Claude Bragdon (1866–1946), the Rochester (New York) architect, graphic artist, theater designer, geometrician, Theosophist, and writer on social and spiritual subjects, included in his essay collection The New Image (1928) seven elaborate black-and-white designs representing the seven degrees of the diatonic scale. They were part of Bragdon's long quest to integrate music into his Theosophical world view, first through the correspondence of tone with color and then with his system of “projective geometry” intended to represent a “fourth dimension” beyond the material world. The images combine this with Jay Hambidge's “dynamic symmetry,” a geometric system believed to be the perennial key to aesthetic satisfaction, and with the supposed emotional content of the seven degrees. Knowing this, it is possible to analyze and explain the seven images and to appreciate them as a modernist contribution to the Hermetic doctrine of correspondences.

Claude Fayette Bragdon enjoyed local celebrity as architect of Rochester’s First Universalist Church (1909), New York Central Railroad Station (1915), and Chamber of Commerce (1917) and a wide readership through his sixteen books published by Alfred A. Knopf from 1916 to 1943. After a half-century of neglect, his place in history has become clearer through Jonathan Massey's monograph and a volume of essays accompanying an exhibition at the University of Rochester Library.

Although toward the end of his life Bragdon admitted that “music says nothing to me—or very little,” he had always felt the need to integrate it into his global vision and ambition. Following the architects of Antiquity and the Renaissance, he used harmonic proportions to plan his buildings, certain that the eye and the ear are gratified by the same mathematical ratios. He pursued the elusive correspondences between tone and color, formulating his own theories and putting them into practice in the “Song and Light Festivals” of the First World War years. Underlying these efforts was his conviction, as a Theosophist, of a cosmos intelligently designed and ordered by correspondences. This chapter describes his quest and its visible fruit in the seven enigmatic illustrations of the essay collection The New Image, titled with the seven degrees of the diatonic scale.

In his first doctrinal work, The Beautiful Necessity, Bragdon explains the relationship between musical and visual proportion. An obvious parallel is between the regular beats of music and the regular repetitions of architectural members in both duple and triple groupings.