Son ou Lumière

This essay will be about abused cats and singing rainbows.  If you have a low tolerance for astonishing coherence of this sort, I suggest you stop reading and turn to the op-ed page of your morning paper.  A current Netflix sensation is a series entitled “Don’t **** with Cats” in which my asterisks of course stand for the universal obscenity ubiquitous in the speech of the verbally challenged, and now used indiscriminately in more or less meaningless nominal, verbal, adjectival, prepositional, and interjectional forms quite without reference to pleasurable conjunction of any sort.   Well a while ago a psychopath mounted on the Internet a video of his demented act of asphyxiating two adorable kittens.  This barbarism outraged a vast legion of cat-lovers, which as it turns out is really the group with which you should not ****, since two of its more obsessive and cyber-fluent members spent a couple of years on-line tracking down the culprit, one Luka Magnotta, a youthful and very weird Canadian narcissist who had later escalated from kittens to college students, one of whom he murdered and dismembered, also on videotape.  Luka is now and permanently in prison in Quebec. 

“As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods,” says Gloucester in King Lear.  “They kill us for their sport.”  Experts in abnormal psychology have noted that boys who torment animals not infrequently later exhibit other serious pathologies, including homicidal violence against fellow human beings.  But felines have always been in a special category as victims of allegorical slaughter.  I refer you to the well-known work of my friend Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History.  With this book we get somewhat closer to today’s actual subject—the ocular harpsichord of the Abbé Louis-Bertrand Castel—but only somewhat and only after briefly considering its theoretical antecedent, the cat-piano.  The cat-piano was supposed to work in the following way.  A number of differently voiced cats, carefully selected by a process of caterwaul-auditions, were to be affixed to boxes within a clavier-like instrument.  Instead of initiating the sound of vibrations from tuned strings, the action of the pianist, or rather painist, caused sharpened hammers to jab the cats, whose induced screeches of agony would paradoxically rise in a feline harmony of beautiful meowsic.  We must remember that through the eighteenth century the torture of small animals seems to have been widely regarded as an acceptable amusement, though we have good reason to hope that the cat-piano never got off the drafting board.

the (imaginary) cat-piano

The grotesque (or perhaps satiric?) idea of the cat-piano may well have derived from some of the acoustical speculations of the Jesuit genius Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680), who in 1650 had published his amazing book, Musurgia universalis, a title I translate freely as “Everything Anybody Could Possibly Ever Know About Music”.  Two generations later this book made a big impact on another erudite Jesuit, the French mathematician Louis-Bertrand Castel (1688-1757).  From both the aesthetic and the scientific points of views many Enlightenment thinkers were concerned with the relationships among the human senses.  Diderot writes a letter about the blind, and another about deaf-mutes.  Rousseau invents a crackpot musical scale.  Other great minds try to squeeze out every drop of juice in the analogy between poetry and painting found in a line of Horace’s Ars poetica.  Here I can suggest another terrific book by another friend—Lawrence Lipking’s The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England.

Father Castel became fascinated with the relationships between vision and audition, seeing and hearing.  He became seized of the idea of inventing a musical instrument that would produce patterns of color rather than patterns of sound.  Castel was brilliant, bull-headed, and highly argumentative.  Voltaire called him “the Don Quixote of mathematicians” because of his propensity for picking arguments with great scientists of his age, especially Sir Isaac Newton.  Newton had done important work on the refraction of light, including identifying the “seven primary colors” as still conventionally catalogued.  Furthermore Newton had already proposed an analogy between the seven colors and the seven musical notes of the expanded scale of Guido d’Arezzo.

 

Sir Isaac Newton's correlation of the primary colors and the musical scale

Castel was still half-medieval in his essentially mystical view of the nature of physical reality.   His mind still danced to the mundana musica, the silent “music of the spheres”, as had the minds of Boethius and Dante.  That music should be studied primarily as a branch of mathematics seemed obvious to him.  He was a noisy anti-Newtonian on important topics of physics, retaining his commitment to René Descartes and his followers, but he enthusiastically embraced the idea of a “music” that would be visual rather than sonic, and in 1725 he published his ideas on the subject and set out to construct a clavecin oculaire, or harpsichord of color.  He had encouragement not merely from various theoretical physicists and mathematicians but also from his friend, the celebrated musician Jean-Philippe Rameau.

There are many references to the clavecin oculaire  or color harpsichord in eighteenth-century scientific literature, but it still remains shrouded in mystery.  Presumably the percussive action initiated by the keys, instead of being directed at taut wires or captive cats, would cause bands of colored material to rise and fall before the audience in richly orchestrated chromatic harmonies.  Heard melodies are sweet but those unheard are sweeter.  The documentary evidence as to whether this musical machine was in fact ever achieved, or whether any actual persons actually saw it perform, is ambiguous and contradictory.  Newton’s ideas were not widely accepted among French intellectuals in 1725.  Voltaire was one of the people who changed that.  In 1737 he published a kind of Newton for Dummies entitled “Elements of the Philosophy of Newton”.  By the time he published a second and expanded edition in 1748 the tide had turned.  The Cartesian loyalties of people like Father Castel were becoming old-fashioned, even quaint.  But in that 1748 edition, in a new chapter on Newton’s optics, Voltaire gave a plug to the clavecin oculaire.  That was a generous gesture from a man who hated Jesuits almost as much as they hated him.  I think Newton himself would have done the same.  I mean, it really is a great idea.

 Rimington's instrument and chromatic score

There have been various attempts to revive Father Castel’s idea, even without his deep ideological investments in it.  A minor British painter of the early twentieth century, Alexander Wallace Rimington, created a “color organ.”  He patented it in 1893, and performed on it before a large audience (viewership?) in 1895.  But by then many important questions about the transmission of light and sound had reached at least general scientific consensus.  With no semi-mystical revelations weighing in the balance and with the battle of the Newtonians and the Cartesians already but a distant memory, Rimington’s device was but a passing novelty, a flash in the pan, or perhaps a blur on the sounding board.