For this essay I will focus on Rouse's Prospero stanzas. This musical work deals very explicitly with the symbol of the colored rooms of Poe's Masque of the Red Death. I want to explain exactly how Rouse was able to convey colors through music. Without going into any science of art and colors, we, as human beings, associate emotions with colors. Colors can be happy, sad, cool, warm, and anything in between. This way you can determine the colors. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essayOpening with blue, a very vague color, we need to determine what shade of blue. The texture is relatively thin, with only bass. Then some strings run silently under the solo bass. This is not a happy room. The main idea has a very low key and a minor key. Take those sensations and imagine a single color that conveys them. I see a dark navy blue. It's not black because the high strings add a little light to the color, but it's still very very dark. Moving on, white, the lightest color provided, has a lot of woods in the upper registers moving around. Even though the key is still lower, the busy instrumentation and overall register make me imagine a scene from a movie where someone runs through a field of flowers, and then pans to a killer lurking in the shadows. This is by far the lightest segment, and white is the lightest color. Moving to the other end of the spectrum, black, it appears that the killer mentioned above found his victim, frightened her, and began stabbing her. I can't imagine any other color than the one death wears: black. The thick, well-spread chord is relatively dissonant, raising the listener's blood pressure and heart rate, as if in danger. This is a great representation of the black room. Going back for my own enjoyment, I'd like to talk about the purple room. The solo bass returns: which gives a feeling of coming full circle and places this room at that end of the color spectrum. Once the bass stops, the brass blows air through the trumpets without creating their actual sound. This sound sends shivers down my spine. It seems very lonely. If used in the horror movie analogy, the main character would enter the spooky basement alone, where the killer is hiding. Please note: this is just an example. Get a custom paper from our expert writers now. Customize EssayThese colors are important because Poe writes everything with a purpose. Rooms with very solid colors would be an odd detail to add for no particular reason. With some cursory research, theories have been developed and I would like to share some of them. Many say that the rooms symbolize the seven deadly sins, all of which Prospero can be assumed to have committed. Many of my colleagues say that, in high school, they were taught that it symbolizes sunrise and sunset, with the blue sky representing morning and black representing the darkness of night. My favorite interpretation is that the rooms symbolize the stages of life, starting from birth and ending with death. This seems particularly appropriate because the room representing death has a red window, perhaps shadowing Prospero's death at the hands of the Red Death. And the ebony clock in the black room, which makes everyone and everything freeze as it chimes, represents life slipping away. Each sound reminds you of how close you are to death, but also serves as a transition between rooms in this one.