[Dixielandjazz] Delete if you're not interested in key/tone color

[Bill Gunter]

Hi listmates,

I have done a bit more googling on the matter and found this interesting 
thesis regarding Scriabin and Rimsky-Korsakov and the way they viewed music.

Source: Wierzbicki writings on Synaesthesia (see last sentence below)

----->start clip

Scriabin and Rimsky-Korsakov ''saw'' musical sounds, and ''heard'' colors, 
in their own ways. That stimuli of one sense organ triggered responses in 
another was something in which they adamantly believed. For them, the 
so-called synesthetic reaction was both constant and consistent.
According to the article on ''Color and Music'' in the wonderfully musty 
1938 edition of the Oxford Companion to Music, the two composers had very 
specific color-music scales in mind. Here they are:

    Scriabin
C      Red
C#   Violet
D     Bright yellow
D#   Steel gray
E      Bluish white
F      Red
F#    Bright blue
G      Orange-rose
G#    Purple-violet
A      Green
A#    Steel gray
B       Bluish white

     Rimsky-Korsakov
C      White
C#    Dusky
D      Yellow
D#    Bluish gray
E      Sapphire blue
F      Green
F#    Grayish green
G      Brownish gold
G#    Grayish violet
A      Rosy
A#    ----
B     Dark blue

Why Rimsky-Korsakov was unable to ''see'' the pitch A-sharp remains a 
mystery. But he did claim to ''see'' all the other pitches. Like Scriabin's, 
his musical scale was chromatic in more ways than one. And different though 
they are in their details, the scales' occasional correspondences seem more 
remarkable than their contradictions.

-----> end clip

These distinctions had only to do with the KEY and not the instrument(s).

An interesting observation for me personally was that when I played a C 
arpeggio and then a C# arpeggio on my keyboard for the lovely and gracious 
Beverly (my beloved bride) and asked her about this she replied:

C arpeggio -- light and airy
C# arpeggio -- dark, like a rainy day

Now Bev knows zip about musical structure, but she has a great ear and knows 
precisely what she likes and doesn't like.

Compare that to Scriabin (C - Red,  C# - Violet), and Rimsky-Korsakov (C - 
White,  C# - Dusky).

I don't get these perceptions. But that don't mean it don't exist 
(grammatical errors for emphasis).

So Scriabin would hear the "Happy Birthday To You" song played in F as "red" 
and played in A as green.  I think red is a better birthday color than 
green, but then again . . .

For further edification on this subject click on this:

http://pages.sbcglobal.net/jameswierzbicki/synaesthesia.htm

Respectfully submitted,

Bill "It's a strange and wonderful world" Gunter
jazzboard at hotmail.com