Visual Accompaniment in Light

VISUAL ACCOMPANIMENT IN LIGHT With the new use of light as an independent medium for aesthetic expression through form, motion and colour and the consequent beginning of an art of light (see COLOUR MUSIC), a promising field is opening up to artists and experimenters whose work in the new medium will, without a doubt, deeply affect the older art forms, particularly music and the arts of the theatre.

Visual Accompaniment to Music.

From Castel (1688– 1757 ) up to the present day a considerable number of experiment ers have attempted to assign a permanent colour to each step in the musical scale, but the results in actual performance have been without scientific or aesthetic justification, partly because the claim that a physical correspondence exists between sound and light vibrations has been permanently disproved by the physicist, and partly because only formless colours were employed and the absence of form and motion, the two most important factors in all visual experience, proved too great a handicap.

The only reasonable solution seems to be the complete libera tion of the visual artist to compose, in form, motion and colour, a visual accompaniment to an already written musical composition and of the musician to compose similarly in melody, harmony and rhythm a musical setting to a silent visual composition with all the freedom he now has in setting a poem to music.

One of the first attempts in this direction was demonstrated by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra and Thomas Wilfred and his clavilux (q.v.) in Carnegie Hall, New York in Jan. 1926. For each of the four movements of Rimsky-Korsa kov's "Scheherazade" Wilfred had composed a mobile visual setting which he played on a large white screen erected between the orchestra and the auditorium. Each musical motif had a cor responding mobile form and colour motif and these were blended and interwoven as the music was played. It was here demonstrated that an aural crescendo can effectively be accompanied by a visual diminuendo and also that the so-called cool colours (blue, tur quoise and green) introduced in definite forms in certain rapid mo tion progressions, can well be used with an aural climax which invariably would have suggested "red" had only formless colour been employed. Form and motion alone have also been used in mobile white, grey and black accompaniments to music.

Visual Accompaniment to the Drama.

The art of light also opens up fascinating possibilities in the use of mobile light settings of abstract, symbolic or even realistic nature which will fold themselves around the action of a play, opera, pantomime or dance as closely as music around a poem—so delicately blended and changed that the spectator, while aware of the unusual em phasis it would give to every scene, would seldom be conscious of the lighting itself.

But before such possibilities can be touched upon it will be necessary to revise the entire lighting system of the theatre. Even the most elaborate of the present day equipments are still manip ulated by the electricians from large cumbersome switchboards, generally so placed in a corner of the stage that the several opera tors are unable to see the results produced. This switchboard should be replaced by a light-keyboard placed in the orchestra pit or in a modified prompter's box under the front part of the stage from which the light-artist can control all visual possibili ties by the sweep of a hand over tiny low voltage keys. Further more, a standardization of lighting units and keyboards must be arrived at in order to permit the playing of a written light-score in any theatre without the necessity of transporting the heavy and delicate equipment as is now the practice.

Having the manuscript of the play before him and using the white cyclorama or backdrop as a painter's canvas the scenic art ist at the light-console can then proceed to illuminate the actors and the necessary material units, at the same time building up, from special projectors, mobile visual settings in apparent space surrounding the action and recording it all in a suitable notation below the lines of the play. Settings projected in light have been used for many years, generally painted in colour upon glass or mica disks which were then rotated in the focal plane of a power ful stereopticon, but only on rare occasions have these been ex ecuted by the scenic designer as an integral part of the setting. They have mostly consisted of detached "effects" such as drifting clouds, water ripple, etc., superimposed upon already painted drops, and the results have lacked co-ordination and depth.