Finding evidence of synesthesia in Messiaen's music.

Jonah Kappraff

Synesthesia is a complex neurological phenomenon in which one sensory stimulus excites an involuntary response in at least one other sense modality. This harmless condition, meaning joined sensation (from the Greek syn, union and aesthesis, sensation), may be as common as one in two thousand people and many researchers are convinced that it is far more common than that (one study found evidence of one in twenty-three people with some kind of synesthesia).1 A synesthete might taste shapes, see colors that correspond to letters, or even link an odor with the sound of a familiar name; whatever the reaction, a true synesthete will always experience it the same way.

Associations between color and music have been frequently suggested for centuries; however, these cross-disciplinary parallels are more commonly metaphoric. In our musical discourse we have adopted such visual terminology as tone color, chromatics, rhythmic painting, and other descriptive phrases that endeavor to link art with music. Although it is a perfectly viable means of communicating among the arts, such language has often been confused with synesthesia, leading many non-synesthetic visual artists to declare their artworks as synesthetic in nature.2

Scientific research on synesthesia began gradually but expanded considerably in the nineteenth century. Although, the condition enjoyed only scattered references in medical and neurological literature before the 1880s, it was a frequently mentioned phenomenon in other circles. In 1690, the philosopher John Locke wrote about a blind man who “...bragged one day that he now understood what scarlet signified ... It was like the sound of a trumpet.”3 Fourteen years later, in 1704, Isaac Newton attempted to devise a mathematical formula that equated frequency of sound waves with the corresponding wavelengths of light.4 Besides these oblique references to synesthesia, there were several overt experiments involving keyboards that displayed light along with sound as well as keyboards that linked sound with smell and taste.5 The exploration of synesthesia did not intensify substantially until the 1880's when a series of papers by the eminent Victorian polymath Francis Galton truly investigated the condition.6 At this point, widespread interest in synesthesia, especially colored hearing, proceeded briskly and by 1926 it was reported that there existed 533 published papers dealing with colored hearing alone.7

The most common form of synesthesia is colored hearing and even this may present itself in any number of manifestations. A synesthete of this class might see colors in relation to pitch, chords, mode, timbre, and/or orchestration. Furthermore, most accounts of colored hearing describe colors that are “wholly inward” and completely separable from the colors seen in everyday life.8 It is important to note, however, that it is rare for multiple people to experience the exact same synethesia. This adds yet another difficulty to the task of identification of this condition. For synethetic artists or composers, works that trigger a particular form of synethesia may only be appreciated fully by the artist himself.

Messiaen's Synesthesia

There is no way to determine whether or not a person is synesthetic without explicit testing in a manner that has only recently been developed. Therefore, the cases of certain artists and composers remain up for debate. Strong evidence suggests that Alexander Skryabin, Wassily Kandinsky, and Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov were synesthetes and, likewise, it is largely believed that Olivier Messiaen was as well. Indeed, more than any of the aforementioned artists, Messiaen wrote about his experiences of colored hearing in his Technique of My Musical Language and also spoke about it in interviews such as those with Claude Samuel.

I am ... affected by a kind of synopsia, found more in my mind than in my body, which allows me, when I hear music, and equally when I read it, to see inwardly, in the mind's eye, colors which move with the music, and I sense these colors in an extremely vivid manner... For me certain complexes of sound and certain sonorities are linked to complexes of color, and I use them in full knowledge of this.9

This statement, made in 1976 during an interview with Claude Samuel reinforces the significance of color that Messiaen indicated in the scores of Sept Haikai, and Couleurs de la cité céleste.

What is the use of understanding Messiaen's particular form of synesthesia? Certainly, no listener (synesthete or not) can expect to experience the same light show that this composer did. How can this highly personal phenomenon inform listeners of Messian's music? To start, the most encouraging feature of Messiaen's condition, as described in his Technique and elsewhere, is its extraordinary consistency. As a result, it is possible for the non-synesthetic scholar to determine the nature of this composer's color responses without actually seeing the colors themselves. Essentially, a study of his music and writings help to codify the particular sonic characteristics that he associated with different colors.

Jonathan Bernard, in his detailed study of Messiaen's synesthesia, observed that unlike some synesthetic composers Messiaen often seems to have chosen to literally paint a picture through his synesthesia. Combinations of hues are given rise by the distinct use of particular sonorities. Messiaen described “all the mingled colors” of a particular Japanese landscape in his Sept Haikai thus:

The green of the Japanese pines, the white and gold of the Shinto temple, the blue of the sea, and the red of the Torii [a kind of porch]... That's what I wanted to translate almost literally into my music.10

Bernard identifies three basic types of color labels described by Messiaen. The first is monochromatic, simply “green” or “red”. The second is slightly more complex, such as two colors mixed or blurring into one another, “blue-orange” or “grey-rose”. The third can include combinations of two or more distinct colors, perhaps produced one at a time by successive chords, or a dominant color that is “flecked, studded, or striped with another color”. Occasionally Messiaen's descriptions would be particularly elaborate, such as, “transparent sulphur yellow with mauve reflections and little patches of Prussian blue and brown purplish-blue.”11

Messiaen did not provide an analysis of the colors behind all of his music. In fact, there are vast segments of his oeuvre for which no color data exists. This is likely because he did not have color in mind whenever he composed, rather only on certain projects. Nevertheless, he did attribute colors to four of his modes of limited transposition and throughout his music these associations remain very consistent. Bernard's research into Messiaen's mode-color associations further discovered that various transpositions within each mode often give rise to new colors but that there is still usually a predominant color for the overall mode itself. For example, in the last of his eight piano Préludes, Messiaen described the second theme as “blue-orange in its first presentation, green-orange in its second presentation”, the first being in a “kind of A”, the second being in a “kind of D”.12

Although Messiaen's color associations are quite consistent, there are many instances in which careful study of certain scores bring up extra problems. Such issues include variations in register, chord voicing, and contour. It has been shown that Messiaen's colored hearing was likely sensitive to such variegation and, therefore, it becomes increasingly hard to completely characterize his synesthesia. Another difficulty arises when Messiaen mixes different transpositions of a mode, as he deemed allowable in his Technique. By doing this, he introduces foreign notes into passages otherwise in a single mode. Consequently, in cases where he provided a list of colors without specifying their location in the score, a simple reference to a list of color associations with the various modes may not be sufficient. Bernard cites a particularly illuminating example from the second movement of the Quatuor pour la fin du temps which Messiaen famously described as simply “blue-orange chords” and later added “blue and mauve, gold and green, and violet-red, with an overriding quality of steely grey.”13 Bernard manages to identify each of these colors in association with pitches in at least four transpositions of two modes. He suggests that while most of the colors arose as a result of the pitch/modal decisions of the composer, some, especially the gray quality may have been a conscious decision “to reinforce this effect of enveloping greyness.”14

Messiaen's particular form of synesthesia may not be extraordinarily unique for the condition. Colored hearing is a common manifestation of synesthesia and many such synesthetes are capable of unusually specified color associations. Although not always providing impetus for his compositional choices, Messiaen clearly used his synesthesia as one facet of his compositional toolbox to an extent that has not been discovered in other synesthetic composers.15 It is because of this that further study of his condition as it relates to his compositional output is worthwhile. An exhaustive study might even develop a harmonic language of color associations in Messiaen's music. The only barrier to such a comprehensive study is the relative dearth of explicit color references in Messiaen's large output.

Bibliography

Bernard, Jonathan. “Messiaen's Synaesthesia, The Correspondence Between Colour and Sound Structure in his Music,” in Music Perception, 1 no. 4 (1986): 41-68.

Cytowic, Richard. Synesthesia: A Union of the Senses, 2nd ed. Cambridge: MIT press, 2002.

Cytowic, Richard. The Man Who Tasted Shapes, 3rd ed. Cambridge: MIT press, 2003.

Marks, Lawrence, E. “On Colored-Hearing Synesthesia: Cross-Modal Translations of Sensory Dimensions,” in Psychological Bulletin, 82 no. 3, (May 1975):303-331.

Peacock, Kenneth. “Instruments to Perform Color-music: Two Centuries of Technological Instrumentation,” in Leonardo 21, (1988): 397-406.

Sacks, Oliver. Musicophilia: Tales of music and the brain. New York: Knopf, 2007.

Samuel, Claude. Conversations with Olivier Messiaen. (Felix Aprahamian, trans.). London: Stainter & Bell, 1976.

Zilczer, Judith. ““Color Music”: Synaesthesia and nineteenth-century sources for abstract art,” in Artibus et Historiae, 8 no. 16, (1987): 101-126.

Footnotes

1. Sacks, Musicophilia, 179.
2. Zilczer, ““Color Music”: Synaesthesia and nineteenth-century sources for abstract art.”
3. Cytowic, The Man who Tasted Shapes, 52.
4. Newton was unsuccessful at proving that such a correlation existed and Hermann von Helmholtz further disproved the hypothesis in the 1860’s. Zilczer, ““Color Music”: Synaesthesia and nineteenth-century sources for abstract art,” 118.
5. In 1724, Louis Bertrand Castel invented the clavecin des couleurs. Castel also suggested the construction of a clavecin des odeurs, which would theoretically open and shut a row of scent boxes arranged diatonically in order to accompany chords with a “concert of perfumes.” Peacock, “Instruments to Perform Color-music: Two Centuries of Technological Instrumentation,” 399-400.
6. Other significant papers were published by Thomas Woodhouse (1710), Georg Sachs (1812), Erasmus Darwin (1790), and Gustav Fechner (1876).
7. Marks, “On colored-hearing synesthesia: Cross-modal translations of sensory dimensions,” 303-331.
8. Sacks, Musicophilia, 170.
9. Bernard, “Messiaen’s Synesthesia”, 42.
10. Ibid. 44.
11. Ibid. 44.
12. Ibid. 45.
13. Ibid. 57.
14. Ibid. 60.
15. Skryabin, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Michael Torke, to name a few.