Color piano

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The color piano is a keyboard instrument . The eye piano is often mentioned as a precursor. The term colored light wing is also used. By pressing the keys down, optical impressions, for example light projections, are generated. The acoustic sounds of the piano can also be heard. This revived the traditional color-tone discussion in the 18th century. In 1912, the Russian painter and graphic artist Wassily Kandinsky tried to combine music with color with his stage composition The Yellow Sound . 2015 is the International Year of Light . On this occasion, a colored light wing was presented in Berlin.

Louis-Bertrand Castel

The French mathematician and Jesuit Louis-Bertrand Castel developed the first designs for a color piano in 1725. When a key was depressed, a color assigned to the key appeared. Twelve different colors were assigned to the twelve chromatic tones of an octave . The color brightness was adjusted according to the pitch. The higher the tones, the lighter the colors.

Alexander Scriabin

Scriabin's keyboard with tone-color assignment

The Russian composer Alexander Nikolajewitsch Skrjabin (1872–1915) created what is probably the world's first “light show” as a synaesthetist : with his Prometheus (op. 60) he created an orchestral work with a part for a color piano for the first time in 1910/11. The work for choir, orchestra and color piano premiered in New York in 1915. A de facto mute clavier à lumière was used for this .

Further developments

Among others, the Russian Wladimir Dawidowitsch Baranow-Rossiné (1917), Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack and Kurt Schwerdtfeger ( Bauhaus ) with the reflective color light plays (1922), the Hungarian pianist and composer Alexander László (1925) and the Dadaist poet Raoul Hausmann (1927) developed the color piano further in the following years. The first electronic light organs were developed around 1960 and today's keyboards together with laser technology or projection lamps represent successors to the original color piano.

idea

The different developments in color light music , including the color piano, are linked by the same idea: to create a holistic work of art by combining all the arts. Whether Caspar David Friedrich , Arnold Schoenberg , Ligeti , Messiaen or Wassily Kandinsky , these artists inspired the idea of the union of all the arts, and they tried to realize this. For example, in his work The Happy Hand , Arnold Schönberg describes exactly in which colors the stage should be illuminated and specifies in the score exactly when and how the colors should change.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Media Art Network | Castel, Louis-Bertrand: eye piano. In: www.medienkunstnetz.de. Retrieved August 24, 2015 .
  2. ↑ colored light wing - color | Light | Music. In: www.farblicht.ch. Retrieved August 24, 2015 .
  3. ↑ Sabine Henkel: The ride on the color piano . In: The world . August 3, 1999 ( welt.de [accessed on August 24, 2015]).
  4. ^ Corina Caduff: Fantom color piano. (PDF) In: Zeitschrift für Deutsche Philologie 121. Volume 2002. Werner Besch, Norbert Oellers, 2002, accessed on August 24, 2015 .
  5. ↑ Jörn Steigerwald: Corina Caduff: The literarization of music and visual arts around 1800. (PDF) 2003, accessed on August 24, 2015 .
  6. ↑ Anabell Heiß: Interaction of image and sound - image sound. (PDF) In: Studienarbeit. 2007, accessed August 24, 2015 .
  7. ^ Salon Sophie Charlotte - Moved into the LIGHT | International year of light. In: www.jahr-des-lichts.de. Retrieved August 24, 2015 .
  8. ↑ Michal Wlodkowski, Matthias Tarasiewicz: WORKS «Color Piano« See This Sound. In: beta.see-this-sound.at. Retrieved August 24, 2015 .
  9. ↑ Colored Light Music - Color | Light | Music. In: www.farblicht.ch. Retrieved August 24, 2015 .
  10. ↑ Media Art Network | Scriabin, Alexander: Promethée. Le Poème du feu. In: www.medienkunstnetz.de. Retrieved August 24, 2015 .
  11. ↑ Michael Haverkamp: Visualization of auditory perception - historical and new concepts. A phenomenological overview. (PDF) 2003, accessed on August 24, 2015 .
  12. ↑ Andreas Muxel: color processor. (PDF) In: Diploma thesis. 2003, accessed August 24, 2015 .
  13. ↑ Tobias Mur: Music visualization today. (PDF) 2007, accessed on August 24, 2015 .