Color As Vehicle of Enlightenment:

For some reason, listening to this piece by the greatly under noticed American composer Miriam Gideon, BÖMISCHER KRYSTALL,

made me think of the greatly under noticed American painter, Hyman Bloom.  Bloom underwent a profound mystical experience of color* and seems to have come up with a  universalism that seems to be more Jewish than Christian, though, along with synagogue chandeliers, Bloom also painted a series of Christmas trees as a result.   I wonder if it's possible for universalism to be categorized that way.

I'm not sure about the chronology and if another of his great subjects, cadavers being dissected, is from the period after his enlightenment, it would certainly be interesting if they were all a result from it.

I don't know why the piece reminds me of Bloom, I don't think it was the word "Krystall" so much as the intense, flashing colors against dark that Gideon managed to get from the "Pierrot" ensemble.  The piece is a result of a project to set the poems in the collection that Schoenberg chose not to set in his famous Pierrot Lunaire cycle.

 *  One night in the fall of nineteen thirty-nine, Bloom was alone in his studio and felt transported by a cosmic sense of color. “I had a conviction of immortality, of being part of something permanent and ever changing, of metamorphosis as the nature of being.”