Music Library Reading Room Notes

Music Library Reading Room Notes Issue no.6 (2004) University Libraries The University of the Arts Compiled by the Music Library Staff Mark Germer: Music Librarian Lars Halle & Aaron Meicht: Circulation Supervisors Philadelphia and the Essence of Light p.2 “A Nomenclature to Underlie the use of Light as a Fine Art” p.4 “A Secularized Theology”: Adorno on Steuermann p.8 Experimentelle Musik 2003: AB Duo in Munich p.11 “Speaking of Apropos”: An Analysis p.13 The University of the Arts . 320 South Broad Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19102 http://www.uarts.edu University Libraries: http://library.uarts.edu Philadelphia and the Essence of Light by Mark Germer A curious and unexplored affiliation and sight, would be hard to appreciate in the University’s past has to do with the without reference to this background. A early 20th-century keyboardist Mary Hal- popular guest speaker and player on the lock Greenewalt. Now a nearly forgotten “color organ”, she was not without recog- resident of Philadelphia, she was once a nition in her development of “illumination flamboyant and seemingly ubiquitous pro- as a means of expression” (Rohrer 1940, ponent of the aesthetic coordination of 107). music performance with projected light. In addition to establishing a reputation as a performer of the standard recital reper- “Color-hearing” is one of various, tory, she also encouraged the exploration presumably related sensory experiences of music’s therapeutic and recuperative subsumed under the term synaesthesia. powers, and saw the synaesthetic ex- Despite wide general interest dating back perience of the spectrum and music as to the 18th century, and a rapidly accumu- the awakening of biological forces. Her lating clinical bibliography, the phenom- presence was a colorful one (the pun is enon remains incompletely understood. unavoidable). Around the turn of the last Much recent literature has addressed century, at a time when electrical lighting literary synaesthesia, in which subjects could still be experienced by many as rela- report unevoked color associations with tively novel, Greenewalt campaigned tire- the sounds of letters or syllables; writers lessly for financial and technological sup- such as Baudelaire and Nabokov have port of her “light-color playing” as well as left well-known descriptions of such ex- construction of the “color-consoles” she perience (Cytowic 2003, chap. 15). But designed. documentation of musical sound-color synaesthesia has also boasted famous adherents. It is difficult, in fact, to find Greenewalt had earned a reputation discussions of the music of Skryabin or as a concert pianist by the early 1900s, Messiaen that do not contain references having graduated from the Philadelphia to these composers’ attempts to incor- Musical Academy in 1893, and eventu- porate synaesthetic experience into their ally performing as soloist with the newly music scores. In the 1920s, the Hun- founded Philadelphia Orchestra after the garian composer Alexander László pro- turn of the century. Born in the Lebanon moted the idea of a generic innovation he Mountains in what was then Syria, she called “color-light-music”(Farblichtmusik). traced her somewhat obscure origins to Many artists and composers who did not the cosmopolitan communities of the Le- claim to be “synaesthetes” themselves -- vant. She was apparently educated in Bartók, Schoenberg, Kandinsky, among Europe before traveling to the Americas others -- nevertheless found themselves in 1882. Her varied interests, especially intrigued with simultaneous sensory stim- those having to do with the simultane- ulation and incorporated versions of it into ous stimulation of the senses of hearing some of their most experimental works. Greenewalt’s early embrace of the sub- cades ago, to say nothing of Greenewalt’s ject, however, as evidenced in the 1918 time. That multisensory stimulation had lecture excerpted below, was reasonably an uplifting or cleansing, even a spiritual sophisticated by comparison with that of dimension, however, did seem borne out Skryabin, for instance, whose prescrip- by experiential evidence, if her consider- tion for a “tastiera per luce” (in the score able written legacy is any testimony. Late of Prometei [1911]), would have provided in life she published a monograph entitled unmodulated projections. It was always Nourathar (Philadelphia 1946), a word of a part of Greenewalt’s vision that nuanc- her own coinage (from Arabic), mean- es of fluctuating, diminishing, intensifying, ing “essence of light”. In addition to her and merging colors could be calibrated musings there -- a mixture of performer’s to comparable nuances of musical mod- memoir, technical schematics, practical ulation and expressive articulation. admonition, and spiritual counsel, with the only accessible fragment of an actual light score -- some 18 linear feet of unsorted As a neurological phenomenon, correspondence and other documents are synaesthesia has been approached reported to lie in the vaults of the Histori- through two principal avenues of inquiry: cal Society of Pennsylvania (www2.hsp. as a pathological behavior involving per- org/collections/manuscripts/0800.htm). ceptual confusion, owing to the collateral There are also legal briefs on deposit in the experience of sensitivity in a modality that Archives of the Library of Congress. The has not been stimulated during the per- excerpts offered here, from a single paper, ception of one that has; and as a univer- are meant only to suggest that a peculiar sal physiological potential for simultane- chapter of Philadelphia history awaits fur- ous processing in all sensory modalities, ther, well...., illumination. hyperexpressed in some individuals (Ter- naux 2003). One tentative supposition holds that the process of neurophysi- ological maturation may include a kind of “sorting out” of the modalities of percep- Cytowic, Richard. The Man who Tasted tion, so that “retention” of sympathetic Shapes. Revised ed. Cambridge, Mass.: sensation by certain individuals may be MIT Press, 2003. in some way vestigial. However, a long road lies ahead before neurobiologists Greenewalt, Mary Hallock. Nourathar: The will have sufficiently accounted for the Fine Art of Color Playing. Philadelphia: myriad variables involving brain pathways Westbrook, 1946. and receptors, the neural mechanisms of attention and memory, to say nothing of the internal and external environmental Music and Musicians of Pennsylvania. Ed. stimuli that have bearing on sensory per- Gertrude Rohrer. Philadelphia: Presser, ception, in order to advance a compre- 1940. hensive theory. Ternaux, Jean-Pierre. “Synesthesia: A The revelations of brain research Multimodal Combination of the Senses,” unfold ing today, owing to image scan- Leonardo 56 (2003), 321-322. ning and other technologies, could not, of course, have been imagined several de- “A Nomenclature to Underlie the use of Light as a Fine Art” by Mary Hallock Greenwalt A hieroglyphic, a symbolism, a denotation the medium to be used. designed for the orientation of artists is [a] Decimal places and their figures can, in necessary adjunct to any art of succes- conjunction with a calibrated and similarly sion. marked resistance slide placed conve- A nomenclature underlying the use of light niently at the manipulator’s disposal, give as a fine art similar to that used on the mu- any intensity desired. But as a nomencla- sic page for recording music is necessary ture for the art, symbols that represent to this art’s perpetuation and growth. hue and saturation must be added not to Compactness, care of the line space, the mention still more cunning marks of ex- width space, is necessary. These marks pression. may be called upon to wedge between the We will therefore turn the ciphers into staves on the music page as an accompa- squares to give them four-cornered room, niment to the music or they may underlie as well as [to] be easier on the following the dramatic line for similar reasons. eye, and mark the decimal commas and To begin then: the main attributes of an periods in such a way as, without drop- art made up of light alone are: brightness, ping beneath the line, they will allow the hue, saturation, time—as time must be a elision of those ciphers or squares, not speaking part of any art of succession— at that point needed, for giving either the and space, as light is a thing for sight. quantity of light or its color. Since hue and saturation lie, as it were, We then get the following: in the lap of brightness, such a nomenclature must take care of the dynamics of light: the bright, the dark, first. So sensitive must this use of intensities [INTENSITY] be that though the increment of least per- ceptible brightness has been measured at A table of brightness, from the thresh- even varying intensities of white light and old of vision to a high light yields twelve the spectrum of colors, expressing with space numerals. From one hundred lam- light, like expressing with time in music, berts or one hundred thousand millil- will come with nuances which can be felt, amberts to the one ten thousandth of a but scarcely measured. millilambert we get the unit and eleven ci- Whilst colors, like notes, are of distinct phers—100,000,000,000. Such an array and definite demarcations from one an- of spaces may well be made use of to hold other, the attribute inseparable from much that may be needed by the occa- light’s power for emotional speech lies in sion. It makes a base carrying within itself its capacity for an insensible increase and a certain amount of definite fact regarding decrease in brightness. It is so that the day comes and goes; it is so connected A sudden bright accent thus: with our capacity for a suggested feeling induced by it. The use of the numeral and its similarly and a sudden dark accent thus: marked slide will denote for repeated use [These symbols are missing in the type- and uses just where the play of different script] increases and decreases of light shall begin and end.

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