Tonight the kitchener-waterloo symphony and the
Institute for quantum computing
will examine how physics and music
intersect.
Physics describes forces in the world
around us
music expresses our perceptions and
feelings
about the world around us, one rational,
one emotional. There is some music on
this concert tonight that may drive you
slightly insane.
I'll tell you that at the outset if you
find your mind wandering
let it wander that maybe the composer's
intention
if you find urself kinda confronted by
the music
that's okay. If you don't like the music,
that's okay
but I will guarantee you that this will
be a most amazing journey tonight
through really interesting and unusual sounds
and some new
ideas. So let's begin as our ideas enter now
into the quantum world. Let's begin a few
centuries ago with
two key figures in physics and music
Isaac Newton describe the natural laws
that govern our universe.
Mozart express the beauty of Newton's
laws with music full of
structure and symmetry. In the music of
Mozart, as in Newtonian physics
every action
has an equal and opposite reaction.
As you play the first movement of Mozart's
symphony number 29,
listen to how elegantly one musical
idea goes to the next.
As music moved into the 19th century,
its logic, order, and symmetry were pushed
to the limit by the composer's
of the Romantic era. After all this
boundary pushing
composers around 1900 were left in a
quandary.
How much further could they go? Anton
Weburn began his career composing
in a lush post
wagnerian style. Listen to this piece his
Langsamer Satz
which he wrote in 1905 for strings.
Like Wagner the melody seems
endless. The music full of yearning, beautiful,
romantic in a way that we can all
understand
Weburn drew upon mathematics and logic.
He gradually moved towards using set
theory and
things like palindromes to create a
musical language that sounded
new and strange on the surface but in
fact
was very tightly structured underneath. As we
listen to his music
we feel lost in a mysterious place not sure
what is happening or
what will come next. It's music
of exploration,
mystery, and discovery
There's a fundamental,
unpredictability of quantum mechanics.
Some physicists
didn't like this. Albert Einstein was one of them.
He said God doesn't play dice.
His friend Niels Bhor quickly said back Albert, don't tell God what to do.
In 1906 the American composer Charles Ives
wrote a piece that perfectly echoes the
struggles that scientists
and musicians were facing in the early
20th century. Think of this piece as a
gateway into the strange new world
of quantum science and music, it's called
the unanswered question.
In the early nineteen hundred's
physicists began to unveil the very
fabric of reality.
The framework they pioneered for
explaining this reality
quantum mechanics continues to amaze us,
confuse us, inspire us, and in many ways
define us. The music you're going to hear
from now on
is directly inspired by science and has
an indirect
but interesting connection to quantum
phenomena.
Around the middle of the 20th century
when quantum science
unveiled strange new dimensions beyond
our experience
the composer Henry Brandt explored new
dimensions in music.
He believed that along with the three
traditional dimensions of
music pitch, rhythm, and timbre, there was
fourth, space. He experimented with the
placement musicians within a performance space,
searching for the new textural nuances,
feeling,s and ideas. He was a scientist of sound.
In the late nineteen sixties and
seventies things began to change.
A young generation of physicists began to
revisit
and rethink the deepest questions of 
quantum mechanics.
They embraced the randomness of quantum
physics rather than fighting it.
The American composer John Cage had the
same intrepid spirit of these
physicist of the nineteen sixties and
seventies. He believed that
everything around us was music. Cage
visited the observatory
and borrowed star maps from the library. 
He composed
Atlas Eclipticalis by copying
the positions of stars and galaxies
onto transparencies and then using those
transparencies to transfer the stellar
information to sheet music.
The players are literally reading the
star charts
with a few extra directions by cage what
you will experience is the soundtrack
of nature's grandest
ongoing physics experiment, the universe itself.
The piece with John Cage is really raw 
randomness to me.
Is is really kind of these facts that
comes in
that we cannot put together. They come from
all these different places.
It's hard to listen it's a little bit scary
because we cannot predict where the
music is going.
We don't really know when it started we don't know where it will end
and this is really a part of quantum
mechanics.
One of my students said to me yesterday
it so that like starting a thesis. You never
know when it's going to end.
Since Wabers time composers were
explicitly applying mathematical
calculations to create music.
This continued through the 20th century
and perhaps reached its apex with the
music of Xenakis.
He would build pieces of music using
calculations that
an architect or engineer would. Xenakis
was one of the world's
first composers to use a computer to
write music
or rather to program computers to
essentially write the music themselves.
He was the architect of the music, the
computer, was the builder.
Tonight has been a behind-the-scenes
look at some of the 
revolutionary ideas that have shaped our
present and future.
If we look back at the music and science
of the twentieth century
There's an incredible experimental
spirit behind both.
A mix of creativity, risk, hard work,
and a willingness to embrace the random
and the weird.
We can't predict exactly what lies ahead
in music or in science.
We know there will be new pioneers,
new works of genius, new directions we
never considered going.
We believe composers will always react
to
and interpret scientific discovery. We
expect tonight's concert
won't be the last quantum symphony. We know the
Universe is endlessly fascinating,
endlessly beautiful.
There is always something going on just
beyond our expectations.
The trick is to never stop looking deeper.
