Transcription
I think what's really important for people to know about what music is is that we're advancing a new hypothesis about what music is doing in our species. Music for me is this kind of invisible everyday miracle that yes, you see the instruments in these contraptions like pianos that are we use to make this stuff, but but why is it having this effect on us?
I'm approaching music as a musician, but I'm approaching what music is as a citizen journalist. You know, the Greeks and many other ancient cultures also felt that music was completely central and that music was made oral so that people could hear relationships and dimensions if they couldn't do the maths themselves. And so there is a sense in which music is the easiest way in which everyone can together learn about and discover the mysteries of the universe. So, we can really get into how does it connect to elements of existence as small as the orbitals of electrons in an atom to things as big as the orbitals of planets around star systems millions of light years away. There are ways in which it's all connected.
The stories that music can tell are ones that other forms can't. I mean, all of a sudden, you it's just it's more than just listening to music. It's having a physical experience. Just these incredible phenomena that we can start to explain and understand and that will open our eyes and ears, I think, to a new appreciation of the orchestra, concerts in general, the relationships that we have with one another. It's just all of these harmonious elements coming together. It's very powerful. I feel in many ways that I'm approaching it not as a specialist, but as an everyman who wants to understand what music is doing in our universe and isn't going to be satisfied until I bloody well find out for myself.
Heat up here.
My name is Bill Barklay. I'm artistic director of concert theater works and of music before 1800. I was director of music at Shakespeare's Globe in London for about 9 years. I'm a writer, director, composer, and producer. What music is did not start as what music is. It started when I was asked to give a lecture on the music of the spheres for a humanity series at Shakespeare & Company by Tina Packer back about 20 years ago in western Massachusetts and I knew nothing about the subject and so I panicked and started reading as much as I could. I came across the moons of Jupiter and three of Jupiter's moons were in a 124 orbital resonance with each other. 124 are three of the first harmonics of the overtone series. And I had what I remember as a wild moment of recognition that there was something to investigate here.
So there are things that we know to be true about this material and there are things that we have no idea why they are true, whether they're coincidences or whether they represent some higher order of organization in the cosmos that we don't yet understand. I'm in the arts, but I'm not an astronomer. Uh I'm not a quantum physicist. And so I do need a a large team of people of specialists that I can bounce these observations off of. Matteo Canello, an astrophysicist who is a research fellow at Princeton who we consult Lucas Volultz, Doctor of Neuroscience at the University of Cologne. Matteo and Lucas and I and Sean Feny will be collaborating on the book What Music is which is currently in process. And I have someone in mathematics, someone in cosmology. And so we're pulling some of the greatest thinkers on this to try to come to the the event horizon of what's true and maybe pointing the direction as to experimentally what science should look at next.
Thomas Hoiser and I met at Vasser College. We were both undergrads. Thomas was a few years behind me. We were both music majors. We were both conductors. And I created this project called the Hamlet Symphony, which I didn't realize then, but I see now as a prototype for concert theater.
It was a combination of uh theatrical uh Shakespeare with a brand new music that was meant to complement the drama. And so Bill's concept of how the orchestra can be featured along with dramatic action and visuals, uh, all of that is something that I've been watching him develop over the course of his career. And we've been talking a lot quite a bit behind the scenes. I think that this concert will be really beautiful no matter what the context, but live and in person, there is something about what they're talking about that requires the physical experience. Like we are actually feeling these things in the concert hall in a way that is the actual vibrations, the feeling, the energy, the love, the excitement, all of that is so real in the concert hall and it ends up being Bill's thesis.
When you're sitting in a concert, you're not multitasking. You're not doing anything else. You are there to hear the sound. A very simple switch your brain makes when you actively listen to something versus when you passively listen to something. Neuroscientists can test this very easily and there's a huge range of differences in your brain when you do that.
It's going to be very different than say just watching a presentation on your screen at home because there's an element of being present with all these people and with all these instruments. They're all resonating in their own ways and they're coming together and they're actually transforming the air in a way that is not going to happen when you're just listening to a facsimile of music through a loudspeaker. Because when you're listening to music through a loudspeaker, that's really the instrument you're listening to. Nothing wrong with it, but it's basically an illusion of sound. It's something that the music theorist Armory Schaefer described as schizophonic, where you've you've separated the musical experience from the actual source. And when you're actually in the same room as the instrument, as the musicians, as the voice that's speaking to you, it's a totally different experience.
We've got a lot of elements in the show where we're in dialogue with the audience. It's not a just you sit and listen and watch. We really do want this to be in conversation with everyone.
An orchestra works because all of its members have a very fine-tuned awareness of how they fit into the whole. An orchestra is such a special creature because it does take the full energy and commitment of of so many individuals. We've got dozens of people working together for a common sound symphony. Even though probably many of the players for a lot of these pieces are playing more rests than they're playing notes, you've got to have patience and you've got to have deep listening.
I think there are a lot of models in musical structures around the world that we can really learn from. One of the things that Bill has talked about, the concepts he explores is the natural uh tendency for uh consonants and harmony and that those things are special in the universe and that they're part of who we are on both a physical and and psychological level that we're looking for that as people. We're looking for that sense of stasis and stability. An orchestra is the best tool for a young person to first come into contact with group social cohesion because the emerging property when it is that good is so beautiful and sonorous and obvious that wouldn't we just try to apply those lessons everywhere. That is the greatest metaphor for civic cooperation you could possibly imagine. We need to be more aware of the whole.
Certain pockets of the scientific community, astronomers, cosmologists were stopping right at the edge of the lake from saying why this would happen. It turns out that I needed another 10 years of science to develop and also for the climate of discussing science to change and become less specialist oriented, less vertical and more horizontal. More discussing with other scientific departments in order to laterally connect the dots and understand how things like orbital resonance and resonance capture occur in our universe and why this is or why it can be explained as an harmonic effect.
We are tackling some pretty big questions not just about music but how music relates to our lives to the universe itself to the way we have come to understand in the past 100 years that at the smallest level everything seems to be vibration and oscillation. Most of those vibrations are irregular. But regular vibrations like the earth moving around the sun once a year or your circadian rhythms that are entrained to sunlight once a day, regular vibrations we know affect other nearby regular vibrations. And those two vibrations, if they're regular enough together in a closed system, will not stay in dissonance forever. They will self-harmonize. They will come to a stable relationship with each other over time. That is why Jupiter's moons have arrived in consonants with each other. That's why the Trappist one solar system 39 light-years away from Earth has seven planets who are all locked in orbital resonance around that star. That's why that happens.
If we think that way and that's our lens, then there are orbits in our lives. There are orbits in our hearts. There are orbits in our families and our communities. And our mission therefore is to enable these orbits to find stability among the other contiguous orbits in their ecosystem. And that's what we're trying to do in our lives all the time. We prefer peace. The universe has chaotic elements. It has chance. It has randomness. It has entropy. It has all of that. But what hasn't been given as much PR is that it also has this inclination towards entrainment along the stable nodes of the harmonic series. And that in a closed system, regular waves that are right next to each other over millennia or over hours or over seconds will lock into harmonic phase. That's what we're doing here is to enable those locking into phase moments to happen and to help other people discover those as well. It's peace. And to speak scientifically, it's the path of least resistance. It takes less energy in a closed system to lock into harmonic phase. That's why music makes us feel extraordinary things because it puts us in touch with what the universe has been doing all along.