One of the qualities that characterizes our string quartet is organising concerts that have an interactive factor- engaging with the audience. I must admit that it was very hard to come up with a concept that would allow the pairing of music and colour in a live concert situation since throughout my research I haven't come across any similar live concert format.
As the research has shown pairing music and colour at any level is an extremely intricate, intertwined and personal matter for everyone. Hence, the biggest challenge was to come up with a plan for the concert that would involve the audience's interactions to the music without complicating the feedback process.
These concerts only lasted abour 30-45' which is definetely not enough time to explain to an audience about the correlation of colour hue with musical pitch and so on, so we decided to rely on their intuition.
The narrative we chose to follow was basedon Goethe's colour wheel and colour theory. We were actually inviting them to let their emotion guide them into choosing one of the six colours.
We gave them the power to vote for the colour they thought would be more appropriate for each of the 4 pieces they listened to (if they felt like sharing it). After each piece, we switched on a torch with the colour that got more votes.
Without fully being aware of it at the time, we realised that this topic was very fascinating for the audience, and that the part they enjoyed the most was to argument with each other about their choice of colour.
It was extremely fascinating to watch them trying to listen to the music very carefully (some of them were closing their eyes in order to better concentrate) since they had such an important task to do right after every piece.
In order to add a fun unpredictable element that matched the theme of the conert we decided to build a small wheel that someone from the audience would spin in order to determine which four (out of the six) pieces we would play, since we didn't have enough time to play all six of them in one setting.
Here is a short video of the day in Rijswijk!
We performed in a different configuration than the usual string quartet semi-circle. We were sitting in a circle in the center of the room. The audience was also surrounding us in cyclic configuration (see image). That way we wanted to be remarkably close to all the people attending the concert, rather than having people sitting extremely far away in the last row.
In some spaces we had the possibility to also include a short presentation (see image).
Repertoire- Crossmodal Correspondence
According to Goethe's Colour Wheel, all colours are a product of these six colours: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, and they all represent different emotions. Since we didn't want the concert to include "serious" string quartet movements, as an effort to make this performance more approachable, we decided to perform six relatively short, tonal (easy to listen to) pieces.
For green and yellow we thought of two lively in major key pieces:
J.V. Brandau Miniatura
B. Britten Simple Symphony: II. Playful pizzicato
We all associated E. Grieg Peer Gynt Suite: Death of Åse with red. However this turned out not to be the case for our audience!
We decided to include a piece by A. Scriabin : Andante (for string quartet), because Scriabin was a synaesthete himself. Since we were talking about each piece with the audience, we felt it was an organic way to introduce synaesthesia as a topic. It is probably the piece that got the most diverse answers!
N. Arctiboucheff Les Vendredis: Serenade, served as dance-like (3/4) short "noble" piece with a classical structure.
Finally we included J.S. Bach Die Kunst der Fuge: Contrapunctus I, since it's a very profound piece. After talking to various colleagues they shared that Bach is probably one of the most popular composers to a "meditation-friendly" atmosphere, which is exactly what we were looking for.
Results
As discussed earlier the purpose of this series of concerts was to witness whether bringing up such a theme on a live concert performance would increase the audience's engagement. Even though we were not looking for consistent results ir trying to prove any correspondence between the pieces we chose and the colours we were able to make two consistent remarks:
1. In all performances, most people would associate Playful Pizzicato with yellow which I found consistent with the literature that there is a clear correspodemce between musical timbre and saturation/hue of the colour.
2. Even though we had come up with a possible association of the pieces and colours (we never really agreed, since everyone had their own personal opinion), it seems that we hadn't taken into account the emotial mediation as a crossmodal correspondence. For example, we would pair Grieg's Death of Ase with red because it is a powerful piece that is about death. However, most people would argue that for them it was blue or puple which in my opinion is consistent with the research. As explained in the emotionally mediated colours section slow minor movements are more likely to be associated with (desaturated) colder, bluer colours. Given that red is a warm colour it indeed doesn't make sense that people would associate it with this piece!
Feedback
The feedback we received was truly heartwarming in all settings. Aftre trying out this concept in Rijswijk in March, we got invited to perform it ten more times in Delft Fringe Festival. People would come after the concert and share all the thought processes that occured during the concert. We encountered two (!) synaesthetes in the audience (one with grapheme synaesthesia, and another with taste), that gave us amazing feedback. Overall, I must admit that the audience was extremely enthusiastic and keen to share thoughts.
