Musical musings: Colour music

Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with its many chords. The artist is the hand that, by touching this or that key, sets the soul vibrating automatically.  ~ Wassily Kandinsky

Ok, let’s try this out. Close your eyes and think green (not in the environmental sense) but green as in green colour. Try relating it to a musical instrument or a type of sound. What pops in your mind.  Clueless? Yes, I am. For Kandinsky, a Russian artist known to be influenced substantially by music, he ” would characterize green best by comparing it to the quiet, drawn-out, meditative tones of the violin.” Issac Newton was a firm defender of a one-to-one correlation between hue and pitch. He strongly held out the belief that each of the seven notes of the Western scale corresponded to a colour in the rainbow. Kandinsky and Newton are just two voices amongst a strong group of artists who are very much into the experiment of the emulation of musical forms in the visual arts. Fast foward into an era of technological innovations like electric illumination and digital recording gives this a whole new impetus. Below is a compiled colour scale of the various sources.

This is certainly a real cursory glaze of the concept of colour music or visual music as it’s also known. As enticing as the palatte of vibrant colours, art is not simply a reproduction of the visible world. Artists seek to endow their works with the emotional intensity so often associated with music. With this in mind, music for the eyes takes on whole new meaning.  Just a peek into some of these music-art masterpieces:

Blue and Green Music, 1921 by Georgia O’Keeffe

Image taken from here.

 

Music-Pink and Blue II, 1919 by Georgia O’Keeffe

Image taken from here.

 

Fuga (Fugue), 1914 by Wassily Kandinsky

Image taken from here.

 

Disks of Newton (Study for “Fugue in Two Colors”), 1912 by Frantisek Kupka

Image taken from here.