Epoch after epoch, we people have tried to lift ourselves above different animals with distinctions which have turned out false — consciousness is just not ours alone, neither is grief, neither is play. If there’s something singular about us, it’s our capability to be wonder-smitten by the world and to invent languages for channeling that surprise — the surprise of the interior world, the language for which is artwork, and the surprise of the outer world, the language of which is science. Binding the 2 and translating between them is the crowning glory of our consciousness: music.
How these two languages mirror and inform one another is what Philip Glass explores some beautiful passages from his memoir Words Without Music (public library).
Glass — who was grinding lenses and constructing telescopes at age eleven, and who has written extra operas about science than another composer — recounts the enchantment science solid upon him as a freshman on the College of Chicago within the early Nineteen Fifties, learning chemistry underneath a Nobel laureate who had chosen to show eighty youngsters with electrifying enthusiasm for the topic — a testomony to how one nice instructor can form a life, can set into movement the orrery of surprise from which all inventive work springs. Wanting again on these lectures, Glass acknowledges the parallels of ardour that nice artists and nice scientists share:
Professor Urey lectured like an actor, striding forwards and backwards in entrance of the large blackboard, making incomprehensible marks on the board… His educating was like a efficiency. He was a person enthusiastic about his topic, and he couldn’t wait till we might be there at eight within the morning. Scientists on that stage are like artists in a manner. They’re intensely in love with their material.
What additionally formed Glass’s inventive spirit and his understanding of creativity was the college’s fairly uncommon alternative to show college students from major sources — the voices and visions of nice artists, writers, and scientists rising from the web page instantly, unmediated by a biographer’s interpretation or a critic’s commentary. Not but twenty, Glass and his classmates learn Schrödinger and Dalton, Newton’s Principia and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, replicated Mendel’s fruit fly experiments and restaged Galileo’s rolling balls. One thing greater than studying emerged from this immersion — one thing radiant with understanding, a manner of seeing how particular person concepts slot in a bigger framework of data, the framework we name tradition. Glass displays on how this imprinted his creativeness:
The research of science turned the research of the historical past of science, and I started to know what a scientific persona might be like. This early publicity can be mirrored in Galileo Galilei, which I composed forty-five years later, by which his experiments change into a dance piece — the balls and inclined planes are there. I discovered the biographical elements of scientists intensely attention-grabbing, and the operas about Galileo, Kepler, and Einstein pay tribute to all the things I realized about scientists and science that got here out of these years.
With an eye fixed to the singular energy of this primary-source methodology of studying, he provides:
The impact on me was to domesticate and perceive in a firsthand manner the lineage of tradition. The women and men who created the stepping-stones from earliest occasions turned acquainted to us — not one thing “handed down” however truly recognized in a most instant and private manner… I now see clearly that numerous the work I selected was impressed by women and men whom I first met within the pages of books. On this manner, these early operas have been, as I see it, an homage to the ability, power, and inspiration of the lineage of tradition.
Wanting again on his personal inventive trajectory, he displays:
Music and science have been my nice loves. I see scientists as visionaries, as poets… What pursuits me is how comparable these visionaries’ manner of seeing is to that of an artist. Einstein clearly visualized his work. In one among his books on relativity, making an attempt to clarify it to individuals, he wrote that he imagined himself sitting on a beam of sunshine, and the beam of sunshine was touring by way of the universe at 186,000 miles per second. What he noticed was himself sitting nonetheless and the world flashing by him at a extremely excessive pace. His conclusion was that every one he needed to do — as if it have been a minor matter — was to invent the arithmetic to explain what he had seen.
Glass provides:
What I’ve to do once I compose is just not that completely different. All I’ve to do after I’ve the imaginative and prescient is to seek out the language of music to explain what I’ve heard, which might take a sure period of time. I’ve been working within the language of music all my life, and it’s inside that language that I’ve realized how concepts can unfold.
Complement with physicist Alan Lightman on music and the universe and the shared psychology of creative breakthrough in art and science, then revisit the neurophysiology of how music enchants us and the story of how Pythagoras and Sappho revolutionized music.
