Harmonizing These Two Arts : Edmund Lind’s The Music of Color and its Antecedents Jeremy Kargon, Assistant Professor Department of Architecture, School of Architecture and Planning Morgan State University [email protected] Tel: 443-739-2886 Abstract Known primarily for his work in Baltimore and elsewhere in the American South, British-born architect Edmund Lind (1829-1909) was responsible for a diverse range of “revival-style” buildings. Lind’s most famous design, the library of the Peabody Institute, reflects the eclectic temperament of an architect for whom aesthetic rules and principles were most usefully conceived as expedient tools, applied as required in the interest of successful professional service. Towards the end of his life, however, another interest received his increasing attention. Twenty-seven intricately-colored plates accompanied an essay titled The Music of Color, which explored an analogy between the senses of sight and of sound. Assembled in 1894, Lind’s writing and illustrations depicted in visual terms the melodies and harmonies of unusual sources, including the music of foreign cultures and the spoken word. Lind’s representational technique anticipated the graphic experiments of a later generation’s avant-garde, especially among those art movements founded in the wake of increasing challenges to traditional modes of perception. Nevertheless, Lind and his enthusiasms remained firmly anchored in a view of art and science drawn from 19 th -century sources. Two particular works, cited by Lind in his essay, represent alternative cross-currents among the many hypothetical links between music and color. In addition, Lind’s own architectural education in London had occurred at the height of the Victorian-era “design reform” movement, which sought to revolutionize the visual character of England’s material culture. The reformers’ appeal to abstract structure, as embodied in their study of botany and quasi-scientific theories of color, was an implicit source of Lind’s later fascination with music’s representation through visual means. Note: formal permission for publication of the illustrations and figures which accompany the following text has yet to be requested. Harmonizing These Two Arts : Edmund Lind’s The Music of Color and its Antecedents 01 Introduction At the end of his recent biography about the English-born architect Edmund G. Lind, Charles Belfoure describes an interest of Lind’s which seems unconnected to his previous work: “the relationship between music and color.” 1 The theme would appear to have little to do with architectural design, its professional practice, or with anything but Lind’s own amateur love of both music and the visual arts. Indeed, Belfoure characterizes an unpublished essay, “The Music of Color,”2 as a typical product of Lind’s retirement, for which the architect had returned to Baltimore after almost four decades of professional work in Georgia, Maryland, and elsewhere in the South. Yet a closer look at “The Music of Color” and its companion piece, “The Number Seven,” points beyond the horizon of Lind’s own career. References to Lind’s essay, more or less unknown among historians of architecture, exist instead in the literature of musicologists, especially those who study the concept of synæsthesia – the perception of one physical sense through the experience of another. The proposition that one can represent through visual means what one hears is, of course, the fundamental premise of alphabetic writing or music notation. But Lind’s unusual illustrations [Figure 01], which use color to depict graphically both music and the aural character of spoken word, are part of a wider history of similar attempts which exist at the confluence of 19 th -century science and art. That period’s technological innovations in the chemistry of dyes spurred theoretical interest in the physical basis of color, which in turn depended upon inquiries into the nature of light and of sound. The intellectual prestige accorded such scientific research led to its study and appropriation by artists and art educators, who sought to base their own efforts on an apparently objective foundation. Figure 01 – “English National Air,” Plate 7, Fig. 1 from The Music of Color The Music of Color, written in 1894, reflects strongly Lind’s own educational roots in Britain’s much earlier design reform movement, which had sought to improve the quality of domestic material culture through improved educational standards for British artisans. 1 Charles Belfoure, Edmund G. Lind: Anglo-American Architect of Baltimore and the South (Baltimore: The Baltimore Architecture Foundation, 2009), p. 162. 2 Edmund Lind, The Music of Color (Baltimore: Peabody Library, 1894), typescript and hand-colored plates. 1 Harmonizing These Two Arts : Edmund Lind’s The Music of Color and its Antecedents That doing so depended upon a mélange of scientism, idealism, and moralistic romanticism led subsequently to Victorian Britain’s unique effervescence among the decorative arts, painting, and architecture. In fact, Lind’s time as a student in London spanned the period of design reform’s greatest educational innovations. So although Lind’s later professional life in the United States was separated by both geography and sensibility from architectural trends in the United Kingdom, one finds in The Music of Color explicit and implicit reference to British writing on related aesthetic matters. And if Lind’s architectural work throughout his career was more diligent than innovative, his unusual essay may be, nevertheless, usefully characteristic of its milieu. 02 “Not So Speculative After All”: The Appeal to Science To begin his essay, Lind refers to the “harmony existing between these two arts,” that is, music and color. Although scholars today can point to an enormous history of writing on this topic, 3 Lind claims to have believed that his ideas were original. Two earlier publications, which Lind found in Baltimore’s libraries, suggested instead that “the sensic [sic] correlations of Music and Color attracted attention as early as 300 years B.C.” 4 He consoled himself, so he relates, that his ideas were different from those he encountered in those books. By his own account, the relationship between music and color had come to his attention as early as 1850, during his days as a student at London’s Government School of Design. It was only much later that he attempted further to describe these ideas systematically; and, at a “social gathering” in the year 1884, he first presented his ideas to an audience. That year marked a time of transition for Lind, since he had only two years before relocated his family and architectural practice from Baltimore to the expanding city of Atlanta, Georgia. Writing a decade later, back in Baltimore, Lind suggests that the charts with which he illustrates his essay were originally conceived at that time. 5 Yet to introduce his topic, Lind appeals first neither to art nor architecture, but to science. He gives the example, without attribution, of an experiment similar to one performed by Alexander Graham Bell: [O]nly very recently, it has been discovered that when the colored light from the solar spectrum is cast on colored worsted placed in a vessel convenient to receive the rays, sounds will be emitted louder or fainter according to the color of the rays directed upon them – the green ray upon a red worsted, or the red ray upon a 3 Consider the extensive treatment of musical analogies throughout the history of art in Ernst Gombrich, The Sense of Order. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 285-305. A survey of theoretical treatments about color and sound is presented in John Gage, Color and Culture. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 227-246. 4 Lind, op. cit., 1. 5 Ibid. 2 Harmonizing These Two Arts : Edmund Lind’s The Music of Color and its Antecedents green worsted, giving out the most powerful sounds – thus demonstrating that colored sounds are not so speculative after all. 6 The experiments which form the background of Lind’s account had been published as early as 1881 in scientific journals in both the United States and England. Bell described what he called the “photophone,” by which audible signals were produced after transmission by pulses of sunlight. Bell relates further on in his article that worsted, dyed in colors including green and red, responded audibly to the application of light of different frequencies. And although Bell’s interests were technological and not overtly theoretical, the inventor’s report includes his tentative belief “that sonorousness under such circumstances would be found to be a general property of all matter.”7 The generality of this “scientific” principle dovetails well with Lind’s own claims for comprehensive relationships among physical principles and human agency. Accordingly, Lind’s first illustration is titled “Solar Spectrum.” [Figure 02] Figure 02 – “Solar Spectrum Divided into 70 Parts,” Plate 1, Fig. 1 from The Music of Color Lind does not cite a source for this chart, although similar representations had become commonplace by the date of Lind’s essay. The numbers at the top of the figure demarcate segments of the spectrum typically associated with what Lind calls the seven “natural” colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. 8 The division into 70 was atypical, however. Throughout both popular and scientific literature of that time, numerical division of the visible spectrum depended upon the geometry of its graphic representation. Some writers chose, following Moses Harris and George Field, to depict a circular “color space” divided into 360 gradations, based on the most common geometrical metric. 9 Others, such as the French theorist Chevreul, divided the color circle into seventy-two – a number easily lending itself also to even division 6 Ibid. 7 Alexander Graham Bell, “Production of Sound by Radiant Energy,” in The American Journal of Science 126 (1881): 463.