Colour and music are vibrations. From the point of view of physics they are related.

Juxtaposition of music /painting -- a phenomenon of the beginning of the 20th century

The colour of music,

the music of colour:

from synaesthesia to multimedia

At noon on Tuesday [6 February 1996] in Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32, Milan, a debate will take place entitled: "Music in Painting and Images", under the patronage of the European Union and with the approval and support of the rector Adriano de Maio. Its purpose: to examine how technology applied to the various forms of multimedia can broaden our knowledge by arousing our curiosity and acting on the memory. Music -- Salvatore Accardo (violin) will play at intervals during the debate between the following: the moderator Gregorio Zappi, the music representative of TGI, Giuseppe Caglioti, president of the cultural Commission of the Polytechnic, Vittorio Piccinini, a painter of musicians, known for his talented pictorial rendering of the music he hears, who is a prominent artist as well as the Director of the Programme "Youth Project 2000", and the photographers Silvia Lelli and Roberto Masotti of La Scala who both have a valuable experience vis-à-vis the relationship between music/painting, through images, and researcher Daniela Bruni, music consultant of the RAI.

Herewith we are publishing the whole text of Daniela Bruni's intervention.

Sound and line, form, visual or audio structures, rhythm, frequencies, space: all of these concepts are interchangeable in the perspective of the history of the arts in music and painting, culture, dance, cinema and television, this latter is par excellence the epitome of the multimedia. Starting in the 20th century, with the advent of the artistic avant-garde movements, music has had a remarkable influence on the artists' imaginative output: becoming itself not only a pictorial subject through the depiction of musical instruments, of performers, or of the places where rehearsals or performances were given (as was customary in previous centuries) but was of decisive importance in the birth of abstract art.

Modern Art's attempts to visualise musical structures, rules of composition, rhythmic movements, sound patterns in an effort to establish visual equivalents through the creation of an autonomous language, led -- from 1910 onwards -- to the the unhinging of naturalistic representation in favour of a representation stripped of objective or concrete points of reference.

Among the most important art movements of our century we cite: the Munich group of "Der Blaue Reiter" (the Blue Rider), Orphism, Symbolism, Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, the Dutch "De Stjil", the

Bauhaus school, the Synchromism of Robert and Sonia Delaunay, non-representation art, all of which were expressions of this mutation.

As early as 1911, one of the pioneers of abstract art linked closely to musical developments, the Russian Wassily Kandinsky, in a letter addressed to the great composer Arnold Schoenberg, father of atonal music, had praised the potential of musical composition in syntony with the immaterial sphere and therefore supremely independent of the visible world and the laws governing naturalistic depiction on which, on the contrary, the visual arts depended at that time.

"Schoenberg's music" Kandinsky wrote, "introduces us into a new realm, where musical experience is not auricular but purely physical: the music of the future begins here" (A. Schoenberg, W. Kandinsky). That same year, spurred on by the enlightening example of his musician friend, Kandinsky took the decisive step towards non-objective painting, freeing it from its imitative role and contemporaneously providing with his essay "Concerning the Spiritual in Art" a sort of elementary manual on harmony for this new concept of painting in which the "interior sound" of colour and form has absolute value. Thus the attempt to establish a relationahip between the invisible and the visible began, whereby the artist would filter music, the immaterial part, through the technical means at his disposal thanks to his knowledge of the language and expression of the world of sound. Music would be taken as the structural model of reference and become an important source of innovation in the visual field.

Music would not only play the role of "god-mother" at the birth of abstract art, but its influence would run like a fine continuous thread from the beginning of the century to today, always in touch with the decisive changes in the development of modern art, and at each stage artists would focus attention on the different aspects of sound, consider certain laws and parametres of music, in a relentless race in search of an ever closer analogy.

This would lead to a new blossoming of in-depth tracts on the correspondences between sound and colour (see Johannes Itten of the Bauhaus), the perception of a "timbric quality" of sound and a return to the principle of "synaesthesia", a focussing of attention on the associations and intersections between different types of concomitant sensation: "to see" sound, "to hear" colour.

Literature, almost a century earlier, in the work of E.T. Hoffmann, had succeeded in concisely expressing this fundamental possibility of "simultaneous perceptions" (syn aistànestai) and its aesthetic and expressive implications: "Not so much in dreams as in that state of delirium that preceeds sleep, and especially when I have listened to a lot of music, I find a combination between colour, sound and scent. It seems to me that all are produced, in the same mysterious way, by a ray of light and that they must blend in a marvellous concert. The perfume of dark red carnations works with extraordinary magic power on me: involuntarily I sink into a state of reverie and then in the far distance hear the notes of a clarinet mounting in rapid crescendo which then gradually fade away (...).

Music!.... You are nature's Sanskrit expressed in sound!.... It is not an empty image, nor an allegory when a musician says that to him colours, scents, rays appear to be like sounds and that he perceives in their intertwining a marvellous concert. As, according to the pronouncement of a great physicist, to hear is but to see from within, so for the musician sight becomes hearing from within, that is, it is transformed in his interior awareness of the music which, vibrating in unison with his spirit, resounds from all that his eyes see.

So Hoffmann wrote in "Kreisleriana", a series of tales with a musical threme, published in 1814.

Years later D'Annunzio would also treat the "music" of nature, evoking a synesthetic procedure, in the poem "La pioggia nel pineto" ("Rain in the Pinewoods"); the wood is like a musical instrument from which the rain draws a concert of sounds, each plant is stirred to more intense life, assumes human sensibility and, at the same time, the man hidden by and entangled in the intertwined vegetation, bewildered by the song of the animals, turns into a plant and becomes so close to nature as to identity with it: "Be quiet ... I hear newer words yet spoken by rain-drops and distant leaves. Listen. The song of the cicadas corresponds to weeping ... And the pine has a sound, and the myrtle another, and the juniper another yet, different instruments played by innumerable fingers".

In the same way F.T. Marinetti experimented with synaesthesia techniques, but with greater veermence, in the "Bombardment of Adrianopolis": in 1914 marinetti was present at the siege of the Bulgarian city as a journalist; in his futuristic interpretation of the battle he drops punctuation, breaks the most elementary rules of grammar, inventing a different usage and setting the typographical characters in a different order; the real situation caused by the bombing recedes in the author's attempt to create a vivid sonorous and visual effect by the use of his "free words", deprived of a logical, syntactical sequence, distorted and set down on the page in a bizzare and chaotic way.

Perception is accompanied by the cultural knowledge of one's own world. Music, sound and colour are the basic primitive archetypes of this physiological procedure. As in an algebra formula a musical form describes its own area. Maths sheds light on the hidden mechanisms of the physical world.

Music reveals the hidden models of our "I". In the past colour represented the plane onto which the soul projected its own unconscious images. Today, colour is the symbolic transfer with which the psyche communicates its submerged world (M.P. Graziani), it is the echo of the unconscious.

In colour, psychology has identified the fundamental properties which relay the development process of the brain's imaginative and emotional combinatory capacities. In fact, colour, although recognized after shape, is one of the first elementary codes with which children learn to express emotions and in the development of society colour is used to express the first elementary sensations (ibidem).

In the very well-known and internationaly recognized kindergartens in Reggio Emilia, one practical pedagogical exercise is to "evoke the audible" (equate colour and sound), broadening one's sensorial world through a training to hear visually or to listen looking; exercising "the chromatic sense of hearing": a children's band seeks to produce chromatic sounds with musical instruments which reflect the colours of autumn leaves spread on a table. As different sounds emerge from the group the teacher tries to record them so as to be able to hear them again all together. One gets a positive impression on coming into contact with these children who seek to surmount a difficulty in a constructive manner by applying a method linked to synaesthesia, and the consequent stimulation of the imagination, in studying and working out practical and theoretical problems.

The greatest economic, cultural, scientific and sociological game of the Year 2000 will be played on the so-called "information hightways", or in other words, the wide-band optical communication networks (A.A.V.V.).

The world's three principal industries are converging on them: telecommunications, informatics and television whose integration process has increased rapidly thanks to the spread of digital technology, based on transcription in numerical form (bytes) of any kind of information whatsoever.

Every type of content, all the production techniques and the transmission of any kind of information, is based on numbers. Every product, book, museum, library, monument will have its numerical symbol.

The spread of this common alphabet, starting with the computer, has extensive networking systems, that it is causing on TV such a technological breakthrough that each one of the sectors in question has begun to invade the field of the others, opening up new types of work, competition and business mergers hitherto unheard of. From the progressive unification of telecommunications, informatics and television one of the most important sociological-business phenomena of the 21st century will appear: multimedia.

This new form of communication which, with the wide-band networks, will be available to any kind of user, will give rise to an explosion of inter-related services from the linkage of the data banks, the multimedia network for the exchange of information and messages at global level (internet), the videophone, e-mail, motion pictures, direct access to libraries, cinetechs, museums, work places/offices.

With the optical networks, the potential of the actual digital soft wear such as CD-ROM and CD-I linked to a personal computer, the multimedia possibilities of "video listening" and interaction will multiply out of all proportion because the required information can be gathered directly from where it is stored and exchanged in real time on a global scale.

Synaesthesia is in itself a circuit of communication based on polydimensional and psycho-sensory synergy which marks the definitive surmounting of the formal limits between the various fields of expression with the greatest flexibility and a broad, interdisciplinary, free scope, which can grasp, interpret and formulate the plural, complex language of yesterday and today.

If, initially, synaesthesia was seen as an interconnection to link the diverse sensory centres and as such an interior phenomenon that in the sphere of the arts sought an equivalent between the different disciplines, strengthening the identity of art, stressing the weakness of practical techniques and the non-specificity of the effective meaning it produced, resolving everything in one and the same act of the creative spirit, with the advent of the new technologies and of the multimedia era, with the birth of the true and proper "synesthetic dispositives" (hologrammes, interface, technologies which transform and reconvert in real time the movements or acoustical and visual signals, virtual reality) synaesthesia has freed itself from the pure and simple intrapsychical evocation of a sensorial preception induced by the stimulation of another and diverse sensoriality (M. Costa) becoming the simultaneous stimulus of the different sense organs, each one of which receives a stream of information coming from the corresponding instruments and which are psychologically compatible, thus facilitating the transfer and growth of knowledge.

From the above, one can better understand how many potential expressions synaesthesia holds, whose effect is certainly exphasized, amplified and spread through the use of the new technologies and interactive processes. It is a welcome and stimulating challenge to follow up to test the validity of future artistic and aesthetic production and, at the same time it is an opportunity to feel active and creative as regards one's relationship with planetary space, building one's own individual trajectory of exploration and exchange.

____

 

THE CULTURAL ACTIVITES OF THE MILAN POLYTECHNIC

"In January 1990" -- the President of the Polytechnic Giuseppe Caglioti explains -- "the commission for Cultural Activities was constituted on an elective basis. Its purpose is to introduce a humanistic component in the mental space of those who work in the Polytechnic; lack of interest in this stated objective would have negative repercussions on the members' professional and personal life".

The programme has developed along two lines:-

-- conventions and lectures by highly qualified people. Of these, the most noteworthy was the inaugural address given by Rita Levi Montalcini, Nobel Prize winner for medicine, on the theme: "From a molecule with one function, to many functions for one molecule".

-- musical performances given by students of the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory and the Civic School of Milan.

In 1993 the Commission started the Milan Polytechnic Choir. The choir's performances at home and abroad have met with success.

Outstanding among the events the Commission has organized was the celebration of the centenary of Carlo Emilio Gadda's birth. The proceedings of the convention and the catalogue of the retrospective exhibition of the writer-engineer were published in a small prestigious volume: "Per Gadda il politecnico di Milano", Libri Scheiwiller, Milan, 1994.

The meeting-debate of Tuesday, 6 February, on "Music in Painting and Images" follows on the convention-debate on "Knowledge through Images", held some months ago, whose proceedings-catologue are being prepared for publication by Prometheus, Franco Angeli Editore, Milan, 1996. The central theme of both debates was the multimedia.

The amount of things to be learned grows at an alarming rate. The time that can be devoted to study on the other hand remains almost unchanged. The multimedia is in fact one of the instruments technology offers to handle this disproportion: it is believed that the emotional impact of synesthetic effects originating in the combination music-painting-image, acting on the memory and stimulating curiosity is at the base of the mechanisms, still little known, able to relay knowledge.

The positive experience to date, and the often enthusiastic response of the staff and the students involved encourage the Commission to pursue the above-stated aims.

________

 

Torna alla home page Sinestesia e Arte Sinestetica

Torna alla home page di Programma Italia