Composers & musicians


Beach, Amy

Bernstein, Leonard	Katchè, Manu	Raff, Joachim

Boone, ‘Blind’	Kerr, Brooks	Rimsky-Korsakov, N.

Brown, Boyce	Ligeti, György	Saradzhev, K.

Day, Sean	Liszt, Franz	Sibelius, Jean

DeCaprio, Tony	Long, Joseph	Torke, Michael

Ellington, Duke	McDonald, Margaret	Van Halen, Eddie

Ford, Emile	Messiaen, Olivier	Wiese, Henrik

Gittleman, Harley	Nelson, Sam	Wolfe, Ben

Jones, Elvin	Paull, Jennifer

Beach, Amy (1867-1944). American pianist and composer.

It turns out that the 19th-century American classical composer Amy Beach had both perfect pitch and a set of colors for musical keys. Here are two quotes from biographies:

From Jeanell Wise Brown, Amy Beach and her chamber music: biography, documents, style (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1994), p. 16:

"Other interesting stories about Amy's musical personality and her astounding abilities as a prodigy are recounted in almost all previous biographical writings. One such story is Amy's association of certain colors with certain keys. For instance, Amy might ask her mother to play the 'purple music' or the 'green music.' The most popular story, however, seems to be the one about Amy's going on a trip to California and notating on staff paper the exact pitches of bird calls she heard."

References are to letters in the Crawford Collection, Library of Congress.

From Walter S. Jenkins, The remarkable Mrs. Beach, American composer (Warren, Mich.: Harmonie Park Press, 1994), pp. 5-6:

"Amy's mother encouraged her to relate melodies to the colors blue, pink, or purple, but before long Amy had a wider range of colors, which she associated with certain major keys. Thus C was white, F-sharp black, E yellow, G red, A green, A-flat blue, D-flat violet or purple, and E-flat pink. Until the end of her life she associated these colors with those keys."

Reference is an interview of Beach by George Y. Loveridge in the Providence Journal, Dec. 4, 1937, p. 5.

Bernstein, Leonard (1918 – 1990)

American composer and conductor. He had ‘timbre to color’ synesthesia, which he talked about in his “Young People’s Concerts” series.

Boone, John William ‘Blind’ (1864 – 1927)

Blind ragtime piano player (see Harrah 2004).

Brown, Boyce (1910 – 1959)

-- jazz saxophonist

Day, Sean

A fairly unknown composer, who has written few works in his spare, hobby-time. Sean Day synesthetically "sees" colors corresponding to musical timbres; each instrument has its specific color .

Click HERE to hear one of his compositions, Absence , a duet for flute and cello. For Sean Day, flutes synesthetically are off-white, with shadings of blue and silvery flashes; cellos are dark cherry wood with green flecks.

DeCaprio, Tony

Jazz guitarist. "I am able to see all twelve tones in their respective colors".

Ellington, Duke

“’I hear a note by one of the fellows in the band and it’s one color. I hear the same note played by someone else and it’s a different color. When I hear sustained musical tones, I see just about the same colors that you do, but I see them in textures. If Harry Carney is playing, D is dark blue burlap. If Johnny Hodges is playing, G becomes light blue satin’” (George 1981: 226).

Ford, Emile

Motown artist. His song "What do you want to make those eyes at me for?" was a #1 hit in the U.K. in1959-1960.

Gittleman, Harley

American composer.

" Each tone I hear is a certain color -- creating a cornucopia of compelling melodies and harmonies for which to visually merge." _ H.G.

Jones, Elvin

Published on Sunday, May 23, 2004
Section: ARTS & SOCIETY Page: 12F
Edition: FINAL
© 2004 The Baltimore Sun

Drummer Elvin Jones was the great propelling force that drove the John Coltrane quartet into vast new territories of jazz, territories that new generations of musicians are still exploring . He was a drummer of inexhaustible energy - physically, emotionally and spiritually - which was a very good thing indeed, because Coltrane could play for hours, wringing the last scrap of meaning from a musical idea. Jones played with Coltrane from 1960 to 1966, an extraordinarily fertile time for jazz music.

He said playing with Coltrane was like "a young boy going to the circus and stopping at the stand selling cotton candy and ice cream cones."
   He was still playing with scarcely diminished enthusiasm when he died Tuesday at the age of 76. During these last few months of failing health, he took an oxygen tank on stage with him when he played. He left a schedule of bookings unfulfilled, and unfulfillable.
   "Playing is not something I do at night," he once said. "It's my function in life."
   To praise Jones and Coltrane is not to disrespect McCoy Tyner, the quartet's pianist, or Jimmy Garrison, its bass player. The quartet came together with rare collective force. They rank in seminal influence with Louis Armstrong's Hot Five, the bebop bands of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonius Monk, and the post-bop quintets of Miles Davis, with Coltrane in one and Wayne Shorter in the other.
   "That feeling is always there," Jones once told a Downbeat magazine interviewer. "If you want to call it jazz, you can call it jazz. Anything you want to call it, but it's a spirit ... a cohesion ... joint effort."
   You can hear that spirit expressed in pieces as varied as My Favorite Things, where the quartet transforms a pop song into art, or A Love Supreme, one of the great spiritual works in jazz.
   Jones played with dynamic power, often setting rhythm upon rhythm, pushing and pulling the music along in an interaction with other musicians that some have called a circle of sound. His drumming was constantly active, a sort of continuous solo without losing rhythmic clarity, adding punctuations and annotations and a flow of inspiration to both solos and ensemble playing.
   "I can see forms and shapes in my mind when I solo, just as a painter can see forms and shapes when he starts a painting," he told Whitney Balliett, the New Yorker writer. "And I can see different colors. My cymbals will be one color and my snare another color and my tom-toms each a different color. I mix these colors up, making constant movement.
   "Drums suggest movement," he said, "a conscious, constant shifting of sounds and levels of sound. My drumming can shade from a whisper to a thunder. I'm not conscious of the length of my solos, which I've been told have run up to half an hour. When you develop a certain pattern, you stay with it until it's finished."
   Jones was born in Detroit, the youngest child in a family of 10. His brother, Thad, a trumpet and flugelhorn player who died in 1986, led a much-acclaimed band with drummer Mel Lewis that played for more than 20 years at the Village Vanguard, the hallowed New York jazz sanctuary. Hank Jones, now nearly 86, remains one of the great jazz pianists.
   Elvin was once asked what his brothers thought of his music: "I don't know," he replied. "They just love me. I'm the baby."

Katchè, Manu

Has performed with Sting, Peter Gabriel, Simple Minds, Joe Satriani, Tori Amos, and Ryuichi Sakamoto, among others.

Kerr, Brooks – jazz pianist

“With the little bit of sight he possessed, Brooks was unable to read or to identify objects, and lead sheets remained a forever closed door to him, but he was able to differentiate colors. I remember when he first told us that in his mind’s eye every musical note was a different color and that the scale resembled a rainbow. He fingered a C on the piano, explaining, ‘This note is red.’ He hit a D. ‘This one is dark blue.’ He hit an F. ‘This is yellow.’ His finger wandered to a G. ‘This one is light blue …’” (George 1981: 225-226).

Ligeti, György (1923 – 2006)

Hungarian composer. Ligeti is probably best known to the wider world for his early works, some of which were 'borrowed' by Stanley Kubrick for the soundtrack of "2001".

"I am inclined to synaesthetic perception. I associate sounds with colours and shapes. Like Rimbaud [sic; Rimbaud was not a true synesthete], I feel that all letters have a colour."
"Major chords are red or pink, minor chords are somewhere between green and brown. I do not have perfect pitch, so when I say that C minor has a rusty red-brown colour and D minor is brown this does not come from the pitch but from the letters C and D. I think it must go back to my childhood. I find, for instance, that numbers also have colours; 1 is steely grey, 2 is orange, 5 is green. At some point these associations must have got fixed, perhaps I saw the green number 5 on a stamp or on a shop sign. But there must be some collective associations too. For most people the sound of a trumpet is probably yellow although I find it red because of its shrillness" (Ligeti 1978/1983: 58).

A strange twist: Ligeti studied and taught (1950 - 1956) at the Franz Liszt [another true synesthete -- see below] Academy in Budapest.

Liszt, Franz (1811 -1886)

"When Liszt first began as Kapellmeister in Weimar (1842), it astonished the orchestra that he said: 'O please, gentlemen, a little bluer, if you please! This tone type requires it!' Or: 'That is a deep violet, please, depend on it! Not so rose!' First the orchestra believed Liszt just joked; more later they got accustomed to the fact that the great musician seemed to see colors there, where there were only tones" (quoted from an anonymous article in the Neuen Berliner Musikzeitung (29 August, 1895); quoted in Mahling 1926: 230) (my translation).

Long, Joseph

Scottish concert pianist.

McDonald, Margaret

Scottish mezzo-soprano operatic singer.

Messiaen, Olivier

Composer Olivier Messiaen, who flourished in the 1940's, was self-admittedly a synesthete, as is quite well detailed in his own writings and in interviews (see Samuel 1994 (1986)). Many of his compositions, such as Oiseaux Exotiques, L'ascension, and Couleurs de la cite celeste, are directly based upon his, in a sense, trying to "produce pictures" via sound, writing specific notes to produce specific color sequences and blends.

Nelson, Sam

Vocalist and programmer for the rock band H is Orange.

Paull, Jennifer

Jennifer Paull describes herself as an interpreter of music and words, and a synaesthete. She has spent her career as an internally known musician, championing the rare and beautiful oboe d'amore, the alto oboe. She remains the only soloist in the world exclusively dedicated to its cause. Her ensemble, "The Amoris Consort", mixes the five colours of the instrumental timbres of the oboe family, including two other rare members apart from her own, the musette and the bass oboe. For her, timbre equates to colour, and musical form to visible, architectural shapes.

Finding that in whichever country she presented her instrument inevitably involved lecturing and writing, the performance of music slowly became too limiting for her canvass. She has turned increasingly to writing, the investigation of colour (as a tool, inspiration and healer), translating (breaking through invisible walls), and devising artistic dimensions and events.

Lecturing in three languages, English, French and Music, she freely admits that all the Arts and many languages influence her palette directly and indirectly. Fascinated by travel, history, and synaesthesia (her "secret weapon"), she freely admits to a certain addiction to interior design, precious stones, intellectual sleuthing, and bonne cuisine (not necessarily in that order).

Ms. Paull established her own publishing company, Amoris International, in the United States. On its web site, her publications and research can be investigated (and purchased), her CD's and those of her ensemble tasted in sound clip illustration, her critics read and her writings explored.

http://www.amoris.com/

Knowing that she was a language synaesthete, seeing letters and numbers in colour, she has broadened her work to include therapy for synaesthesia overload and word-blindness with successful results.

Musical performance ceased being her ultimate goal as the colours of words and the invisible barriers of translation into different art forms and languages were encouraged by her increasing awareness and confidence in her condition. She simply follows where it leads. Giving synaesthesia free rein has made the once musician and publisher into a published writer and a translator. Colours, textures and feelings triggered by the awareness of her varying forms of synaesthesia, have increased as she accepted its omnipresent dimension as her path to explore. It touches her world in everything she does from choice of the colour of her children's names, to the perfume and feel of musical keys, the sounds of paintings and the choreography of poetry.

"I chose my children's names by colour. My son's are Patrick and Pascal (P is celestial blue and a is pale green) and my daughters are Nathalie and Nadia ( N is this sunset or dawn pink). My name is Jennifer (both the n's in there) Paull; the capital P makes up the 'weight' of 2 smaller ones."

Raff, Joachim

In 1855, the composer Joachim Raff "declared that the sounds of instruments produced color impressions of various kinds. Thus the sound of a flute produced the sensation of intense azure blue; of the hautboy [oboe], yellow; cornet, green; trumpet, scarlet; the French horn, purple; and the flageolet [bassoon], grey. The clearest and most distinct shades were those evoked by the high notes" (Krohn 1892 : 22). It is unknown whether Raff was a synaesthete; he may well have been, but this small set of colored timbres does not provide enough information, without more direct claims as to where the correspondences originate from. Note once again here the association of trumpets with a shade of red (scarlet).

Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai

Rimsky-Korsakov had synesthetically colored musical keys:

C

G

D

A

E

B

F^#

D^b

A^b

E^b

B^b

F

white

brownish-gold, light

daylight, yellowish, royal

clear, pink

blue, sapphire, bright

gloomy, dark blue with steel shine

greyish-green

darkish, warm

greyish-violet

dark, gloomy, grey-bluish

darkish

green, clear (color of greenery)

This is according to an article in the Russian press,

Yastrebtsev, V. "On N.A. Rimsky-Korsakov's color sound- contemplation." Russkaya muzykalnaya gazeta, 1908, N 39-40, p. 842 - 845 (in Russian),

cited by Bulat Galeyev (1999).

Saradzhev [Saradzhian], Konstantin (b Derbent, 8 Oct 1877; d Erevan, 22July 1954). Armenian conductor and violinist. He graduated from Hrimaly's violin class at the Moscow Conservatory in 1898, then taught the violin at the Moscow Synodal School and gave solo recitals. In 1900, he had lessons with Sevcik in Prague. From 1901, he was conductor of the Moscow Opera Lovers' Club and, at the same time, he formed a string quartet. Having decided to devote himself to conducting, he studied with Nikisch in Leipzig (1904-8). After his return to Moscow, he conducted the Sokolniki summer symphony concerts in 1908 and 1910-11. He proved to be a persuasive advocate of new music by young composers; he conducted the first performances of Myaskovsky's symphonic poem 'Silence' and of Prokofiev's 'Autumn Sketches' and Piano Concerto no. 1 (with the composer as soloist). In 1909 , Saradzhev was one of the founders of the Evenings of Contemporary Music, and, in 1923, he organized the chamber concerts of the Association for Contemporary Music. Saradzhev had an excellent conducting technique, with a clear beat, and the ability to imbue the orchestra with his own artistic ideals. He was professor of the conducting class at Moscow Conservatory (1922-35) and then returned to Armenia as musical director and principal conductor of the Erevan Opera and Ballet Theatre. As principal conductor of the Armenia Philharmonia (1941-4), he popularized the works of young Armenian composers. From 1939 to his death, he was director of Ereven Conservatory, where he taught the orchestra, opera and conducting classes. He was made a People's Artist of the Armenian SSR in 1945; a volume of his collected articles and reminiscences was published in Moscow in 1962.

["Hrimaly" and "Sevcik" with Easteuropean letters, JJ]

I. M. Yampol'sky, in: Stanley Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary ofMusic and Musicians, London 1980, Vol. 16, p. 495.

Sibelius, Jean (1865 - 1957)

"For him there existed a strange, mysterious connection between sound and color, between the most secret perceptions of the eye and ear. Everything he saw produced a corresponding impression on his ear – every impression of sound was transferred and fixed as color on the retina of his eye and thence to his memory. And this he thought as natural, with as good reason as those who did not possess this faculty called him crazy or affectedly original.

"For this reason he only spoke of this in the strictest confidence and under a pledge of silence. 'For otherwise they will make fun of me!'" (Adolf Paul (1890), as quoted in Ekman 1938: 41-42).

Torke, Michael

Definitely a synesthete, reporting that one of his types is colored time units (days of the week, years, and such).

Van Halen, Eddie

Rock guitar player.

Wiese, Henrik

Wolfe, Ben

Jazz bass player.

Last up-dated: 11.February.2008

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	(1908 - 1992)