From Cosmology to Neuroscience to Rock Music and back piero scaruffi Jan 2015 www.scaruffi.com
Jul 15, 2015
The Universe
• Einstein: matter distribution determines spacetime geometry that determines the motion of matter
• Schroedinger: the total energy of a system determines the probability of its position at any given time
www.scaruffi.com
The Universe
• Entropy: Entropy can never decrease
• Indeterminacy: The more precise, the less precise
www.scaruffi.com
The Brain
• Problems
– How to survive in a nonlinear(chaotic) world
– How to process an infinite amount of information
• Solution
– An organ to simulate the nonlinear world
– Memory (which is NOT storage)
Regulated By biorhythms
www.scaruffi.com
The Brain
• A tool to find regularities in nature (that actually don’t exist: no two seasons are identical, no two rocks are identical)
• A tool to predict the future
• A tool to turn the incomprehensible into mathematics
www.scaruffi.com
Human Civilization
• Actually, mammals are not that good at civilization
• Anyway…
Human civilization over the millennia www.scaruffi.com
Human Civilization
• Three stages of brain development
– Child: helpless, selfish, dumb
– Young person: rebellious, violent, reckless, immature
– Adult: a computer (symbol processor)
• Simulation
• Theory of mind
• Planning
• Communication
• Cooperation
www.scaruffi.com
Human Civilization
• Note: In prehistory most brains never made it to the adult stage
www.scaruffi.com
Human Civilization
• Cave art • Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Vedic, Greek deities • Monumental architecture • Monotheism: Mazdaism, Judaism, Christianity,
Islam • Philosophy: Upanishad, Greeks, Qiu Kong, Lao-
tsu • Math: Babylonia, Pythagoras, India • Literature: Gilgamesh, Sinuhe, Homer • Science: Archimedes • And, above all, warfare
www.scaruffi.com
Human Civilization
• Mysteries, theater, dance, music
• Poetry rhymes = rhythm
• Singing poetry: a tool to memorize long epics
Symposium scene
www.scaruffi.com
Greek Tragedy
• Theater (550BC)
– "Theatron" = "seeing place", the place where the audience sat
– "Tragedia" = "goat-song" (goat skins of the chorus)
– "Chorus" = "dance"
– Theater began as a religious ceremony
– The Anthenian theatre focused on Dionysus, god of fertility, wine, sexuality, agriculture
– Yearly Dionysian fertility festival in March, including
• one week of public wine drinking
• phallus-worshiping orgy
• dithyrambos (dance and chant to the god)
– The dithyrambos evolves into tragedy www.scaruffi.com
Greek Tragedy
• Theater (550BC)
– The first plays were transcriptions in verse form of
these religious rites
– The first playwrights were poets and the first plays
were mostly recited (or sung) and danced by the
chorus
– Contests and competition like in athletic games
– The chorus danced in front of the stages ("orchestra”)
– A play included loud music, bright colors, spectacular
dancing
– The performance took place in an open-air theater
– The audience was 15-17,000 people
www.scaruffi.com
The Birth of Reading
• First popular literature: inscribed epigrams (especially in sanctuaries) since 7th c BC
• The Attic tragedies were the first books (for the purpose of documenting how to produce the play)
• Then people started reading them for entertainment
• Communal reading (aloud)
www.scaruffi.com
The Birth of Reading
• Aristophanes’ “Frogs” (405 BC) mentions the reader Dyonisos
• Logographers (e.g. Lysias, 5th BC) • Book market (book exported from
Athens as far as the Black Sea, Socrates mentions that a book by Anaxagoras costs one drachma)
• Child literacy (Herodotus: in 495BC in Chios 120 schoolchildren died in an accident while learning how to read and write)
www.scaruffi.com
The Birth of Composition?
• Written text: removal of enaction, the text has to be emotionally self-contained
• Did the same happen to music?
• Advantage of music: no need for glasses or lighting!
• Disadvantage: no recording medium
www.scaruffi.com
The Birth of Composition
• The Seikilos epitaph (1st c AD) is the oldest surviving musical composition
www.scaruffi.com
Music as Religious Power
• Schola Cantorum (5th c, Rome): a place for training ecclesiastical singers (future popes Sergius I, Sergius II, Gregory II, Stephen III, Paul I trained there)
• Gregorian monody (7th c until the 15th century)
• The original metrical performance of Gregorian monody disappears by 1050
• Secular monody (12th c, e.g. troubadours in France)
www.scaruffi.com
Music as Religious Power
• Ars Nova (John XXII complains in 1324 against the risks of secularising sacred music)
• Avignon pomp (especially Clement VI from 1342)
• Polyphony
– Cathedrals: choir and/or organ
– Vast majority of places: improvisation “Cantus super ltbrum” (13th c)
• Splendor and might Giovanni Battista Facchetti’s organ (Piacenza, 1544)
www.scaruffi.com
Music as Political Power
• 14th th: Princes’ private chapels are redesigned for polyphonic music
• Princes become patrons and practitioners of music (French king Charles the Bald of 9th c. was a harp player)
• Courts compete for music and musicians
• Guillaume Dufay (15th c, Burgundian school), Josquin Desprez (15thc, Franco-Flemish School), etc
• Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor (1486)
Quaternionenadler by Hans Burgkmair (1510)
www.scaruffi.com
Western Music
• Folk music: stories and sex • Meistersinger (14th-16th c) • Frottola (Italy, 16th c) • Opera (Jacopo Peri's “Daphne” in 1597; Venice’s opera house of
1637) • Instruments: harpsichord, lute, violin, contrabass, viola, cello, harp,
trombone, trumpet, guitar, flute, pipe organ • Freedom to improvise • Symphony • Ballet • Classical music for both God and the King • The piano (Bartolomeo Cristofori , 1709) • Romanticism to Wagner: love, death • Music is the ultimate, “total” art • Formal dance
www.scaruffi.com
Western Music
• Music magazines
• Musical Times (England, 1844)
• Billboard (USA, 1894)
www.scaruffi.com
Western Music
• The 19th century for the middle class
– Industrialization
– Lighting
– Tourism
– Phonograph
– Urbanization
www.scaruffi.com
The 20th Century
• The century of the avant-garde (1908-52, Cubism to Cage)
• The century of women
• The century of the young generations
• The century of democracy
• The century of globalization
www.scaruffi.com
• Electricity • Regriferator • Automobile • Airlane • Telegraph • Telephone • Phonograph • Camera • Cinema • Radio • Typewriter • Calculator • Skyscraper • Plastic
The 1910s
www.scaruffi.com
The 1910s • Futurism (1909): machines and noise • Carl Jung (1912): the collective subconscious • Alfred North Whitehead’s and Bertrand Russell’s
“Principia Mathematica” (1913): math logic • Suprematism and Constructivism in Russia (1915) • Franz Kafka’s "The Trial" (1915) • Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity
(1915) • Dadaism (1916): chance, irrationality • Jazz (1917): improvisation • World War I (1914-18)
www.scaruffi.com
The 1910s • The 1910s set the stage for a confrontation
between the extremely rational and the extremely irrational
EINSTEIN RUSSELL
DADA JAZZ KAFKA
www.scaruffi.com
You are a formula Everything
is relative
You are and you are not
You are just a reflex
You are a probability
Everything is uncertain
Everything is moving away from you
www.scaruffi.com
The emancipation of the dissonance
History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
www.scaruffi.com
There will always be something you cannot prove
Your mind creates reality
Truth is an opinion
Life and machines obey the same laws of nature
Everything is information
Everything comes from just one point
Mind is a symbol processor
www.scaruffi.com
The post-Newtonian world
• The mind is a symbol processor
• Living beings are machines
• The universe is evolving
• New frontiers in the conquest of nature (electronics, nuclear energy, space)
• There is a limit to scientific knowledge
www.scaruffi.com
The 1940s
• World War II
• The Holocaust
• Hiroshima
• Disintegration of the British Empire
• Rise of the USA and Soviet Union
• The computer
www.scaruffi.com
The 1940s
• Existentialism (Sartre, Camus, …)
• Abstract painting (Pollock, Kooning, …)
• Electronic music (Cage, Darmstadt school, Schaeffer)
• Bebop
• 1949: George Orwell’s “1984"
www.scaruffi.com
What the Mid-century inherited
• Nonconformism
• Anxiety
• Chance
• Freedom Salvador Dali
Charlie Chaplin John Cage
Charlie Parker
www.scaruffi.com
Music after WWII
• Noise
• Free jazz
• Psychedelic rock
• Ambient music Karlheinz Stockhausen
Brian Eno John Coltrane
Velvet Underground www.scaruffi.com
Popular Music of the 20th century
• Storytelling and protest
– Blues
– Singer-songwriters
– Rock
– Rappers
• Dance
– Jazz
– Dance crazes (charleston to twist)
– Rock
– Techno/house/etc
• Love/sex
• Soul
• Rock
• Pop
• Soundscape
www.scaruffi.com
BRAIN OF THE
IMMATURE YOUNG
ADULT
Popular Music of the 20th century
• Instruments
– Electric guitar
– Electronic keyboard
Jimi Hendrix Klaus Schulze
www.scaruffi.com
Rock music = neuroscience
Sex Dance (rhythm)
Stories (language) Rebellion
Innovation
? www.scaruffi.com