Liberation of the Senses: An Exploration of Sound-color Synesthesia in the Music of Alexander Scriabin and Olivier Messiaen

Abstract

Ascribing color to sound has long been a part of the music compositional lexicon. Performers, composers, and scholars have long relied upon descriptive vocabulary usually reserved for the visual arts. Those who regularly use colors as aspects of critical terminology do so to convey a desired effect, but how do we explain the various accounts of people with synesthesia who literally see, hear, feel, taste, or smell colors when they listen to music? For synesthetes, a stimulus experienced in one of the five senses triggers a response in another sense. Although numerous types of synesthesia exist, I will focus primarily on sound-color synesthesia and the various forms of written, audio, and visual art it has inspired. Synesthesia is not reserved for those persons who experience such psychological perceptions; many people without synesthesia are interested in the phenomenon. This thesis will define the main characteristics of synesthesia and compare the various modes of analysis scholars have presented on the synesthesia-inspired music of Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) and Alexander Scriabin (1872-1914). Special attention will be given to the comparison of Scriabin's Prometheus (1911), a piece calling for the projection of colored light to accompany the music as a visual representation of the composer's subjective color palette, with selections from Messiaen's oeuvre featuring performance instructions described in terms of color. These analyses provide avenues for the comparison of Messiaen and Scriabin's color and tonal vocabularies, and form the basis of a new approach to analyzing their music using color.