Eighteenth-century French ideas about music and tone color crystallized in two related phenomena: the early modern interest in musical instruments with an optical dimension, and the codification of a critical language for tonality in the early nineteenth century, particularly among the mathematician and musicologist Alexandre-Étienne Choron and the polymath François-Joseph Fétis. This attraction to musical color interacted with broader cultural impulses, from the dialogue of sound and science to a vogue for discussing musical repertories in tandem with the visual arts.
Between 1725 and 1825, fascination with musical color shifted from practice to theory, from scientific experimentation and the construction of new musical instruments to a more theoretical discussion of color and tone. This blog post is about a polarizing figure who sought to build musical color-instruments: Louis-Bertrand Castel. In a subsequent post, I turn to Choron, Fétis, and others who traced how musical harmony and its colorful chromaticisms had changed since the eighteenth century, and what those changes meant for instruments, players, and the public who discussed their scintillating sounds and performances.
Between 1725 and 1825, fascination with musical color shifted from practice to theory, from scientific experimentation and the construction of new musical instruments to a more theoretical discussion of color and tone. This blog post is about a polarizing figure who sought to build musical color-instruments: Louis-Bertrand Castel. In a subsequent post, I turn to Choron, Fétis, and others who traced how musical harmony and its colorful chromaticisms had changed since the eighteenth century, and what those changes meant for instruments, players, and the public who discussed their scintillating sounds and performances.
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