Alexander Harmonington
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 Portrait of Harmonington (c. 1795) | |
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| Died |
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| Occupation | Composer, theorist, performance artist |
| Known for | Inventing harmony, founding member of the Blue Man Group |
| Notable work | Ooooo: An Operatic Vowel Journey in One Act |
Sir Alexander Harmonington (23 April 1748 – 14 September 1817) was a Lower Saxon-born composer, theorist, and performance artist best known for inventing musical harmony and being a controversial founding member of the Blue Man Group. Despite his many innovations, his work was largely misunderstood during his lifetime and continues to confuse scholars today.
Early life[edit | edit source]
Harmonington was born in 1748 in a small village in Lower Saxony. Born with an unusual blue skin pigmentation (later attributed to excessive colloidal silver ingestion or, as he claimed, “divine artistic purpose”), he was raised in a musical household where screaming was the dominant form of expression. At age 9, he famously corrected a church choir’s chaotic performance by suggesting they "pick a note and stick to it," a moment widely recognized as the birth of harmony.
Career and major works[edit | edit source]
Harmonington’s most notable contribution to music was his formalization of harmony in 1769, documented in his pamphlet Consonance for the Common Man. The pamphlet was largely ignored at the time due to its handwritten footnotes being in Pig Latin.
He later garnered notoriety for his experimental performances, including a live Baroque beatboxing showcase in Vienna, which was met with confusion and mild rioting. Undeterred, Harmonington relocated to England, where he was knighted for “services to sound.”
His magnum opus, a twelve-hour opera entitled Ooooo: An Operatic Vowel Journey in One Act, was completed in 1816. Featuring 112 characters all singing the vowel “O” at different pitches, the opera premiered to a single standing ovation—by Harmonington himself.
Other lesser-known works include:
- The Argumentative Symphony (1773) - Required two orchestras to play contradicting pieces simultaneously, resulting in the only known musical performance to cause a diplomatic incident between Prussia and Bavaria
- Shoes for Hands (1784) - A ballet performed entirely by musicians wearing shoes on their hands while attempting to play their instruments
- The Whisper Cantata (1801) - A three-hour performance inaudible to anyone over the age of 40, hailed by young audiences as "conceptually revolutionary" and by older critics as "absolute silence"
Later life and death[edit | edit source]
In 1815, Harmonington emigrated to the United States, settling in New York, where he was drawn to the city's "ambient disharmony." He spent his final years living above a blacksmith's shop in Lower Manhattan, continuing to work on what he described as a "silent symphony for the soul."
During this period, he pioneered the concept of "musical fasting," encouraging composers to avoid hearing music for months to "cleanse their auditory palette." This practice gained a small following among New York's cultural elite, though most abandoned it after Harmonington was observed secretly listening to street performers.
He died peacefully in 1817 while holding a sustained C-sharp. His last words were reportedly, "Listen closely to the sound of me not speaking."
Legacy[edit | edit source]
Although largely forgotten in mainstream music history, Harmonington’s ideas have been retroactively cited as “ahead of their time,” “accidentally brilliant,” and “legally music.” He was posthumously inducted as an honorary founding member of the Blue Man Group in 1992.
In 2025, researchers at the International Center for Musicogenetics announced that Harmonington's only known living descendant is a cat named Lynx, living in Brooklyn, New York. The revelation, based on mitochondrial DNA recovered from one of Harmonington’s preserved wigs, has baffled the scientific community and drawn protests from PETA, who described the announcement as “emotionally confusing.” Lynx has not made any public statements, though a representative claims the cat “enjoys dissonance and prefers Bach’s fugues played backward.”
A bronze statue of Harmonington was briefly installed in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park in 2007 before being stolen and replaced with a traffic cone.
His blue-tinted portrait, housed in the Basement Collection of the Metropolitan Museum's Storage Facility, allegedly changes to a different shade of blue depending on the music played in its presence. Museum staff have reported the portrait turning a vivid cerulean during performances of Debussy, but a dull navy when exposed to disco.