Tone Color

Greetings, O friends. Today I wish to tell you about color and music, for surely we know that music and color are inseparable. Indeed, ask any university's music faculty, and they will tell you all about the importance of tone color, indeed, everything short of what they mean by it. I have spent a fair amount of time around music faculty, so I have heard a great deal myself about how this or that musician needs to improve the tone color in performing this or that piece of music. What is the poor musician to do when faced with such a demand? What am I to do when more tone color is demanded from me? In general, I just try to play the music in question generally better, and this seems to make the music faculty happy. Clearly among my improvements was an increase in tone color, but which improvement it might have been I cannot say, and there is an excellent reason for this.

I cannot say because tone color does not exist. It is one of many absurd sophistries on which artists and the critics thereof thrive. Artists, of course, are notoriously bad at disciplines other than their particular Art, and very frequently they are not so excellent at that, either, so imagination must replace rationality as the primary reasoning center when dealing with such subjects as wordsmithery, philosophy, and history. Rather than provide a sound and objective technical criticism, subjectivity takes the day, and music faculty turn immediately to their vague sophistries to try to say what they do not understand to say, understanding only that something needs to be said, and that is, "Play it better, as we train you to do." Spare us, therefore, this nonsense about tone color and the worst offense of all, the will to crescendo (or whatever physically impossible technique you may wish to hear). Please simply tell me what possible improvement I can make, even if it is as general as, "Play better." For I hate sophists, even if I might be one.

Now, as long as we are talking about tone color, though, I would like to say that I have wholly subconsciously assigned colors to the twelve tones of our Western musical system. They are approximately these, and no others:

A A#/Bb B C C#/Db D D#/Eb E F F#/Gb G G#/Ab

Now when we speak of tone color, let us do so rationally, according to this system. I want to hear the music faculty say, "Make your F#'s blacker...blacker than the blackest black...times infinity!" and blast it, those will be the blackest F#'s the world has ever heard! I will show you just how black an F# can be! These are real tone colors; these are objective and playable tone colors; for they are true for me, a posteriori. In the Arts, after all, we are both allowed and expected to embrace explicit contradictions, even and especially ones that defy the physical limitations of acoustics.

Also,
Metal!