Jos Janssen wrote:

>4.  Messiaen always made a point of perceiving harmony and colour as
>two phenomena originating from the same source, i.e.  E major is a vast
>Bordeaux red.  I must confess that my poor mortal mind doesn't quite follow
>him there.  Is there anybody who can "enlighten" me?

The explanation is largely congenital-- Messiaen was born with a
"condition" ("ability?") called synaesthesia, wherein two kinds of sensory
input are "unnaturaly" and consistently linked.  A friend of mine has it
with numbers and colors, i.e.  for him 1 is always black, 2 is always pale
yellow, 3 is always royal blue, etc.  Messiaen had it with musical keys and
colors (so does Roger McGuinn of the Byrds, curiously).  Therefore for
Messiaen each key was always linked to the same color whenever he heard it.
One gets the impression that Messiaen had a hard time beleiving that others
did not have these correspondences, or that at least he couldn't give rise
to them in his listeners.  In The Messiaen Companion, edited by Peter Hill,
there's actually a chart showing which keys meant which colors for
Messiaen-- if you're really interested I'll post it to the List.

Jon Lewis
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