Musicologica Olomucensia

My work deals with synesthetic tendencies in the art around 1900, with emphasis given to the theoretical and practical application of searching for analogies between tones and colours. I focus on the idea of Alexander Nikolajevic Skrjabin to combine music with the play of colour lights, which was first put into practice in the symphonic piece Prometheus, op. 60, written between 1908 and 1910.
Also the several functions of the so called light part for two voices, which is to be realised on a colour piano and is found in the store of the above mentioned piece, are briefly discussed. Skrjabin´s correspondences between tones and colours are analysed on the background of authentic witnesses by Skrjabin´s contemporaries Leonid Sabaneev and Charles Myers. These demonstrate Skrjabin´s synesthetic disposition and his liking for combining colour associations with both the chords of his tone centers and the scales of the traditional major-minor system, and also his preference of the quint circle model.
In his synesthetic disposition Skrjabin felt to be encouraged by his study of the work of Helena Petrovna Blavacka, the founder of the teosophic society, who in her major work The Secret Doctrine presented her own system of colour and tone analogies based on the diatonic keynote. Another source of inspiration for Skrjabin were the contacts with Russian symbolist poets in whose work synesthecy played a vital role. Through his symbolist friends he also got acquainted with the work of the French symbolist René Ghil whose attempt at verbal instrumentation may be regarded as the most extreme example of synesthetic tendencies in the literature of his time.
Whereas the synesthetic experiments of René Ghil are - as far as I know - not mentioned in the secondary literature about Skrjabin, it is, on the other hand, generally known that Skrjabin used to compare his synesthetic experiences to synesthetic experiences of Nikolaj Rimskij Korsakov. Therefore I compared also Rimskij Korsakov´s analogies with Skrjabins´s analogies and I came to the conclusion that despite many similarities Skrjabin is in his combining tones with colours much more systematic than his older fellow artist. Shortly after Skrjabin´s death it was Joseph Mathias Hauer who tried to work out an extensive and complex system of analogies between colours and tones. The results of his analysis are presented in his works The Colour of the Tones (Über die Klangfarbe) from 1918 and The Heart of Musicality (Vom Wesen des Musikalischen) from 1920. Hauer attributes the primary role to the correspondence between the colours and music intervals. In his concept the correspondences between the colours and keynotes are based on the interval between the basic tone of the given keynote and the C-tone regarded by him as a kind of centre and compared to the white colour.
Later in my work I deal briefly with the attempts as the synesthecy of tones and colours in plastic arts during Skrjabin´s lifetime. I focused on concrete analogies and nor on the general attempt to achieve a certain musicality of the visual expression. As far as concrete analogies are concerned, I mention the experiments of Vasilij Kandinsky and Johannes Itten. In this work I do not give much attention to the experiments with colour music produced on colour pianos: first, because it is not known that Skrjabin and other artists discussed here were acquainted with the development and history of colour music and second, because the colour music itself will be the topic of a special study.
The aim of my work was to show that Skrjabin was not the only one in his time to experiment with the colour and tone synesthecy; on contrary it is exactly this tendency in his work, which makes him a typical representative of his period - a period characterised in music by the release of the traditional tonality and a change toward the atonality and by a parallel change towards the abstract painting in the plastic arts.