Did you ever sense that each of the major and minor keys in music could have its own color? Did you ever match up the colors with the tonalities while playing or studying music?
I once read in the Grove that some composers associated certain colors with certain tones or keys. Some of them considered C as white, which is natural with the absence of any sharps or flats on the staff. Just plain white. The guy who took this idea the farthest was Aleksandr Skriabin, the mad genius who invented the “color organ,” precursor of psychedelic light shows and MP3 visualizations. He composed “music” for this organ which, instead of playing notes when you played its keyboard, projected colored lights, each note a certain color. Skriabin assigned the color red to C. Perhaps because red is the beginning of the visible spectrum as C is the beginning of the cycle of fifths.
When I was young, playing through Bach’s Inventions and Rachmaninoff’s Preludes (in all the major and minor keys), and other pieces, and studying music theory, I intuitively sensed a color for each one. These colors still seem to go with the same keys, in my subjective impression. Here’s what I thought of them. I’d like to know if anyone else has assigned colors to notes or keys, and if so, which ones?
C major: white
a minor: pale yellow, pale amber
G major: bright blue, sky blue
e minor: ice-blue
D major: bright green
b minor: purple
A major: yellow
f# minor: dark red
E major: aqua, turquoise
c# minor: plum, dark purple
B major: magenta
g# minor: dark turquoise
F# major: bright red
d# minor: dark violet? (not sure about this)
G-flat major: indigo
e-flat minor: dark gray
D-flat major: maroon, purple-brown
b-flat minor: navy blue
A-flat major: brown
f minor: dark brown
E-flat major: gray
c minor: black
B-flat major: steely blue
g minor: dark blue
F major: light brown, tan, beige
d minor: dark green
Although, when I listen to certain types of music with my eyes closed, vivid mental images conjure up, I can’t really say that I ascribe colours with particular sounds. Shapes, yes, but those are ill-defined and I’d be hard pressed to put them into words. This quasi-visual activity is a great part of my enjoyment of music.
People might be interested in looking up synesthesia. (Sometimes spelled “synaesthesia”.) Roughly, it’s a kind of interwiring of the senses. Most comonly, it causes people to actually see colours when they hear certain sounds. Scriabin was one of the most famous synasthete.
I’ve always thought of notes and colors of the rainbow being analogous to each other in that each has seven members. The sharp/flat notes would be blends of the colors to either side. Here’s how my note/color table would look:
C- Red D- Orange E- Yellow F- Green G- Blue A- Indigo B- Violet
The only flaw I see in this model is that yellow/green would have no representation since there is no such note as E#/Fb. Likewise, magenta cannot be represented since there is no B#/Cb note.
I don’t think a harmonic color spectrum should be based on a linear musical scale. Jomo Mojo mentioned the circle of fifths in the OP and this would be much more logically appropriate to correlate with a color wheel.
Related to the above, it’s not useful to say “there are 7 colors” and then assign them linearly to the seven unequally-spaced notes in a diatonic scale.
Nitpick: Of course E#, Fb, B#, and Cb exist. Have you ever studied anything in a remote key signature? E# is the leading tone of F# Major, for example.
The method I’ve studied to correlate color to key goes as follows:
Simply superimpose a color wheel over a circle of fifths. Orient it any way you like. Let’s suppose C Major is equal to pure yellow. This gives us the following very logical color scheme:
C Major G Major D Major A Major E Major B Major F# Major Db Major Ab Major Eb Major Bb Major F Major
Notice I’ve used tonalities (major/minor) instead of just plain notes. This is so that a modulation or change in tonality will yield a different coloration. If you switch from C Major (no flats or sharps) to C minor, you are modulating to the equivalent of Eb Major (three flats), which is Reddish-Orange.
I should clarify that this is not a subjective formula, as in “C Major just feels yellow to me”. I admit that I don’t really correlate colors and tonalities emotionally or intuitively. This is just an objective, logical way to match the two concepts together.
It’s an interesting study. I played a recital once (viola) where I had the tech guy change the lighting appropriately each time the music modulated to a different key. Some of the changes were quite dramatic, I thought, but ultimately the audience feedback was negative.
I never thought it out that fully, but I remember jamming on the piano, doing random chord changes (um, well, I was also a bit stoned at the time), and I do remember feeling like each key chord has its own color. E major was bright orange-gold. D major was sort of teal or aqua. A major was fire engine red. C#minor was rusty orange-brown. G major was yellow-gold. F major, green. B major, brown-gold. F# minor was bluish grey. Those are the only ones I remember. I thought I was just weird, I had no idea such peculiar notions would occur to anyone else!
Or you could go this route, since there are twelve tones, and rather twelve colors if you reach for tertiaries. I went with the RGB scale (light), rather than RYB (paint), to see if it made any difference comprehensionwise. I’m not sure it did. Still is colorful, though.
I understand using a rational, systematic, mathematical way to do this. I never tried that, though, I just got totally subjective impressions while playing, the way AHunter3 did. They would naturally be different for each person. My scheme as a whole is uneven. There is no orange in it. There are several blues.
For D major and d minor in particular, I got very vivid feelings of bright green and dark green. They made me think of growing plants and pine forests. For some of the keys with lots of sharps and flats, the colors came through murky and not as strong.
If there is any pattern to my tonality colors, notice how the bright primary colors are all keys with sharps, while the keys with flats tend to be earth tones.
I love your list and agree with it completely. Isn’t that strange? I especially love C minor (I assume you mean the harmonic minor) being black. It’s my favorite key. A dirge simply can’t have its maximal weight in any other key.
Libertarian, you are no doubt thinking of Beethoven’s Funeral March (second movement of Sinfonia Eroica) and also Chopin’s Funeral March, both of them in c minor. Wasn’t Chopin’s Prelude written as a dirge for Polish freedom also in c minor?
I’m amazed you totally agreed with my scheme! I would never have expected two people to come up with the exact same colors. But now that you mention it, white for C major and black for c minor do have a certain sense of inevitability, and that’s where I began from. I didn’t plan it or design it this way, it’s just that when I played in those keys, those are the colors that I saw in my mind.
“Beethoven must have written his Funeral March because he had a stomach ache.”
—Frederic Chopin