The History of MUSIC is long and illustrious.

It is not really the purpose of this exposition to go into any amount of detailed consideration of the subject. Yet it would be efficacious to make some mention of the general direction that MUSIC has taken over the years, if only for the purpose of trying to extrapolate the path that VUSIC will take in this analogy.

Taking all of the tales of the origins of MUSIC with a grain of Salt, we can eliminate the originators (the Gods, the arch-types, etc.) of the components of MUSIC and get to what have been the high points, or the phenoms of MUSICAL History.

It is interesting to note that every advance in the widening of the utility of MUSIC has resulted in a phenom. By that is meant: Every time the MUSIC got louder, more people could hear it. The more people that heard it, the more phenomenal the MUSICIAN/S involved became.

For example: Alan Adale. He went from castle-to-castle singing of the exploits of Robin Hood and Maid Marion. He played a Lute which could be heard by 20-30 people if they made an effort not to make any noise. He was a phenom, because while he could play for only 20-30 people, that was better than having no MUSIC at all.

It was not until MUSIC evolved into an orchestral style with sometimes as many as 100+ MUSICIANS playing in concert that the "Concert Shell" came into existence. A symphony orchestra could play for hundreds. While the orchestras became famous, it was the composers that became the phenoms.

Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Mozart, each had their own shot at "phenom-dom". The phenomenon passed as people got used to hearing hundreds of MUSICIANS play together with more or less virtuosity.

But there was one character during this time who stood out, and that was Caruso. What made him a phenom of sorts was that he could sing loud, and on key! He could be heard over an orchestra playing at full tilt.

I have heard him on some old scratchy vinyl recording of Caruso and he was alright, even by today's standards. But unless there was something about him that did not translate from performing live to performing on a recording, he would not be as highly regarded today as he was in his own time.

The next step in the evolution of MUSIC was the advent of the Big Band. While the orchestras were large and thus grand, the band was smaller, tighter and thus more facile. But because the intruments were still acoustic, even the Big Bands were quite large. In fact, the Golden Age of Big Band MUSIC was called the "Big Band Era". The stars of the Big Band Era were alas, not phenoms, but they were famous, as you will recognize the names of Phillip Sousa, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, and Glen Miller to name but a few.

Since these guys, though famous, were not phenoms, why, you might ask, have they been mentioned? Because... it was from this environment that the next phenoms arose. There have been three of them, each bigger that the last, with the last one becoming the standard by which subsequent phenoms would be measured.

First was Rudy Valle. He was a phenom not for his talent, but for his use of a device that amplified his voice. He made use of the megaphone, a cone that directs all of the SOUND pressure created by the singer by keeping it from dispersing, thus making it louder for those in front of the megaphone. At the time, this was a significant advance in the field of Acoustics.

Second was Al Jolson. He was a phenom not for his talent, but for his use of a device that amplified his voice. He made use of the microphone, a diaphragm that is modulated by the SOUND pressure created by the voice of the singer. This modulation produces magnetic signals which are amplified and fed out through loud speakers, thus making it louder for those in front of, not the microphone, but the loudspeakers. At the time this was a significant advance in the field of Acoustics.

But there was more to Al Jolson. He became the first singer to be seen publically performing, using a microphone to put a magnetic signal on a Movie film, producing the first "Talkie", called "The Jazz Singer". Not only did Jolson have the ability to be loud, but to be loud in many places at the same time!

And Third, there was Frank Sinatra. He was a phenom not only for his talent but for an attribute that, whether it was real or not, couldbe produced by promotion. There was a "charisma" surrounding Frank Sinatra. This was the result of not only an advance in the technology of SOUND production, but also because promotional activity imbued Sinatra with an aura of fame that made him more recognizable than any MUSICIAN up to that time.

It wasn't that the singer was better, it was that he could be heard better because of the fidelity improvement , it became to be called "Hi Fi" (short for HIgh FIdelity) which gave the singer a quality that the un-amplified voice does not have.

This is not to say that a bad singer could automatically SOUND good if amplified... Quite the contrary, if one sang badly, it was exposed by the amplification. One had to be pretty good to keep from SOUNDing really bad.

Not only could Sinatra sing on key like Caruso, but he could also be heard over the Big Band without yelling! With all this ability, the SOUND of a Big Band, well rehearsed, the arch-typical MUSICAL Cadillac (as Doc Severinson has called his own Big Band), cooking in the way that only a Big Band can cook, is in itself compelling. But when a clean cut, well dressed, slender, handsome Italian/American boy starts crooning in soft, romantic, or plaintive tones, into a microphone and the SOUNDS are mixed so that the full tilt cooking band is smaller than the softness that is the singer and a phenomenal thing happens.

All the talk about Sinatra's phrasing, or his styling of a song, or his elan' when it came to being at ease, may be valid to explain why Sinatra endured, but the screaming females were a feature of this phenom and would evidence themselves at subsequent phenom emergences. There is even some evidence that what makes a phenom a phenom is that he can be heard over the screaming.

None-the-less, Sinatra is known as "The Chairman of the Board" and though his virtuosity suffered at the hands of time, it didn't seem to diminish Sinatra's popularity.

After Sinatra, what could possibly be bigger?

There were Sinatra clones who made it with more than moderate success, such as Bobby Darin, and there were those who did the same thing that Sinatra did and who themselves became quite famous and respected more for the quality of the performance that the quality and depths of the sentiment and meaning in their songs. There was Bing Crosby, Tony Bennett, Frankie Laine, Eddie Fisher, and a gaggle of other Sinatra contemporaries, who, though they were hugely successful, not a one of them was a Sinatra.

At that time, there had been a resurgence of MUSIC making in the Black Community and there were a number of really good Black MUSICIANS who were starting to show the power of amplified MUSIC by using microphone in front of their instruments.

This SOUND had only moderate success, compared to Sinatra, until there appeared on the scene: An amplified, four piece band, Drums, Bass, rhythm Guitar and lead Guitar, with a quartet of backup singers called "The Jordanaires".

These eight MUSICIANS were never given a name as a band but they could cook in the way that, up till then, only a Big Band could cook.

Then out would come this clean cut, well dressed, slender, handsome Greek God/American boy who would and could sing in the accepted manner of the Black MUSICIANS dwelling in the underground scene called "Race Music".

Along with the singing came gyrations, sexually suggestive, blatently provocative. This was the next phenom with the alliterative name, Elvis Presley.

Again the girls were thrown into gales of ecstacy at the mere sight of this first phenom to exceed Sinatra.

Presley made hit after hit in a market that didn't even exist in Sinatra's time. The Recording industry, the SOUND industry, the Distribution industry, the Publicity industry, the Movie industry, the Television industry, and most importantly, the inception of a new "kind" of MUSIC made possible by advances in electronic technology, made of Elvis, the phenom by which subsequent phenoms would be measured.

If Sinatra was the "Chairman of the Board", Presley was "The King".

It would be unfair not to mention the contemporaries of Presley, for... "There but by the Grace of God..."

There was the first really exposed example of White Rock n Roll... Bill Haley and the Comets, with "Rock Around The Clock", which was chosen as the theme MUSIC for the Glen Ford , Sidney Portier, Vic Morrow, Ramone Ramone movie, "Black Board Jungle".

It would also be unfair if we were to leave out one of the most influential factors that made the Rock n Roll phenomenon possible.

It is not the scope of this treatise to delve into the advancements made in MUSIC making technology, but the invention of the Electric Guitar by Les Paul and the building of Electric Guitars by Fender, fueled the phenomenon producing mechanism.

Bill Haley, Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, and Carl Perkins, deserve mention.

If Presley was acknowledged as occupying the Number One spot in Rock n Roll, the Second and Third spots would have to go to Jerry Lee Lewis, "The Killer", and Little Richard Penaman, known as "The Architect of Rock and Roll", with it being a toss up as to which one is Second and which one is Third.

Eventually the phenom of Rock n Roll's Golden Age came and went, and the world settled down not, having no idea where the next phenom would appear.

The next advance in phenomenon-ism came with a band out of Liverpool, England. The Beatles.

There have been no genuine phenoms since The Beatles.

The History of VUSIC is as varied as the history of MUSIC.

The earliest known formalized SOUND/LIGHT correspondence theory was formulated by Sir Isaac Newton in the mid 1600s.

Louis Bertrand Castel, a Jusuit priest, who was a mathmatician, philosopher and contemporary associate of Athanasius Kircher, wrote "Musique en Coleurs" in 1720. He also invented the Clavessin Occulaire, which was announced in 1725 and completed on December 21, 1734. The Clavessin Occulaire is an instrument that employed candles as the LIGHT source. The candles were enclosed in a rotatable tube with a slit in it. The tube was enclosed in a box with a slit covered with colored paper. When the tube was rotated by a keyboard and linkage mechanism so that its slit corresponded to the slit in the box, LIGHT would be released.

The LIGHT would go through the colored paper and be cast onto a tapestry used as a screen. The tapestry screen was also "waved", that is, the tapestry was "rippled" by the choir boys, assigned to provide a movement factor.

The instrument was intended to be used in religious services in a darkened cathedral.

Castel's contemporaries were Remeau, Gretry and Rousseau, the Swiss philosopher and writer.

Goethe, the famous German philosopher labored twenty years on a book called "Farbenlehre", which was on the relationship of SOUND and LIGHT. It was finished in 1810 and Goethe considered it his most important work.

Guert, Gunsevoort Finn, Edward Mayron, A.B. Klein, Rimski-Korsakov and Scriabin all formulated Tone/Color correspondencies and the latter two were known to have scored some of their MUSICAL compositions for Color.

A. Wallace Rimington, professor of fine arts at Queens College, London, built a LIGHT organ patterened after Castel's in 1893 and in 1895 presented possibly the earliest known performance of LUMIA with a symphony orchestra. The program was performaned in St. James Hall and became so influential that it prompted Scriabin to score "Prometheus: The Poem of Fire" for Remington's LIGHT Organ in 1910.

In 1915, Modest Altschuler, with the help of Preston S, Miller, who designed the Electric LIGHT Organ built by the Electrical Testing Laboratory in New York, conducted the Russian Symphony Society's performance of "The Poem of Fire" in Carnegie Hall.

Arthur Bliss wrote his "Colour" symphony and even Beethoven is known to have spoken of Colors when referring to his MUSIC.

Thomas Wilfred, Mary Hallock Greenwalt, and Walt Disney are among those who endeavored to coalesce LIGHT and SOUND into a single artistic expression.

History will continue to produce the examples that will be added to these pages. As the technology to record VUSIC and the effort to produce VUSIC continues.

Those who deserve mention will become ubiquitious on the world scene. Among those future stars will be Jeane Zekowski Doane, of the Eyedream of Jeane Concert Lightshow, Greg Zekowski, and a few others, all of whom have, at one time or another, possessed and performed with The Crystalume.

Of course, lurking out there somewhere is the next great VUSICIAN who will, at last, produce beauty so transcendent and Synaesthetic that it will be irresistible. That one might just become an "instant over-night" success.

The world awaits.