Scriabin, teclado de luz, ouvido absoluto

Um muito novo Evgeni Kissin toca o Étude Op.8 n. 12.


O grande Horowitz toca o mesmo Étude.
A minha existência toda cabe nestes dois minutos e vinte e quatro segundos.


E o próprio Scriabin a tocar o seu Étude.



Revisitei hoje Scriabin a propósito da cinestesia, uma condição física que afecta um número muito reduzido de pessoas. Essas pessoas veêm cores nos diferentes sons. A cinestesia está muitas vezes associada ao ouvido absoluto, a capacidade (de 1 em cada 10.000 pessoas) de reconhecer qualquer nota retirada do seu contexto. Conheci uma delas, é uma característica surpreendente.

Scriabin, diz-se, sofria de cinestesia (ou seria por escolha própria, mais místico que cinesteta). Não sei se teria ouvido absoluto. O seu teclado de luz ainda hoje faz a ligação entre a cor e a música. Curiosidade: o timbre é a cor da música, a coloratura um dos elementos de virtuosismo do bel canto. Soprano de coloratura, Kathleen Battle canta o monólogo de Zerbinetta.



"In his autobiographical Recollections, Sergei Rachmaninoff recorded a conversation he had had with Scriabin and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov about Scriabin's association of colour and music. Rachmaninoff was surprised to find that Rimsky-Korsakov agreed with Scriabin on associations of musical keys with colours; himself skeptical, Rachmaninoff made the obvious objection that the two composers did not always agree on the colours involved. Both maintained that the key of D major was golden-brown; but Scriabin linked E-flat major with red-purple, while Rimsky-Korsakov favoured blue. However, Rimsky-Korsakov protested that a passage in Rachmaninoff's opera The Miserly Knight supported their view: the scene in which the Old Baron opens treasure chests to reveal gold and jewels glittering in torchlight is written in D major. Scriabin told Rachmaninoff that "your intuition has unconsciously followed the laws whose very existence you have tried to deny."

While Scriabin wrote only a small number of orchestral works, they are among his most famous, and some are frequently performed. They include three symphonies, a piano concerto (1896), The Poem of Ecstasy (1908) and Prometheus: The Poem of Fire (1910), which includes a part for a "clavier à lumières", also known as the Luxe, which was a color organ designed specifically for the performance of Scriabin's symphony. It was played like a piano, but projected colored light on a screen in the concert hall rather than sound. Most performances of the piece (including the premiere) have not included this light element, although a performance in New York City in 1915 projected colours onto a screen. It has erroneously been claimed that this performance used the colour-organ invented by English painter A. Wallace Rimington when in fact it was a novel construction personally supervised and built in New York specifically for the performance by Preston S. Miller, the president of the Illuminating Engineering Society.

Scriabin's original colour keyboard, with its associated turntable of coloured lamps, is preserved in his apartment near the Arbat in Moscow, which is now a museum dedicated to his life and works."
(da Wikipedia, sobre Scriabin)

Notáveis cinestetas: Bernstein, Duke Ellington, David Hockney, Ligeti, Liszt, Messiaen, Nabokov, Rimsky-Korsakov, Sibelius, Kandinsky.

E as correspondências de Scriabin, segundo Galeyev e Galechkina.



"The violins, the deep tones of the basses, and especially the wind instruments at that time embodied for me all the power of that pre-nocturnal hour. I saw all my colors in my mind; they stood before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me.", Kandinsky sobre a sua audição de "Lohengrin", de Wagner.


---
Visual Music, uma exposição no Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, no link parte da exposição online.
Página dedicada a Scriabin, onde é possível ouvir muitas das suas composições, embora as interpretações...
Artigo interessante sobre cinestesia na NPR: "For Pianist, Music Unleashes Rainbows of Color"
"Synesthesia" and Artistic Experimentation" de Crétien van Campen
"The Mythical time in Scriabin" de Lia Tomás
"Sound and Vision" no Guardian