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With synaesthesia, "I approach music from a visual perspective," says Andrea Tarrodi. "Different notes have different colors."
Lousia Sundell
Swedish composer Andrea Tarrodi often refers to colors in the titles of her works, for instance, we’d roll and fall in green (2011), Serenade in Seven Colours (2013) and Nocturne in Blue and Green (2018).
That tendency is likely the result of having synaesthesia, a neurological phenomenon in which stimulation of one sense (such as hearing) involuntarily triggers an experience in another sense (such as seeing). Or in Tarrodi’s case, hearing a specific musical note and seeing a particular color.
"I have synaesthesia, so I approach music from a visual perspective," Tarrodi said in an interview with BBC Music Magazine. “Different notes and chords have different colors. When I was young, I was initially torn between painting and composing, and I still approach music through an artistic lens. I do sketches and drawings of the shape of the music before I write it and then always do a painting or illustration on the scores when I complete them.”
That process came into play when she wrote Liguria (2012), inspired by an Italian seascape. The Civic Orchestra of Chicago will perform Liguria in concerts June 1 (at the Kenwood Academy High School) and June 2 (at Symphony Center), conducted by Ken-David Masur.
Commissioned by Swedish national radio and written for the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Liguria received its premiere by the orchestra on April 20, 2012, at Berwaldhallen, conducted by Daniel Harding. Liguria has since then been performed many times in Sweden and abroad. In 2017, it was performed at the BBC Proms.
In a program note, Tarrodi wrote: “On the northwest coast of Italy by the Ligurian Sea are five fishing villages clinging to the steep cliffs. These are called Riomaggiore, Manarola, Corniglia, Vernazza and Monterosso; between the villages are paths connecting them through the mountains. In August 2011, I visited this area and, as soon as we arrived, I knew that I wanted to write music about it.
"The result is a work that can be described as a ’walking tour’ among the villages: Riomaggiore, with its high waves; Manarola, with its clock tower; Monterosso, where sunbathers hurried to secure a place on the beach and open up their colorful beach umbrellas, as if in a scene in a Fellini film; Vernazza, with its watchtower and cliffs, and lastly, Corniglia, where the night sky was filled with stars.”
Based in Stockholm, Tarrodi has written for a variety of instrumentations, orchestras and choirs. After she won a Swedish composition contest in 2010 for her orchestral piece Zephyros, her music began to be performed by ensembles world. She is composer-in-residence at the Nordic Chamber Orchestra.
Her music is tonal and often described as impressionistic. “There’s always been the same feeling in my music, but I’ve evolved technically over the years and have learnt to express myself better,” she said. "I prefer writing for orchestra, because of the huge palette of sounds available.
“”Writing for chamber ensembles, though, helps me to learn skills and techniques which I can then translate to my orchestral writing. When you write chamber music, you can really focus on the details because you often tend to have more time to do so."
