1/12/2024 0 Comments Spencer finch![]() Using this scheme, Finch translated another text - Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle - notating it on a large piece of paper as colored dots. A longtime poetry buff who actually studied literature in school, the artist discovered a theory of writer Vladimir Nabokov, which the Russian expatriate called “colored hearing.” Considered by some to be a type of chromesthesia, Nabokov took each letter of the alphabet - in English, French, and his native Russian - and assigned each a color based on its sound. blues and violets) begin to disappear, fading more and more with time until even the reds with the longest wavelengths have faded to gray, just like in the movie.įinch also draws on literary sources in his work. As the exhibition space grows dimmer, the colors with shorter wavelengths (i.e. Intended to be viewed at dusk, Back To Kansas capitalizes on the human eye’s capacity to see different colors in low light environments. For this work, Finch pulled a series of seventy color swatches from the palette of the innovative 1939 Technicolor classic The Wizard of Oz and arranged them in a matrix on a wall. ![]() Another installation of his, Back To Kansas (2013), reaches out to film. and it seemed like a piece of music that lent itself to these ideas about multiplicity I was working with.”įinch has devoted much of his work to exploring the limits of color as a medium for blurring borders with other art forms. So I thought about ways of exploring multiplicity in a visual way that connected to music, and specifically piano music. . . Many of the other ideas for Newton’s Theory simply followed from working with Steinway & Sons: “I wanted it to be very specific to the site,” says Finch, “without it being floating musical notes or something. Or right hand, and hangs from the ceiling with identical fixtures representing the work’s aria at the highest and lowest positions. Each fixture represents the pitches in the left Each movement’s translation is illuminated along one of thirty-two fluorescent double fixtures. Bach’s iconic Goldberg Variations and translated the first few measures of each movement into a series of colored bars, whose lengths correspond with pitch duration. He also famously conceived of a piano that projected certain colored lights based upon what was being played, and called for the instrument, the clavier à lumières, to be used in his 1910 tone poem Prometheus: The Poem of Fire.įor Newton’s Theory, Finch drew upon the visual spectrum as set down by Isaac Newton - much like Scriabin did - assigning colors to each note of the chromatic scale, from red for C to violet for B-natural. Based in part on Isaac Newton’s Optics, in which the colors of the visual spectrum were limited to seven - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet - to match the seven pitches of the major scale, Scriabin applied the visual spectrum to the twelve keys in the circle of fifths. Although these long-standing claims have recently been brought into question, there is no doubt the composer drew associations between colors and tonal areas in music, much like Messiaen. These “color chords” set aside traditional harmony and instrumentation for the otherworldly harmonic sensibility and timbral quirks of his unique soundscapes.Īnother composer, the Russian–born Alexander Scriabin, may have also experienced synesthesia. Not only did he notate colors in some of his scores, but he would also construct the tonal areas of his works from the pitch-color associations he experienced. An uncommon neural condition, synesthesia mixes up and supplements sensory experience, so that input from one sense - the sound of a voice, for example - is consistently accompanied by the perception of, say, a taste or an odor. Messiaen’s chromesthesia meant that his experience of sound was augmented by a perception of color, and this unique perspective heavily influenced his compositions. ![]() Olivier Messiaen, for example - the French organist, composer, and twentieth-century mystic - famously experienced chromesthesia, a form of synesthesia. Some musicians have had a notably immediate relationship with color. ![]() When a section of music falls outside the piece’s key, that section is filled with “chromaticism.” Timbre is often referred to as “tone color,” which ranges from mellow and dark to bright and brilliant. For example, a significant portion of the musical lexicon is inspired by metaphors about color. What sets music apart is the frequency with which musicians fall back on visual language to describe musical phenomena. Where visual artists might discuss brush strokes or shading, musicians talk about articulation, timbre, and vibrato. As with any art form, there is a highly developed technical language that accompanies music.
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