Colour coding

The recently concluded Kandinsky exhibition at Tate Modern was widely appreciated for showing how music influenced the artist’s move towards abstraction. Two concerts featuring seminal compositions by Schoenberg were held alongside talks which explained how abstract forms hit painting and music at about the same time. What was not so fully explored was the blissfully eccentric international movement devoted to synaesthesia, the scientific name for the condition in which the senses are confused with one another, which preceded Kandinsky’s work and gave it a context.

The vogue for Colour-Music was thoroughly a child of its time. Like the invention of idealised languages (Volapük in 1879, Esperanto in 1887 and Ido in 1900, to mention only three), Colour-Music was an attempt to find meaning beyond what was already obvious and available. By 1900 groups all over Europe were talking about combining music and colour in the same performance. Books and tracts were written; new works of art written and painted; a new instrument (the Colour Organ) invented.