Much of what influences my composition and performance is my synesthesia! I have sound-color synesthesia as well as grapheme-color synesthesia, meaning that when I hear sounds or see letters or numbers, my brain strongly associates them with a color. In music, each pitch has its own color, although the register, intonation, or timbre can affect the exact hue. When I listen to music, it is as if I am experiencing a vivid daydream of colors that appear without my conscious thought. This can be a bit overwhelming (especially when I’m playing piccolo and some of the higher notes sound like bright starlight), but since I’ve always experienced music in this way, I absolutely love the colorful aspect of sound (but earplugs are nice at times).
My ballet, The Yellow Wallpaper, while inspired by a short story that is not about synesthesia and instead features a very literal yellow wallpaper, to me, needed to have yellow qualities in the sound. Often, yellow is considered a very “ugly” or “alarming” color; think of neon yellow safety vests, yellow lights at a traffic stop, or perhaps the distressing yellow wallpaper with a nauseating sequence of off-kilter patterns. However, yellow is also a beautiful color; think of warm sunlight, fresh lemons, the center of a daisy, the inviting glow of turmeric, buttercups, dandelions–the list goes on. When writing this ballet in which the protagonist is both apprehensive of the yellow wallpaper but also fascinated by its strange beauty, I wanted to embrace these qualities in the music: sound that is both startling and unfamiliar as well as bright and entrancing.
To me, the note C is yellow, so I selected tonalities centering that pitch for much of the ballet. However, just because I will instantly see yellow at the strike of that note, this does not mean that anybody else will understand what I am referencing; even other synesthetes may not see the same colors that I do. So, I decided to employ a CM7 chord for the beautiful moments of the wallpaper; the major seventh has a sparkling quality to its dissonance that, I hope, may evoke a light, bright color, such as yellow. For a little added dissonance to contribute to the strangeness of the yellow wallpaper, I decided to stack a B major triad on top of a C major triad to create my “Wallpaper Chord.”
I hope that listeners experiencing this ballet are able to “see” some of the nuances that I’ve intended. Whether or not they are able to see the yellow is in the air, but I hope they will be able to see both the strangeness and the beauty of the yellow wallpaper!
