“After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music,” Aldous Huxley wrote as he contemplated the transcendent power of music half a century earlier than this supreme hallmark of our species sailed into the everlasting silence of spacetime aboard the Voyager, encoded on the Golden Record because the sonic fingerprint of what we yearn for and what we’re — “atoms with consciousness.”
All of our most inexpressible emotions — our loneliness and our longing, our grief and our famishing starvation for that means — are scale fashions of our nice cosmic loneliness, microcosms of the immense silence of spacetime itself. And so, to bear all of it, we sing — singing as sensemaking, singing because the supreme gesture that bridges lonelinesses, singing because the tonic gasp on the surprise of existence and the ravishing improbability of it all.
And but music was not inevitable — nothing in our animal structure requires this extravagance of expression, nothing within the legal guidelines of chance inclines towards it. However as soon as there was consciousness — which can be, arguably, not inevitable: take a look at each different planet we now have studied — music arose from our complicated consciousness, from this cathedral of thought and feeling: a byproduct as inevitable as god.
This wonderful inevitability comes alive with unusual splendor in The Listeners — the staggering oratorio composer, violinist, vocalist, and polymathic music-sibyl Caroline Shaw made for and recorded with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, impressed by the Golden Document dreamt up a technology in the past by the poetic, prophetic Carl Sagan, who noticed us as “a species endowed with hope and perseverance, at least a little intelligence, substantial generosity and a palpable zest to make contact with the cosmos.”
5 centuries of celebrated poetry tackle a brand new radiance within the gentle of Shaw’s music, recorded reside at First Congregational Church in Berkeley, California, within the spring and autumn of 2019. Among the many spoken-word recordings that punctuate the sung poems, their soulful prose-poetry magnified by the orchestral magic, are Sagan’s personal phrases from his iconic Pale Blue Dot speech and a recording the Secretary Normal of the United Nations made that NASA by no means requested for, however which Sagan discovered “so sensitively and gracefully composed, and so applicable,” that they included it on the Golden Document:
We step out of our photo voltaic system into the universe in search of solely peace and friendship, to show if we’re referred to as upon, to be taught if we’re lucky. We all know full properly that our planet and all its inhabitants are however a small a part of the immense universes that surrounds us and it’s with humility and hope that we take this step.
The fifth piece on the report, titled “Of a Million Million,” inspirits Tennyson’s 1885 poem “Vastness” — a masterwork of ethical readability and scientific foresight that envisioned, epochs earlier than the Kepler mission found the primary exoplanet, a universe of innumerable attainable worlds and held up, a century earlier than Maya Angelou did, a mirror to humanity with strains of searing resonance immediately:
Many a fireplace upon our darkish globe sighs after many a vanish’d face,
Many a planet by many a solar could roll with a mud of a vanish’d race.Raving politics, by no means at relaxation — as this poor earth’s pale historical past runs, —
What’s all of it however a hassle of ants within the gleam of 1,000,000 million of suns?Lies upon this facet, lies upon that facet, truthless violence mourn’d by the Sensible,
1000’s of voices drowning his personal in a well-liked torrent of lies upon lies;[…]
Nationwide hatreds of complete generations, and pigmy spites of the village spire;
Vows that can final to the final death-ruckle, and vows which are snapp’d in a second of fireside;[…]
Spring and Summer season and Autumn and Winter, and all these previous revolutions of earth;
All new-old revolutions of Empire — change of the tide — what’s all of it price?[…]
What’s all of it, if all of us of us finish however in being our personal corpse-coffins eventually,
Swallow’d in Vastness, misplaced in Silence, drown’d within the deeps of a meaningless Previous?What however a murmur of gnats within the gloom, or a second’s anger of bees of their hive? —
Peace, let or not it’s! for I beloved him, and love him for ever: the useless usually are not useless however alive.
However, to me, the crowning glory of the report is the second piece, drawn from Whitman — the poet laureate of astronomy, who called himself a “kosmos” and uniquely understood music as the profoundest expression of nature.
Caroline Shaw recomposes Leaves of Grass in such a method that the singer — bass-baritone Dashon Burton — enters Whitman’s river of language mid-stream, partway by the forty-sixth part of “Tune of Myself,” culminating in that one beautiful line that titles the tune:
Let your soul stand cool and composed earlier than 1,000,000 universes.
Inexpressible feeling driving on a pillar of breath — the true Pillars of Creation, each steadying the soul and setting it free.
The Listeners, additionally savorable on Spotify, is an enchantment in its entirety. Complement it with one among Emily Dickinson’s deepest-feeling and farthest-seeing poems, dropped at life in an animated song.
