The color of music: Sarah Davis Hughes’ ‘The Colorways and the Circle of Fifths’

Artist Sarah Davis Hughes had always loved music, but after winning an accordion from the New England Accordion Connection and Museum in Canaan, that love became a musical journey, ultimately leading to her book “The Colorways and the Circle of Fifths.”

Hughes explained that the idea for the book came after studying with Paul Ramunni of the Accordion Connection for a year. “He introduced a piece of music that I knew well by ear but had never seen written down.” Upon seeing the music, Hughes described a sense of blindness. “The chords looked like thorny blueberry bushes on the page,” she said.

Determined to figure it out, Hughes said, “I knew color systems, design and theory, so it was simply a matter of organization. If I could assign a color to each note and color that black-and-white score, I would instantly recognize the notes.”

She set out to create a system. “The colors that I assign to each note should make sense together like the notes make sense together,” she said.

She recalled the color wheel, which illustrates the harmonic structure of color, and the Circle of Fifths, which shows the harmonic structure of music. Both serve as foundational systems —one for color, the other for music. “What if I simply superimposed a classic color wheel onto the Circle of Fifths?”

She began by placing the primary colors — red, yellow and blue — then set the note C at the top. The next primary color, yellow, aligned with E, followed by blue at A-flat/G-sharp.

“I was very surprised to see that all of the hot colors — blood red, vermilion, orange, gold, hot yellow, chartreuse — fell on the white notes C, G, D, A and B,” Hughes said. “The cool colors — green, teal, blue, lavender and purple — are black notes.”

Once the colors were mapped onto a miniature keyboard, Hughes saw clear correlations. “For instance, there are two oranges: G, vermilion, and D, orange,” she said. “The notes are diatonic partners” and harmonize with one another. She found similar relationships between the two yellows — hot yellow and gold, corresponding to E and A — as well as chartreuse and green, B and F-sharp.

She also observed that the triangular relationships among primary, secondary and tertiary colors mirrored musical thirds, or counterbass notes. Mixing all three primary colors produces “mud,” she said, just as playing all the notes in the triangle creates dissonance. But pairing two colors, such as yellow and blue, produces green, while their corresponding notes — E and A-flat — form part of a major chord. “Add B, chartreuse, as the fifth — E, A-flat, B — and you get a beautiful chord,” she said.

In songs that move upward by thirds — from C to E to A-flat, as in “The Impossible Dream” — she said the effect is a vertiginous sense of ascent. Compositions built on the three primary colors, she added, are similarly bold and striking, citing Mondrian’s circus paintings as examples.

“Everything was about setting it up so that I could look at a color and immediately know what to play,” Hughes said. “I practiced chords and scales on the keyboard, fixing my eye on each color as I played it. It worked.”

“At that point, Paul and I started to plan how we could share it with people and wondered if it might help others enter music,” Hughes said.

The result is “The Colorways and the Circle of Fifths,” a guide for students, teachers and musicians of all levels to help them understand, play and compose music. The book includes worksheets to support learning.

“The Colorways and the Circle of Fifths” is available at Oblong Books and Music in Millerton. Hughes is artist in residence at the Accordion Connection and Museum, where her pastels, prints and original artwork from the book are on view upstairs.