Arts and he has perfect pitch and the rare gift of synesthesia. I believe this means he sees colors with pitch. They say this ability brings an added dimension to the emotion he feels when he performs, and therefore to the emotion the audience feels when they hear him perform. Can anyone elaborate on this phenomenon and explain more what it is exactly?

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'Truth and beauty joined'

[Droell]

Originally posted by Joy:
There will be a performance by a young pianist, Bryan Wallick, here at the Scottsdale Centre for the Arts and he has perfect pitch and the rare gift of synesthesia. I believe this means he sees colors with pitch. They say this ability brings an added dimension to the emotion he feels when he performs, and therefore to the emotion the audience feels when they hear him perform. Can anyone elaborate on this phenomenon and explain more what it is exactly?

I didn't know there was a name for it.

Whenever I hear music I sense images. I always have. Some are stronger than others. They combine & mix & run into one another. The third symphony conjures up one set of images, the dark & brooding 1st movement of the ninth entirely different ones. Late at night when I am drifting off to sleep, if some certain parts of Beethoven symphonies or concerti come to me, I hear them as spoken dialogues, as arguments. Pity I can never remember what.

Running an errand in the car a few hours ago, the radio played Glazunov's first waltz.
When I hear the main theme, it always makes me think I am in a swing, outdoors in a glade, slowly spinning around, slightly dizzy.

It makes no difference if it's "good" music or not. I can still hear raw rage in rap, which still frightens me. There was all the Lionel Ritchie-ish easy listening stuff that flooded the airwaves back 10 & 20 years ago, which made me physically ill. (I was stuck living with people with poor taste.)

Images & music are inseparable to me. I cannot imagine life without them. Music without images would be like being color blind.

Would this kind of sense perception make a better performer? No. Performance is based on technique. Technique is drilled into one's head & fingers until it becomes automatic. Typists have technique. Authors have literary ability. Occasionally the two combine.

It would make for a keen musical critic, except he would constantly leave his readers behind.

If Mr. Wallick actually sees colors, then he has a more intense version of this most pleasant disease. I have wondered sometimes if Beethoven himself had it. His music sounds very much as if he could see it. His composure when playing the piano at his early salons (women weeping, him steely-faced) is suggestive.

[Sorrano]

A good composer to study in relationship to this ability is Scriabin. I believe he, too, experienced this and established a color code for the different keys. I cannot elaborate much on this but I do know that he experimented with it.

As a side note, Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle plays on colors, also, with the 7 doors of the castle that open and each lets in a particular color that has relevance to the events of the opera.

[Peter]

Originally posted by Joy:
Can anyone elaborate on this phenomenon and explain more what it is exactly?

Try this link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia


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'Man know thyself'

[sjwenger]

Do you think the two Disney Fantasia movies demonstrate what synesthesia is like?

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[Joy]

Thanks all! Lots of interesting answers. Thanks also for that website. I found the colours of the piano keys most fascinating that people can actually 'see' it this way!

SJ: Interesting point. It seems like a reasonable deduction about the Disney movie to me. That movie was such a breakthrough for the film industry. It's so unique and the music throughout is wonderful. It opened my eyes to different classical music when I was younger for sure.

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'Truth and beauty joined'

[Droell]

Originally posted by sjwenger:
Do you think the two Disney Fantasia movies demonstrate what synesthesia is like?

Back 100 years ago some very enthusiastic Theosophists exerimented with "seeing" music. The underlying theory was that well-crafted, well-performed music created astral colors & shapes, which built during the time it took to perform the piece. They commissioned artists to paint what they saw & published a couple of books of their findings. One of the pieces they described is a well-known Wagner overture. Pity I cannot remember which one.

Anyone who has seen C.W. Leadbeater's book, Thought Forms, with its numerous color plates, will have an idea of what might be possible in this regard.

This was the work of highly trained clairvoyants. I don't think any of them were exactly musical. Back in the 1930's, George Gurdjieff said that music was capable of manipulating the listener to extreme degrees. A disciple named Thomas de Hartman took it up & much later a CD was released of the result. I found it merely dull.

The celebrated Victoria, once a close friend of mine, is a woman with no musical taste at all, but during my time with her, trained herself to an amazing degree of clairvoyance. About ten years ago we went to a concert at the Hollywood Bowl. The Detroit Philharmonic played Carmina Burana. I asked her about the colors of the music. Her ideas did not match mine.

But at any rate, what Disney did was something resembling what the Theosophists had done, which, at the time of the first Fantasia, was very much on the minds of many creative people.

The definition of "synesthesia", given in the Wikipedia, as the "neurological mixing of the senses", is mere nonsense. All true forms of clairvoyance supercede the five senses, as well as neurons in the brain, in the same way that an animal's experience of the world supercedes that of the trees it wanders among.

[Peter]

Those musicians interested in music and colours tended to disagree, take the colour green - RIMSKY-KORSAKOV would have said it was an F. For Scriabin, the pitch would have been higher, an A. For the 19th-century German musicologist Karl Riemann, it would have been clearly, brilliantly, in E major.

Aleksandr Scriabin (1872-1915), worked to incorporate his own synaesthesia into his concerts. In 1911 he wrote a symphony entitled Prometheus, the Poem of Fire. This symphony was to incorporate the usual orchestra, piano, organ, and choir. However, this score also included orchestrations for a "clavier a lumieres", or color organ, which would play coloured light during the symphony. The light would be in the shape of clouds, beams, and other shapes which would "flood" the concert hall. The climax would include a white light so strong as to be "painful to the eyes." The first performance of Prometheus took place on March 29, 1915, in Carnegie Hall.

Sir Arthur Bliss, who wrote his Colour Symphony in 1922, was not a synesthete. He was simply yet another influenced by the ideas of "colour music", although, for him, it did not come with the trappings of mystic religions, but, rather, with British traditions. The symphony features four movements: Purple; Red; Blue; and Green. Bliss based this work upon the symbolism generally associated with the colors in traditional English heraldry, along the following lines: " Purple - Amethysts, Pageantry, Royalty - and Death; Red - Rubies, Wine, Furnaces, Magic, _ ; Blue - Sapphires, Deep Water, Skies, Loyalty, Melancholy ; Green - Emeralds, Hope, Youth, Joy, Spring, and Victory

Olivier Messaien talks about experiencing the "gentle cascade of blue-orange chords" while listening to Quator pour la fin du temps. He later talked of seeing "colours which move with the music" and sensing these colours "in an extremely vivid manner."

Beethoven described B minor as a *black key".

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'Man know thyself'

[Hofrat]

Originally posted by Peter:
Beethoven described B minor as a *black key."

Dear Peter;

Do you have a source for that? This is most strange since B-minor and D-major are "relative keys." That is to say, they share the same key signature. In this case, they both have an F# and a C#. I know Beethoven said that D-major was his "happy key," but when and where did he call B-minor his "black key?"


Hofrat

[Joy]

Originally posted by Peter:
Those musicians interested in music and colours tended to disagree, take the colour green - RIMSKY-KORSAKOV would have said it was an F. For Scriabin, the pitch would have been higher, an A. For the 19th-century German musicologist Karl Riemann, it would have been clearly, brilliantly, in E major.

Aleksandr Scriabin (1872-1915), worked to incorporate his own synaesthesia into his concerts. In 1911 he wrote a symphony entitled Prometheus, the Poem of Fire. This symphony was to incorporate the usual orchestra, piano, organ, and choir. However, this score also included orchestrations for a "clavier a lumieres", or color organ, which would play coloured light during the symphony. The light would be in the shape of clouds, beams, and other shapes which would "flood" the concert hall. The climax would include a white light so strong as to be "painful to the eyes." The first performance of Prometheus took place on March 29, 1915, in Carnegie Hall.

Sir Arthur Bliss, who wrote his Colour Symphony in 1922, was not a synesthete. He was simply yet another influenced by the ideas of "colour music", although, for him, it did not come with the trappings of mystic religions, but, rather, with British traditions. The symphony features four movements: Purple; Red; Blue; and Green. Bliss based this work upon the symbolism generally associated with the colors in traditional English heraldry, along the following lines: " Purple - Amethysts, Pageantry, Royalty - and Death; Red - Rubies, Wine, Furnaces, Magic, _ ; Blue - Sapphires, Deep Water, Skies, Loyalty, Melancholy ; Green - Emeralds, Hope, Youth, Joy, Spring, and Victory

Olivier Messaien talks about experiencing the "gentle cascade of blue-orange chords" while listening to Quator pour la fin du temps. He later talked of seeing "colours which move with the music" and sensing these colours "in an extremely vivid manner."

Beethoven described B minor as a *black key".

Very interesting! Also Chopin composed the Etude In G Flat Op. 10 No. 5 ('Black Key'), did Choping call this piece 'Black Key' or is it another piece that got named later like Beethoven's 'Moonlight'? If Chopin did name it that then why? Has it got anything to do with synesthete or just the black keys of a piano?


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'Truth and beauty joined'

[This message has been edited by Joy (edited 02-02-2006).]

[Peter]

Originally posted by Hofrat:
Dear Peter;

Do you have a source for that? This is most strange since B-minor and D-major are "relative keys." That is to say, they share the same key signature. In this case, they both have an F# and a C#. I know Beethoven said that D-major was his "happy key," but when and where did he call B-minor his "black key?"


Hofrat

Without checking I'm not sure of the source, but I have read this many times. If you think about it there are very few pieces by Beethoven in B minor - two works by other composers come to mind, Schubert's unfinished and Tchaikovsy's 6th, both works starting very darkly indeed!

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'Man know thyself'

[Peter]

Originally posted by Joy:
Very interesting! Also Chopin composed the Etude In G Flat Op. 10 No. 5 ('Black Key'), did Choping call this piece 'Black Key' or is it another piece that got named later like Beethoven's 'Moonlight'? If Chopin did name it that then why? Has it got anything to do with synesthete or just the black keys of a piano?

It is simply because of the black keys of the piano!


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'Man know thyself'

[Joy]

Originally posted by Peter:
It is simply because of the black keys of the piano!

That's what I thought, thank you!


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'Truth and beauty joined'

[Hofrat]

Originally posted by Joy:
Very interesting! Also Chopin composed the Etude In G Flat Op. 10 No. 5 ('Black Key'), did Choping call this piece 'Black Key' or is it another piece that got named later like Beethoven's 'Moonlight'? If Chopin did name it that then why? Has it got anything to do with synesthete or just the black keys of a piano?

Dear Joy;

The Chopin etude in G-flat has a key signature that comprises 6 flats. In essence, you are playing on the black piano keys only, hence the nickname "black key." It does not mean "dark" or gloomy."

During Beethoven's life time, his opus 27/1 sonata was know as the "C#-minor sonata" for the express reason that it was in the key of C#-minor. In 1831, 30 years after the sonata was written and 4 years after Beethoven's death, the music critic Ludwig Relstab wrote that the Beethoven C#-minor sonata reminded him of moon light being reflected off a lake. Since then, pianists have been trying to put a ripple in their renditions of the C#-minor sonata.


Hofrat

[Hofrat]

Originally posted by Peter:
Without checking I'm not sure of the source, but I have read this many times. If you think about it there are very few pieces by Beethoven in B minor - two works by other composers come to mind, Schubert's unfinished and Tchaikovsy's 6th, both works starting very darkly indeed!

Dear Peter;

Beethoven's bagatella opus 126/4 is in B-minor and it is far from being a "dark" or "gloomy" piece. As a matter of fact, I had the opportunity to hear Glenn Gould perform this bagatella as an encore two nights in succession. The first night he played it with "sturm and drang." The second night he played it "soft and sensuous." Both nights he brought down the house!! Perhaps "dark" and "gloomy" is not a function of the key; rather, it is a function of the rendition.

Beethoven wrote a very "dark" and "gloomy" largo assai in his "Ghost Trio." That was written in D-minor. The beginning of the dungeon scene in Fidelio is also "dark" and "gloomy." That was written in F-minor. Nowhere are D-minor or F-minor described as "black keys."


Hofrat