Synesthesia

Alexander Scriabin was a Russian pianist/composer who lived from 1871-1915. His mother was a concert pianist, but she died when little Alexander was but one. Somehow, however, he inherited her gifts, and became a prodigy on the piano, composing and performing as well as even building pianos at an early age. He even tried his hand at conducting an orchestra of children as a little boy, resulting, sadly, in tears.

He grew up and his music was well-received. In fact, he was considered something of a visionary. He enjoyed moderate fame and success during his lifetime in his home country and always pushed the envelope, to greater or lesser success. As is quite often the case when mad genius is mixed with an artistic character, he led a slightly less-than-exemplary moral life. He abandoned his wife and children to woo and wed a much younger student. And there was no shortage of tragedy in his life, too. Perhaps the greatest was the death of a favorite son, a child with his second wife, who was an aspiring composer following in his father’s footsteps. The poor child died of drowning after a boating accident at age eleven.

What interests me about the man is something similar we have in common. Alexander, it is said, or he likely said it, had the condition of synethesia, where one experiences a sensation in one sense as a response to a stimulus in another. In Scriabin’s case, he ‘saw’ music as colors. Now, I don’t have that exact condition, but as a songwriter and musician for most of my life, I often thought of chords as colors, often when visualizing my fingers on a fretboard. My scheme that I envisioned was:

E - Black
A and D - Silver or white
C - Yellow
G - Orange
F - Dark red
F# - Magenta
B - Blue
Bb - Gray

Those were the main chords I wrote with.

Scriabin's scheme was a little different. Here’s what he saw:



I find it quite interesting that we both saw F, G, and B the same. But as you can see, his is a flowing of one color / chord / key into the next, whereas mine was pretty much purely arbitrary.

Scriabin had planned to utilize this ability in a series of concerts where the appropriate colors would be flashed out over the stage and audience while the orchestra played. Though overall the idea flopped at the time, he could be credited with creating the first laser light show.

It is truly sad that the world would never see these and his other ideas developed. In one of the more tragic fates in the artistic world he died young, at age 43, after a shaving cut on his lip became infected and resulted in blood poisoning.