("Chomsky Suite" by Tod Machover)
(pages rustling)
("Chomsky Suite" by Tod Machover)
- [David] Welcome to Kronos, Noam.
I bet you never thought you'd be sitting
in the middle of a string quartet.
(laughter)
Maybe, would you wanna start off by
playing that violin over there?
- This one?
- Yeah, that one, yeah.
You need the bow too.
- Oh, all right.
- Yeah, that's right.
And I rosined it all specially for you,
so it's all set to go.
(audience laughs)
- Well, you remember
the introductory remarks
were that there was a certain moments
when you shouldn't get up and walk out.
(audience laughs)
When one of the musicians
is holding a violin.
But this is an exception.
This is your chance to walk out.
(laughter)
I won't inflict this on you.
- [David] Scratch away!
- Scratch away?
- [David] Press harder! (violin screeches)
There it is!
- Oh, whattaya know!
- [David] Put it close to
the mic so they can hear it.
- Uh-uh! (Noam laughs)
(audience laughs)
(violin screeching)
I'll tell you, I
I once did learn how
to play an instrument,
I've no musical talent, it
skipped me in my family, but
I once did learn
how to play an instrument, a guitar.
There was a band,
a pickup band made up of MIT and Harvard
mostly graduate students, some faculty.
My wife was on and she
played the accordion.
Ken Hale, our department, was
the fiddler, a great fiddler.
And there was a ringer, a
student from the conservatory,
who sort of ran it.
And for one concert they needed a guitar
and they didn't have anybody to play it,
so she thought she would teach
me how to play the guitar.
And she managed to teach
me how to play one string.
But to move my fingers
so that it would look
as though I was playing the guitar.
And we sort of carried it off.
So maybe I could learn this.
Actually my son brought
something like this home, once.
A little bigger, but not
much, from third grade.
The music teacher had
shown the kids violin,
he was utterly entranced with it,
so he convinced the teacher
to let him take it home,
and he went on to,
to get to the point here,
he was thinking of becoming
a professional violinist.
But an event occurred which
I described to Daniel once,
which made him decide to become
a gifted amateur instead,
which he is.
But I never progressed beyond
the first string. (chuckles)
- So, Noam, what's in
your record collection?
- Pardon?
- What's in your record collection?
- Well, one record is the
basis for what you just heard,
the first Bach suite.
It's uh, must've listened
to it a couple hundred times
in the last few years
and many times before.
It has a rather special personal meaning,
if you don't mind some personal anecdotes.
My wife and I were married
as children, basically,
had, we were working students,
never had any time for anything.
Never got more than a
short distance from home.
But early in the 1950s we did manage to
take off a couple of weeks
over the summer, first time.
And we decided to go to Europe,
which was a trek for two kids
who had really never been away from home.
And the goal was to go to Prague,
where Casals was then running the,
Pablo Casals was running
the Prague Festival.
And the absolute peak
achievement what drew
some of the best professional
musicians in the world
to this little town in the Pyrenees
was his playing of the Bach suites.
Casals had essentially
resurrected them from oblivion
and I think probably
became the first cellist
to perform them seriously.
The atmosphere was indescribable.
I mean, it, Prague is a lovely
little town in the Pyrenees
it's right below Mont
Canigou, which is the,
kind of the symbol of Catalan nationalism.
Casals was a committed
Catalan nationalist.
Actually,
by all rights,
my bones should be up on
Mont Canigou right now.
I decided to try to climb
it in a fit of abandon and
lost the trail halfway up and
I started wandering around
and by the sheerest accident
ran into
the shed of a Catalan woodsman
who lived alone up there and
after he cursed at me in
Catalan for about half an hour
he showed me a trail back.
Oddly it never occurred
to me to be nervous.
I later understood why.
Turns out the male brain
doesn't mature until about 25.
(audience laughs)
Before that you think
you're indestructible,
nothing can happen.
There's probably an
evolutionary reason for that.
But there had to be somebody
in hunter-gatherer tribes
who was willing to go out
and fight that saber-toothed tiger.
(audience laughs)
Anyhow it didn't occur to me.
I came down,
we had done some quite
remarkable things on that trip.
We went through Paris,
where we were able to catch a concert
by the incredible Russian
violinist David Oistrakh,
who was on one of his
rare visits to the West.
In Rome we saw a magnificent
outdoor performance of Aida
at the Roman ruins, Terme di Caracalla,
unforgettable.
Managed to get to the Lascaux caves,
they were then still open, now sealed.
And could see why Picasso,
when he went there,
exclaimed that 30,000 years ago,
they had already discovered
the secrets of modern art.
And many other things,
but the peak was what we were aiming for,
the Prague concert.
We finally got to it
the indescribable aura,
quite apart from the personal aspect,
about as close to, when he
did play one of the suites,
the first suite, and
it's about as close to
a moment of sublimity as I can imagine.
Actually it had a further
personal meaning to me.
Casals was a dedicated
republican, antifascist.
He claims, he recorded
the suites, six of them,
for the first time, actually
maybe the first time
they were ever recorded,
right at the end of the
Spanish Civil War, 1939.
Just at the time when
Barcelona was under attack
and it soon fell, that
meant Franco's fascism
took over Spain.
He of course had to flee,
he would've been killed immediately.
Fascist slogan was "Death to intelligence"
and he was a marked man
as a republican activist.
Went across the border
and managed to survive
the Second World War.
He refused offers by the
Nazis, who admired his music.
He was already a very famous cellist,
and they wanted him to
come to Berlin, he refused.
He refused to play in occupied France.
After the war, Casals refused
to play in any country
that recognized Franco.
And he wouldn't play in
Russia, anti-Bolshevik.
Wouldn't play in the
former fascist countries.
But he was, had, you
know, just flooded with
lucrative offers to come
and perform after the war
but he refused.
He finally agreed to
play in Prague and he,
I think in the late '40s,
began the Prague concerts
and we were lucky to be
able to catch one of them,
one of the early ones.
All of this also had a special
personal meaning for me.
As a child I was,
in the 1930s, I was closely following
the dreadful rise of fascism in Europe.
The first article I wrote,
or at least remember writing,
was right at the time of
the fall of Barcelona.
It was about how,
I don't want to inflict
that on you, either,
but it was about the fall of Austria,
Czechoslovakia, then Barcelona.
The kind of last hope for some barrier
to the spread of this hideous specter
of fascim all over Europe.
And I knew something about
Casals's, by the time we went,
about his record and the
performance, heard it many times.
And being in Prague and
listening to this heroic figure
and magnificent musician,
carrying forward,
as he did every time,
kind of a new performance
of the suites, to which he devoted
much of his artistic life, was,
along with everything
else, quite a remarkable
and unforgettable experience.
So, hearing this,
these elaborations and
developments of it is
personally very meaningful for me.
If there's a lesson in all
this, which maybe there is,
for young people among you,
when you have opportunities
like that don't let them pass.
They can enrich your lives enormously and
the memories remain
and in later years
become more vivid and
even more significant.
So, it's wise to exploit the chance.
(applause)
("Chomsky Suite" by Tod Machover)
- Thank you for that,
that was beautiful, Noam.
I've been thinking about this for months,
trying to know what
to ask.
I think you know what I,
what I'm trying to ask,
because of all the people I've ever met
I think you might be the
best listener that I know of.
And the ability to really listen,
and get beyond the actual words,
and to really read and also
get beyond the actual words
and know what's really meant,
is something you've spent your
whole life doing, I think.
And what I wanna leave with this evening,
is some sense of how,
through a musical experience,
we can demand of the
environment we live in,
the leaders that we have,
the culture we have,
that our society be more just.
Our,
that it just be more open to the future
and to what really needs to be done.
I've always thought
music is the one language
that really doesn't need
translating very much.
Even though, when we play with a musician
form Afghanistan, or someone from China
or someone from many
different parts of the world,
frequently we need translators to make a
nonverbal musical experience.
But I'm just wondering if you
have any thoughts about this.
(Noam clears his throat)
- There are some real puzzles
about the nature of music
and its ubiquity.
As far as I know, every human
society that's been found
has some form of music and
I think some form of dance.
It may not be in the tonal
idiom of classical music,
maybe something else, but something.
And it's a good question, "Why?"
Since it's universal, it
very likely originates
somewhere in East Africa.
Before our ancestors,
maybe 50,000 years ago,
probably quite a small group of them,
left Africa, quickly
spread around the world.
So it's gotta be something
deep in our nature
that's embedded there, for some reason.
And there's a good question, "Why?"
What is it about music
that makes it part of
the nature of humans?
It's, species-specific, I
mean, songbirds have song,
but it's quite a different phenomenon.
Music is not
instrumental in the sense of
trying to achieve some end, like mating,
or something like that.
It's been, there is one other, a couple,
there are a few other
similar biological phenomena.
One of them, of course, is language.
Language is universal, it's every human,
all humans have it.
All humans have the same capacity.
We know that if you take an infant
from some Amazonian tribe that,
the tribe hasn't had human
contact for maybe 20,000 years
and you bring that child to Boston,
raise it here from infancy, it'll
be indistinguishable
from my grandchildren.
Maybe it'll be studying
quantum physics at MIT.
And conversely, which means,
there are individual differences
but there's no known group differences.
Which means that first of all it means
that language hasn't evolved,
language capacity has not evolved
for at least 50,000 years.
And in fact it doesn't seem to
go back very far before that.
Same is probably true
of the musical capacity,
but it's harder to study,
I don't think it has been studied.
In the case of language, you
can at least imagine some
selectional reason why
it should've propagated.
It may not be the right reason,
these are mostly fairy tales,
but at least you can imagine something.
Can I say music, it's
hard to see what it is.
That kind of puzzle has
bothered evolutionary biologists
ever since Darwin and
Wallace co-discovered
the theory of natural selection.
Wallace, in his writings about it,
was very puzzled about
the fact that humans all
have arithmetical capacity.
Again, no selectional reason possible,
because it's only been used
very recently in human history
and by a very small group of people.
But it's again, universal.
So an Amazonian child
has the same capacity as,
say, my grandchildren.
Even if it's not developed
in the culture in which the kid lives.
And he wondered why, since it has, again,
no selectional value.
He thought that there
must be some other force
in evolution beyond natural selection.
Darwin strongly disagreed with
him but had no explanation.
Very likely, in the case of arithmetic,
it's sort of an offshoot of language.
That you can, if you understand,
once enough had come to be understood
about the structure of language,
you could see how a minor,
actually simplification of it,
could give you the basis for arithmetic.
But nothing like that is
known in the case of music.
Except maybe at a very
primitive level there's
probably just cause we don't
understand enough, either,
about language or music.
So it is known by now that
there are, pretty well-known,
that there are special neural
tissues unique to humans
which, in newborn infants
and probably intrauterine,
pick out of the environment
certain rhythmic structures.
Roughly at the level of a syllable,
so probably specific to humans.
It's probably the core of picking out,
an amazing achievement of an infant,
to pick out of the whole,
complex environment,
the data that's language-related.
How children do that, nobody understands.
No other organism can do it.
And picking out a certain
rhythmic structure
may be part of the core of it.
Later come other rhythmic characteristics.
By about six months old a child
has pretty much the understanding,
knows the intonational
structure of the language
that it's been exposed to.
Maybe that has something to do with the
part of the development of music.
That leaves open a very deep question,
what about structural properties of music?
It's not just rhythm, of course.
Well, where do they come from?
It's tempting to think that
somehow they grew out of
the language capacity.
Which something is sort of
suggested by Leonard Bernstein's
famous Norton lectures 40 years ago.
And there's been work on it since,
but it still remains quite a mystery.
But that's just from the
point of view of biology.
What about from the point
of view of our lives?
Well, you know, I mean listening to
a skilled,
sometimes remarkable musical performance
or seeing a work of art or
does do something to us
or should do something to us personally.
It should instruct us that,
however good we are at what we do,
and most of us work hard
doing things we're expert at,
doing well, but it should tell
us there's something more.
You should really be, have
an idea, you should be aiming
at something much higher.
At maybe something you can't achieve
or even begin to achieve.
Look, I'm never gonna be
Pablo Casals, obviously.
Or even play this.
But the fact that he
could continue to do it,
and that I could appreciate it,
particularly in those
remarkable circumstances
but even just listening
to the record and so on,
you know, for many other things,
does, should inspire us to at least try
to aim for something higher
than what we can do regularly,
expertly and appropriately.
So try to find some touch of
sublimity in your own work.
Or for that matter your own life.
Because even a life can, the humblest life
can be quite beautiful.
Actually that reminds me of something that
I mentioned that my son
was an aspiring violinist.
My wife and I took him to a master class
when he was about 12 years old,
run by Yehudi Menuhin
over at the conservatory.
And I remember there was
one young woman violinist
who played a piece with
just absolute perfection.
You know it was technically
the most magnificent
thing you can imagine.
And at the end of the piece
Menuhin looked at her and said,
"Magnificently done,
"but you didn't stop
to smell the flowers."
And that was a very meaningful comment.
And it's for all of us.
We have to somehow stop
to smell the flowers.
There's more to life than
doing what you can do
with technical perfection.
And listening to a marvelous work of music
brilliantly performed, teaches us that
the flowers are there, it's for us to try,
somehow, to smell them.
Try to excel, try to go beyond
what we know we're capable of
and at least aim for
something higher in life.
Whether it's in your activities,
try to make it a better world.
In your work try to achieve some goal
that can barely be formulated
or whatever it may be.
(pages rustling)
("Chomsky Suite" by Tod Machover)
(applause)
