Light And/As Music in the History of the Color Organ Ralph Whyte Submitted
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“A Light in Sound, a Sound-like Power in Light”: Light and/as Music in the History of the Color Organ Ralph Whyte Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2019 © 2019 Ralph Whyte All rights reserved ABSTRACT “A Light in Sound, a Sound-like Power in Light”: Light and/as Music in the History of the Color Organ Ralph Whyte This dissertation examines the history of the relationship between light/color as an artistic medium and music. Looking at four artist-inventors from the eighteenth through to the mid- twentieth centuries, I consider how new arts of light and color arose from music, relied on music, and also distanced themselves from it. Drawing chiefly on published and unpublished primary sources, this dissertation compares artists’ and inventors’ conceptions of what this new art should be as it was continuously reimagined and reconstituted in their works, discourses, and technologies. I suggest a running tension throughout this history between the aspiration for a new and even autonomous art and its reliance on the music. In Chapter 1, I investigate the work of the eighteenth-century French Jesuit monk Louis Bertrand Castel, who in 1725 proposed the first ever instrument for color music, his clavecin oculaire or ocular harpsichord. I note conflicting tendencies in his thought as he suggested two different avenues for color music: as a form of multimedia, and as a separate, silent medium capable of giving pleasure on its own. The next chapter turns to the color organ and color music of the late nineteenth-century inventor and artist Alexander Wallace Rimington. Drawing on contemporaneous theories of color, reception of Rimington’s performances, and the inventor’s own writings, I locate Rimington’s organ at the intersection of a continuing tradition of analogizing music and color and late nineteenth-century attempts to theorize color independently and systematically. I then demonstrate how Rimington’s desire to use color music as means of improving color perception can be understood as part of a larger debates about sensing color and color education around the turn of the twentieth century. Chapters 3 considers Mary Hallock Greenewalt’s instrument, the sarabet, and her art form, nourathar¸ while the final chapter looks at Thomas Wilfred’s (usually silent) light art, lumia. I suggest that Greenewalt and Wilfred’s relationship to music is a source of tension in their work, as they attempted to extricate and purify light art into an autonomous art form but display various forms of musical influence. Contents List of Figures ............................................................................................................................. ii Acknowledgments ...................................................................................................................... iv Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 1 Chapter 1: The Harmony of the Senses and Louis Bertrand Castel’s Color Music .................. 20 Chapter 2: Alexander Wallace Rimington’s Color Music and the Separation of the Senses ... 74 Chapter 3: Bejeweling Beethoven with Mary Hallock Greenewalt ........................................ 129 Chapter 4: Visual Music Falls Silent: Thomas Wilfred’s Lumia ............................................ 185 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................ 236 i List of Figures Figure 1.1: Kircher's table of colors and musical intervals ............................................................28 Figure 1.2: Cureau’s diagram of color intervals ............................................................................29 Figure 1.3: Newton’s color circle ..................................................................................................32 Figure 2.1: Rimington and his color organ ....................................................................................80 Figure 2.2: Diagram of the lower section of the color organ .........................................................81 Figure 2.3: Rimington’s color scale represented in frequencies and adjectives ...........................91 Figure 2.4: Rimington color scale represented in pigments ..........................................................92 Figure 2.5: Rimington’s colors for Chopin’s Prelude in C minor .................................................99 Figure 2.6: The first ten chords of Chopin’s Prelude in C minor. .................................................99 Figure 2.7: Rimington’s colors for Dvorak’s Waltz in A major (op. 54, no. 1) .........................101 Figure 2.8: The first two measures of Dvorak’s Waltz in A major (op. 54, no. 1) ......................101 Figure 3.1: Greenewalt’s photograph of her film rolls for three pieces of music ........................146 Figure 3.2: Still from a video of the unfurling of acetate film for Debussy’s La Lune Descend Sur La Temple Qui Fut ................................................................................................................148 Figure 3.3: Greenewalt with her “light phonograph" ..................................................................149 Figure 3.4: Greenewalt at her sarabet ..........................................................................................150 Figure 3.5: Diagram of the sarabet control ..................................................................................152 Figure 3.6: “Design for a color accompaniment of the Piano Composition called Et La Lune Descend Sur La Temple Qui Fut” ................................................................................................156 Figure 3.7: Two Light Scores for the first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata ..........157 Figure 3.8: Measures 7 to 17 of Debussy’s La Lune with Greenewalt’s setting .........................160 Figure 3.9: Strikes of red and pink for rising fifths in measures 27 and 28.................................161 Figure 3.10: Measures 41 and 42 with Greenewalt's setting. ......................................................161 Figure 3.11: Greenewalt's Moonlight Sonata setting, measures 1 to 11 ......................................162 Figure 3.12: Light “crescendos” matching the ascents and descents of broken chords ..............163 Figure 3.13: Debussy, La Lune measures 1 to 6, and Greenewalt’s setting, measures 1 to 5 .....167 Figure 3.14: Darkness descends at the end of Greenewalt's Moonlight setting...........................168 ii Figure 3.15: Greenewalt's image of those conspiring against her ...............................................178 Figure 4.1: Wilfred at the clavilux model E ................................................................................188 Figure 4.2: Wilfred with a clavilux junior ...................................................................................189 Figure 4.3: Wilfred, Lumia Suite op. 158 ....................................................................................200 iii Acknowledgments Writing a PhD may often be a solitary endeavor, but it is not a sole one. Firstly, I would like to thank my advisor George Lewis, who played Colin Firth to my Taron Egerton. Over the years, we have shared countless hours of fruitful conversations and, at the end of this project, he gave me a powerful necessary push toward the finish line. I also thank my other committee members: Benjamin Steege for his perspicacious questions, Ellie Hisama for pushing me to be more careful and thoughtful from the proposal defense on, Karen Henson both for raising essential disciplinary considerations and her inspiring graduate seminars, and Noam Elcott for bringing his expertise on art history and media theory to bear on the work. Elaine Sisman and Walter Frisch generously gave their time to read and provide comments on an early draft of what became chapters 3 and 4 of this dissertation. Other faculty members including Susan Boynton, Giuseppe Gerbino, Julia Doe, and Ana Maria Ochoa have also given me support and guidance through my time as a graduate student at Columbia. In addition, I thank all of the staff in the music department office, particularly the unfailing helpful Gabriela Kumar, and in the university’s music library. Elsewhere, staff at both the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia were always accommodating. I would not have made it to Columbia in the first place without both the education and encouragement of the music faculty of King’s College, London. Both Roger Parker and Andy Fry encouraged me to pursue musicology and to look westward in that pursuit. Roger is a iv legendary mentor for good reason and he read material from chapters 3 and 4 with characteristic care, in the process giving me essential writing advice when I most needed it. Yet further back I would never had pursued music if not for several music teachers at the junior school of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and Bathgate Academy, including my first ever double bass teacher Laura-Ann Brown. My fellow graduate students at Columbia have been my greatest friends and interlocutors for seven years. Not only did Paula Harper (née Horner) provide bounteous emotional support, but, having finished her own dissertation too quickly, she also thoroughly