THE SOUNDSCORE TO heartBEAT: A NARRATIVE-FORM MUSIC ...

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These instruments usually did not produce music, but attempted to translate music into
color patterns by projecting displays of colored Ught onto a screen. Performances on
color organs were essentially visual accompaniments to performances of musical works.
The most celebrated use of the color organ is in Scriabin's orchestral tone poem,
Prometheus: the Poem of Fire (1908-10). The score includes a clavier a luce or
"keyboard of lights," notated in two parts on one staff The lower part functions as an
optical pedal point, indicating the color of the basic background light flooded throughout
the hall. This color changes gradually throughout the work, denoting the spiritual
evolution experienced by listeners of the music. ^^ The upper part is more active,
involving continuous changes in numerous colored spotiights. A new color is indicated
for each tonal center, and the intensity of the lights follows the dynamics of the music.
Film
Film and Television
The medium of film provided early enthusiasts of color music the first practical
means of creating synaesthetic artworks. Adrian Bemard Klein, an important color music
theorist and builder of several color organs, said of the medium in 1937,
It is sufficient to assert here that the colour film seems by far the
most direct method of reahzing nearly everything which had
occurred to the imagination of the pioneers of colour music.
Hardly the fringe of possibihties has been explored. ^^
Klein saw tremendous advantages in film methods over color organ techniques,
including the elimination of expensive and unique equipment, the precise synchronization
of sound, and an ability to reach a large audience easily. He was particularly sensitive to
the medium's tremendous creative potential to artists. Klein proposed numerous
techniques for the making of an "abstract colour film."^*- These included the preparation
of individual colored cells, animating solid models, and handpainting individual frames of
film with colored dyes.
Cinematography has emerged in the twentieth cenuiry as an important and highl\'
popular artform. Significant and diverse contributions exist in the work of Sergei
Eisenstein ^Alexander Nevskv. 1938, score by Sergei Prokofiev), Walt Disney (Fantasia.
1940), Stanley Kubrick fClockwork Orange. 1971) and Francis Ford Coppola
(Apocalypse Now. 1979). Advances continue in the techniques of film production and
presentation, while an ever-expanding audience, through home video and cable television,
insure its continued success and dissemination.