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CIt has long been known that consumers travel far to find inspiration. Mendelssohn went to the remote island of Staffa in Scotland to write his opening on the Hebrides, while Messiaen found music in the mountains of Utah. Deborah Pritchard decided to take a trip to Mars.
"It was majestic, with all those red hills and valleys that look a lot like those of the Earth," says the award-winning composer about his trip. "To be able to see the landscape was extraordinary."
A small context: Pritchard's trip to Mars was actually a trip to the data observatory of Imperial College London. It's here that the images of the Curiosity vehicle – a vehicle the size of a car that scours the crater Gale of the planet, equipped with a camera, a drill and even d & # 39; A kind of selfie stick – give visitors an immersive virtual experience. on the planet. For Pritchard, everything was in the name of inspiration. His mission, along with that of seven other musicians, was to update the Holst Planets for the 21st century using the latest scientific knowledge.
Holst's masterpiece can be considered a modern classic, but there are good reasons to see it again. Especially because when Holst started the writing process in 1914, our understanding of the solar system left a little to be desired. "Martians build two huge canals in two years!", Tells The New York Times story, citing the observations of respected astronomer Percival Lowell.
The fact that Holst did or did not believe in a Martian super-race (as the public apparently did) is irrelevant because his Planets suite was not based on science, but rather on the astrological characteristics of each planet. . Mars was therefore the bearer of war, Venus represented peace, Uranus the magician, and so on. He made for bold and characteristic music – but do these planetary personalities have a basis in reality?
"Not really," says Dr. Philippa Mason, field geologist at Imperial Oil, and one of six scientists is committed to coaching composers throughout the process. "For example, Mars is really a cool, calm and benign place, while Venus is hell-volcanic, dense enough and hot enough to melt the lead." It seems that Holst has completely upset these two neighbors of the Earth.
The idea of reinventing The planets using modern science came from the young British composer Samuel Bordoli who, along with Sound UK producers, paired each musician with a planet and a mentor and asked them to write a play five minutes for string quartet. Entitled The Planets 2018, the results will be made by the Ligeti Quartet in the planetariums of the country from Saturday.
The timing is neat. Not only does the first concert mark the centenary of Holst's debut in the Planets suite, but Greenwich – where the planetarium tour begins – is the place where astronomers have conclusively refuted the claim of a Martian army of build waterways at 33.5 million kilometers.
Bordoli chose the gas giant Uranus for its composition and started an intense email exchange with David Rothery, professor of planetary geosciences at the Open University. It took a lot of "naive questions" before finding a musical way: Rothery explained how a sunset could have appeared on the planet and something was clicking.
"It was so different from everything we could live," says Bordoli. "You would see the sun as a single point that would begin to spiral out 42 years until it disappears below the horizon. And then, of course, you have 42 years of darkness. His finished piece hopes to represent this long journey from light to dark.
Bordoli has never had the opportunity to "visit" his planet as Pritchard did. She made several trips in the 3D room of Mars to admire the landscapes, take photos and fire on her mentor, Sanjeev Gupta, professor of earth sciences at Imperial. When I visit, I can see why she wanted to keep coming back. Seeing the arid but beautiful landscape of the planet so vast and so limpid is breathtaking. And Gupta is a contagious professor with a store of exciting questions. He explains how Curiosity has been on Mars for six years now, studying minerals and the atmosphere. Gupta taught Pritchard the story of Mars: "Since there was water and an atmosphere, it was probably a nice environment for picnicking, there are about 3.5 billion of years, when the water and the atmosphere were lost.
Unlike Holst's original, Pritchard says she intended a sense of calm and peace in her composition. The discovery of Mars was a very cold planet, despite its desert appearance that led her to cool her chords, using quarters. But what's most important for music, she says, is her emotional response: learning how Mars was able to shelter life gave her a new love for what we have on Earth. "It could have gone so easily in the other direction," she says, "so the music reflects that, the realization that Mother Earth needs to be protected."
Just steps from the Mars Room, in a secluded part of the School of Mines, is a cramped room filled with terrestrial rocks, ranging from ancient fossils to crystals. Gupta leads me with Ayanna Witter-Johnson, a singer and cellist whose work bridges the gap between classical and alternative R & B. She decided to take the Earth for the project, a planet that Holst did not include. Gupta thinks she has had the most difficult task: "Because we all know Earth so well."
As a Witter-Johnson mentor, Gupta decided to focus on the Earth's history: how it was destroyed 4.6 billion years ago by a collision with planet Theia's the size of Mars and how dust and debris land but also the moon. It was a story that Witter-Johnson had never heard before and that inspired it. "It's nice to have a mythological story, whether it's true or not," she says. "I realized that I did not want to give a definitive answer to what is the Earth … so my piece became an invitation to the public to contemplate what they the Earth was thinking.
If we know too much about the Earth, then Shiva Feshareki had the opposite problem. The Anglo-Iranian composer and turntablist chose Venus for his planet, but quickly discovered that he was missing information from our nearest planetary neighbor.
"The atmosphere is so dense that visible light can not penetrate it," says Mason, who supervised Feshareki. Because of this, much of what we know about Venus is based on other data readings – we can then use what we know from Earth to extrapolate information from them. This scientific process led Feshareki to consider a completely new approach to composition.
"I started thinking about things like pitch, rhythm and notation and how these concepts are only conditioning as musicians," she says. "Instead, I wanted the quartet to listen deeply, think about the movement of their body and bows, and focus on the physical nature of the sound and think about how the sound is actually physics and mathematics.
His final piece consists of only five notes, but in these notes is a "sonic sculpture" that forms as the quartet explores his sonic universe. It's as ambitious and inventive as the project itself. Mason seems pleasantly puzzled by what she saw from Feshareki's instructions for the musicians. "She sent me the diagram," she says. "It's a series of circles that represent octaves, almost like orbits. Then she chose these notes and plotted them, and what came out is a kind of star shaped structure that represents the final destination.
Something that the Ligeti Quartet did is guess: "It would be interesting to know!", Laughs Mason. But in truth, it is a revealing experience for all concerned, whether they are scientists or musicians.
"The quartet was surprised by the magnitude of the planet debate," Gupta said. "There is a vision of science that it is data, interpretations and solutions. In fact, we have ideas and assumptions and that requires a lot of creativity, just like music. In geology, there is a big gap between what you see in the rocks and what they can tell you … a lot of our work is about how you interpret it and the stories we can tell. It's not just hard science.
"I realized that scientists and composers are explorers," says Witter-Johnson. "We ask questions, trying to find solutions and discover new things. That's what this project is. "
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