Derek Jarman and the colour of noise

I’ve been reading Chroma, by Derek Jarman (1994), I believe the last of his books published during his lifetime. It's a meditation on colour, all the more poignant as he was going blind at the time. At several points he talks about the colour of music:

- ‘the painter Kandinsky who heard music in colours said: "Absolute green is represented by the placid middle notes of a violin"’
- ‘It was on a tortoiseshell lyre that Apollo played the first note. A brown note. From the trees came the polished woods to make the violin and bass, which smuggled up to the golden brass. In the arms of yellow, brown is at home’
- ‘You set the colours against each other and they sing. Not as a choir but as soloists. What is the colour of the music of the spheres but the echo of the Big Bang on the spectrum, repeating itself like a round’.

This an ancient theme, going back at least as far as Pythagoras and various occult cosmologies linking musical notes, colours and heavenly bodies in a cosmic harmony. I particularly like the colour thought forms of Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, where they attempted to show the colour forms they believed were left by different kinds of music, the music of Gounod hanging over a church for instance. More recently there have been attempts to scientifically ascribe colours to sound, based on analysis of the frequency spectrum to identify pink noise, blue noise and so on.

Has anyone tried applying some of these ideas to current music? What does a dubstep thought-form look like hanging above a club in South London? What colour is grime?

Madonna, Britney and Hamas

Funny Marina Hyde article in The Guardian today about islamists and pop music.

In Schmoozing with Terrorists, published this week, journalist Aaron Klein conducts interviews with several jihadists, during which he asks their opinions on various celebrities. To summarise: holy warriors seem to have got pretty exercised about that kiss between Madonna and Britney Spears at the 2003 MTV video music awards...

Anyway, Abu Abdullah, a senior member of Hamas's military wing, has a strategy for handling the ladies. "At the beginning," he tells Klein, "we will try to convince Madonna and Britney Spears to follow Allah's way." Um ... dude, did you see this year's MTV awards? Britney can't even follow the backing track's way. The complex strands of the Qu'ran might be a stretch at this difficult stage in her journey. But Abdel-Al, a like-minded leader of the Popular Resistance Committees, concurs: "If these two prostitutes keep doing what they are doing, we of course will punish them. I will have the honour - I repeat, I will have the honour - to be the first one to cut off the heads of Madonna and Britney Spears." Can you technically be anything other than the first person to cut off someone's head? Whatever. He goes on to say that women such as Madonna "must be 80 times hit with a belt". I think I already saw that in the Express Yourself video.

Comanche Sun Dance

In desparate times, millennarian movements have arisen in which people hoped to be liberated from their oppression by a sudden magical transformation, perhaps sparked by the return of the ancestors or divine intervention. In many of these movements communal dancing and festivities have played a key role, what Bryan Wilson in his study Magic and the Millennium called 'efforts to dance into being the new dispensation' - a party to bring on the end of the world, or at least turn it upside down. One such episode arose on the South Plains of the United States in the 1870s:

'the Comanches... way of life was under severe threat in the 1870s, when the buffalo herds were fast diminishing, when Ishatai ('Coyote Droppings'), a young warrior medicine-man, who had 'proved' his own immunity to bullets and had 'raised the dead", arose in 1873. The Comanches had resisted confinement in the reserva­tion at Fort Sill...

Ishatai claimed to have communed with the Great Spirit, and he successfully predicted the appearance of a comet, to be followed by a long summer drought. He succeeded in gathering all the Comanches together—a feat which the great chiefs had never been able to do in the past—to perform the Sun Dance, in which all but one band, the Swift Stingers, joined. This was a wholly new venture for the Comanches, although they had watched the Kiowa sun dances and those of the Cheyenne for many years. A buffalo herd was captured, and a buffalo was killed, stuffed, and mounted on a pole. Mud-men clowns (imitated from clowns seen among the Pueblos) provided 'a light hearted gesture in an act of desperation—the inauguration of the Sun Dance for the earthly salvation of the Comanche way of life'.

A mock battle was fought, and the people danced in bands for five days before the sun dancers themselves danced, drummed, and sang for three further days, doing without food and water for the duration of the dance. Ishatai had promised that he would share his immunity with others, and that they should drive the whites from the land and restore the old way of life. But in the action they mounted against a post at Adobe Wells, soon afterwards, nine Comanches were killed. Ishatai lost his power, and the Comanches, their spirit broken, entered the reservation in 1875.

Source: Bryan Wilson, Magic and the Millennium (London: Heinemann, 1973). Picture is of a Sun Dance amongst the Ponca people