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Mary Elizabeth Hallock Greenewalt 

(1871-1950) was an inventor and pianist who performed with the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh symphonies as a soloist. She is best known for her invention of a type of color music she called Nourathar.

Mary Elizabeth Hallock's arrival in Philadelphia in 1882 at the age of eleven set into motion a forty-year career as a musician, inventor, lecturer, writer and political activist. Born in Beirut, September 8, 1871 to Sara (Tabet) Hallock, descendant of an aristocratic Syrian family, and Samuel Hallock, a U.S. consul, she was educated in Beirut and Philadelphia.  A gifted musician, Hallock graduated from Philadelphia's Musical Academy in 1893, and in 1897 studied piano in Vienna with Theodore Leschetizky.

In 1898 in Johnstown, New York, Hallock married Dr. Frank L. Greenewalt, thirty-two years old and a physician-in-chief at Girard College.  The Greenewalts had one son, Crawford, born in 1902. Greenewalt, a pianist noted for her interpretation of Chopin, began in the early 1900s to investigate how gradated colored lighting might enhance the emotional expression of music.

By 1920 Greenewalt had obtained the first of many patents covering a color organ designed to project a sequence of colored lighting arranged for specific musical programs.  

In combining light and color as a single performance Greenewalt believed she had created a new, fine art which she named Nourathar, or essence of light. Although awarded eleven patents, Greenewalt spent a number of years pursuing patent infringements, finding recourse in the courts in 1932 with a judgment in her favor. Greenewalt's professional activities also included lecturing on music and serving as a delegate to the National Women's Party, which was instrumental in winning women's suffrage.

After retiring from the concert and lecture stage, Greenewalt published Nourathar: The Fine Art of Light-Color Playing in 1946. She died on November 26, 1950, in Wilmington, Delaware.

(Collection 867, Mary Elizabeth Hallock Greenewalt Papers, 1769-1950, 35 boxes, 29 vols., 18.2 lin. feet)

 

Source: The Historical Society of Pennsylvania

 

 

Mary Hallock Greenewalt had studied piano with the illustrious Theodore Leschetizky and had a concert career, including recordings of Chopin for Columbia Records. Her desire to control the ambience in a concert hall for sensitive music like Chopin's led her to experiment with light modulation. She invented the rheostat in order to make smooth fade-ups and fade-outs of light, and the liquid-mercury switch, both of which have become standard electric tools. When other people (including Thomas Wilfred) began infringing on her patents by using adaptations of the rheostat and mercury switch, she tried to sue, but a judge ruled that these electric mechanisms were too complex to have been invented by a woman, and denied her case. She continued to perform on her color-organ, the Sarabet, for which she created a special notation that recorded the intensity and deployment of various colors during any given musical composition.
("The Dream of Color Music, And Machines That Made it Possible" by William Moritz, Animation World Magazine, Issue 2.1, April 1997)

 

Source: Center for Visual Music

 

 

Mary Elizabeth Hallock Greenewalt, 1st generation, female, piano / organ

Reading

Farbe-Licht-Musik – Synästhesie und Farblichtmusik (2005) by Jörg Jewanski and Natalia Sidler focuses on the research on the color-light-music of Alexander Lászlo who in 1925 achieved overwhelming success with his multimedia show. A short time after his new art form fell into oblivion. The autors of this work revived and developed the experiments of Lászlo: his music has been rediscovered and coupled with actual visuals. (Natalia Sidler)

Sons et Lumières (2004) – A History of Sound in the Art of the 20th Century (in French) by Marcella Lista and Sophie Duplaix published by the Centre Pompidou for the excellent Paris exhibition in September 2004 until January 2005.


Curated by the Pompidou’s Sophie Duplaix with the Louvre’s Marcella Lista, the show required a good three or four hours to absorb, with its bombardment of sensory and intellectual input, including painting, sound sculpture, sound/light automata, film and video, and room-size installations. (Frieze Magazine)

Notation. Calculation and Form in the Arts (2008) is a comprehensive catalogue (in German) edited by Dieter Appelt, Hubertus von Amelunxen and Peter Weibel which accompanied an exhibition of the same name at the Academy of the Arts, Berlin and the ZKM | Karlsruhe. (ZKM)

Links

 

SEE ALSO

Optical Poetry (2004) by Dr. William Moritz is the long-awaited, definitive biography of Oskar Fischinger. The result of over 30 years of research on this visionary abstract filmmaker and painter. In addition to Moritz's comprehensive biography, it includes numerous photographs in colour and black and white (many never before published), statements by Oskar Fischinger about his films, a newly created extensive filmography, and a selected bibliography. (John Libbey Publishing)

Bärbel Neubauer (*1959) was born in Austria, studied film and stage design in Vienna at the Academy of Arts, diploma in 1983. She has been making about 30 animation films and experimental films since 1980 and composing music and filmmusic since 1991. (independent exposure)

Hammerhaus (2010) by Kurt Laurenz Theinert (visual piano) and Axel Hanfreich (sequencer). The music is insignificant in the positive sense, autoreferential, and its visual equivalent is the rectangles and lines with which Theinert fills the screen. Hanfreichs Minimalist sounds resonate like impressions from an abstract world that knows no natural noises, not even diagonals but only right and left, top and bottom - as if Mondrian had painted the music. (Kurt Laurenz Theinert)

Kurt Laurenz Theinert (*1963), photographer and light artist, concentrates in his work on visual experiences that do not refer, as images, to anything. On the contrary, he is striving for an abstract, reductiv aesthetic that has ultimately led him – through a wish for more dematerialisation – from photography to light as a medium. With the aid of software developers Roland Blach and Philipp Rahlenbeck, he has also created an image instrument (Visual Piano) on a MIDI-keyboard basis, that allows him to translate his artistic intentions into live performances while configuring time with light. (Kurt Laurenz Theinert)

Stephanie Maxwell is a California-born filmmaker who practices a unique form of experimental filmmaking art. Her techniques include direct on film painting and etching, object animation, motion painting, copier techniques, live action manipulation, and much more. Her works blend the hands-on approach to animation with digital processes in very creative ways. (Stephanie Maxwell)