Nourathar

Mary Elizabeth Hallock-Greenewalt (Sept. 8, 1871 – Nov. 27, 1950) was an inventor and pianist who performed with the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh symphonies as a soloist. She is best known for her invention of a type of visual music she called Nourathar.

Thomas Eakins painted her portrait in 1903, currently in the Roland P. Murdock Collection of the Wichita Museum of Art.

Greenewalt was born in 1871 in Beirut, then part of Syria, to Samuel Hallock and Sara Tabet. After her mother began exhibiting symptoms of mental illness, eleven-year-old Greenewalt and her siblings were sent to live with friends and relatives in the US, where Greenewalt spent the remainder of her youth in the Philadelphia area. As a young adult Greenewalt studied piano at the Philadelphia Conservatory of Music and then with Theodor Leschetizky in Vienna. After her return to Philadelphia she married Frank L. Greenewalt, a physician. The couple had one son, Crawford Hallock Greenewalt, a chemical engineer who eventually served as president of the DuPont Company. In her later years Greenewalt resided in Wilmington, Delaware. She died in Philadelphia at the age of 79.

Columbia Records released her performance of Chopin's "Preludes in E Minor, C minor, A Major" and "Nocturne in G Major" in March, 1920 (A6136).

The name for her art, Nourathar, was adapted from the Arabic words for light (nour), and essence of (athar). Unlike earlier inventors of color-music such as the painter A. Wallace Rimington, Hallock-Greenewalt did not produce a strict definition of correspondence between specific colors and particular notes, instead arguing that these relationships were inherently variable and reflected the temperament and ability of the performer.

...
Wikipedia