In an earlier article on Blind Practising, I mentioned that as a child I read in some book that taught one how to gain the power of literally `seeing` the future. All you need to do was to close your eyes and to visualize light! Supposedly, you would then start seeing the future! The trouble was I fell asleep before seeing any light.
Today I had dinner with a friend, James, who came to my concert last Friday. He confessed that he had not been a fan of classical music, and that when he listen to ‘just music’, he found it not as interesting as if the music were “accompanied” by visual imageries - such as pictures or film. (He wrote an interesting blog on his web site called `Why I don`t go to piano recitals`)
These two seemingly unrelated events from two different time of my life trigger my thoughts about sight and sound.
When I learn a new work, one of my greatest concern is ‘finding the right mood’. To me, mood is not necessarily finding the right ‘adjective’, but more to find the right series of ‘nouns’ that will conjure up the right mental visual image. For example, for the opening of Ravel`s La Valse, I visualize `light weighted black emptiness`. You can hear the opening here:
Pianists often talk of ‘color’ of a certain passage, as if aural sounds and visual images is but one thing. In fact some musicians suffer from synesthesia - which wikipedia defines as:
a neurologically based phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway
For musicians that suffer synethesia, this often means seeing color visually when hearing music. Often certain notes, or keys which a passage is in conjure up specific color. Unfortunately, musicians can never agree which color belong to which note or key as the color appears differently for different people.
Alexander Scriabin is a Russian composer that suffered from this abnormality. He composed a work called “Prometheus, The Poem of Fire”. In this work, Scriabin explored the synthesis of multiple sensory perceptions - sight and hearing. The score requires a “colour keyboard” - designed to link musical notes with coloured lights. Each note was assigned a colour, e.g. red for C, green for A and blue for F sharp. The interplay of colours was projected during the performance onto a screen.
Don`t miss this surreal experience! Click on below to listen (and watch!):
This all leads me to conclude one thing: that some art forms may appear exclusive to one sensory perception, but in reality for most people, the experience will leak into other senses.
