Profounder, profounder, man’s spirit must dive
Composer, conductor, and communicator Leonard Bernstein set for himself in 1973 the impossible task of analysing music through the lens of linguistics during his Norton Lectures as Harvard’s Poetry Chair. The lectures, though flawed, are an example of intellectual inquiry and courage. They invite us to cross borders of thought and listen for unanswered questions across realms of knowledge.
His first lecture is especially suggestive for any physicist. In it, Bernstein explains and illustrates the harmonic series as the sequence of vibrational overtones of a string: music is just poetry woven with the laws of physics. In the last decade we have begun to hear the first phrase of spacetime itself, listening the gravitational ringing of black holes. Their own overtone sequence, however, is remarkably non-tonal, breaking the same sacred aesthetic principle organising Bernstein’s grammar.
Nonetheless, the trumpet line that asks The Unanswered Question in Charles Ives’ composition that christens Bernstein’s lectures is also non-tonal: it climbs and falters along the harmonic series, ever skeptical of the choir of flutes, ever insisting, never reaching home, hence unanswered, whither music. We shall go yet one step further, into Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The Sphinx”, the poem that probably inspired Ives’ piece, and take its advice seriously: let’s take our quest through nature, ever profounder, venturing into the universal grammar not of music, but of the Universe itself.
Contributed by Jaime Redondo-Yuste
