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Synesthesia as a vehicle for developing the twentieth century Gesamtkunstwerk
Jonah Kappraff
Between 1908 and 1912 Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), an iconic figure of
twentieth century abstract art, worked steadily on developing a new artistic philosophy.
Culminating in a theater piece, Der gelbe Klang (The Yellow Sound), and a long essay
entitled Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky’s work represented a new
interpretation of the German concept known as the total work of art, or
Gesamtkunstwerk. The driving force behind Kandinsky’s influential approach to creating
a fusion of art forms was largely due to popular new research on the neurological
condition of synesthesia. This harmless condition, meaning joined sensation (from the
Greek syn, union and aesthesis, sensation), is experienced when one sensory stimulus
excites an involuntarily response in at least one other sense modality. Because of
synesthesia’s influence on artists and composers who experienced synesthesia and
those who merely knew of the phenomenon, the notion of Gesamtkunstwerk in the
twentieth century became inextricably linked with physiology.
The intersection of synesthesia and the Gesamtkunstwerk
The term Gesamtkunstwerk was coined by Richard Wagner to describe his
music dramas, which combined music, theater and visual arts, and subsequently the
composer and his idea have been commonly linked in cultural history. Theories of a
total work of art did not originate with Wagner and certainly did not end with him, as
attempts to transcend the perceived limits of art have long preoccupied artists. In the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries many theater works frequently employed
simultaneous use of disparate media, and by the nineteenth century the Romantic idea
of a fusion of the arts became akin to artistic Utopia.1 For Wagner and others, the
attraction to the Gesamtkunstwerk lay in the assumption that such works would be more
resonant, more powerful and more spiritually expressive than any one art could aspire
to be.
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In the mid-nineteenth century, the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling
developed the first coherent theory of Gesamtkunstwerk. Schelling’s philosophy aimed
to show that the “system of Nature and the system of the Spirit were both
manifestations of the Absolute” and that the absolute work of art is produced by a
genius who has the capability of conveying the “Nature of Things.” In other words, by
giving the Absolute concrete form (the painting) the artist approaches the universal ideal
of Nature with a tangible creation. For Schelling, the total artwork was the apex of
artistic achievement and a true manifestation of God’s total artwork: the universe.2
Not unlike the development of theories on the Gesamtkunstwerk, research on
synesthesia began gradually but expanded considerably in the nineteenth century.
Although likely experienced throughout history, synesthesia enjoyed only scattered
references in medical and neurological literature before the 1880’s, yet was a frequently
mentioned phenomenon in other circles. In 1690, the philosopher John Locke famously
wrote about a blind man who “…bragged one day that he now understood what scarlet
signified…It was like the sound of a trumpet.”3 Fourteen years later, in 1704, Isaac
Newton attempted to devise a mathematical formula that equated frequency of sound
waves with the corresponding wavelengths of light.4 Besides these oblique references
to synesthesia, there were several overt experiments involving keyboards that displayed
light along with sound as well as keyboards that linked sound with smell and taste.5
Although several significant researchers touched on the phenomenon during the
latter part of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century, the exploration of
synesthesia did not intensify substantially until the 1880’s when a series of papers by
the eminent Victorian polymath Francis Galton truly investigated the condition.6 At this
point, widespread interest in synesthesia, especially colored hearing, proceeded briskly,
and by 1926 it was reported that there existed 533 published papers dealing with
colored hearing alone.7
In addition to colored hearing, other manifestations of synesthesia were
investigated as well and, for nineteenth century artists, the implications of a simultaneity
of the senses became an attractive topic. A synesthete might taste shapes, see colors
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that correspond to letters, or even link an odor with the sound of a familiar name;
whatever the reaction, a synesthete will always experience it the same way. Near the
end of the nineteenth century, as the popular literature on synesthesia became more
prevalent, many poets, visual artists and composers became preoccupied with the
artistic implications of combined senses. Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud are
both known to have written poetry that suggests synesthesia and the novelist Karl
Huysmans created a hero who exhibits a form of taste-sound synesthesia.8 More
famously, the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin, a confirmed synesthete, included
a color-light organ (tastiera per luce) in his fifth symphony, Prometheus: Poem of Fire.
Although unsuccessful in his lifetime, this keyboard was intended to flood the concert
hall with specific colored lights that shifted throughout the performance.
The relationship between synesthesia and the Gesamtkunstwerk gradually
became established as artists latched onto the prevailing philosophies. The German
painter Otto Philip Runge felt that only through music could a true union of the arts be
realized because of music’s unique synesthetic ability. He wrote:
Music, after all, is that which we call harmony and tranquility in all the three other
arts. Thus, there must be music through words in a beautiful piece of poetry, just
as there must be music in a beautiful painting and a beautiful building or any kind
of idea which is expressed through lines.9
Although this statement relegates synesthesia to a more metaphorical role, Runge’s
Gesamtkunstwerk clearly establishes that in a synesthetic total work of art, the
individual elements form a unified whole, transcending the sum of its parts. As a
practical application of his theory, Runge’s described his Die Tageszeiten as “an
abstract painterly fantastic-musical poem with choirs, a composition for all three arts
collectively”.10
Kandinsky’s Gesamtkunstwerk
Despite Wassily Kandinsky’s suggestion later in life that Richard Wagner’s
Gesamtkunstwerk achieved far less “totality” than such visionary concepts as those put
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forward by Schelling and Runge, the seeds for Kandinsky’s artistic theory were planted
in 1890 at a performance of Wagner’s Lohengrin in Moscow. It was at this performance
that Kandinsky had his first truly synesthetic experience. In his memoirs, Kandinsky
remarked:
The violins, the deep tones of the basses, and especially the wind instruments at
that time embodied for me all the power of that pre-nocturnal hour. I saw all my
colors in my mind; they stood before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were
sketched in front of me.11
Partly owing to the effect of this performance, Kandinsky devoted his life to art and soon
after became swept up in much of the spirituality and mysticism that was popular in fin-
de-siècle Europe. Not surprisingly, awareness of his synesthesia had a major impact on
Kandinsky’s interest in the fusion of art forms and, when combined with his passion for
Theosophy and other spiritual beliefs, his ultimate art theory resembled an
encompassing theory of humanity’s place in the universe.
The premise of Kandinsky’s theory of Gesamtkunstwerk begins with his
contention that true realism in art has nothing to do with representing visual reality but
rather rendering the inner harmony and spirituality behind an object’s material surface.
By rendering the inner dimensions of a subject, the artist elicits a certain resonance that
gives rise to a synesthetic response in the audience. For Kandinsky, the artwork is
intended to:
…create a certain complex of vibrations. The aim of art is to accumulate these
complexes and to achieve a refinement of the soul.12
The key to understanding this philosophy is that Kandinsky believed not every
viewer would have the same reaction to a work of art. An audience member’s reaction
would be contingent on their predisposition to a certain form of synesthesia. The highest
quality experience would be one that stimulates a response in multiple senses. For
Kandinsky, knowledge of the differences between viewers’ reactions was a requirement
for the artist and a major downfall of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk. In Kandinsky’s eyes,
Wagner merely repeated the same artistic message in multiple mediums, leading to an
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agglomeration of stimuli but a lack of inner meaning. Going further, the major difference
between Kandinsky and Wagner’s theories was that in Wagner the Gesamtkunstwerk
takes place on stage and in Kandinsky the synthesis of elements takes place in the soul
of the viewer who, in a way, becomes a co-producer of the Gesamtkunstwerk.13
Kandinsky’s individual paintings exhibit important elements of this philosophy,
however it his large-scale performance piece Der gelbe Klang (The Yellow Sound) that
best illustrates his own theory of Gesamtkunstwerk. Completed in 1912 and published
in Der Blaue Reiter Almanach, an avant-garde periodical published by a group of likeminded artists and composers, Der gelbe Klang is a plot-less drama that combines
music by Thomas von Hartmann with dance, colors and lights into a unified theater
piece. It functions entirely as a symbolic fantasy, prompting Kandinsky and Arnold
Schoenberg to agree that it “should not be judged by intellectual rules.”14 The piece was
conceived in such a way that no single facet of the production is emphasized more than
another; music and lighting, for example, are integrated into the fabric of the work rather
than serving only as punctuation.15 The text includes many directions relating to the
character of the music. In scene five, men in differently colored costumes move
independently and in relation to the orchestral colors which, according to Kandinsky,
correspond to the colors of their costumes.16 For Kandinsky, this piece could trigger a
true synesthetic experience for an audience. Unlike some artists, he was not as
concerned with conveying his own synesthesia, but rather generating a spiritual reaction
in his audience.
Kandinsky’s contention that all audience members would be able to experience
some element of synesthesia suggests a parallel between his philosophy and a theory
of the neurologist Richard Cytowic. Cytowic is responsible for reintroducing synesthesia
into the medical literature during the 1980’s with his books The Man who Tasted
Shapes and Synesthesia: A Union of the Senses, and his clinical research on the
condition has led to a resurgence of interest in the topic. It is Cytowic’s contention that
synesthetes can be thought of, metaphorically, as “cognitive fossils” because of their
intimate connection to the essence of things, unhindered by “semantic abstraction.” In
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other words, a synesthete’s brain makes sensory associations automatically and without
any manner of higher-level thought process. To him, and evidently to Kandinsky as well,
the capacity for synesthesia exists in everyone and is capable of being induced in
individuals who are not ordinarily synesthetic.17
Arnold Schoenberg’s Die glückliche Hand
A prime example of a non-synesthete composer who experimented with the
possibilities of this condition was Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951). Schoenberg came to
know Kandinsky in 1911 when, after attending one of Schoenberg’s chamber music
concerts, the artist was inspired to paint Impression III (Konzert) and to begin
correspondence with the composer. The ensuing friendship lasted for many years and
was most definitely a key element in the theory behind Schoenberg’s own
Gesamtkunstwerk entitled Die glüickliche Hand (The Lucky Hand). It is possible to see
echoes of Kandinsky in the text of a lecture given by Schoenberg about this piece:
In reality, tones…are nothing else than a particular kind of vibrations of the air.
As such they indeed make some sort of impression on the affected sense organ,
the ear. By being joined with each other in a special way, they bring about certain
artistic, and, if one may say so, certain spiritual (emotional) impressions… [I]t
should also be possible, under certain conditions, to bring about such effects with
other media; that is to say, if they were treated like tones…If one knew how to
bring them into relationship with each other according to deeper laws than the
laws of the medium. According to the laws of a world rationally constructed by its
creator. [sic]18
The drama itself is symbolic in the manner of Der gelbe Klang rather than a
psychological stream-of-consciousness like the composer’s 1909 monodrama,
Erwartung. The universally named characters Man, Woman (who functions both as
muse and femme fatale), and Gentleman participate in an allegory of “the true artist’s
need to rise above such worldly concerns as the carping of critics and the pursuit of
beauty as conventionally conceived.”19 The Kandinsky-like, pseudo-synesthetic
coordination of the staging with the lighting and music is nowhere more exemplified than
by the so-called “lighting crescendo” in scene three. The scene begins in darkness but
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soon is host to a synchronized crescendo of wind, lighting, color and music that is
meant to mirror Man’s gathering emotion. John Crawford points out that as the
crescendo occurs, the order of colors and the orchestration that Schoenberg chose to
accompany the build corresponds to Kandinsky’s associations between color, sound,
and emotion as outlined in his Concerning the Spiritual in Art.20
It has been well documented that Schoenberg and Kandinsky independently
developed elaborate theories on the expressionistic qualities of art and the requirement
of art to communicate a higher spirituality than merely what is considered beautiful.21
However, the direct correlation between the nature of Schoenberg’s lighting crescendo
and Kandinsky’s theory of colors further suggests that Schoenberg was not a
synesthete but instead deeply influenced by Kandinsky’s rare condition as well as the
philosophy that he derived from it. Der gelbe Klang and Die glückliche Hand were
composed during the same period and speak to the profound effect that synesthesia
had on artists hoping to transcend the limits of their medium.
Synesthesia in later twentieth century art
The relationship of synesthesia to art during most of the twentieth century is often
confused by the tendency toward metaphor and analogy. In our discourse we have all
adopted such terms as tone color, chromatics, rhythmic/text painting and other
descriptive phrases that endeavor to link art with music. Although it is a perfectly viable
means of communicating among the arts, such language has often been confused with
synesthesia, leading many non-synesthete visual artists to declare their artworks as
synesthetic in nature.22
At the Hirshhorn Museum of Contemporary Art in Washington D.C. a recent
exhibition entitled Visual Music chronicled a century of multimedia treatments of art and
music. The thrust of the exhibition is not only synesthesia but also the role that
technology has played in blurring the division between art and music. Beginning with
nineteenth century color organs and the abstract art and music of Kandinsky and Olivier
Messiaen, another noted synesthete composer, and continuing through abstract film,
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light shows and present-day digital installation art, Visual Music explores the gamut of
this sublime overlapping of sensations.23
Despite the proliferation of non-synesthetic art that uses the notion of
synesthesia as inspiration, it is still possible to pinpoint a few undeniably synesthetic
artists and composers who use their gift in the service of a true modern
Gesamtkunstwerk. The two most publicly synesthetic artists are the painter David
Hockney and the composer Michael Torke. Both exhibit colored hearing and use it in
their work while also hoping to be recognized primarily as talented artists irrespective of
their synesthesia.
David Hockney (b. 1937) is well known as a British ‘Pop’ art painter. He is
untrained in music and did not become aware of his synesthesia until he was asked to
develop sets for the Ballet de Marseille and the Glyndebourne and Metropolitan Operas.
In an interview with Richard Cytowic, he described how he responds to music and how
he conceives of sets:
I find that visual equivalents for music reveal themselves. In Ravel, certain
passages seem to me all blue and green, and certain shapes begin to suggest
themselves almost naturally. It’s the music that attracts me to doing the set
designs rather than the plot.24
Hockney listens to the music repeatedly while developing his designs and even allows
his arm to be guided by the music. For him, it is distinctly the melody that dictates color,
shape and the configuration of patterns. Of particular interest to the study of
synesthesia is Hockney’s sensitivity to different shades of a single color. As evidenced
particularly by his exclusively blue design for Stravinsky’s Le Rossignol, Hockney
contends that, “There are a lot of different blues in it. It’s not just all one blue.”25 This
typically synesthetic comment recalls Claude Monet’s revealing experiments with
painting subjects (i.e., Rouen Cathedral and haystacks) during different times of day.
Indeed, one of Hockney’s most important tools in his work is light, because once the
opera is finally staged, the lighting acutely alters the color of his sets. For Hockney,
unlike Kandinsky and Schoenberg, there does not seem to a particular philosophical
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desire to impart his synesthesia to the audience. Instead, he finds that he cannot allow
himself to settle for designs that clash with his innate synesthetic predilection.26
Composer Michael Torke (born 1961) is a reluctant synesthete. Although he
associated colors with pitches and keys from a very young age, he is afraid that his
synesthesia has eclipsed his merit as a composer. In an interview, Torke put it frankly:
It's kind of like this: some people have perfect pitch and some people don’t. What
if I were to make my career on perfect pitch, you'd be like ‘Who cares?’27
Despite his decision to play down his synesthesia, Torke’s compositions cannot fully be
appreciated without taking note of this aspect of his work. Torke has given many of his
compositions colorful titles such as Bright Blue Music, Rust and Copper. These pieces
always remain in a single key due to Torke’s association between color and key and he
aims to explore not only the sonic environment of certain colors but also the unique
moods of each color.
Originally a composition that stood alone, Torke’s Ecstatic Orange was paired
with Verdant Music and Purple in 1987 and was choreographed for the New York City
Ballet by Peter Martins. The title movement of the set, Ecstatic Orange, is a frenetic
foray into the world of a single color and sections titled “Orange Pekoe in Flames,”
“Absinthe and Apricot,” and “Unripe Pumpkin,” among others, indicate the same
synesthetic sensitivity toward shades of one color that is exhibited in David Hockney.
Also, like Hockney, Torke has no particular interest in conveying his synesthesia to the
audience.
I found that some of the people who talk about synesthesia want to zoom into
this very personal spiritual space, which I think is bullshit…None of that really
interests me because the associations I have with music and color are really selfindulgent. They’re mine personally – they’re not anyone else’s. And someone
else who sees color isn’t going to see the same color. And so for me to make a
big fuss about it seems to be doing the wrong thing. What I want to do with music
is to make its expression universal. My personal feelings, I don't think, are
important at all.28
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As the Hirshhorn exhibition shows, experimentation with synesthesia is alive and
well. However, from this interview and David Hockney’s limited use of his synesthesia to
primarily his set designs it appears that, nowadays, true synesthete artists are apt to
distance themselves from their unique condition. Torke says:
It baffles me why synesthesia would be of any interest to anyone, and that it
continues to be kind of a hook for people, both uninitiated and initiated, to get into
the music.
Torke’s apparent disinterest in his own condition is surprising given the rich
history of synesthesia and the arts. In contrast to Kandinsky, Scriabin and Messiaen,
the unavoidability of synesthesia has not had a profound an effect on Torke and
Hockney’s personal viewpoints regarding the role of artistic expression.
Conclusion
The primary difficulty in discussing and diagnosing synesthesia is that it is a
highly personalized perceptual phenomenon. For synesthetes, the reality of combined
sensations is integral to their experience of daily life much like the five basic senses are
for the rest of the population. Indeed, many synesthetes are not aware that they are
different from anyone else until adulthood. Therefore, while the attempt to create a
Gesamtkunstwerk that conjures a synesthetic experience in an audience was a
philosophical goal of artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, the most complete union of the
arts happens only for the synesthete who conceives of it. Still, as demonstrated by the
collaboration of Kandinsky and Schoenberg and by the prevalence of pseudo-
synesthetic music and art in the twentieth century, the very notion of a clinically
verifiable joined sensation advanced the concept of Gesamtkustwerk far beyond the
scope of Wagner’s music dramas.
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Endnotes
1 Domling, “Reuniting the Arts: Notes on the History of an Idea,” 4.
2 Berghaus, “A Theatre of Image, Sound and Motion: On Synaesthesia and the Idea of a Total Work
of Art,” 13.
3 Cytowic, The Man who Tasted Shapes, 52.
4 Newton was unsuccessful at proving that such a correlation existed and Hermann von Helmholtz
further disproved the hypothesis in the 1860’s. Zilczer, ““Color Music”: Synaesthesia and
nineteenth-century sources for abstract art,” 118.
5 In 1724, Louis Bertrand Castel invented the clavecin des couleurs. Castel also suggested the
construction of a clavecin des odeurs, which would theoretically open and shut a row of
scent boxes arranged diatonically in order to accompany chords with a “concert of
perfumes.” Peacock, “Instruments to Perform Color-music: Two Centuries of Technological
Instrumentation,” 399-400.
6 Other significant papers were published by Thomas Woodhouse (1710), Georg Sachs (1812),
Erasmus Darwin (1790), and Gustav Fechner (1876).
7 Marks, “On colored-hearing synesthesia: Cross-modal translations of sensory dimensions,” 303331.
8 Baudelaire’s Correspondances ends, “Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent”
(Perfumes, colors and sounds reply to one another). In Rimbaud’s Le sonnet des voyelles
he assigns colors and rich descriptions to each vowel.
9 Berghaus, 14.
10 Ibid.,, 15.
11 Kandinsky, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, 364.
12 Berghaus, 19.
13 Berghaus, 20.
14 Arnheim, “Arnold Schoenberg and Wassily Kandinsky: Letters, Pictures, and Documents,” 94.
15 Stein, “Kandinsky and abstract stage composition: practice and theory, 1909-12,” 64.
16 Crawford, ““Die glückliche Hand”: Schoenberg’s “Gesamtkustwerk”,” 590-91.
17 Cytowic, Synesthesia: A Union of the Senses, 10.
18 Crawford, ““Die glückliche Hand”: Schoenberg’s “Gesamtkustwerk”,” 589-90.
19 Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia, 42.
20 Kandinsky associates motionlessness/morbidity with brown, green, and violet; strength/excitement
with shades of red; and climax with the most psychologically disturbing colors, orange and
yellow. Crawford, 591.
21 Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia, 48-49.
22 Zilczer, ““Color Music”: Synaesthesia and nineteenth-century sources for abstract art.”
23 Examples of non-synesthetic composers who experimented with visual music include, Ligeti, Amy
Beach, and Duke Ellington. Brougher, Kerry et al. Visual music: Synaesthesia in art and
music since 1900.
Synesthesia: A Union of the Senses, 312.
24 Cytowic,
12
25 Ibid., 315.
ossignol and I thought “It doesn’t fit the
music.” The lines weren’t right….We went through 27 versions of The Rite of Spring sets
26 Hockney states, “We made about 10 palace drops for R
before they fit the music too. Most of the problem there, however, was getting the color
right.” Ibid., 316.
27 Pogoff, interview on www.ComposersOnline.org
28 Ibid.
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