Science and art do mix, maestro says
“Classical concerts are just so boringly presented,” says Daniel Harding. “It’s no wonder people stay away.”
The British maestro, who has been shaking up the classical world ever since he conducted the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra at the young age of 19, is not the only person who thinks so. The ossified nature of the concert is a perennial worry of orchestral managers and tends to bring forth the same tired solutions: Put on a light show; get rid of the penguin suits; play more crossover music; get pop stars involved.
Harding wouldn’t stoop to such quick fixes. He has an impatient intelligence that leaves other people panting in his wake. The 39-year-old has been the principal conductor of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra since 2007, the latest staging post in a meteoric career that saw him conduct the Berlin Philharmonic at the age of 21, become principal guest conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra at age 29 and open the opera season at La Scala Milan at 30.
Harding is keen to try “something new” — a series with his Stockholm orchestra called Interplay, an attempt to liven up orchestral concerts. He wants to join the concert experience to the rest of our lives as thinking, feeling human beings. He’s invited notable thinkers in a variety of fields to curate their own concert with the orchestra. After their concert they talk to the audience about their own discipline, and discuss the ways it can illuminate the musical experience. The orchestra is keen to make the most of its distinguished guests, and is streaming the concerts (which last until next May) and podcasting the talks.
Harding has landed a starry list of speakers. Physicist Brian Cox talks about advances in cosmology and our view of the solar system, before a concert that includes a brandnew piece on an astronomical theme. Ian Bostridge, who was a notable historian before he became a world-famous tenor, prefaces his concert of satanic and savage music from Berlioz and Britten with a lecture on witchcraft. Swedish neuroscientist Fredrik Ullen, who’s also a phenomenal pianist, talks about the effect hearing and making music can have on the processing power of the brain. Historian Simon Schama explores the inter-relationships between music, culture and power, before a performance of Britten’s War Requiem.
To launch the series, Oxford professor Marcus du Sautoy spoke of the secrets of symmetry in music. During the rehearsal he mesmerizes everyone with his erudition, demonstrating the symmetries of a sine wave with a length of rope and showing how the “golden ratio” — the mathematical proportion that make everything from proscenium arches to the structure of a leaf esthetically “perfect” — is buried deep in Mozart’s Magic Flute.
Not all the connections are equally obvious, but for Harding that’s not so important. “What I’m trying to get over is that music isn’t a diversion, which you dip into for light relief after a hard day at the office. It’s implicated in our lives in so many different ways. I think when audiences become aware of that they’ll actually listen in a different way.”
Was there a light- bulb moment when the idea came to him?
“Well, I was looking for a way of working really intensively with the orchestra for a longer period, and I came across an essay by the scientist Richard Feynman, who’s always been a hero of mine. He describes these long arguments he had with an artist friend, who would say: ‘ You just look for the explanation of things, you’re blind to beauty.’ Feynman would retort: ‘I can see the beauty, but I see so much more. You artists are lost because you have no religion and you don’t understand science.’ In the end, they agreed each needed to learn about the other’s world view, so they gave each other lessons every week.”
Harding has not restricted himself to scientists. As well as Schama, his guests include author Candace Allen, who will talk about the roles race and class have played in music, and human rights lawyer Philippe Sands, who will present a lecture on genocide. But Harding is passionate about bridging the divide between the arts and science.
“There is a lot of ignorance about science,” he says. “Nobody at a dinner party would admit to not having read Hamlet, but they’re happy to say math isn’t their subject. Everyone should know the second law of thermodynamics, as much as the great literary masterworks.”