Art on the treshold
A collective artwork originates with the interaction of three artists:
light designer, pianist and eurythmist.
The light designer creates a sphere of light with the mixing console
in harmony with music from the pianist’s playing.
Each tone corresponds to a certain colour,
each form (tone-circle-image) to a certain harmony.
With her movement, the eurythmist forms a colour sound space,
which is created by the interplay between the other artists.
Though invincible
It stands before me
Whilst still grows
In me the strength
To overcome
The threshold.
Through the art
The light
The tone
In me
I step across.
Nourishing
I now go
Through the life
That is within me.
Through Sound
Tone
Colour
Light.
27.2.2019 Atmani
Musicians and artists have always been interested in the relationship between sound and color. In music we talk about the timbre or color of a musical note, in painting the tone or pitch of a color.
Many artists have looked for a relationship between painting and the composition of music. The first to do so was Modest Mussorgsky who composed a work “Paintings at an Exhibition” based on the pictures of Viktor Hartmann. At the time of the emergence of theories of color proposed by Goethe, Runge, Johannes Itten, Kandinsky and Jawlensky, many artists were occupied with their own investigation of the relationship between notes, sound and color.
In 1911, Alexander Skrjabin pioneered a new phase by writing two of the “voices” in his score for Prometheus to be “sung” by light. Since coming across the score for Prometheus in Moscow in 1992/93, the author Atmani has been exploring ways to connect notes, sound and color in one instrument.
Atmani’s work with the engineer and computer scientist Dr. Ralf Tita made possible the implementation of his vision. The first step of the implementation was the development of the Tone-Circle-Images, which are a mathematical projection of notes. This method allows a note to be depicted as a circle, a second note as a second circle, but when both are played together (an interval) the result is a specific structured figure (Originally, the Tone-Circle-Images were explored in relation to the motion of the astronomical planetary movements.).
Both Alexander Skrjabin and Dr. Rudolf Steiner created schemes assigning colors to tones. In a further development of this technique, a laser sensor integrated under a piano keyboard records the movement of a key and sends the measurement to a computer. The computer calculates the Tone-Circle-Images and the colors, which in real-time are then flooded onto the projection surface/wall and into the room. In this process a spectrum of tones is always assigned a base color chosen by the pianist independently of the piano key-color-sounds for a certain phase of a composition. The rationale behind this is a development of the Russian theory of music and composition that views the sound spectrum as the beginning of modern music. If music up to Debussy and Wagner is just about tonal, both gradually become a sound spectrum that replaces the tonal order.
For instance, Skrjabin’s Prometheus is based on the Prometheus chord. Thereafter the sound spectrum becomes the starting point for the composition. The colors of the base phase indicate and intensify the basic style of the sound spectrum whereas the color correlations of the individual notes depict the internal movement. The figures produced by the Tone-Circle-Images can also be differentiated by color allowing the tension between the elements of the composition to emerge clearly.
The pianist operates the controls on the grand piano via a mixer that he or she plays similarly to the various registers of a church organ. This is the way the light organ works, which in fact has also been aided by advances in lighting as now the lights themselves can change color.
Until now, sound, color and form were always separate. In the light organ they become a new, large instrument engaging the human senses, those of the audience and also the pianist.
Years of work by Dr. Ralf Tita along with Atmani are responsible for its design. He absorbed the intuition and vision and independently carried out the technical implementation that Atmani accompanied and encouraged.
Visualization of sounds is a major part of cymatics. As such, the light organ is the perfect expression of the new art of cymatics, in which people are animatedly immersed in tone, sound and color while simultaneously a balance is maintained between art and science (colors and Tone-Circle-Images).
The world premiere of the light organ as played by the Russian composer and pianist Nina Aristova will take place on April 26 2017 at the MOCA – Museum of Contemporary Art in Beijing, China. She will be premiering a piece: seven laments of the song “Es ist Nacht” (It is Night) from Atmani’s “Manengesang” (Song of the Manes).
The light organ is the highlight of the sub-exhibition “Breakthrough to Light” from the Werstatt-Atmani and part of the main exhibition “Partnerships” of the Gallery of Pashminart together with the MOCA Beijing from April 26 to June 10, 2017.