Musica universalis

The equations for atoms and light are, almost literally, the same equations that govern musical instruments and sound.

Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question (2015)

Wonder tracks

I am about to spend a few days off-grid on a small island, writing.  Here are ten pieces of human music linked to wonder [see footnote] that I could imagine taking with me:

1. Pygmy polyphony. People may have probably been singing like this for tens of thousands of years and perhaps much longer. They want the forest to be happy.

2. Shen Khar Venakhi from 11th century Georgia. The last line translates as "You yourself are the sun, shining brilliantly."

3. Miserere Nostri, Domine by Thomas Tallis. 

4. J.S. Bach — pretty much passim but let's say the Gigue from 4th Partita.

5. For a bit of OTT, the Dies Irae from Verdi's Requiem conducted by Riccardo Muti 

6. Even more OTT, Das Lied von der Erde by Gustav Mahler. Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod.   

7. The final scene of The Firebird by Igor Stravinksy.  

8. Once in a Lifetime from Remain in Light by Talking Heads. There is water at the bottom of the ocean. 

9. Become Ocean by John Luther Adams. Alex Ross has called it "the loveliest apocalypse in musical history."

10. For my family, What a wonderful world sung by Louis Armstrong.  

What would you take?


Footnote:

Any experience of wonder is, of course, historically situated and constrained in all sorts of ways. My list probably does little more than highlight my prejudice and ignorance. But all of us are, inevitably, situated — albeit in different places!  I'll go with a definition of wonder by the philosopher Martyn Evans:

an attitude of altered, compellingly-intensified attention towards something that we immediately acknowledge as somehow important – something whose appearance engages our imagination before our understanding but which we will probably want to understand more fully with time.

Tracks that didn't quite make my cut include music for Japanese flute, the fourth movement from Mozart's 41st Symphony, Artur Schnabel playing Beethoven's 24th variation on a theme by Diabelli, A Hard Rain's a Gonna Fall by Bob Dylan and Um Tom by Caetano Veloso.  As a restorative after the Dies Irae, try Tutto nel mondo è burla.  My favourite Armstrong track is West End Blues (with Earl Hines), and the song my eight-year-old would like is Somewhere Over the Rainbow.

More possibilities than we imagine

We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that consequently we have many more possibilities before us than we imagine.

from Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari (2011)

Image from Mundus Subterraneus by Athanasius Kircher (1665)

The intimate Pleiades

Imagination completed what mere sight could not achieve. Looking down, I seemed to see through a transparent planet, through heather and solid rock, through the buried graveyards of vanished species, down through the molten flow of basalt, and on into the Earth’s core of iron; then on again, still seemingly downwards, through the southern strata to the southern ocean and lands, past the roots of gum trees and the feet of the inverted antipodeans, through their blue, sun-pierced dawning of day, and out into the eternal night, where sun and stars are together. For there, dizzyingly far below me, like fishes in the depth of a lake, lay the nether constellations. The two domes of the sky were fused into one hollow sphere, star-peopled, black, even beside the blinding sun. The young moon was a curve of incandescent wire. The completed hoop of the Milky Way encircled the universe.

Star Maker by Olaf Stapleton (1937)

Image: ESA

Clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low & horridly cruel

What a book a Devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of nature! 

Letter from Charles Darwin to Joseph Hooker , 13 July 1856

Image: Alexander Wild

Narrow chinks

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.

At Breaking Convention 2015,  David Nutt mentions evidence that psilocybin opens up the brain.

Any-angled light

A photon at the centre of the Sun may collide with atoms between about 49 billion trillion and 49 trillion trillion times before it reaches the surface. Even moving at the speed of light between collisions that will take from around five thousand to half a million years.

Sunshine's Crazy Sloppy Path to You by Robert Krulwich