Multiple settings find their simplest expression in opera. This form of art is so old that we no longer any attention today to the fact that there is a superimposition. Only certain modern futurists would rise up against such a mixture, pretending that each art should be sufficient to itself. The most complete trial that has been achieved in this field dates from around 1895. A French poet, P.N. Roinard, had a rather strange play put on, in which the basic feeling of each scene was symbolised by a colour, a flower and a scent. The “Art Theatre” did not have any follow-up. Nearer to us, Loi Feller achieved marvellous stage effects using play of coloured lights, combined with choreographic ensemnbles. Let us remember, finally, that great artists such as Léonard de Vinci, Jean Sébastien Bach, and Skriabine, were tempted by the combination of music and colour.

Baranoff-Rossine’s optical piano, projecting in space or onto a screen, colours and moving shapes, varied to infinity, depends absolutely, as in the sonorous piano, on the operating of the keys. All the previous seekers had not been able to decompose it in its intimate elements: it is in fact quite arbitrary to want to translate a musical note by any specific colour.

A = black, E = white, DO = violet, R’ indigo… poet’s fantasy. Oboe = green, flute = blue, trumpet = red, these are purely litterary reconciliations that, even if they might be exact, are incapable of moving us. Between sound and light there are harmonies that are otherwise precise, drawn from their very structure: in a musical composition we distinguish the three following basic elements; the intensity of the sound, the pitch of the sound, the rythym and the movement. This will be one of Baranoff-Rossine’s merits to have been able to extract these elements from music to bring them closer to similar elements existing or able to exist in light.

Research has moreover enabled us to find others that are just as simple. One should not mistake the Saphites optical piano with its luminous effects, luminous organs, and coloured projections. These are primitive and incomplete instruments, giving a limited number of coloured beams, and not colours. Rossine’s optical piano produces luminous colours, varied to infinity, simultaneously united with the abstract and concrete shapes (decorations and images) in a static and dynamic state, successive and simultaneous. All these results, moreover, can be increased by developing the pianitst’s technique. The quality of the luminous colour is far above anything that we have imagined previously. The shapes and colours are richer than in a kaleidoscope and their choice depends on the will of the player; the projection frame can be varied to infinity. Thanks to his optical piano, Baranoff-Rossiné has created a new art form that as a consequence has its own unity, and it does not involve purely and simply superimposing one phenomenon on another.

(We have respected the use of the 3rd person in this autobiographical text.)