Video Seen: the Roots of Music Videos

Grammy Pulse, 1984.

Video Seen: the Roots of Music Videos

Dr. William Moritz

The MTV Phenomenon may only be a few years old, but mankind has longed for a Visual Music since antiquity. The patterns of folk dances, the decoration of costumes and musical instruments, the choral dances of Greek tragedy and its successors Grand Opera and Ballet – all these represent popular Visual Music expressions across the ages. Santayana warns that whoever does not remember the past is condemned to repeat it. If music videos are to be the new art of the ’80s, we must look back briefly to avoid the mistakes and surpass the triumphs of Visual Music pioneers.

Aristotle and Leonardo da Vinci theorized about color harmony, and Father Athanasius Kircher in the 1640s pointed out that since the color spectrum of the rainbow repeats itself in cycles just as the musical scale repeats itself, then there must be a Visual Music that corresponds, note for note, to auditory music. It seemed that only the technology was lacking.

The Ocular Harpsichord

A century later, Father Castel actually built an “ocular harpsichord” which consisted of a conventional harpsichord with a six-foot square frame built above it, containing 60 small windows in five rows of 12, each with a tinted glass of a specific hue corresponding to one note on the keyboard. As a particular key was played, a system of levers and pulleys would simultaneously lift the tiny curtain to reveal a glimpse of the appropriate color.

In one model, Castel used some 500 candles, with mirrors to amplify their light. When you think of the ornate keyboard music of the period (Bach, Handel, Scarlatti, etc.) translated into precise patterns on Castel’s grid – with trills flickering, runs flowing across horizontal rows, and melodies in fugue casting the same configuration here and there across the screen – what a dazzling sight it must have been! The celebrities of Paris flocked to see it, and applauded. It was written up in the first Encyclopedia. Books about it appeared in England and Germany, as well as France. Castel confidently predicted that someday every home in Paris would own one. But apparently the instrument was too complex and too expensive: The Ocular Harpsichord was never mass-produced, and died with its inventor.

Assorted Color Organs

But the dream of Visual Music and the “color organ” lived on in the dozens of composer-inventors who contrived with colored liquids and burning gas, daylight and electricity, to project colors in rhythmic time like music. Each one – Jameson from England, Kastner from France, Hector from Australia, Wilfred from Denmark, etc. – seems to have believed that his particular refinement constituted the crucial breakthrough, and now Visual Music could begin in earnest.

Especially touching in this respect was Mary Hallock Greenewalt (1871-1950) who, while creating and improving her color organ, the Sarabet, 1911-1931, patented some dozen complex inventions, including the rheostat dimmer with 267 calibrated graduations of brightness and the liquid mercury rotary switch, which have become standard electrical tools. However, she encountered an unassailable wall of prejudice against her as a woman – skepticism that she could have made technical, scientific discoveries, doubt that she might be a serious composer in a radical new artform. Finally, in her mid-70s, she published an account (sometimes understandably bitter) of the new art she called Nourathar (Essence of Light), which had by then been totally eclipsed by the Technicolor movie, the actual breakthrough that made Visual Music a mass art.

Animation, Avant-Garde, Boop and Busby

Just as sound was converting Hollywood to “all singing, all dancing,” Oskar Fischinger (1900-1967) had produced what is probably the first prototype of the Rock Video, using popular records, synchronized to hand-drawn abstract animation, with titles reading: “You are hearing Electrola disc #______, a foxtrot ______, available at your local record store.” In the course of a 30 year career, he produced about 30 distinguished Visual Music films, mostly drawn entirely by hand, so that no technology but rather a fine sense of color and rhythm make his films enduring favorites.

The aesthetics of current videos also derive from the surrealism of other avant-garde filmmakers of the 20s – Bunuel’s Chien Andalou and the Rene Clair/Erik Satie’s Entr-Acte, for example – who thrived on surprising juxtapositions and outrageous scenarios synchronized to popular and classical music played lived and on records. The Fleischer brothers linked this surrealism with American pop hits in the “bouncing ball” and Betty Boop cartoons in the early ’30s, while the lavish musical numbers of Busby Berkeley refined the abstract dance pattern and the theme décor or synoptic plot to a model perfection.

You Can Show That Again

As the ’40s and ’50s saw the commercial film industry lapse increasingly into treating musicians as star performers – possibly because crazed fans shrieked for Frank Sinatra, Johnnie Ray and Elvis Presley – the experimental film scene continued to pioneer a genuine visual music, with supreme masters of abstract imagery like James Whitney and Jordan Belson, and Harry Smith who worked with jazz musicians like Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonius Monk.

While Scopitones and T.V. dance shows continued to present documentaries of singers-on-stage, Bruce Conner’s imaginative visualization of Ray Charles’ One More Time (Cosmic Ray, 1960) and his dynamic portrait of Toni Basil (her first “video,” Breakaway, 1966) pointed to new directions for a visual imagery complex and challenging and “musical” enough to appeal more and more on repeated viewings, just as popular or classical songs have a replay value that may reach its peak only after dozens of hearings and may remain eternally fascinating.

Yesterday and Tomorrow

The psychedelic era of the late ’60s, epitomized by the Beatles’ White Album, taught us that the world of music was broader and more engaging than anyone believed. The subtle mattes and dramatic time-lapses of filmmakers like Pat O’Neill and David Lebrun and video artists like Michael Scroggins and Bill Viola have shown us enthralling spectacles to match the most dazzling and refined sounds.

No keyboard limits Visual Music to 88 “sights.” All the riches of film, video, computer graphics and lasers form our daily visual vocabulary. But the intricacies and complexities of auditory music demand a visual partner of equal subtlety and variety. The mastery of visual equivalents to harmony, melody, rhyme, counterpoint, orchestration, etc. – all running simultaneously, as they do in most music – remains the greatest challenge of Visual Music, and a study of the pioneers and masters in this field (only a few of whom are mentioned here) can only help us improve our art.

Moritz, William. “Video Seen: the Roots of Music Videos.” Grammy Pulse. v.2 n.5 (Oct/Nov 1984): 4-5.