A similar demand for white-clad audience was posited by the Italian Futurist artists Arnaldo Ginna and Bruno Corra, who experimented with "color organ" projection in 1909 and painted some nine abstract films directly on film-stock in 1911.* The German Hans Stoltenberg also experimented with drawing abstractions on film about this same time, and the Finnish/Danish/Russian Leopold Survage (then resident in Paris, and friends with Picasso and Modigliani) prepared hundreds of sequential paintings for an abstract film Rythme Coloré, which he hoped to film in one of the new multicolor processes that were being developed, but the onset of World War I prevented that; he sold a number of the paintings, so that they were widely dispersed and have still not been filmed.

Mary Hallock Greenewalt with her Visual-Music Phonograph (1919.) Photo by Shewell Ellis.

Two rival color-organ artists vied for American and international audiences during the 1920s. Danish-born Thomas Wilfred came to America as a singer of early music, and got involved with a group of Theosophists who wanted to build a color organ to demonstrate spiritual principles. Wilfred called his color organ the Clavilux, and named the artform of color-music projections "Lumia." He stressed polymorphous, fluid streams of color slowly metamorphosing. He established an Art Institute of Light in New York, and toured giving Lumia concerts in the United States and Europe (at the famous Art Déco exhibition in Paris). He also built "lumia boxes," self-contained units that looked rather like television sets, which could play for days or months without repeating the same imagery. When young animator Jordan Belson saw Wilfred's Lumia in the late 1950s, they inspired him to alter his style to incorporate softer, more sensuous imagery.

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.

Parallel in the 1920s, Walther Ruttmann and Oskar Fischinger were pioneering visual music films in Germany, using tinted animation to live musical accompaniment. The Hungarian composer Alexander Laszlo wrote a theoretical text Color-Light-Music in 1925, and toured Europe with a color organ of his own devising, which contained switches for colored spotlights and slide projections on the stage above his piano. When the first reviews complained that the visual spectacle was much tamer than the Chopin-like dazzle of Laszlo's virtuoso piano compositions, he contacted Fischinger to prepare some filmed abstract images of greater complexity and vibrancy. Fischinger prepared a dazzling spectacle with three side-by-side movie projections that were augmented by two more overlapping projectors to add extra colors to the finale, and some complementary changing slide-projections around the borders of the film projection. Much to Laszlo's chagrin, the reviews flip-flopped: the astonishing visual imagery was much livelier and more modern that the old-fashioned Chopin-style piano music. Fischinger subsequently performed his multiple-projections several times under the title R-1, a Form Play, with live music by a percussion ensemble--a kind of predecessor to the light-shows such as Jordan Belson's Vortex Concerts of the late 1950s and the Rock concerts of the late 1960s. (Laszlo fled to Hollywood during the Nazi era, and wrote lush symphonic scores for dozens of B-movies and television shows, from Charlie Chan and Attack of the Giant Leeches to My Little Margie and Rocky Jones, Space Cadet.)

Four times (1927, 1930, 1933, 1936) the University of Hamburg hosted an international "Color-Music Congress," which brought together artists (music, dance, film, painting, etc.), perceptual psychologists, and critics to explore issues of synaesthesia and multidisciplinary artforms. Color-organ performances there included the Austrian Count Vietinghoff-Scheel's Chromatophon and the elaborate Reflectorial Color Play by the Bauhaus artists Kurt Schwerdtfeger and Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack.