In the previous article I had discussed the ANS synths, acronym of the name of Skrjabin to whom the machine was dedicated, today I will talk about the Clavier à lumières designed by Skrjabin himself for the execution of his work < > in 1910.
The instrument consists of a keyboard which projects a beam of colored light for each note or corresponding change of harmony. The colors highlight the moods evoked by the music and indicated by Skryabin in the score according to the synaesthetic system (the part of the Clavier à lumières is indicated in the score in the key of G on two staves of the stave: one follows the chromatic scale, the other the circle of fifths).
It is still debated whether Scriabin was an outright synesthete, it is certain that color associations have been influenced by theosophical readings and writings of Louis Bertrand Castel, French mathematician and Jesuit who devised the ocular harpsichord. Castel was convinced that sound and color had the same characteristics, namely: the undulatory nature and being vibrational phenomena, rectilinear propagation, the change of direction due to reflection and refraction.
The instrument shown in the figure worked in this way: when a key was pressed, small panels appeared in a box above the harpsichord, showing different preset colors based on the correlation between the musical scale and the chromatic spectrum. In other experiments Castel used gods colored crystals of different sizes; however the light source available at the time, the candle, was not powerful enough to produce the desired effects. Castel initially worked by matching the colors of the chromatic spectrum to the notes of the diatonic scale, starting with the Violet for C and ending the scale with the Purple for high C.
After Castel's death in 1757, his ideas continued to circulate also because during his life he was able to show his instrument to personalities such as Teleman, Montesquieu and Diderot, who in 1753 dedicated a voice from the ocular harpsichord Encyclopedia; Rousseau himself recounted having met Castel and seen the ocular harpsichord. Later the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, grandfather of Fanny and Felix, mentioned Castel's harpsichord in the Eleventh Letter on Sensations. In 1768 Euler described him to the Princess of Anhalt-Dessau claiming that she certainly had heard of him before, even though he believed he was unable to give pleasure.
On the other side of the world, in the United States between 1876 and 1877 Bainbridge Bishop he invents a sort of ocular harpsichord which in the first example consists of a keyboard with suns 4 keys corresponding to the notes la-re-fa-la e, as many windows from which colors are projected. Subsequently Bishop himself will patent the Color Organ which unfortunately has not come down to us as the 3 specimens built were destroyed in a fire.
In 1893 Bishop leaves us a detailed description of the Color Organ in the text entitled < > which we report below: “I built a series of experimental tools, remodeling and changing them in order to make the idea clearer and to get the best effect. The most satisfying one I've built is a semicircular plate of ground glass about five feet in diameter, framed like a picture, and set at the top of the instrument. The colors are shown on it. The instrument is equipped with small windows with different colored slides and each window is equipped with a shutter and constructed in such a way that, pressing a key of the organ, the shutter opens and shows the color of its light. This light, diffused and reflected on a white screen behind the sheet of frosted glass and partly also on the glass itself, produced a shaded color on the neutral tint of the glass… I positioned the instrument in front of a sunlit window, but it can be used also an electric light placed behind. I had some trouble deciding how to position the range of colors to use, but in the end I decided to use red for C and divide the color spectrum into 11 semitones, adding purple for B, and a lighter red for C an octave higher, and to double the intensity and volume of the colors as they go down an octave. The lowest notes or pedals and their colors are reflected uniformly on the entire glass. The general effect is to present the movement and harmony of the music as well as its feelings to the eye. The instrument can be used by playing sounds and colours, both together and separately”.
Also towards the end of the XNUMXth century was English Alexander Wallace Rimington, unaware of the experiments of his American colleague, built an instrument similar to Bishop's also called this Color Organ, which had the advantage of a greater intensity of the light produced thanks to the use of electric current.
In 1895 Rimington gives to the press < > where he speaks of the instrument that has the external form of an organ equipped with a keyboard that produced colors and a projector. Rimington, who was familiar with Castel's studies, also made use of the works of Hermann von Helmholtz to give a scientific basis to his work by comparing the frequency of each note of the chromatic scale to the frequency of the colours. All this caught the attention of Skrjabin who wanted to use this tool to represent his < >, but he didn't because the color changes were too slow. Another prototype Clavier à lumières was built by Alexander Mozer, photographer and teacher of electromechanics at the Moscow Higher Technical Education School; which consisted of a wooden disc on which they were placed 12 light bulbs which are lit with buttons. The object was considered too rudimentary by the composer, due to the fact that it limited itself only to lighting some colored bulbs.
The first performance of Prometheus was held in 1911 in Moscow, but without the Clavier à lumières and Scriabin never had the opportunity to see his work performed with the help of light projections because the first time this instrument was used was in 1915 at the Carnegie Hall in New York and Scriabin had been deceased for a month. The results were not exciting also due to the fact that it was chosen to project colored light beams onto a white screen; Clarence Lucas wrote on the matter: “A white screen was illuminated by rays and beams of light of various colors without any possible connection with the music, which only served to distract the senses of the audience from listening too concentrated on the music.”
[AE Hull, A Great Tone-Poet: Scriabin, London, 1927, p. 227; transl. it. in L. Verdi, Kandinsky and Skrjabin, Lucca, Akademos, 1996 p. 62.]
It will be in 1962 in Kàzan that it will be possible to perform Prometheus for the first time with the luminous flux that followed the musical development, making use of new machinery set up by the local Aviation Institute. The concert was described as follows: "Dark. The audience fell silent. Hundreds of people waiting, and like a cry, a thin dazzling beam hit the edge of the projection screen. It moved along the surface. The slow, timid ray suddenly rose and spread (…). The sound of the first deep, low notes was heard. And suddenly the projection screen joined them, began to sing. A light shone and grew brighter as the notes sounded louder and higher. And the screens responded with a dazzling red to those notes, which seemed to no longer have enough space in the hall, to the notes of a passionate struggle.
[B. Galeev, Light. Music of the Designers' Office Prometheus, in «Interface», III, 1974, p. 160; transl. it. in L. Verdi, op. cit., p. 63.]
In Italy the first execution with luminous effects took place in 1964 at the Florentine Maggio Musicale.
Coming to the present day precisely in the 2010, to celebrate the centenary of the composition Prometheus is performed from Yale Symphony Orchestra faithfully to Skrjabin's indications, perhaps just as he had imagined it in 1910.
In the video shown at the bottom we can take advantage of this synesthetic composition.
Happy listening.
