The Sound of Light: Scriabin's Clavier à lumières

The Sound of Light: Scriabin’s Clavier à lumières

by Edward Campbell-Rowntree

Originally published in the Piano Tuners Association Newsletter, April 2020. https://pianotuner.org.uk

  “Colours blaze up, feelings and vague dreams emerge. I want. I create.” 

— Alexander Scriabin

The premiere of Scriabin’s Prometheus: The Poem of Fire, Op. 60, at Carnegie Hall, New York.

Across the plaza from the Palais Garnier (home of the Opéra de Paris) lies the Café de la Paix, an unofficial cultural institution whose patrons once included the likes of Oscar Wilde, Emile Zola, Ernest Hemingway, and even Edward VII; it was a place charged with the cosmopolitan values that  now symbolise our contemporary understanding of the Belle Époque as a period of fervid cultural exchange—as W. Scott Haine puts it, ‘The café is a place where people go not merely to drink, but also to think.’ [1]

One summer evening after a concert in 1907 three composers meet at the Café de la Paix; Alexander Scriabin and Sergei Rachmaninoff, both former classmates from the Moscow Conservatory, sit alongside the distinguished professor of composition at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Their conversation turns to the relationship between music and colour and, more specifically, how different tonalities relate to particular spectral frequencies. The conversation was recorded by Rachmaninoff who, unlike his colleagues, was unaware of the phenomenon and protested its existence; ‘To my astonishment,’ he writes, ‘Rimsky-Korsakov agreed in principle with Scriabin about the connection between musical keys and colour. I, who do not feel the similarity, contradicted them heatedly.’ [2]

In attempting to prove their theory of tonal-spectral associations, Scriabin and Rimsky-Korsakov quoted the second scene from Rachmaninoff’s own work The Miserly Knight (1906), in which the title character descends to his cellars and opens his numerous chests to reveal his exorbitant wealth in the form of gold. Might have Rachmaninoff unwittingly written this scene in a tonality whose associated colour matched the glistening treasure revealed to the audience onstage? Rachmaninoff conceded that the scene in question was indeed written in the key of D major, which both Rimsky-Korsakov and Scriabin both agreed was gold-yellow. ‘You see,’ said Scriabin, ‘your intuition has unconsciously followed the laws whose very existence you have tried in vain to deny.’ Following the discussion Rachmaninoff wrote that his two colleagues left the café ‘with the air of conquerors who were convinced that they had thoroughly refuted my opinion.’ [3]  

‘Colour-hearing’ is a particular example of synaesthesia, a model of cross-sensory perception in which certain individuals experience one sense via the physiological stimulation of another; the word has been variously translated as ‘co-sensation’, ‘co-imagination’ or ‘co-representation’.  Biographers have been quick to cite the anecdote above as the moment Scriabin realised his own synaesthetic capabilities and started quantifying them into an integrated system of key-colour associations. But his awareness of the connection between music and colour can be found in his writings before his encounter at the Café de la Paix. Take the Fourth Sonata in F#-major, for example, written sometime in 1903, for which the composer wrote a complimenting poem in French, which begins; “In a light mist, a transparent vapour, lost afar yet distinct, a star gently twinkles . . . It is beautiful . . . The bluish mystery of its radiance attracts me, rocks me adorably . . .” [4] Read against Scriabin’s unique mapping of key-colour associations, F#-major indeed corresponds to the shade of blue described in the poem. 

Modern scholars have cast doubt on whether Scriabin was in fact a ‘real’ synaesthete, mainly due to his mapping of colours onto the circle of fifths; unlike most synaesthetes, whose experience of key-colour associations is often unsystematic and disorganised, Scriabin upheld his own brand of synaesthesia as a beautifully ordered universal system that could be scientifically proven much like the harmonic series. As some scholars have suggested, by postulating his theory as a naturally occurring phenomenon (not one based on individual perception) Scriabin was aligning his own discoveries with Max Planck’s quantum theory, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, and Niels Bohr’s theory of atomic structure, all of which were gaining traction during 1910s. [5] ’It can’t be personal,’ wrote Scriabin, ‘there must be a principle, must be unity.’ [6] Scriabin did not, then, experience synaesthesia in the modern clinical sense of the word [7]; rather than experiencing direct spectral association with particular notes via physiological stimuli, he had a general sense of the colour of particular tonal areas which were further inspired by a contemporary fascination with extra-sensory capabilities, as well as his readings of Theosophy and his interest in mysticism (another discussion entirely). Scriabin’s synaesthesia was associative, even philosophical, but not physiological.

Nevertheless, Scriabin is usually cited as the first in an impressive lineage of composers who experienced synaesthesia; Franz Liszt, Jean Sibelius and Olivier Messiaen are some notable examples who followed him. Unlike other synaesthetic composers, however, Scriabin was the first to incorporate actual light into his compositions; Prometheus: The Poem of Fire, Op. 60 (1910), conceived as something between a piano concerto and symphonic tone-poem, was his first attempt at doing so.  The orchestration of Prometheus is enormous, but the scoring of the tastiéra per luce or clavier à lumières (keyboard of light) is certainly its most distinctive element. Commonly referred to as simply the luce (light) part, Scriabin conceived of the instrument to flood the concert hall with light using an assortment of concealed lamps which would generate different hues according to the composer’s his own peculiar arrangement of colours onto the circle of fifths. Exactly how the luce part relates to the score is a complex issue, but Scriabin thought of it as ‘counterpoint of light’ intended as a ‘powerful psychological resonator for the listener.’ [8]

The American premier was given at Carnegie Hall on March 20, 1915 and billed as ‘The Most Talked of Musical Composition of the Twentieth Century…Introducing the New TASTIERA PER LUCE (A Coloured Light Keyboard).’A few weeks after the premier Harry Chapin Plummer wrote in Scientific American explaining how the actual mechanism of the instrument worked. ‘The colors appeared,’ he wrote, ‘simultaneously with the rendition of the music, filtering through a mesh of fine gauze within a square framework at the back of the stage, above the orchestra, and were controlled from a keyboard, not unlike that of an ordinary piano…’ [9] The keyboard itself consisted of only one octave and with two pedals beneath it to control the varying intensity of the light. The bulbs themselves were specially ‘supplied by courtesy of the General Electric Company’, ranging from 100-400 watt tungsten bulbs, and different colours were achieved through a combination of glass filters placed at a distance above each bulb. Above the instrument was a large gauze curtain onto which the light was projected for the audience to see. The apparatus was about 16 feet high from the floor to the top of the gauze.

The mechanism of the colour piano. Reproduced from Scientific American (1915)

The music itself was described by audiences as dissonant, harsh, chaotic, overly complex; the added dimension of light served to add another layer of confusion. ‘In marked contrast to the complexity of the tonal scheme,’ wrote Plummer, ‘the color scheme, as finally evolved, proved to be somewhat simple in its operation and in its results.’ Audiences witnessed Scriabin’s early model of multimedia art, his answer to the Wagnerian concept of a Gesamtkunstwerk—a ‘total work of art.’ Prometheus was an early experiment in this genre. Scriabin’s later years were spent envisaging the unification of dance, coloured light, perfume, philosophy, and music in his work Mysterium, a weeklong work designed to be performed in a spherical theatre at the foot of the Himalayas which would bring about the end of the world through the spiritual transcendence of humanity and the dissolution of the material world. He died before his vision was ever realised, but Scriabin’s addition of light to the symphony through the invention of the the tastiéra per luce remains a truly fascinating concept.

[1] Leona Rittner, W Scott Haine, Jeffrey H Jackson, The Thinking Space: the Café as a Cultural Institution in Paris, Italy, and Vienna, (Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2013), 

[2] Rachmaninov, ed. Oskar von Riesemann, Rachmaninoff’s Recollections (New York: Routledge Revivals, 2015), 157.

[3] Ibid.

[4] The Notebooks of Alexander Scriabin, trans. Simon Nicholls, Micheal Pushkin, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 240.

[5] Lincoln Ballard, Matthew Bengtson, John Bell Young,  The Alexander Scriabin Companion: History, Performance, and Lore, (Rowman & Littlefield, Maryland, 2017), 135.

[6] Ibid.

[7] B. M. Galeyev and I. L. Vanechkina, ‘Was Scriabin a Synesthete?’, Leonardo, 2001, Vol. 34, No. 4 (2001), 361. 

[8]  Kenneth Peacock, ‘Synesthetic Perception: Alexander Scriabin's Color Hearing’, Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Summer, 1985, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Summer, 1985), 483, 502.

[9] Harry Chapin Plummer, “Color Music—A New Art Created With the Aid of Science”, Scientific American, Vol. 112, No. 15 (April 10, 1915), 343, 350-351.