Goldberg City Variations
Oct. 4th, 2018 10:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmolinguistOn Tuesday night, Andrew and I went to the Royal Northern College of Music for "Goldberg City Variations." It was so wonderful. A familiar and much-loved piece of music, accompanied by a computer-generated cityscape video based on the sounds.
Watching abstract "landscapes" and "buildings" assemble themselves, with orderly rows of lines and angles flying into place like an IKEA instruction manual come to life, was endlessly fascinating and yet so soothing, like filling in one of those intricate mandala-type coloring pages. It gives the visual part of your brain something to do while you're taking in the music.
Bach's music, especially Goldberg (written to soothe an insomniac who was rich enough to be able to employ poor Goldberg to stay up all night and play for him) is so warm and alive, it might not seem the most intuitive accompaniment to greyscale rectilinear architecture. But of course there's too nothing modern for Bach: when his music was suggested for inclusion on Voyager's "golden record," to explain humanity to any aliens that might find it one day, Carl Sagan famously declared that'd be "just showing off." I'm as happy to have Bach represent me to any alien as Sagan was.
At the end of the performance, a message came up on the screen saying that it was inspired by "Cosmic City" by Iannis Xenakis, who I'd never heard of so I've looked him up now and...My beloved Messiaen thought he was too weird to give music lessons to. An architect who wrote music that evokes "the physics and patterning of the natural world, of the stars, of gas molecules, and the proliferating possibilities of mathematical principles."
He sounds like someone I should be listening to. (I've tried his music out on Spotify now.)
Watching abstract "landscapes" and "buildings" assemble themselves, with orderly rows of lines and angles flying into place like an IKEA instruction manual come to life, was endlessly fascinating and yet so soothing, like filling in one of those intricate mandala-type coloring pages. It gives the visual part of your brain something to do while you're taking in the music.
Bach's music, especially Goldberg (written to soothe an insomniac who was rich enough to be able to employ poor Goldberg to stay up all night and play for him) is so warm and alive, it might not seem the most intuitive accompaniment to greyscale rectilinear architecture. But of course there's too nothing modern for Bach: when his music was suggested for inclusion on Voyager's "golden record," to explain humanity to any aliens that might find it one day, Carl Sagan famously declared that'd be "just showing off." I'm as happy to have Bach represent me to any alien as Sagan was.
At the end of the performance, a message came up on the screen saying that it was inspired by "Cosmic City" by Iannis Xenakis, who I'd never heard of so I've looked him up now and...My beloved Messiaen thought he was too weird to give music lessons to. An architect who wrote music that evokes "the physics and patterning of the natural world, of the stars, of gas molecules, and the proliferating possibilities of mathematical principles."
He sounds like someone I should be listening to. (I've tried his music out on Spotify now.)