Visual Music

Visual Music Abstract Animation and Synaesthesia

Wassily Kandinsky • The theory and works of Kandinsky were concerned with abstracted musical forms. He describes an experience of Wagner's Lohengrin during the early 1890's: "All my colours were conjured up before my eyes. Wild, almost mad lines drew themselves before me. It was quite clear to me that painting was capable of developing powers of exactly the same order as those music possessed."

Kandinsky completed his first nonrepresentational painting and his treatise On The Spiritual In Art in 1910.

The Colour Organ • Synaesthesia has a long history in human artistic endeavour. Classical Greek philosophers debated whether colour, like pitch, could be considered a quality of music. There have also been various mystical explorations with musical scales and the colours of the rainbow, such as the colour-organ experiments of the Jesuit priest Fr. Castel in the early 18th century. Alexander Rimington and his Colour Organ, 1893.

Music to Colour •

Rimington patented his Colour Organ in 1895, the same year that cinema was invented. The instrument operated by passing light through carefully tinted glass discs.

Coloured keys were arranged above a conventional keyboard, connected to a lens-and-filters system, allowing colours to be played. Various pedals changed the quality of light, allowing dissolve-like effects. Rimington went on to published ‘Colour Music: The Art of Mobile Colour’ in which he argued that the standard repertoire might be performed in colour. He subsequently expressed a wish that musicians would begin to write dual scores, one for colour and one for music.

Alexander Scriabin •

The Russian composer Alexander Scriabin aspired for the Wagnerian idea of the 'Gesamtkunstwerk’ in his hybrid symphony 'Prometheus: The Poem of Fire'. Scriabin was a theosophist who discovered his synaesthetic ability at a concert in the company of Rimsky-Korsakov, when they both agreed that the piece in D major appeared yellow. Scriabin built a colour organ for use in his performance of his symphony in New York in 1915.

‘Let us be born in vortex! Let us wake up into the sky! Let us merge our feeling into a common wave! And in the luxurious glitter of the last flourishing, appearing to each other in a naked beauty of sparkling spirits, we will disappear… we will melt away...’ Scriabin wanted to create a symphony for the end of the world.

Coloured Rhythm

“ I will introduce rhythm into the concrete action of my abstract painting, born of my interior life; my instrument will be the cinematographic film, this true symbol of accumulated movement. It will execute the 'scores' of my visions, corresponding to my state of mind in its successive phases. I am creating a new visual art in time, that of coloured rhythm and rhythmic colour."

• Beginning in 1912, Leopold Survage produced abstract paintings which he called 'Coloured Rhythm'. He hoped to animate these works on film, developing colour and movement to evoke sensation. He intended these abstract images to flow together to form what he called "symphonies in colour". In 1914, he presented his ideas to the Gaumont Film Company to ask for support for further development towards the application for a patent. He was turned down.

The Clavilux • Thomas Wilfred was a Danish musician who turned to the medium of light, which he manipulated into dreamlike compositions of varying colours and intensities. He called this practice 'Lumia'. He wrote, 'The lumia artist conceives his idea as a three-dimensional drama unfolding in infinite space. In order to share his vision with others he must materialize it. This he may do by executing it as a two-dimensional sequence, projected on a flat white screen by means of a specially constructed projection instrument controlled from a keyboard’.

The first Clavilux was constructed in 1919, in a studio on Long Island

Hans Richter • After a brief career as a Cubist, Richter became, with Tristan Tzara and Hans Arp, one of the founding members of Zurich Dada. He returned to Germany in 1919. A cinematic avant-garde was beginning. Painters and photographers came together to extend the strategies of Modernism into the cinema. The focus was on the nature, properties and functions of the camera, film strip and the screen.

Rhythmus 21, 1921 • “Rhythm expresses something different from thought. The meaning of both is incommensurable. Rhythm cannot be explained completely by thought nor can thought be put in terms of rhythm, or converted or reproduced. They both find their connection and identity in common and universal human life, the life principle, from which they spring and upon which they can build further”.

The constantly shifting forms render the spatial situation of the film ambivalent

Viking Eggeling • Viking Eggeling shared a studio with Hans Richter in the Swiss countryside. In 1920 Eggeling and Richter wrote the pamphlet 'Universelle Sprache' in which they likened abstract art to a kind of universal language.

Symphonie Diagonale • Geometric shapes rhythmically emerge and recede along an imaginary diagonal axis. The effects of shadow and light magnify the perpendicular lines, while the parallel and curved lines create a harmony of shapes that play with light. An animated tableau of circles and lines appears and then fades away. This film comprised of 6,720 drawings.

Eggeling used abstract forms that corresponded, in his mind, to movement. He insisted that his films be screened in absolute silence

Walter Ruttmann • After studying architecture and having worked as a graphic designer, he began working with film. Ruttmann would often play the cello at screenings of his films, and pioneered several animation techniques, including the use of wax plates. Ruttman later went on to work with Leni Riefenstahl, editing "Olympiad" in 1936, and was killed during World War II while making a newsreel.

Lichtspiel Opus I

At the end of WW1, Ruttmann wanted to produce "paintings set in motion'. The film combined the separate art forms of painting and music into one work.

• Lichtspiel Opus I was the first abstract film to be shown in public, in 1921. Ruttmann was trained in painting and music, both of which show up clearly. Ruttmann painted on small glass plates and photographed each drawing one frame at a time before modifying or adding and finally handcoloring.

Oskar Fischinger • In 1921, Fischinger was thrilled by the first performance of Walther Ruttmann's Lichtspeil Opus No.1 and vowed to devote himself to absolute cinema, which could best combine his skills at music and graphic art. At first, he experimented with cutting through shapes of wax, shooting a frame for each cut. He was influenced by Tibetan Mandala shapes.

Oskar Fischinger working in his studio in Los Angeles (c.1942)

Allegretto • Branded a ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis, Fischinger fled to the US. He worked for Paramount Pictures and started ideas which developed into Disney's 'Fantasia'. He worked on one sequence but left abruptly when his styles were simplified. In Allegretto (1936), radiating concentric circles pulse while rhomboids and diamonds dance and shimmer suggestively across what look like radio waves, all synched perfectly to the score.

"It was like a different language that I didn't know existed," says Pete Docter, director of the Pixar hit Monsters Inc. "Here's a guy who's doing something completely different with animation."

Circles

Made with Gaspar Colour (a 3-color process pre-dating Technicolor) which Fischinger helped to invent, ‘Circles’ was one of the first European color films.

• In 1933 Fischinger made a film called Circles. Only at the close was it apparent that this play of form and colour was a commercial for an ad agency. The film evaded the usual Nazi censorship restrictions against "degenerate" art.

Mary Ellen Bute • During a 25-year period, from 1934 until about 1959, the abstract films Mary Ellen Bute made played in mainstream movie theatres around the US, usually as the short with a first-run feature, such as Mary of Scotland, The Barretts of Wimpole Street, or Hans Christian Andersen. Millions saw her work, many more than most other experimental animators.

Absolute Film

From Bute’s film ‘Tarantella’. Her ideas are remininiscent of Richard Wagners term, ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ , first used in 1849, for a total, integrated or complete artwork.

• “We view an Absolute Film as a stimulant by its own inherent powers of sensation, without the encumbrance of literary meaning, photographic Imitation, or symbolism. Our enjoyment of an Absolute Film depends solely on the effect it produces: whereas, in viewing a realistic film, the resultant sensation is based on the mental image evoked”.

Jordan Belson • Jordan Belson studied painting before seeing Fischinger's work in 1946. He first animated real objects (pavements in Bop-Scotch [1952]). They foreshadow his later mystical concepts. Between 1957 and 1959, Belson collaborated in the historic Vortex Concerts, which combined the latest electronic music with moving visual abstractions projected on the dome of Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco.

Samadhi • Samadhi (1967) supposedly evokes the ecstatic state achieved by the meditator where individual consciousness merges with the Universal. "I hoped that somehow the film could actually provide a taste of what the real experience of samadhi might be like."

Later, he added, "It is primarily an abstract cinematic work of art inspired by Yoga and Buddhism. Not a description or explanation of Samadhi."

Anima Mundi • Anima mundi is a pure ethereal spirit claimed was proclaimed by some ancient philosophers to be diffused throughout all nature. It is the title of a 1991 short documentary film directed by Godfrey Reggio, focusing on Nature and Wildlife, scored by Philip Glass.

The movie was commissioned for use by the World Wildlife Fund in their Biological Diversity Program.