Pianist Elena Piccione and Romanian Astronomer Dumitru-Dorin Prunariu Enact the Composer’s Worldview on November 4
The notion that all sounding music was but a small-scale enactment of the cosmic harmony generated by the movements of the heavenly bodies was foundational to Sebastian Bach’s worldview. But modern audiences are conditioned to view music as an autonomous art, as entertainment, or as at most a sonorous analog to composer’s biographies or events in their own world. We rarely get to experience Bach's authentic, cosmically centered, worldview. We rarely have the opportunity to bring the cosmos together with Bach’s music -- to live Bach's worldview -- in a single sitting.
This Friday, November 4, the Royal Observatory Greenwich will offer just such an opportunity. In a fascinating and finely textured program, barrier-bending Italian pianist Elena Piccione, founder of the AMI Associazione Mozart Italia in Finale Ligure, and astronomer Dumitru-Dorin Prunariu, a Romanian cosmonaut, expert in the Romanian Association for Space Technology and Industry, and author of numerous scholarly books and papers offer the first-ever musical program in the Observatory, combined with a panel discussion that is sure to delight and enlighten all students of the Liberal Arts. The Observatory’s Facebook events page describes it as “a cultural conjunction of Bach’s compositional chords and the existential, not so much technical, experience of cosmic flights,” and adds that “[b]oth basically reveal the same eternal human longing: the sublimation of the earthly, limited human condition through cosmic transcendence, the aspiration of a higher spiritual essence.”
The Liberal Arts tradition given voice in those statements is the key to understanding how Bach and other musicians of his time were taught to understand music. The worldview dates back to ancient Greece and is a masterpiece in the beauties of inductive reasoning:
1. Wherever there is motion, there is vibration.
2. Vibration is the sine qua non of music.
3. Because the heavenly bodies are in constant motion, the cosmos must produce vibration, and therefore music. (That humans cannot hear this music simply reflects the smallness of humanity in the cosmos; nevertheless, we unknowingly sense or feel this cosmic music just as we sense unobservable things such as the force of gravity, the passage of time, etc.)
4. Because everything on our planet is a function of its own position in the cosmos, the music we make and hear must be the only musical manifestation of these cosmic principles that our human ears can perceive; it is, in a literal sense, a microcosm of cosmic music.
Finally, later thinkers (including those of Bach’s time) held that the worth and the power of a piece of music was proportional to the extent that it was consonant (“sounding with”) the music of the cosmos – in the Lutheran ideology of Bach’s own time, to the extent that it channeled the divine power and beauty of cosmic music that we, as humans, must know exists but cannot perceive with our finite senses. Good music channeled the sublime beauty and power of God’s heavens.
So an event in which Piccione’s ever deeply-felt renditions of Bach’s own essays in humanly perceivable enactments of cosmic music (here’s one recent example) unfold beneath the cosmic tapestry observable in Greenwich, the Prime Meridian of the world, possesses a real and very powerful beauty. This event is a marvelous opportunity for all who can be there – and the conversation that follows should offer an opportunity for those fortunate souls to contemplate these profoundly philosophical musical and astronomical wonders.
The Music of the Cosmos begins at 8:00 p.m. GMT this Friday, November 4. For more information see here.
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