COLOUR MUSIC IN THE NEW AGE:
De-mystifying De Clario.

2: CLASSIC CODES

   The importance of the number seven was intimated by the title of "Sevenness: Sublunar"; the first of its events was introduced by a quote from Hippocrates from the 5th. century BC, that revealed something of the origins of seven's significance:

"The number seven, because of its occult virtues, tends to bring all things into being. It is the dispenser of life and the source of all change. For the moon itself changes its phases every seven days. This number influences all sublunar things."

   The Pythagoreans inherited Babylonian number expertise, enabling them to formulate the famed Pythagorus' Theorem; they also acquired a special reverence for the number six as an important prime factor at the base of the sexagesimal system. The significance of six - equal if not greater to that of seven - was due to it being a perfect number. That is, its factors of one and two and three not only multiply together to form six, but also add up to six. When it is cubed (or multiplied by itself three times), the product is 216, the span in years that Pythagoreans believed the soul must wait in the heavenly spheres before being reincarnated on earth. It was probably this pagan significance given to 6x6x6 that prompted later Judeo-Christian mythology to anathematize 666 as the number of the Beast.

Illustration 3 : "THE BRIAR WOOD" from "The Legend of the Briar Rose", by Sir Edmund Burne-Jones, 1870-90.

"Is there really some hidden significance in the number seven?
It crops up again and again in the ballads of Faery...seven sons, seven daughters, seven knights; seven years of penance, seven years of absence. Spans and combinations of seven were integral to the Faery Process. Seven was the number of years that Hind Estin kept his earthly mistress in Elmond's wood. Seven was the length of time the Great Silkie told his earthly wife to nurse his son before he would return to claim him. A seven-yearly sacrifice of one of their number was made by the fairies to Hades; and seven years was the time that Thomas Rymer of Ercledoune spent in the Otherworld, with the Queen of Elfland. Yes, it was always seven years that mortals spent in that place, and always through wishing for what was forbidden - entering the spell which halts time, which turns reality to gauze, which thrills the nerves with a beauty only longed for and never found until now; a beauty like the inside of music, a dream that none could bear to wake from, but would wake nevertheless - to find reality shrivelled, savourless and dead.
Seven was the penalty;
Seven was the payment;
Seven was the key.
Pythagorus considered it the number most compatible with the Divine,
and our bodies renew themselves every seven years."

Christopher Koch, "THE DOUBLEMAN', 1985.

   Ever since revelations, seven has received better press than six among Christians, who hold there are seven virtues as there are seven deadly sins. Seven became a lucky number and hierarchies, progressions and groupings of seven were common: the most significant heavenly bodies numbered seven, musical convention demanded seven different notes, and both pages and squires in the 12th century were required to undertake seven year's training. The Councils of Trent, held from 1545 to 1563, set the official number of Catholic sacraments as necessary steps for salvation at seven (as distinct from the two recommended by Luther and Calvin). While avoiding the heathen six, the sanctified use of seven is not an exclusively Christian practice. The menorah, the sacred candlestick of the Jews, has seven branches symbolic of the days of the Creation; the proscribed pilgrimage routes of Hinduism include seven sacred rivers and seven holy cities; and the ancient Persian mystery cult of Mithras, the most powerful rival to Christianity in 4th century Rome and whose god shared Christ's birthday, was entered into by seven stages of initiation. Even the present Federal Government has funded a seven step program as a quick-fix for long-term unemployment - seven easy steps of self-awareness 'awaken the giant within' to achieve 'job readiness' in a final breakthrough.

   Many management courses, as well as the self-improvement programs and spiritual panaceas available from New Age bookshops, employ seven-step techniques. The common numerological base obscures significant differences, enough to generate conflicting beliefs - even among colour-music-chakra codes. Their diverse creeds can make for uneasy bedfellows; suggesting that seeds of strife are buried within the New Age movement.
   One clear example of a seven-step code, currently used in Australia, is found in "Colour Therapy", by Julie Gunstone. Like De Clario, she saw significance in a parallel arrangement of ROYGBIV, the C scale and the chakras. But even though their two codes share the cornerstone of 'sevenness', commonality diminishes when details are compared. For example, De Clario located desire and emotion at the second chakra, aligned to orange, but Gunstone relegated passion and other basic emotions to red, at the base chakra. Moving up to the second chakra, she assigned wisdom, inspiration and insight to the colour orange. However, they agreed that yellow at the third chakra stood for intelligence and both saw green at the fourth, or heart chakra as representing balance (since it is central in each system). Logically enough, they agreed the throat was the seat of communication and that the brow accounted for second sight and clairvoyance (as held in folk tradition). Here other minor differences began; by omitting indigo, De Clario had to colour this sixth chakra violet, while Gunstone reserved that colour for the crown.
   The particular importance De Clario attached to violet's position at the brow helped set the two systems apart, but his main point of departure was with the use of white at the final chakra. White was so clearly intended to surpass violet, as used by Gunstone, that it created the main difference between the two codes. A symbol of spiritual completion and a journey into the light, De Clario's white light was the necessary goal of "Sevenness: Sublunar". As the colour worn for mourning in India, white signifies the untrammelled nature of the soul passing on to a higher plane - the white shrouds used to wrap corpses in the West evoke a similar state. A more direct influence may come, once again, from Theosophy and Annie Besant's Introduction to Yoga" of 1907 :

"The mind is like a prism. If you put a prism in the path of a ray of white light, it will break it up into its seven constituent rays and seven colours will appear. Put another prism in the path of these seven rays, and as they pass through the prism, the process is reversed and the seven become one white light. The mind is like the second prism. It takes in the five sensations that enter through the senses, and combines them into a single precept." and "Manas, the sixth sense, adds to the sensations its own pure elemental nature. What is that nature that you find thus added? It is the establishment of a relation, that is really what the mind adds."

   De Clario's system did not account for the black notes; the variation of interval between white notes, of either tone or semitone, was ignored. But most strange of all was the colouristic scope of the note B - it could be construed to represent another whole spectrum, compressing the colours back into the original white light from whence they came. This one note (of no great importance) was given the same colour weight as the entire three-quarters of an octave before it. Thus, an inevitable inconsistency resulted from the use of a symbolic white ending - but there was nothing in De Clario's notes to justify an undue emphasis on B.
   Sir Isaac Newton would never have considered aligning the note B with white - it was merely one increment in a grand scheme of which white light was the ne plus ultra. B was the sixth note of the Dorian mode, a traditional church mode that gave Newton a standard, and which had a white note scale beginning on D. Accordingly, Newton gave B the sixth colour of ROYGBIV - indigo. The more important colours, the red, yellow and blue primaries, were allotted to the notes of the key chord - D, F and A.
   The note B had some importance in the Phrygian mode (starting on E), where it was the fifth note, the dominant, the all-important third harmonic. But B was usually avoided wherever possible; no mode was based on it and it was considered unpleasant to the ear. According to the Oxford Companion to Music, B was "a note which the spiritual advisers of our ancestors considered barely respectable."
   Colour-music codes that employ white note scales (and most of them do) revive the essence of modal music. The key of C major is commonest and paraphrases the Ionian mode - described as late as 1600 as 'the wanton mode'. I know of none that starts on B . It is paradoxical to find B has become extolled where it was once anathema to modal musicians, and glorified in spite of its low rank in the musical hierarchy. Notes were invented so as to avoid B (the black note B flat was the first). The legacy of this discrimination can still be seen on any keyboard today. B is the only white note that does not have another white note a perfect fifth above it. While other fifths (C to G, D to A, etc.) sound clear and stable, B to F is unresolved. In fact, it is a diminished fifth only: the perfect fifth to B is F sharp, which was the second of the black notes added to the scale.

   Even such notional colour-music codes as De Clario's embody ancient principles inherited, through Newton, from the Greeks. From the 6th. century BC on, Pythagoreans had founded the formal basis for Western music with a set of mathematical laws governing the vibration of strings: later Greeks speculated that colour would be bound by a similar set of laws, but lacked the means to investigate them. Plato envisaged a cosmos of eight concentric spheres, each with its own distinctive colour and musical note. The eighth note was the same as the first, but an octave higher; all eight, sounded together, produced the music of the spheres. De Clario prefaced the second night of "Sevenness: Sublunar" with a quote from Book X of Plato's "Republic":

"And on each of its circles was seated a Siren on the upper side, carried round, and uttering a single sound on one pitch. But the whole of them, being eight, compassed a single harmony within the seven intervals."

"And possibly colour may be distinguished into its principle degrees, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and deep violet, on the same ground that sound within an eighth is graduated into tones."

   Ironically, the Greeks might have gained a better understanding of colour by studying painting techniques. It is probable that contemporary painters understood the rainbow-like progression of colours to be got from mixing the pigments available at the time. It is but a small step from knowledge of the palette to methodical observations of spectral effects in nature, such as in rainbows and waterfalls and on thin films of oil. But the imaginative leap between practice and theory may have been more difficult than it now seems. The Peripatetic treatise "On Colours" recommended that observations be made "not by blending pigments the way that painters do" but by "comparing the rays reflected by known colours". Likewise, Plato and Aristotle seem to have considered painting as little more than a charming deceit, and it was accorded a lowly status in the scheme of Greek ethics compared to music and dance. Theirs is the legacy we have retrieved from antiquity, while scant few art objects have survived to demonstrate virtuosity in colour mixing.
   By relegating painting to the position of an inferior craft, the Greeks ignored a most appropriate methodology available to them for studying colour. By AD 1600, investigators into light and colour were equally ill-informed and ill-equipped, and many looked to the known but irrelevant mathematical framework of music for a modus operandi. They also had to contend with overlying theories and symbolism from late classical and medieval theology, astrology, heraldry, alchemy, medicine, magic and other such styles of thinking, Analytic investigation of the properties of light and colour had been sidelined, or so it seems, by the weighty opinions of the great philosophers, which had deflected the development of colour science from a fruitful course for 2000 years.

   It is small wonder that painters sought colour techniques to satisfy their own needs (though the artists' hermetic practices could contribute little to any philosophical or scientific generalities). The specialized paint recipes and colour names that evolved within medieval workshops often seemed ambiguous or cryptic to outsiders, but they served immediate, practical purposes. One concern was to produce artwork of lasting worth, requiring stable pigment mixes that would remain colour-fast. For example, inert carbon blacks could be safely mixed with most other pigments, while a mixture of azure (from the semi-precious stone lapis lazuli) and vermilion (a vegetable extract of cinnabar) was chemically risky, as well as costly. Most safe and efficient artistic practice, whether for fresco work or illuminating a manuscript, would require separate preparation of up to ten individual pigments, sufficient for a day's work. Artworks produced in flat areas of colour, with little paint mixing other than tonal modelling (mainly with black), are those that have survived to this day.
   Two related innovations in the painters' craft emerged at the end of the 13th century - the use of oil to bind pigments and of the palette for holding paint. The oil coated individual pigment particles in a thin film, preventing otherwise reactive chemicals from effecting each other. A whole new range of hues was made available by mixing traditional colorants at the preparation stage. Further, blobs of viscous oil paint of different colours could be placed side by side on a hand-held palette, where they could be mixed even more subtly. An artist could expect to return to the same palette the next day and find the slow-drying oils still useable, unlike traditional, fast-drying egg tempera. A painting in oil, too, would remain wet for some time, allowing further manipulation, including colour mixing, on its surface.

   Oils had become the preferred medium for painting on panels by the middle of the 15th century in the Netherlands, and the practice soon spread to the rest of Europe, With the increase in possible colours came a quest to isolate the simplest, most basic set - the least number that could be mixed to obtain the greatest range of hues. Red, yellow and blue were generally agreed upon, as they could produce secondary oranges, greens and purples as well as tertiary browns, while black and white could provide tonal variation within each hue. Conversely, none of the other colours could be mixed to replicate the painters' primaries of red, yellow and blue.
   As the new technique took hold, so did the doctrine of painters' primaries. By 1600, red, yellow and blue were more or less codified, in a plethora of artists' treatises and manuals made available through the innovation of printing. Still, the concern for primaries seemed mainly an academic one; artists strove to impress authorities with their learned credentials, in the hope that painting might be included with the Quadrivium of liberal arts studied at universities.
   Scholarly alchemists at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor in Prague might incorporate the primaries at the core of their colour-music codes, but their predecessor, the painter Arcimboldo, had no such qualms. His code included such expressive mixed colours as morello (a shade of blackberry), as well as a dark brown. In a spirit of practical collaboration, rather than dry scholasticism, Arcimboldo approached della Vignola with hand-painted colour swatches, hoping the keyboard player could match them with musical equivalents. Here we see perhaps the first attempt to create a colour-music instrument.
   The English chemist Robert Boyle acknowledged the "Mechanical use" of red, yellow and blue by painters and dyers, in a 1664 treatise "Experiments and Considerations touching Colour" that must have inspired Isaac Newton. Boyle continued to scour the surfaces of objects microscopically, for evidence of 'asperities' that might account for the colours they gave off. Soon, Newton was to reveal how colour existed in light rather than the object it fell upon, When his "Opticks" was finally published in 1704, the colour-music wheel tucked at the back showed the painters' primaries aligned to the common chord of a musical key, as part of a colour-music code; Newton hoped to reconcile his own spectral findings to the colours of acknowledged practical importance - red, yellow and blue.
   Painters took Newton's scheme in their stride, simply adopting the convenient arrangement of colours in a circle as a sort of abstract palette. Within a few years, variations on the colour wheel began to appear in painters' manuals: gone were its musical implications; gone too was Newton's precise colour sequence of ROYGBIV. Many of the new arrangements resulted in colour circles of painters' primaries, interspersed with their related secondaries. The colours were arranged around the rim in the order they were mixed (in an approximately spectral sequence of ROYGBV), while complementaries (those minimal pairs of colours, such as blue and orange, that are required to make a neutral brown) were positioned opposite each other on the circle. This basic six-part colour circle is still used today to illustrate the rudiments of painting.
   Major painters, such as Rubens, revelled uninhibitedly in the gamut of colour available with oils. Where primaries of red, yellow and blue seemed emphasized, as in some works by Poussin, their use was not dogmatic: they were an aesthetic choice rather than rote obedience to rule, giving an intellectual coloration to his art to supplement the subtle geometry underlying his compositions. Towards the end of the 18th. century, a Newtonian approach to colour music was used by some art theorists, analysing the works of past masters such as Poussin (who had privately mused on relationships of modes and colours).
   Principles of colour music correspondence became popular among dilettantes of the Romantic period, as the search for universal harmony gained momentum. But most artists were disaffected with elaborate colour theories as impractical - red, yellow and blue were still accepted as the appropriate pigment primaries. Even the lingering English obsession, for codes and theories based around the ROYGBIV of their local hero Sir Isaac Newton, was tempered by warnings from important painters such as Turner:

"And in the science of colour, if she were to stipulate for hues and tones of colour beyond mechanical principles, she would step to self destruction; for recipes of colour would but extend mediocrity, and such practice could but generate manner instead of style."

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