Several months ago, I promised a “multimedia presentation” to accompany my comments on Scriabin’s Prometheus. Well, here it is. Thanks for your patience.

The rambling below was meant to precede the show, but I’ve been advised that that’s not the way to do things, so here you go. Click on the picture of Scriabin’s pathetic personal 12-bulb doodad below to see the animation in a new window. It might take it a second to load the music clip. Yes, it just starts in the middle of the action like that.

Okay, so, now that you’ve seen that – to recap: the piece is scored for piano, orchestra, and “light keyboard,” the last of which is an imaginary instrument, notated like an organ, that produces colored light. The part for this tastiera per luce is a single staff at the top of the score and contains two voices*: one very slow (each note generally lasting for an entire section of the piece) and the other somewhat faster, generally moving whenever the harmony changes.

These notes (if read in the normal way, i.e. as musical notes and not colors) correspond to the harmonies in the music. What I just said is only very roughly accurate, but right now I don’t feel like going into technical detail about how Scriabin’s harmonic thinking actually works – I can hear the massed forces of the academy marching on the other side of that particular ridge. For our purposes let’s just say that every note in the piece is drawn out of a certain chord, which gets transposed all over the place, and every note in the luce part is what Scriabin thought of as the “root” of that chord, at that point in the music.

Why are there two voices? The faster-moving voice reflects the musical foreground; the slower-moving voice reflects the underlying harmony, a harmony which is not always necessarily being played, though it often is, at least in part. This is a lot like the distinction, in normal harmonic analysis, between the key that a piece (or section) is in and the chord that is actually being played at a given time. But the issue gets confused here because I’m talking about “harmonies” as opposed to “keys” – and because, like I said above, I’m not really talking about “harmonies,” – they’re really more like “scales” or “chords that are treated as scales.” Scriabin boasted, with good reason, that in this work, melody and harmony were indistinguishable.** “Tonalities,” I suppose you could say, though it’s a bit misleading. The extremely loaded word “set” is actually fairly appropriate to Scriabin, but I’m not going there.***

Whatever these harmony-ish things are, they govern the music, Scriabin identified them with certain notes, and Scriabin identified certain notes with certain colors. So those are the colors meant to be produced by the light keyboard: the colors of the two harmonies that make up the music at a given point; the underlying “what key are we in” harmony, and the moment-to-moment harmony.

I think I read somewhere that Scriabin intended the underlying color to appear as a sort of field against which the other colors would appear. I can’t find that quote right now, and maybe I just made it up. Anyway, it seems reasonable enough. I know for certain he said something about envisioning the lights as tongues of flame.

This multimedia presentation (read: cartoon) is basically the result of my being curious to see whether it would add anything to my appreciation of the music to see it with the intended colors. The colors you see in the animation are taken directly from the indications in the score (via Scriabin’s “color wheel” as compiled by Bulat Galeev and included in the Dover edition of the score), and handled with a little license, in order to suit the animation. The musical excerpt is from early on in the piece; it’s the first statement of the main theme in its extended form, the same material that will come back near the end with terrifying grandeur. All but the very end of the excerpt have the underlying pitch of B-flat: “Rose (or Steel).” Then, just as the excerpt is ending comes the shift to B natural: “Blue (or Pearly Blue).”

As you see, I put the “Rose (or Steel)” background through a lot of changes (some of which might be a bit much, I admit), and at one point it is overwhelmed by the foreground. But to my mind this is in keeping with the harmonic life of the piece, and hopefully the formal sense of the whole still reflects the formal progress of the piece more or less faithfully. Of course, the excerpt is so short (about 2 minutes out of the 23 in the piece) that you can’t really get a sense of form – the best I can hope for is that this all feels like one coherent “section,” with a new section about to begin at the very end, and with one very brief premonition of yet a different section popping up for a second.

My other motivating interest, here, is in the possibility that well-choreographed music visualizations might be able to actually elucidate the formal design of the music they reflect; Fantasia as actual music education, so to speak. Far too often (even in Oskar Fischinger’s work) the logic behind animation-to-music is not inherently musical. I tried hard to keep the “sense” of the music in the details of the choreography. But it’s very difficult not to let this stuff become merely fanciful… This is something that I think about a lot and I’ll probably be working up a few more of these things in the future.

I dunno, I have a lot more than that to say about my choices here and whether they are good ones, but maybe now’s not the time.

What this is: Animation to part of Prometheus, based on the colors prescribed in the score (at least by name), and attempting to reflect the music visually in a musically-relevant way.

What this is not: A realization of Scriabin’s light keyboard part and/or a visualization of Scriabin’s stated conception of the piece. If I had a team of really good animators, though, I would love to try something like that. If anyone out there wants to fund that project, by all means bring it on.

* For you non-musicians, that means two notes are playing at any given time. Although sometimes one voice takes a break, and sometimes the two voices coincide on the same note, but they are still notated as distinct.

** His boasting quote continues with a lovely image, at least in translation: “There is not a wasted note, not a wedge where a mosquito could get in and bite.”

*** But I do want to note here that a “normal” harmonic analysis of Prometheus – i.e. one based on the standard tonal system (which, I would argue, governs the way we hear the piece regardless of how it was constructed) would not, generally, name Scriabin’s notes as the functional harmonies. In fact, it would not always agree with Scriabin as to when the harmony was or wasn’t changing. So it is important to recognize that the light keyboard is not showing us “what the harmony is” in any traditional sense – the theoretical constructs to which the colors correspond are themselves totally idiosyncratic to Scriabin.