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

3:  CLASSIC CODES:
- Colour

   In Book X of his "Republic", Plato wove a tale describing the reincarnation of souls. Some modern theologians have speculated his vision was a genuine revelation, though difficult to unpack into words. The myth envisaged a cosmos enclosed in eight concentric spheres, as a model of the heavens. Each sphere had 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 Plato's myth of Er:

"The meadow below, and the meadow above; for there is a meadow on the earth, and a meadow too in the sky;
the various flowers of the stars; the rose below, and the rainbow above!"

   From time to time, religious authorities have banned depictions of sacred subjects. The iconoclasts of Byzantium, for example, went about the wholesale destruction of images in the early Middle Ages. We have witnessed an equivalent violence to artwork in our own era: in 2001, the Taliban dynamited second-century statues of Buddha in Afghanistan. Like the iconoclasts of old, they followed the dictates of religious zealots, to purge the country of false idols. Such fractious vandalism (in the Middle East or, indeed, anywhere in the world) is nothing new. In AD 787, the second Council of Nicea had attempted to reverse a destructive tide of iconoclasm. Depictions of Christ and Mary were welcomed, in "both gold and silver and of every colour", but "deceitful colouring of the pictures" was to be avoided. Handbooks were issued to control "the unlawful art of painting", and prescribed colours to be used when portraying saints, prophets and martyrs. (Artists, however, seldom seemed to follow instructions very closely.) Similar strictures applied to colours worn in real life; purple robes, for instance, could only be worn by members of the Imperial court at Constantinople. High status came at a great cost - over 12,000 murex shellfish were sacrificed in dyeing a single toga. The manufacture and trade of royal purple was traditionally a monopoly of Phoenecians, living along the seaboard of present-day Lebanon. When the Hebrew scriptures commented on the fine stuff of the Phoenecians, they sneered at "the prettiness of Tyre", but cloth hangings of their Tabernacle, and in the temple of Solomon, were dyed with the same Tyrrean purple. Christians, too, would clad the whore of Babylon in purple and scarlet - the costume of celebration in the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh. At the same time, Christ (as in the mosaic above) was adorned in the same colours.

Illustration 2 : THE 'DALMATIC OF CHARLEMAGNE'.
This 14th century Byzantine sakkos is embroidered with
Christ in Judgement, seated on the ubiquitous rainbow.

   The moral equivocations of religion altered the symbolic significance of a colour, depending on its context. Even Christian clerics were at first confused, as to what to wear. Some were resplendent in robes embroidered with gold thread, to befit their station at court. As for the vestments of ordinary priests, these were originally an undyed white, or sober black and brown. More sumptuous costumes - of red, green and, occasionally, violet and other colours - were soon adopted for ceremonial use. Their colours were sometimes analogized to the elements - earth, water, air and fire - that were believed to make up the universe. The idea provoked differing reactions among the church hierarchy. While Gregory of Nyssa was to consider it a kind of virtuous contemplation (apart from any truth in the matter), Tertullian held the comparison to be idolatrous. Indeed, the symbolism of the elements had originated in pagan Greece, to become incorporated in astrological beliefs, medical and alchemical procedures, and the rites of magic.
   According to Empedocles, in the 5th century BC, all matter arose from mixtures of the four elements. He likened creation itself to the work of painters, who "take many-coloured pigments to work with, and blend together harmoniously more of one and less of another till they produce likenesses of all things". The analogy invites the choice of four fundamental colours, to match the elements. His younger contemporary, Democritus, described all elements as white in their pure form, except for yellow fire, while black indicated matter in a transitional state. But even this was a convention, for a reality merely of atoms and void. In a parallel development, black, white, red, and a yellow-green were singled out, as basic colour sensations. Plato himself adapted the four-fold scheme, but substituted the quality of 'brilliance' for yellow-green. Not until the 2nd century AD, do we find the colours attached to elements. Antiochus, an Athenian astronomer, aligned them from black earth to yellow fire, though others took up different colours. Tertullian reported green earth, blue water, white air, and red fire. They originated, he said, in the liveries of the four main stables in Rome, which ran horse races at the circus. They also served as a naturalistic description for the seasons. Red summer, white winter, and green spring served the Romans, leaving blue for autumn. Nowadays, seasonal colours can be personalized, on the popular "Colour Me Beautiful" web site. A woman's hair tone - dark to light - and its colour - warm or cool - determine her 'season', in the hope she will purchase coordinated accessories, makeup, and a set of colour swatches.

   Ancient Greek authors, from Democritus to Ptolemy, wrote on painting and colour, but their works are lost. Only the Peripatetic treatise, "On Colours", remains, dating from the 3rd century BC. It recommended that observations be made "not by blending pigments the way that painters do" but by "comparing the rays reflected by known colours". Painting was accorded a lowly status in the scheme of Greek ethics compared to music and dance. Plato and Aristotle made some remarks on colour, but seem to have considered painting as little more than a charming deceit. After making his musical universe in "Timaeus", Plato went on to attempt an explanation of colours. From combinations of four basic sensations - white, red, black, and the quality of brilliance - some nine further colours arose. As to proportions of the mixtures, Plato declared only God could fathom it. He derided any attempts to put number to colour, and the one extant text devoted solely to colour makes no attempt to do so. Scant few art objects survive, to demonstrate Greek virtuosity in colour mixing, though the names of famous painters, such as Apollodorus and Apelles, live on. Such is the legacy we have retrieved from antiquity. By relegating painting to an inferior craft, theorists ignored a most appropriate methodology available to them for studying colour. 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 - rainbows, waterfalls, thin films of oil, and so on. But the imaginative leap between practice and theory may have been more difficult than it now seems. Analytic investigation of the properties of light and colour were sidelined, or so it appears, by the weighty opinions of the great philosophers. Their few remarks barely constitute a colour science, and sometimes deflected investigations from a more fruitful course. When Aristotle wrote of the rainbow, in "Meteorology", he restricted its colours to red, green, and purple, claiming that:

"These are almost the only colours which painters cannot manufacture: for there are colours which they create by mixing, but no mixing will give red, green, or purple".

   Aristotle, in "De Sensu", made an attempt to regulate the order of colours. Between the poles of light and dark, he plotted a course from white, through yellow, crimson, violet, leek-green and deep blue, to black (with grey being a variety of black). The five intermediate colours arose, he supposed, from mixtures of the white and black extremes. From these seven, all other colours could be mixed. Aristotle compared them to savours, from sweet to bitter, "for there are seven species of each". The idea was to take hold in the Middle Ages, and quickly become conventional wisdom. At first glance, Aristotle's colour order seems sensible. By using black and white as standard measures, colours can be found that yield a tonal scale, from lightest yellow to the darkest blue. But, by no means would this procedure be certain. Any colour may vary tonally, yellow perhaps the least, and red can become as dark as most blues. Any darker greens and purples would also migrate towards the black end of Aristotle's scale. Conversely, any colour (including black) can be sufficiently lightened, that it may fall closer to white than a rich yellow.
   Later authors made some small alterations to the Aristotelian colour sequence. The popular 13th century encyclopaedia, "On the Property of Things" by Bartholemaeus Anglicus, moved red to the centre of the scale. [Illustration 4, below] Since Aristotle stipulated all colours to be mixes of black and white, Anglicus decided that equal amounts would make red. He, and many that followed his lead, filled the place vacated by red with an extra yellow, a citrine. (The term indicates the emergence of orange as a distinct colour category, though some called it the more traditional saffron, or crocus.) John Guillem supplied the sky blue of blazon instead of citrine, for "Display of Heraldry" of 1610. The official colours of blazon were settled at seven (with a few minor exceptions), by the 16th century; it is notable that they are the same, at least in species if not in sequence, as Aristotle's seven. Even though heraldic colours had originated among the unrelated colours of planets, precious stones and metals, Guillem arranged them in a tonal order. Like most, he recognized five intermediate colours, made from the two extremes of black and white. He located them according to their distance from either end of the scale, or by their proximity to central red.
   Cennino Cennini, in his practical "Craftsman's Handbook" at the end of the 14th century, made passing mention of the seven. Any suggestion, that each was made from black and white, would be laughable in a painter's manual. So he divided them into four mineral and three artificial pigments - a distinction found in Vitruvius and Pliny - before describing the many paint colours that were readily available. Of course, gradations of a colour were common in art practice. The painters of antiquity had mastered transitions from light to dark, and understood the limits in moving from one colour to the next. For example, a smooth passage between green and purple is achieved by an intervening blue, their common component. Unfortunately, Aristotle's blue lies on the other side of green, next to black. His scale is effectively broken in two - a warm scale from white, through yellow and red, to violet, and a cool scale from green to blue and black. Visual logic would require a spectrum-like progression, as found on colour-mixing diagrams. Aristotle used no prism or colour wheel to guide him, but he did have evidence in the rainbow. He chose to ignore it: his tonal progression was two dimensional, and could give no final running-order of all colours. A more balanced system would consider both hue and tone, as concurrent sequences, and some authors sought to apply more logical colours. Richard Haydocke, in his 1598 translation of Lomazzo's "Treatise on the Art of Painting", corrected one inconsistency when switching blue and green.

Illustration 4 : ARISTOTLE'S TONAL PROGRESSION OF SEVEN COLOURS

"Now there be 7 Sortes of Simple colours, from which all the rest arise,
of these 2 extreames, as WHITE & BLACKE, and 5 middle,
as light yeallow, redde, purple, blewe and greene."
Richard Haydocke, 1598.

ARISTOTLE                                    c350 BC AQUINAS                                     13th C ANGLICUS                                      c1250 CENNINI                                      c1390 THOMAEUS                                       1523 CARDANO                                       1550 SCALIGER                                       1557 DOLCE                                       1565 TELESIO                                       1570 GREGOIRE                                       1576 MOCENIGO                                       1581 LOMAZZO                                       1584 HAYDOCKE                                       1598 SCARMILIONIUS                                       1601 GUILLEM                                       1610 FLUDD                                       1629 LA CHAMBRE                                       1650 VOSSIUS                                       1662 BUONANNI                                       1681

FLUDD'S COLOUR CIRCLE, from "Medicina Catholica", 1629-31.

"Note that the rest of those speciall colours before mentioned, besides white and blacke, are called Colores medii,
that they have their primary Essence from these, either by an equall or uneven for corporation or mixture of these two together:"
John Guillem, "A Display of Heraldrie", 1610.

   Albertus Magnus, the teacher of Thomas Aquinas, had declared the colors were divided arbitrarily into seven, to bring them into harmony with classifications of taste, sound, and smell. In 1550, the famed mathematician, doctor, and astrologer, Girolamo Cardano, took the analogy literally. He aligned white with sweet, and black with bitter, with five pairs of taste and colour in between. (He also conflated white with yellow, and black with dusky, due to ambivalence in Aristotle's text.) Julius Caesar Scaliger would attack Cardano in 1557, claiming mixes were made the way Plato described, and from the four elements, fire to earth, which he coloured yellow, blue, green, and white. Still, like Cardano and many others, he ended by listing the same seven colour species as Aristotle. Even those who played with prisms (Bernardino Telesio and Vidus Scarmilionius) concluded there were seven simple colours, though they moved green to the middle, where it is found in the rainbow. Telesio followed the spectral sequence closely, and thought its colours changed with the waxing and waning of the elements, and their associated qualities. He asserted the red end indicated warmth, the blue end cold, a notion that still divides colours today.
   In some other texts, Aristotle had named green as a middle colour (including at the centre of the rainbow). His immediate successors found it a more restful colour than exciting red, and the ancients ground emeralds as a salve for the eyes. Green reminded medieval churchmen of spring, and some recommended green vestments as an alternative to red. In books on optics and heraldry, green was praised for its beauty and mildness, and, in 1490, the Platonist Marsilio Ficino described it as "the middle step in colours, and the most temperate". Cardano, on the other hand, made red the centre, saying: "We assume that white contains a hundred parts of light, scarlet fifty, black none". Aristotle, too, had suggested a way to estimate - if not measure - the amounts of black and white in colours. In "De Sensu" 3, he judged colours to be harmonious, if the proportions in their mixes resembled musical ratios. Then he considered them attractive, though few colours were accorded this honour.
   After conceding "it is possible to believe that there are more colours than just white and black", Aristotle singled out purple and red, to be compared to the musical intervals of a fourth (ratio 4:3) and a fifth (3:2). If black were the keynote, with white an octave above it, purple presumably contained four parts light, to three of dark. The ratio in red would be 3:2, of light to dark (not fifty-fifty, as Cardano and Anglicus asserted). (Aristotle's musical method should not be taken too literally - white might otherwise contain a measure of darkness, as well as two of light, to conserve the octave ratio of 2:1.) Learned gentlemen toyed at the scheme, with varying results, until a colour-music code of a more thorough kind emerged, in Isaac Newton's "Opticks" of 1704. It is interesting to speculate how the method might apply to all seven colour species, though Aristotle never went so far. Black, blue, green, purple, red, yellow, and white could fill the intervals of Greek music - within a diatonic octave of the Greater Perfect System - as shown below.

Illustration 5 : GREEK THEORIES OF COLOUR AND MUSIC.

   Mathematical ratios, whether ancient or modern, locate notes in the overall structure of a musical system. Such relationships had importance in an orderly universe, according to Plato. In "Timaeus" (the only Platonic dialogue known in Western Europe during the Middle Ages) he used musical structure to describe the cosmos. Greek music was more fully described in Boethius's "De musica", of about AD 500. From the 9th century on, scribes would clarify his text with arced diagrams, of the above kind. They located divisions within the Greater Perfect System, and marked the main Pythagorean ratios. For Aristotle, colours could have intrinsic harmony, too, accorded by the hidden balance of light and dark within them. He thought their virtues could be as expressed as musical ratios. Vincent of Beauvais agreed, in "The Great Mirror" of 1244, that proportionate colours caused delight. Like musical notes, they were governed by ratios that were compatible to the senses. White, for example, might shift a semitone, with the addition of a little red. (Today, we would presume they mix to pink, although yellow was the likely result on Aristotle's colour scale.) The red may have represented the fifth note, or was it a green? - details are skimpy and my Latin too poor to tell. Certainly the green, mixed with some yellow, gave most pleasure to Vincent's eye and ear. Purple and red were Aristotle's choices instead - colours valorized in antiquity, as the Tyrian purple and kermes red dyes of the most costly, honourable garments. Their degrees of lightness were expressed as musical ratios - the fourth, fifth and octave intervals. Though Aristotle elsewhere chose seven main colours (and Vincent reeled of the names of an extra dozen or so), not all were allocated a musical note. A selective approach to colour music, focused on the main Pythagorean consonances, encouraged the search for the most fundamental colours.
   The polyphonic church music of Vincent's era combined contrasting voices in rich harmonies; octave intervals, with perfect fourths and fifths, were its chief accents and points of repose. Medieval musicians retained the Greek schema, as best they knew how, and the Pythagorean ratios were protected by Papal Bull in 1324. But tastes change, in music as well as colour, and fresh challenges emerged early in the 16th century. John Dunstable - representative of the contenance angloise - delighted in the sweet harmony given by the third. He preferred it to the fourth, and as the middle note of a triad of the first, third, and fifth. Together, they form the common chord we are familiar with today. The innovation became widely accepted by 1558, when the influential theorist, Gioseffo Zarlino, penned "Le Institutioni harmoniche". He was obliged to expand Pythagorean theory, to accommodate intervals of major and minor thirds, as well as the sixths. While justifying his changes with number mysticism, Zarlino also appealed to the evidence of the senses:

Illustration 6 : YELLOW, RED, AND BLUE, from
François D'AGUILON, "Opticorum libri sex", 1613 [top left], and
Athanasias KIRCHER, "Ars magna lucis et umbria", 1646 [below left].

   "The number of simple color species is five, and there are three species of mixed colors", wrote François d'Aguilon. The illustration provided, in his textbook on optics, was the first useful colour-mixing diagram to come off the presses. White and black (to left and right) enclose yellow, red, and blue, the three painters' primaries we are familiar with today. To show how other colours arose, d'Aguilon connected the five simple colours with a series of arcs. On the lower arcs, the three primaries - yellow, red, and blue - were linked two at a time. The resultant gold (or orange), green, and purple, were d'Aguilon's three mixed species, now known as secondary colours. His choice of simple colours was not entirely new - Chalcidius had emphasized the same five colours, around AD 300, in his Latin commentary on Plato's "Timaeus". D'Aguilon arranged them after the manner of Aristotle, in a tonal progression between white and black. He further acknowledged Aristotle's choice of red and purple, and their connection to sound, though he refrained from giving their musical ratios. However, the diagram itself was adapted from works on music theory, particularly Boethius's "De musica", where arcs were used to connect notes in harmonic proportions. But perhaps the greatest influence on d'Aguilon was the artist Rubens, who designed engravings for "Opticorum". He embellished the frontispiece of the textbook with a peacock (an ancient symbol of colour), and he may have acquainted the author with the painterly use of colour.
   Athanasias Kircher adapted d'Aguilon's diagram in 1646, keeping much the same arrangement, and adding names for tints and shades of each colour. He appended an interesting table of analogies, including grades of tastes, from sweet to bitter - the sense originally aligned, by Aristotle, to seven colours. The elements were variously divvied up among the colours, as were five increments each of lights, of ages of man (from infancy to senility), qualities of mind (from intellect to ignorance), and of beings (from God to plants, with man in the middle). At the very last, he gave Greek names for musical strings, one for each of the five colours. They span an octave: the lowest note, at black, could be taken as E, followed by F, a, and d, to end on high e and white. (Though the diagram labels the blue string paramese, or b, I assume Kircher intended parhypate, or F. The sequence was corrected in later work, to places notes in ascending order.)
   Colour correspondences, of Kircher's kind, have a long tradition. In "The Blazon of Gentrie" of 1586, Sir John Ferne provided no fewer than fourteen different parallels to the seven colours of heraldry (although music was not among them). The renowned philosopher al-Kindi, in 9th century Baghdad, had conjured up similar analogies from Greek and other sources. He gave each string of a lute its own season, element, and celestial region, dividing the bodily humours, stages of life, and faculties of body and soul among them. Kircher operated in much the same spirit, by adapting d'Aguilon's popular diagram. He elaborated his correspondences in "Musurgia universalis" of 1650, again giving colours to notes. In total, Kircher was to construct three colour-music codes, all quite different.

Illustration 7 : PRIMARIES & SECONDARIES in the New Age

"All ye materialls (wch of themselves doe colour) are Red, yellow & bleu from wch (with fundamentall white) ariseth ye greate variety wee see in dyed stuffs."

"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."