click bellow to
|
|
How vast those Orbs
must be, and how inconsiderable this Earth, the Theatre upon
which all our mighty Designs, all our Navigations, and all our
Wars are transacted, is when compared to them. A very fit consideration,
and matter of Reflection, for those Kings and Princes who sacrifice
the Lives of so many People, only to flatter their Ambition in
being Masters of some pitiful corner of this small Spot.
Christiaan Huygens, Cosmotheoros: or conjectures concerning the
inhabitants of the planets (1698)
The Planets is
a project about the Solar System. I followed the development
of the James Webb Telescope from a distance, through published
news reports. And I started to follow its discoveries almost
daily after its launching in 2021. How many discoveries! What
a magnificent transformation in our vision of the Universe!
Without making any comparison with the divine Joseph Haydn, who
lived between 1732 and 1809 and who was Mozart's master and great
friend, I couldn't help but think of his famous encounter with
William Herschel, who lived between 1738 and 1822. Herschel was
not only a great astronomer - discoverer of Uranus, the moons
of Saturn and infrared radiation for example - but also a brilliant
composer and the builder of the most powerful telescope in the
world in his time.
Haydn was in London and visited Herschel. I tell the story in
my book Music - A Brief History of Western Musical Thought, published
in 2014.
From that meeting of Herschel, his telescope and Haydn was born,
after about six years of intense work, The Creation after which
Haydn fell ill, so much energy he had devoted to this work.
At that time, Haydn wrote: "Never was I so devout as when
I composed The Creation. I knelt down each day to pray to God
to give me strength for my work....When I was working on The
Creation I felt so impregnated with Divine certainty, that before
sitting down to the piano, I would quietly and confidently pray
to God to grant me the talent that was needed to praise Him worthily".
Look at the sky. Isn't that the same thing we all feel?
I never became an astronomer, not even an amateur one. When I
was a child my father bought a telescope, with which we traveled
through the sky. But the equipment was small and I did not know
the secrets of that wonderful Universe. I didn't know where to
look and what I saw.
Many years later, we were in Italy, in Chianti, at the home of
my dear friend, the poet, architect and artist Aldo Roda, a great
connoisseur of Rudolf Steiner's thought, who lived from 1861
to 1925. We went go to the superior terrace of his house and
got deeply marveled at trips through the sky having him as our
guide.
Those were delightful trips.
How could I not be enchanted by the James Webb telescope? Hubble
had already been a strong reference in my life, as surely in
the lives of all of us.
How could I not have Hypatia in mind? A thought attributed to
the famous Greek astronomer, tortured and murdered by miserable
people in a rage for power, is: "Life is growth, and the
more we travel, the more truth we can understand. Understanding
the things that surround us is the best preparation to understand
the things that lie beyond".
The first time I thought of making a musical composition related
to outer space was when I received, I believe in 1995, a recording
of Saturn sent to me by the American astronautical engineer Louis
Friedman. He had created in 1980 the Planetary Society with Carl
Sagan and Bruce C. Murray. I had contacted them because my Woiksed
project, the first virtual planet in history, the beginning of
the so-called metaverse. That project of mine, started in 1980,
had received a major international award a year earlier. Unfortunately,
there was no possibility of a collaboration with the Planetary
Society, but he very kindly sent me that recording.
Two years later I composed SETI - a concert made exclusively
with extraterrestrial sounds. This concert had its world premiere
in Geneva shortly afterwards.
The Saturn "sound" information that Louis Friendman
sent me was a conversion of the electromagnetic waves into a
frequency profile within our hearing spectrum.
That material served as the basis for the composition.
I prepared other compositions following the same principle, such
as the opera Metamorphosis that used the "sounds" captured
outside the Solar System and was made in partnership with my
dear friend, the Swiss philosopher René Berger, responsible
for the libretto, in 2009. The opera Metamorphosis had its world
premiere in New York at the Experimental Intermedia Foundation
in 2016, under the direction and curation of composer Phill Niblock,
another dear friend.
Starting in 2020 NASA started to make regular "sonification"
of the frequencies picked up from various celestial bodies, with
the collaboration of musicians.
I saw how some "sonifications" have been done and that's
not what this is about here!
The captured elements, in electromagnetic waves or within the
sound spectrum of hearing, reveal factors such as frequency fluctuations
and irregularities in time. These differential factors are used
as a reference for composition, which is done by a human being
- in this case me - and not by algorithms.
Therefore, it is not about a "sonification" - not expressing
here any judgement of value about them!
The entire composition follows a pulse rate of about 41 BPM,
a grave movement, but both the pulse rate is slightly irregular
and the rhythmic cells produced are "oriental", i.e.
they exchange values with each other.
41 BPM is a value well below the resting heartbeat in adult people
who are not athletes. The basal value for normal people, therefore
at rest, is around 60 BPM. When we hear a lower pulse rate, we
tend to reduce our pulse rate to relaxation values.
The composition process initially used NASA's "translations"
of the electromagnetic frequency emissions into a sound spectrum
within our hearing spectrum. Then, this set of sounds, from the
eight planets, were again "translated"; this time into
frequency and time data. What interested me was the gap between
the information data.
This whole process immediately reminded me of Mozart when he
said, "The music is not in the notes, but in the silence
between".
This relational data, of the voids between frequencies and time,
was the basis of the composition, which operated eight independent
systems of sounds - one for each planet.
The result was surprising in terms of the frequencies, whose
often consonant relations remind us of Kepler, and of the time
- whose relations bring us, besides the pulsation that confers
a powerful element of unity, a great rhythmic richness.
The music is totally different, from beginning to end, but we
have the feeling that it is the same... or "almost"
the same. It is of a deeply meditative character... but the listener
is always under a constant relative tension.
It was not about the frequencies themselves, but about the "distances",
the "silences" that separates them... in time and space.
The Planets is
a meditative composition.
At the beginning of the 21st century, time has lost value. Everything
must be fast. A university professor in the field of cinema told
me, months ago, that if a student was not able to create movies
of a few seconds, there was no point in studying cinema. "People
have no time! Everything must work in a cell phone!" - he
said.
People are stopping reading books, just ask your cell phone;
many people don't have the patience to cook, and start eating
industrialized foods, which are "faster". Some years
ago, another professor, in the audiovisual area, said that historical
documentaries made no sense because they were "wasted time"
- people already knew what was needed, why more?
But time is fundamental - with health it surely is the most fundamental
thing we have in life. Without time you cannot love, you cannot
write a book, study, write a musical composition, admire a work
of art, admire a sunset or sunrise, learn, be with your friends,
you cannot listen to music, read books, immerse yourself in works
of art...
Time is what we call "quality". There is no quality
of life or of thought without free time.
Because of this, like many of my other works, The Planets is
a work for a long time of meditation - as so many works by Haydn
also were, for example.
As soon as I finished recording a few days ago, I was surprised
by something unusual. The final recording was 2 hours, 22 minutes
and 2 seconds long!
I went to look up what the number 2222 meant.
In 1890. James Strong, professor of exegetical theology, published
The Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, an index of all the
words in the Bible. Under the number 2222 we find, "2222
zo? - life (physical and spiritual). All life (2222 /zo?), throughout
the Universe, is derived - i.e. it always (only) comes from and
is sustained by God's self-existent life. The Lord intimately
shares His gift of life with people, creating each in His image
which gives all the capacity to know His eternal life".
Then I did a search in some mystical books. They said that the
number 2222 is very favorable to everyone.
In my book Music - A Brief History of Western Musical Thought
I also tell the story of Johannes Kepler and his vision of the
Solar System. It was based on the Music of the Spheres - numbers
and magical relations.
Kepler said that "each planet has its individual soul by
whose aid the star would ascend in its circuit".
Here is the version of the composition, with a movie I made with
images of the planets of our solar system made by NASA, it is
only 40 minutes long.
Have a nice trip!
Emanuel Dimas
de Melo Pimenta, 2023
|
|
|