ART & PHYSICS  Parallel Visions in Space, Time and Light
by Lenard Shlain 

Chapters 1,8,19

Image and Insight:The Integration of Art and Physics
The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers. James Baldwin

Physics is a form of insight and as such it's a form of art. David Bohm

Chapter 1 - Illusion / Reality

Art and physics are a strange coupling. Of the many human disciplines, could there be two that seem more divergent? The artist employs image and metaphor; the physicist uses number and equation. Art encompasses an imaginative realm of aesthetic qualities; physics exists in a world of crisply circumscribed mathematical relationships between quantifiable properties. Traditionally, art has created illusions meant to elicit emotion; physics has been an exact science that made sense. Even the stereotypical proponents of each endeavor are polar opposites. In college, the hip avant-garde art students generally do not mingle with their more conventional counterparts in the physics department. By casual juxtaposition, these two fields seem to have little in common: There are few if any references to art in any standard textbook of physics; art historians rarely interpret an artist's work in light of the conceptual framework of physics.

Yet, despite what appear to be irreconcilable differences, there is one fundamental feature that solidly connects these disciplines. Revolutionary art and visionary physics are both investigations into the nature of reality. Roy Lichtenstein, the pop artist of the 1960s, declared, "Organized perception is what art is all about." Sir Isaac Newton might have said as much for physics; he, too, was concerned with organizing perceptions. While their methods differ radically, artists and physicists share the desire to investigate the ways the interlocking pieces of reality fit together. This is the common ground upon which they meet.

Paul Gauguin once said, "There are only two kinds of artists -- revolutionaries and plagiarists." The art discussed in this book will be that created primarily by revolutionaries, because theirs is the work that heralds a major change in a civilization's worldview. And in parallel fashion, although the development of physics has always depended upon the incremental contributions of many original and dedicated workers, on a few occasions in history, one physicist has had an insight of such import that it led to a revision in his whole society's concept of reality. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke referred to this sort of transcendent insight as a "conflagration of clarity," allowing certain artists and physicists to see what none before them had ever imagined, and it is they -- the revolutionary artist and the visionary physicist -- who will be paired in the coming pages.

Emile Zola's definition of art: "Nature as seen through a temperament," invokes physics, which is likewise involved with nature. The Greek word, physis, means "nature." Beginning with this common ground as a point of departure, I will describe the connections and differences between these two seemingly disparate ways our perceptions of nature are organized.

The physicist, like any scientist, sets out to break "nature" down into its component parts to analyze the relationship of those parts. This process is principally one of reduction. The artist, on the other hand, often juxtaposes different features of reality and synthesizes them, so that upon completion, the whole work is greater than the sum of its parts. There is considerable crossover in the technique used by both. The novelist Vladimir Nabokov wrote, "There is no science without fancy and no art without facts."








 Insofar as science is the subject, I shall concentrate in this book on physics as it has developed during the last several hundred years. Nevertheless, the reader should keep in mind that present-day physicists wear a mantle that has been passed down through the ages. Physicists are the modern representatives of a distinguished tradition that winds its way back through the first scientists, Christian theologians, natural philosophers, pagan priests and Paleolithic shamans, the exceptional of whom have contributed pieces to the infinite jigsaw puzzle of nature. The first physicist was probably the one who discovered how to make a fire. 

I single out physics in particular because in this century all the other "hard" sciences have learned that they are anchored to this rock. Chemistry had its beginning in the attempt to identify and separate the elements, and it came to be fused to the laws that govern atomic events. Astronomy began as a fascination with heavenly movements and advanced to an inquiry into the arrangement of the solar system. Today, in studying the galaxies, astrophysicists address the laws that govern forces and matter. From it's origins in Aristotelian taxonomy, biology has evolved to the study of the physical interaction of atoms in molecular biology. Physics, formerly one branch among many, has in this century, become enthroned as the King of the Sciences. 

In the case of the visual arts, in addition to illuminating, imitating, and interpreting reality, a few artists create a language of symbols for things for which there are yet to be words. Just as Sigmund Freud, in his Civilization and Its Discontents, compared the progress of a civilization's entire people to the development of a single individual, I propose that the radical innovations of art embody the preverbal stages of new concepts that will eventually change a civilization. Whether for an infant or a society on the verge of change, a new way to think about reality begins with the assimilation of unfamiliar images. This collation leads to abstract ideas that only later give rise to a descriptive language. 

For example, observe any infant as it masters its environment. Long before speech occurs, a baby develops an association between the image of a bottle and a feeling of satisfaction. Gradually, the baby accumulates a variety of images of bottles. This is an astounding feat considering that a bottle viewed from different angles changes shape dramatically: from a cylinder to an ellipse to a circle. Synthesizing these images, the child's emerging conceptual faculties invent an abstract image that encompasses the idea of an entire group of objects she or he will henceforth recognize as bottles. This step in abstraction allows the infant to understand the idea of "bottleness." Still without language, the baby can now signal desire by pointing. 

Then at a certain moment, in that part of the brain called Broca's area, the connections between synapses attain a critical number, tripping the switch that suddenly lights up the magical power of language. This word factory, noisily chugging away, generates sounds that will replace and even eclipse the earlier images. As soon as the baby connects the bottle's image with the word "bottle," this word begins to blot out the image, so much so that as adults we are rarely aware that when we engage in abstract thinking, we are not thinking in images. Concepts such as "justice," "freedom" or "economics" can be turned over in the mind without ever resorting to mental pictures. While there is never final resolution between word and image, we are a species dependent on the abstractions of language and in the main, the word eventually supplants the image. 

When we reflect, ruminate, reminisce, muse and imagine, generally we revert to the visual mode. But in order to perform the brain's highest function, abstract thinking, we abandon the use of images and are able to carry on without resorting to them. It is with great precision that we call this type of thinking, "abstract." This is the majesty and the tyranny of language. To affix a name to something is the beginning of control over it. After God created Adam, the very first task He instructed Adam to perform was the naming of all the animals. God informed Adam that by accomplishing this feat he would gain dominion over all the beasts and fowl. Note that God didn't teach Adam anything as practical as how to make a fire or fashion a spear. Instead, He taught him to name. Words, more than strength or speed, became the weapons that humans have used to subdue nature. 

Because the erosion of images by words occurs at such an early age, we forget that in order to learn something radically new, we need first to imagine it. "Imagine" literally means to "make an image." Witness the expressions we use when struggling with a new idea: "I can't picture it," "Let me make a mental model," and "I am trying to envision it." If, as I propose, this function of imagination, so crucial to the development of an infant, is also present in the civilization at large, who then creates the new images that precede abstract ideas and descriptive language? It is the artist. In the following pages I shall demonstrate how revolutionary art can be understood as the preverbal stage of a civilization first contending with a major change in its perception of the world. In order to elaborate this thesis, I shall examine art, not only as an aesthetic that can be pleasing to the eye but, as a Distant Early Warning system of the collective thinking of a society. Visionary art alerts the other members that a conceptual shift is about to occur in the thought system used to perceive the world. John Russell, the art critic, says: "There is in art a clairvoyance for which we have not yet found a name, and still less an explanation." 

  
 




 Despite each discipline's similar charge, there is in the artist's vision a peculiar prescience that precedes the physicist's equations. Artists have mysteriously incorporated into their works features of a physical description of the world that science later discovers. 

The artist, with little or no awareness of what is going on in the field of physics, manages to conjure up images and metaphors that are strikingly appropriate when superimposed upon the conceptual framework of the physicist's later revisions of our ideas about physical reality. Repeatedly throughout history, the artist introduces symbols and icons that in retrospect prove to have been an avant-garde for the thought patterns of a scientific age not yet born. Few art historians have discussed this enigmatic function of art in depth. Robert Hughes, another art critic, explains why it is so often overlooked: 

The essence of the avant-garde myth is that the artist is a precursor; the truly significant work of art is the one that prepares the future. The transitional focus of culture, on the other hand, tends to treat the present (the living artist) as the culmination of the past.7 

All too often, when reading about the work of exceptional artists, we are told about the past styles that influenced their work. Their pedigrees are traced backward to former artists, and rarely is their work explained in terms of how they anticipated the future. 

A large segment of present society, unable to comprehend art's vision, dismisses the importance of art. Marshall McLuhan, in his seminal work, Understanding Media, asks: 

If men were able to be convinced that art is precise advance knowledge of how to cope with the psychic and social consequences of the next technology, would they all become artists? Or would they begin a careful translation of new art forms into social navigation charts? I am curious to know what would happen if art were suddenly seen for what it is, namely, exact information of how to rearrange one's psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties...8 

Revolutionary art in all times has served this function of preparing the future. 

Both art and physics are unique forms of language. Each has a specialized lexicon of symbols that is used in a distinctive syntax. Their very different and specific contexts obscure their connection to everyday language as well as to each other. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy just how often the terms of one can be applied to the concepts of the other. "Volume," "space," "mass," "force," "light," "color," "tension," "relationship" and "density" are descriptive words that are heard repeatedly if you trail along with a museum docent. They also appear on the blackboards of freshman college physics lectures. The proponents of these two diverse endeavors wax passionate about elegance, symmetry, beauty and aesthetics. The equal sign in the formulas of the physicist is a basic metaphor used by many artists. While physicists demonstrate that A equals B or that X is the same as Y, artists often choose signs, symbols and allegories to equate a painterly image with a feature of experience. Both of these techniques reveal previously hidden relationships. 

  
 




  Niels Bohr, a founder of quantum physics, was intrigued by the relationship between physics and language and observed: 

It is one of the basic presuppositions of science that we speak of measurements in a language that has basically the same structure as the one in which we speak of everyday experience. We have learned that this language is an inadequate means of communication and orientation, but it is nevertheless the presupposition of all science.... For if we want to say anything at all about nature -- and what else does science try to do? -- we must somehow pass from mathematical to everyday language.9 

Van Gogh addressed the same concern when in frustration he wrote to his brother Theo about his inability to articulate his feelings in words: "Really, we can speak only through our paintings."10 

Revolutionary art and visionary physics attempt to speak about matters that do not yet have words. That is why their languages are so poorly understood by people outside their fields. Because they both speak of what is certainly to come, however, it is incumbent upon us to learn to understand them. 

In the parable of the Tower of Babel, early humankind attempted in a grand collaborative effort to build a tower to reach the heavens. Yahweh, looking down from the clouds, became so incensed that ordinary mortals should think they were capable of such a godlike feat that He summarily garbled the speech of every worker and so brought the construction to a halt. 

History has been the record of our agonizingly slow resumption of work on this mythic public monument to knowledge. Gradually the parochial suspicions that had been abetted by large numbers of local dialects have given way to the more universal outlook of modern humankind. Currently, this work in progress is the creation of a global commonwealth. The worldwide community of artists and scientists is and has been in the forefront of this coalescence, offering perceptions of reality that erase linguistic and national boundaries. Reconciliation of the apparent differences between these two unique human languages, art and physics, is the next important step in developing our unifying Tower. 

To understand the connection between art and physics, we must first ask, "How do we know the world?" Plato, in his famous cave analogy, proposed that we are all like prisoners chained to a low wall in a cave, unable to turn around and witness firsthand the activities of real people conducting their lives before a large fire on the ledge behind. Instead, because of the constraints imposed by our manacles, we can see only our own shadows mingled with the ghostly shadows these free people cast onto the opposite wall that we as prisoners must face. Our perceptual apparatus condemns us to believe these flickering images of things and people are the "real" things, and it is only from this secondhand information that we can deduce the nature of reality. 

Two thousand years after Plato, RenÈ Descartes reiterated this distinction between the inner eye of imagination and the external world of things. He split the purely mental "in here" of our consciousness (res cogitans) from the objective world of "out there" (res extensa), and declared these two realms inviolably separate. In the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant reinforced the views of Plato and Descartes in his Critique of Pure Reason. Kant sadly declared that we can know the nature of things only by what filters through our senses and is processed by our mind, but we can never directly experience the Ding an sich: the thing in itself. By thus banishing us to the impenetrable tower of our thought, Kant asserted that we must all peer out at reality through the chinks of our senses. Our exasperating inability to know the world directly is one of the central existential dilemmas he perceived in the human condition. In his monumental work entitled The World as Will and Idea, Arthur Schopenhauer summed up this philosophical point of view in his trenchant opening sentence, "The world is my idea." 

  
 







 The faculty we use to grasp the nature of the "out there" is our imagination. Somewhere within the matrix of our brain we construct a separate reality created by a disembodied, thinking consciousness. This inner reality is unconnected to external space and exists outside the stream of linear time. When reminiscing about a day at the beach, we knit together elements of that day that no longer "actually" exist. We can run the events forward and backward with ease, and amend with alternate possibilities what we believe happened. It is the bane and the balm of individual perception that "objective" reality is seen through the filter of each person's temperament: in the classic Japanese tale, Rashomon, each person is convinced of the truth of his or her own version. Consciousness, resembling nothing so much as long columns of ants at work, must laboriously transfer the outside world piece by piece through the tunnels of the senses, then reconstruct it indoors. This inner spectral vision amounts to a mental "opinion" unique to each individual of how the world works.
When a critical mass of people agrees on one viewpoint we call that agreement a "consensus." Group consensus within the context of society leads us to form political parties, religious sects, and economic systems. Each model is based upon an accepted belief system. When an entire civilization reaches a consensus about how the world works, the belief system is elevated to the supreme status of a "paradigm," whose premises appear to be so obviously certain no one has to prove them anymore. No longer even questioned, the assumptions upon which the paradigm rests become a priori postulates. Two plus two will always be four and all right angles are equal. For believers, these assumptions constitute bedrock "truths."

"Truth," as defined by Alfred North Whitehead, "is the confirmation of Appearance and Reality."1 What makes any set of bedrock truths slippery is that every age and every culture defines this confirmation in its own way. When the time comes to change a paradigm -- to renounce one bedrock truth and adopt another -- the artist and physicist are most likely to be in the forefront.

Some people might object to pairing art and physics, since the artist is concerned not only with external reality but with the inner realm of emotions, myths, dreams, and the spirit as well. While art is thought to be relatively subjective, physics, until this century, scrupulously avoided any mention of the inner thoughts that related to the outer world. Physics concerned itself instead with the objective arena of motion, things and forces. This stark difference between art and physics blurs in light of the startling revelations put forth by the quantum physicists that emerged from the fusion of the contradictory aspects of light.

In 1905, Albert Einstein proposed that light could exist in the form of a particle, that is, a small piece of something called a photon. For over two hundred years light had been experimentally proven to be a wave. Einstein's proposal implied that light had two distinct and seemingly opposing natures: a wavelike aspect and a particlelike aspect. At the turn of the century, what was to be a surprising feature of quantum reality amounted to a Zen koan. This mind-knot seemed insoluble because the rules of conventional logic could not be applied.

In a bold move Niels Bohr synthesized these antithetical aspects of light in his 1926 theory of complementarity. Stating it simply, Bohr said that light was not either a wave or a particle, but was both a wave and a particle. Knowledge of both these very different aspects was necessary for a complete description of light; either one without the other was inadequate.

  
 







 As it turned out, light would reveal only one aspect of its nature at a time, resembling an odd carnival peep show. Whenever a scientist set up an experiment to measure the wavelike aspect of light, the subjective act of deciding which measuring device to use in some mysterious way affected the outcome, and light responded by acting as a wave. The same phenomenon occurred whenever a scientist set out to measure the particlelike aspect of light. Thus "subjectivity," the anathema of all science (and the creative wellspring of all art) had to be admitted into the carefully defended citadel of classical physics. Werner Heisenberg, Bohr's close associate, said in support of this bizarre notion, "The common division of the world into subject and object, inner world and outer world, body and soul is no longer adequate....11 Natural science does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves."12 According to the new physics, observer and observed are somehow connected, and the inner domain of subjective thought turns out to be intimately conjoined to the external sphere of objective facts.
John Wheeler, one of Bohr's students, subsequently expanded Bohr's duality, proposing that Mind and Universe, like wave and particle, constitute another complementary pair. Wheeler's theory proposes a connection between the inner realm of consciousness (Mind) and its reciprocal, the external world of the senses (Universe). According to Wheeler, Mind and Universe are inextricably integrated. The Talmud expresses this subtle relationship in an apocryphal story of a dialogue between God and Abraham. God begins by chiding Abraham, "If it wasn't for Me, you wouldn't exist." After a moment of thoughtful reflection, Abraham respectfully replies, "Yes, Lord, and for that I am very appreciative and grateful. However, if it wasn't for me, You wouldn't be known." Somehow, in one of the great mysteries of the cosmos, human consciousness is able to ask questions of nature and the answers that come back are actually comprehensible. Perhaps, as Wheeler suggests, the two, Mind and Universe, are simply aspects of a binary system. Art and physics, then, may be seen as two pincers of a claw the Mind can use to grasp the nature of Wheeler's complementary image, the Universe.

At the same time that quantum physicists began to wrestle with Bohr's theory of complementarity, which is not classically scientific and seems to border on the spiritual, the Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung, promulgated his theory of synchronicity, the internal corollary in human experience of this external quantum idea. Like Bohr, Jung repudiated the conventional doctrine of causality. He proposed that all human events interweave on a plane to which we are not consciously privy, so that in addition to prosaic cause and effect, human events are joined in a higher dimension by meaning. The principles of synchronicity and complementarity, bridging as they do the very separate domains of the psyche and the physical world, apply as well to the connection between art and physics. The German language encapsulates this idea in the word, zeitgeist, which unfortunately has no single word equivalent in English, but means "the spirit of the times." When discoveries in unrelated fields begin to appear at the same time, as if they are connected, but the thread that connects them is clearly not causal, then commentators resort to proclaiming the presence of a zeitgeist.

Originally using the theory of complementarity to unite the opposite and paradoxical aspects of light, Bohr went on to extend his philosophical device to include other pairs of opposites. This book is about the complementarity of art and physics and the ways these two fields intimately entwine to form a lattice upon which we all can climb a little higher in order to construct our view of reality. Understanding this connection should enhance our appreciation for the vitality of art and deepen our sense of awe before the ideas of modern physics. Art and physics, like wave and particle, are an integrated duality: They are simply two different but complementary facets of a single description of the world. Integrating art and physics will kindle a more synthesized awareness which begins in wonder and ends with wisdom.

The connections between the art of one period and the physics of a later one become more apparent when examined retrospectively, looking all the way back to classical Greece. Sometimes the lag period is several hundred years; at other times it can be decades. In this century, an auspicious conjunction between art and physics occurred in its first decade with both fields exploding into many new directions.

Art generally anticipates scientific revisions of reality. Even after these revisions have been expressed in scholarly journals, artists continue to create images that are consonant with these insights. Yet a biographical search of the artists' letters, comments, and conversations reveals that they were almost never aware of how their works could be interpreted in the light of new scientific insights into the nature of reality. In these cases to be discussed, artists have continued to work in splendid isolation, bringing forth symbols that have helped the rest of us grasp the meaning of the new concepts even they, the artists, may not have understood intellectually.

  
 





 The same principle holds true in reverse. Upon making his discovery, the physicist is usually unaware of the artist's anticipatory images. Rarely has a physicist, discussing a new breakthrough in his science, acknowledged an influential artist who preceded him. Despite many deep friendships throughout history between artists and scientists, revolutionaries in art and visionaries in physics seem peculiarly separate. Picasso and Einstein, who I shall demonstrate shared a common vision, never even met or evinced interest in each other's work.
Since the visual arts do not exist independently of music, drama, poetry, literature, philosophy and architecture, I will weave these fibers into the fabric of this thesis where appropriate. However, the principal thread of this book is the visual arts of Western civilization against the backdrop of physics. This skein can be followed through ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and then on to Rome. The thread seems to have been broken during the disruption of the Dark Ages, but in that nocturnal period it still spun on virtually unobserved into Europe, reemerging in the Middle Ages until, like a phoenix rising, it reappeared resplendent in the Renaissance. The culture we call Western tradition then spread its net ever wider until it has encompassed all of Europe and the Americas.

In order to create a context in which to discuss the individual works of the artist and how they relate to the theories of the physicist, we need to make one more digression to ancient Greece where many of the premises of our present day value and thought systems originate. Not unlike the great founders of the major religions of the world, the early Greek thinkers began their inquiry by assuming that the variegated manifest universe arose from a cosmic unitary principle. Each of them attempted to trace all experience back to one primordial element. Around 580 B.C., Thales of Miletus, the first philosopher, declared that it was water. Heraclitus almost immediately disagreed, announcing that the original element was fire. Soon other voices cast their votes for air or earth. In one of the first great syntheses of science (and, I might add, one of the first known compromises), Empedocles proposed that perhaps there was not just one primordial element but rather four. If at the root of reality there were four different essences, then all of existence could be explained as some combination of the basic building blocks of water, fire, earth, and air. This idea "felt" right to the college of early philosophers perhaps because the number four universally evokes a sense of foundation. Whether it is the four points on a compass, the four corners of a square, or the four legs to a table, there is in this cardinal number an expectation of fundamental completeness.

One hundred years after Empedocles, however, Aristotle was not quite satisfied with this scheme. He observed that all things here on earth are in varying states of flux and argued that something was missing. Influenced by Plato's concept of an eternal ideal, Aristotle posited that, in addition to the tetrad proposed by Empedocles, there must be a fifth essence, a quintessence, that is constant and immutable and somehow connects the other four. Since the celestial constellations seemed unchanging in their unwavering courses across the sky, he proposed that the quintessence was composed of the stuff of stars.

Although we have discarded the early Greeks' quaint notions in the latter half of the twentieth century, this ancient scheme retains an uncanny familiarity. In our present paradigm we still acknowledge four basic constructs of reality: space, time, energy and matter. Space and time constitute the gridwork within which we conduct our lives, while inside their frame, energy and matter, and various combinations thereof create our world of appearance. These four elemental constructs form a mandala of totality. All perceptions created in the dream room of our minds are constructed from these four building blocks.

In looking to the light from the stars, Aristotle's speculation was close to the reality of twentieth-century physics. The quintessence, we have learned, is not the stars, but rather light itself. This, too, is fitting. Elusive and enigmatic, this fifth essence has engendered wonder and reverence throughout history. Whether it was the miracle of fire or the life-giving rays from the sun, light in and of itself has always been the most mysterious element. It has been accorded a prominent place in all religions of the world, and discoveries in modern physics revealed that it was the unique nature of light that held the key to unlocking the secrets of the other four. Both the fields of quantum mechanics and relativity arose out of two unresolved questions about the nature of light. Further, Einstein discovered that the speed of light was an invariant and immutable number. In some strange way light is the link connecting space, time, energy and matter. The symbol for the speed of light in physics, c, plays a prominent role in the key equations connecting the other four.

  
 






 In the coming chapters we shall principally explore the interrelationships of space, time, and light. The reason for coning down to these three elements is to narrow the focus for a more manageable discussion. A book about art by itself contains many currents and characters. Similarly, the history of physics shares this diversity. When trying to integrate one in terms of the other the thesis is in danger of sinking into a morass of names, dates and movements. Space, time and light were the three constructs revised by Albert Einstein in his 1905 special theory of relativity. They will be the key characters in the synthesis ahead. However, quantum mechanical conceptions, mass-energy and field theories, the other equally important physics revolutions, will be touched upon whenever it is pertinent.
 
 











 Great art can communicate before it is understood. T.S. Eliot 

The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present. Wyndham Lewis 

Chapter 8 - Modern Art / Newton Triumphant 

The wintery ice sheet blanketing Western art and thought began to thaw in the middle of the nineteenth century. Where cracks appeared, inflows began to erode the reigning Newtonian mind-set and the tyrannical system of perspective. At the time, these innocent-looking freshets issued forth from so many different quarters that they would not have appeared to an observer to be the beginning of a flash spring flood. Yet they were interconnected in an indiscernible pattern that would eventually profoundly change both art and physics. 

The invention of photography was one such current that affected people's common notions of space, time, and light and also had a major impact on art. Through knowledge gained in the fields of optics and chemistry the scientist built a little machine that could create in an instant what it took an experienced artist days and sometimes months to accomplish. The machine's product was a piece of paper that reproduced a single moment frozen from the space of visual reality. It would come to be called appropriately enough, a snapshot. With the click of a shutter and the flash of magnesium, the camera could record the here and now with stunning accuracy. By the middle of the nineteenth century, photographs were ubiquitous throughout Europe. 

The new contrivance was named a camera because of its similarities to the camera obscura invented in the fifteenth century. Camera obscura means "dark room" in Italian. Leonardo described its principles in his unpublished notes, and they remain the same today. If, on a sunny day, you sit in a darkened room with only a pinhole open on one side, images of the outside world will be projected upon the opposite wall. Trees, passing vehicles, pedestrians strolling; all appear in lifelike detail -- except they are upside down. If, next, you place lenses in the pinhole, the images are righted. The room is already something of a small box; if you reduce its size still farther, to that of a portable box, the camera obscura becomes an instrument you can aim at a group of people at a lawn party. In the sixteenth century in Europe magicians did just that, to the pleasure, amazement, and mystification of the well-to-do. 

The miniaturized camera obscura quickly became an indispensable aid for painters to solve problems of perspective. Some found it easier simply to trace the lenses' two-dimensional image on the camera's glass than work out the geometrical details of depth. The idea of preserving images had to wait for advances in chemistry. 

The vast numbers of images this instrument has produced has made it difficult to remember that, like the telescope, microscope, and sextant before it, the camera is a scientific instrument that measures space and time. The crucial element necessary to conduct these measurements is light. "Photography" literally means "writing with light": photo-graphy. 

 





 Most paintings executed at the dawn of fixed-image photography were versions of what the artist thought he saw. The new space/time/light machine confirmed the validity of most visual data. The images provided by the camera, however, also included distortions that were routinely filtered out by the brain. The camera had no brain, and so short-circuited the aesthetics of the interpretive process. Since a photograph contains precise information about the visual relationship of parts to a whole, which is the basis for the science of perspective, the camera allowed artists for the first time to compare their own observations about nature against an objective standard. 

Much to many people's surprise, the photographic record and that of the artist's were not always the same. For instance, the peculiar distortion of a hand that is made gigantic when photographed too close to the camera lens created an optical oddity that was not apparent when someone put a hand up close to the beholder's eye. The fact that such deformations existed at all threw into question the truth of the proverb "seeing is believing" and replaced it with "the camera doesn't lie." This shift in platitudes actually reflected a more important shift -- the relocation of optical truth from the visual center of the brain to a piece of silver-impregnated paper -- and did not go unnoticed by a few of the new generation's artists. 

Besides reassessing some rules of perspective by accurately measuring space, the camera interrupted the flow of time, bringing it to a abrupt halt. The camera could freeze one moment, thus allowing an observer to inspect it at leisure. The first major dispute to be settled with the camera was the age-old question, How does a horse run? A trotting and galloping horse's legs move too quickly for the human eye to perceive their exact sequence. Some people believed that at any given moment all four hooves may be off the ground; others believed that the horse's gallop did not include a moment when the horse was airborne. Artists portraying galloping horses could not afford the luxury of indecision: They had to choose one position or the other. Prior to the camera, the academic convention was to depict a galloping horse with both forelegs extended forward at the moment that both hind legs were extended backwards. 

The camera ended this uncertainty. In 1872 two horsemen placed a wager on the question and one of them, Leland Stanford, hired Eadweard Muybridge to settle it. Muybridge set up a series of cameras along a track and, using a complicated system of trip wires, recorded a running horse on multiple film exposures. The gambler who bet all four hooves were off the ground at once won the wager. 

The results, however, were not anything anyone could have anticipated. Instead of the elegant idealized motions envisioned by generations of artists, the gallop seemed an awkward way for a horse to propel itself forward. When painters began to represent this new information in their canvases, critics were disturbed and condemned these works because "something didn't look right." Rocking horses still depict the gallop the old way. 

Having measured the space within the moment of stopped time, Muybridge devoted the rest of his life to studying time and motion of objects passing through space. His studies had a seminal influence on the artists of the next generation. He also invented the basis of an entirely new art form -- the motion picture. 

The rapid proliferation of photographs caused the artists to wring their hands in despair. The academic painter Paul Delaroche declared, "From today, painting is dead!"1 Artists were concerned that the camera would compete unfairly in the business of image reproduction, threatening their economic bases because a principal source of the nineteenth-century artist's income was the portrait. Everyone of note had to sit for a portrait at one time or another. But with the advent of the camera, the time required for this tedious task was dramatically reduced. 

  
 



 Most artists paid servile obeisance to the dictates of the academy and slavishly accepted its criteria. To be singled out by the academy's jury for an exhibition in the official salon was the key to the commercial success of an artist. It was not immediately apparent to the juries that, after almost six hundred years, the illusionist perspectivist art favored by the academy's traditions had lost its vitality. Many of the paintings submitted to the salon were trivial exercises in draftsmanship. Despite the importance of the jury's imprimateur for any ambitious young artist, the time was ripe for someone to announce that the emperor had no clothes. 

The unlikely rebel who performed this mission was the urbane, sophisticated Édouard Manet. In his youth Manet trained with the Academic painter, Thomas Coutre. When he reached the age of twenty-seven, however, he destroyed virtually all his paintings in a fit of disgust and announced to his close circle of young artist friends, "From now on I will be of our times and work with what I see."3 

Manet went on to unveil several paintings that created an uproar in the art world. In l863 he exhibited his large composition, Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (Luncheon on the grass) (Fig. 10.1) in the Salon des Refusés, an unofficial exhibition organized by artists to protest their rejection from the official Salon. Many art historians mark this point as the beginning of modern art. 

Within the conventions of any period, artists can choose both their subject, and the manner in which they depict their subject; their particular interpretations embrace the ways they see the world. Since the beginnings of art thousands of years ago, this vision has almost always been decipherable. The spectator could use the rules of common sense to figure out the work of art. In the Academy, there was a veritable mandate that art had to be understood. 

In a flurry of brush strokes Manet challenged this fundamental dictum by composing a painting that had no logical consistency. There was no story, the allusion to myth was tenuous, and it was not picturesque. In short, no easy interpretation was possible. The four characters in Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe were all disconnected and were not even looking at one another. The juxtaposition of an undressed woman staring at the viewer while two fully clothed boulevardiers discoursed on some subject, oblivious to her proximity, outraged Parisian critics. Unlike all previous art, this painting made no sense and they considered it immoral. Most critics believed that Manet was either mad, incompetent, or a prankster. 

Besides the obvious incongruities regarding the painting's theme, Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe contained other, subtler, revolutionary peculiarities. Manet purposefully violated the reified laws of perspective. He disconnected the foreground from the background by eliminating the middle ground. The woman who is bathing in the pool in the rear of the composition would have to be a nine-foot-tall giant if her size were corrected for perspective. Previously, when a painter tampered with perspective, it enhanced the composition. Manet's bathing giant serves only to trouble the viewer. Further, Manet treated shadow irreverently. He purposely confounded the critics by lighting up the canvas from two different directions. The work looks as if it were painted using floodlights in front of the subjects, in addition to the natural light filtering through the trees. (Even here, Manet paradoxically arranged these shadows as if the light from the sun were coming from several directions simultaneously.) The painting's inflammatory content and strange construction tacitly challenged Aristotle's logic and Euclid's space, and called into question an entire paradigm built upon reason and perspective. 

The critics excoriated Manet for his composition as well as for the crudeness of his technique. They could not understand how so promising a young artist could be so clumsy and inept about the rules of perspective. They derisively called Manet's figures flat playing cards.4 But Manet was a master draftsman. If he chose to violate perspective's sacred canons, it was because he knew the old style of painting was exhausted. His subsequent paintings introduced his viewers to many fresh ways of seeing the world. 

In his Music in the Tuileries (1862) (fig. 10.2), painted about the same time as Le Déjeuner, he presents a chaotic scene without a focus. The vanishing point is smeared across the rear of the canvas. No central character emerges around which a viewer can begin to build a coherent view, so the hierarchy of subject evident in previous art is missing. To add to the visual stress, Manet eliminates the perpendicular line. 

  
 





 As I mentioned, the only two naturally occurring vertical lines (of consequence) in nature are the perpendicular alignment of human form and tree trunks. These two verticals intersect the equally straight horizon line to form the right angle of experience. This convention is so ingrained that all amateur photographers, when lining up the camera to take a snapshot, first align the frame of the picture with the vertical and horizontal. In Music in the Tuileries Manet obscures the guiding verticals and camouflages the horizon. Every tree trunk is curved; every man's hat tilts. All is askew even though anyone who has visited the Tuileries knows that the tree trunks there are not curved. In fact, the gardeners who carefully tended these trees made sure that they were straight as arrows in keeping with the geometric designs favored by the Age of Reason. While many other artists had created canvases that did not contain any perpendicular verticals, theirs were for the most part done to enhance the compositions' emotionality. Manet's Music, on the other hand, has more to do with revising the viewer's notions of space. 

If Manet tampered with the vanishing point and challenged the rectitude of verticals, it should come as no surprise that he was also the first artist in Western history to curve the hallowed horizon line. The horizon, the orienting line of all perspectivist art, is the most crucial stripe on a canvas. Anyone who has attempted to draw a picture using perspective knows that the first decision regarding the composition must be the location of the horizon line. 

Before Manet, all paintings were created so that this line was visible, or if hidden, implied. (Footnote: The one major exception to this rule was the trompe l'oeil ceiling paintings by the eighteenth- century Italian master, Giovanni Tiepolo. Trompe l'oeil is a style that stuns the viewer with illusionary tricks. However, although his paintings lacked a horizon line, Tiepolo substituted an overhead vanishing point and always maintained the integrity of the concept of perspective.) The Western tradition's unquestioning faith in the veracity of a straight horizon line is reminiscent of the stylistic conventions of Egyptian artists who for three thousand years represented the human figure in the same configuration: face in profile, torso full view, and legs in profile. But Manet, a true revolutionary, curved the straight horizon. In his work Boats (1873) (Fig. 10.3) as well as in many others, he tampers with the one razor-sharp straight line of consensus reality and bends it ever so slightly into a gentle arc. The elucidation of the concept of "curved spacetime" and its place in the physical world was still 50 years away, but in the 1860s this prescient artist anticipated the idea and tantalized his puzzled viewers. By defiantly presenting arabesque verticals and a curved horizon, Manet challenged a mind-set about space that had been born in antiquity and (except for an hiatus during early Christianity) had remained essentially unchanged until it became petrified. 

The horizon we see appears straight, but in fact we know it is curved. Each visible straight segment is but an exceedingly small arc of a circle twenty-four thousand miles in circumference. Manet had a larger view than the rest of his colleagues, and at some deep level he knew that the flat, pancakelike space of Euclidean appearance was in need of revision. 

In addition to having obscured the vanishing point and curving the horizon, Manet began to move the horizon up off the picture plane. In a series of paintings executed in 1864 concerning a battle at sea involving the ship Kearsage, this orienting line continues to rise, getting ever higher, until finally, in 1874, it floats off the canvas. In that year Manet painted his remarkable work Boating. (Fig. 10.4) This innocent-looking work does not seem very revolutionary to the eye of a twentieth-century viewer. In it, however, Manet elevated the perspective of the point of view so that the horizon was left out of the picture frame altogether. In this, he joined his contemporary Edgar Degas, who also presented many of his subjects, principally ballet dancers and women at their bath, using an angle of vision that did not contain within the work the horizon or vanishing point. Manet tried to capture the offhand, random, candid moment. The pervasive influence of the camera is evident in his works. 

While Manet was questioning some very fundamental assumptions regarding the perception of space, his contemporary and equally revolutionary colleague Claude Monet became the first artist since the Renaissance to investigate the dimension of time. Monet realized he could not re-create the essence of an object by painting it in only one frozen moment. To convey that essence fully, Monet needed to show how the object changed in time. 

In 1891 Monet began to paint the same scene repeatedly viewed from the identical position in space, but at different times of day. He portrayed the entrance of the cathedral in Rouen in forty separate works. Viewing these paintings when they are placed in sequence creates a cathedral that begins to exist in time, as well as in the three dimensions of space. 

Monet, a simple man with a child's outlook on life, and no formal academic training, had seized upon a great truth about time before anyone else: An object must have duration besides three extensions in space. Monet did not write down any theories or express one as an equation; rather he illuminated this truth in the limpid colors of his silent images. 

  
 





 Monet's ideas about time were as subtle as they were radical. Unintentionally, he became the herald of change. In 1895, a few years after Monet had discovered a way to introduce this notion in paint, H. G. Wells raised the same issue in literature. At a dinner party, Wells's protagonist in The Time Machine playfully attempts to controvert some ideas that are almost universally accepted. He begins by stating that a mathematical line, a line of nil thickness, has no "real" existence in the prosaic, as opposed to abstract, sense. All present agree. Nor, he says, has a mathematical plane any existence. Again, all agree. Neither, then, can a cube with only length, breadth, and thickness have a real existence, he says. At this, of course, his dinner companions all protest. But the Time Traveler counters, can an instantaneous cube exist?
Clearly, any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have length, breadth, thickness and duration.... There are really four dimensions, three of which we call the three planes of space, and the fourth, time.5 

By introducing series painting Monet incorporated the concept of changing time into the frozen moment of art. The word "series" itself is not an art term but rather is borrowed from mathematics and connotes sequence. Sequence is the backbone of time. Monet painted twenty separate moments of haystacks because he wanted to demonstrate how they changed with the seasons. It is as if Monet were saying, "If you want to know the complete nature of haystacks, you must see them through time as well as in space." (Fig. 10.5 and 10.6)

In his concern for time, Monet enlarged the moment of the present by capturing the fugitive impression of now. He even invented a name for his style: he called it "Instantaneity". This word comes not from the visual world of space, but rather from the abstract notion of time. Monet was not at all scientifically informed. He would have been surprised had anyone told him he had invented a radical new way to see time before anyone devised a corresponding totally new way to think about time.

Besides time, Monet's paintings introduced other innovations concerning the nature of space and light. He was one of the early artists in the post-academic tradition to dispense with the all-important direction of Euclidean vectors of orientation. A painting is a flat surface that holds an assortment of colored pigments. Visual clues are needed for the viewer to decipher the basic orientation, or direction, of a painting. Euclid's space depends upon the descriptive words "top", "bottom", "right" and "left", the vectors of plane geometry. Solid geometry adds the notion of near and far. Artists refined this latter vector when they discovered perspective.

From the fifteenth to the twentieth century, Western civilization was restricted to using Euclidean coordinates. Then the seeds of doubt about the inviolability of the Euclidean conception of geometry began to sprout in the field of mathematics. The artist, unaware of these doubts, nevertheless found a way to express them visually.

After Monet retreated to his garden at Giverny in 1881, he began to concentrate on representing the surface of a pool of water. (Fig. 10.7) Building on Manet's manipulation of the horizon line, Monet raised the viewer's angle of vision until the horizon was somewhere off the canvas. Then, unlike Manet, he reduced the variety of elements on the canvas to two: water lilies and water. His paintings in these later years became increasingly diffuse. The distinction between what was in the water, on the water, or reflected upon the water became ever more difficult for the viewer to discern until they became a continuum of elements and color. Finally, in compositions that tested the limits of realism and bordered on abstract art, Monet's image became so blurred that all orienting visual clues disappeared. Along with work by the early abstract painters, Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian, Monet could claim the dubious distinction that it was accidentally possible to hang some of his late paintings upside down. His innovation, however, challenged the veracity of Euclid's vectors.

Unlike previous painters, he was not as interested in the geometry of shapes and forms as he was in the massing of colors. In trying to capture his "impressions," he blurred the outline of objects and his smudged straight line was no longer the sharp boundary restraining an object's color.

  
 
 Music's exclusive function is to structure the flow of time and keep order in it. Igor Stravinsky 

Without music, life would be a mistake. Friedrich Nietzsche 

Chapter 19 - Music / Art / Physics 

Until now the focus of the book has been the connection between the visual arts and physical theories. However, the changing perceptions of space, time, and light are also evident in music and literature. Because each of these fields could be the subject for entire books, the chapters on these three subjects will touch only those aspects that relate to space, time, and light. 

Visual art is an exploration of space; music is the art of the permutation of time. Like his counterpart the painter, the composer has repeatedly expressed forms that anticipated the paradigms of his age. In this chapter, I will place a brief history of music alongside those of art and physics as supporting evidence for my principal thesis. Music's leitmotif will be seen to have run a course that parallels Western society's revisions of space, time and light. 

While art and physics are solely human expressions, music is a common medium for many living forms. Song is the language of birds and whales. Lions, tigers and other animals are soothed by tranquil melodies. It has even been proposed that plants respond to music. The ability of species to generate and respond to music is one of the great unexplained mysteries of nature. Apparently, appreciation for music is built into the genetic foundation of all higher life-forms. In humans, perfect pitch seems to be encoded somewhere within the strands of DNA. If the fittest do indeed survive, then how does the ability to sing in key or keep time to rhythm complement or enhance that survival? Perhaps, as the essayist Lewis Thomas has suggested, we are part of a grand symphony that includes the "rhythm of insects, the long pulsing runs of birdsong, the descants of whales, and the modulated vibration of a million locusts in migration..."1 He proposes we do not fully appreciate the music because we are not the audience, but rather members of the orchestra. 

Evidence for musical ability in humans has been found in artifacts at Upper Paleolithic ritual sites. Musical instruments probably existed as early as thirty-five thousand years ago, a date that coincides with evidence of the first prehistoric art and from these earliest times, all subsequent civilizations seem to have included music as part of their fabric. In classical Greece music played an increasingly important role during its rise.2 The Greek word for "distinguished" also meant "musical." In Greek religion, the muse Calliope protected all who loved music. Among their mythical heroes, none was as loved as the poet-musician, Orpheus. Music was part of everyday life as well as a manifestation of the divine, and played a crucial role in the new art form, drama. A chorus accompanied Greek theatrical productions, singing, dancing and pantomiming in synchrony with the main action. The early Greek poets were actually wandering minstrels who chanted and sang rather than recited the epic poems. Later, in the Athens of Pericles, rich patrons sponsored annual musical Olympiads, whose winners - not unlike the winners of Grammy Awards today - were national culture heroes. 

The Greeks believed that music possessed the power to drive men mad, as Ulysses mythological encounter with the Sirens in the Odyssey confirms. The Sirens' haunting song had the power to destroy mortals' reason. Curious to hear their song, Ulysses ordered his crew to stuff their own ears so they could navigate in safety, but he had them tie him to the mast with his ears open so he could hear the Sirens as his ship sailed past their island. 


 
 The Greeks not only made music; they were the first to use reason to understand its production. Early musicians had already observed that the tone produced by a plucked string could be varied by decreasing or increasing its length. In the sixth century B.C., Pythagoras found that when he divided the string by whole numbers, he could produce half the notes of an octave of music. Thus, he demonstrated that intervals had a mathematical, which meant a rational, foundation, and music and physics entwined for the first, but not the last time. 

After he discovered the interval's arithmetic basis, Pythagoras proceeded to speculate about celestial music. He proposed that the movements of the planets and stars created vibrations for the gods, and he named this divine harmony, unheard by mortal ears, the Music of the Spheres. To the objection that no mortal had ever enjoyed this music, Pythagoras replied that the sound is present at the moment of our birth, but because there is no silence against which we can compare it, we cannot hear it. 

Since the fourth century B.C. the changes in Western music have been so enormous that despite his knowledge and love of music, Pythagoras would be completely bewildered by what we listen to today. Ancient Greek music was monodic. Their word for melody, melos modus, literally meant the "road around," and Greek melody was a single-line theme that meandered through the musical register.3 Though the Greeks understood the textures of harmony, they had little knowledge of the complexities of counterpoint, and all members of a Greek chorus sang the same song in unison. This linearity reflected the ancient Greek outlook in other matters, including a reliance on Euclidean rectilinear axioms and a pictorial linear narrative style in art best exemplified by vase paintings. 

When Rome conquered Greece, the Romans usurped Greek music. As they did in art and science, the Romans refined what the Greeks had begun but they made few original contributions to music. 

The ascent of Christianity accompanied the disintegration of the classical world beginning around A.D. 400. These contrapuntal forces clashed with such dissonance that they brought about a four-hundred-year-long European intermission in human knowledge that we now call the Dark Ages. The statue of Calliope lay toppled from her pedestal. There was no one to reassemble the pieces in the midst of the mass migrations and almost constant warfare of those difficult times. As the vast Roman Empire fragmented, Latin, its monolithic language, also disintegrated into many different dialects. 

The musician, like the artist, sought sanctuary in the Church. Protected and surrounded by the new religion, music served it. In Europe, during this formless lump of centuries, what individual powers the kings could not claim, the Church subsumed. The Red and the Black created a checkerboard on which society could play out its destiny. Artists, authors, and composers did not sign their works; faith rather than reason dominated intellectual debate, and people sang in chorus. The hypnotizing cadences of Gregorian chant, seeking to create a divine vibration that would resonate with the powerful message of the New Testament, became the song that would last a millennium. Scientific inquiry was lulled into a long hibernation. 

As this aesthetic ice age began to melt, music suddenly blossomed forth in a most unexpected form. Love songs appeared like primroses after a cold, bleak February. These eleventh- and twelfth- century paeans to courtly love were something new. Passion had been the province of the Church, as in the Passion of Christ, not of sexual attraction. But when troubadours began to sing the praises of Arthurian romantic love, their songs became the musical fashion of their age. 

  
 

 Music remained relatively unchanged4 until the thirteenth century, even though there were many cross-currents of innovation.* (FN: Most notable was the invention of musical notation which began in the late eighth century in St. Gall, in what is now Switzerland.) During the late medieval period, choirmasters chopped linear melody into segments and rearranged them so they could be sung out of sequence.5 These superimposed melodies could now be heard simultaneously by the listener. By the beginning of the fourteenth century, composers were so excited about this new polyphonic musical form and the fledgling musical notation they developed in order to write it down that they called it ars nova, the new art. Polyphony had its beginning at a time when the simultaneity of multiple views was at its zenith in art, and logic and sequential causality had not yet reestablished their effectiveness as systems of thinking. (*f.n.: The popular canons, "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" or "Three Blind Mice," when sung out of phase in a chorus, are examples of polyphony.) The towering themes built using polyphony resembled nothing so much as the style of Gothic architecture. It was almost as if the Gothic cathedral evolved to complement polyphony, which also resembled the mosaic and the stained-glass window in that its discontinuous segments could be linked together to make up a much grander, unified, composition. 

The introduction of polyphony made possible immense complexity for music. The ancient Greek melodos had created a music time line comparable to the Euclidean vector of length: melody determined the horizontal direction of music. Polyphony now added the vector of height, so that instead of being a single thread, melody was a two-dimensional, chain-stitch, aural fabric complementing the visual tapestries of those times. The mosaic nature of medieval music is best illustrated by the peculiar fact that there exist virtually no surviving complete scores. What has come down to us, however, is "part music"; that is, each fragmented part of what was a whole composition. Part music is the name used for these fractured segments of a complex score. 

In the middle of the fifteenth century, accompanied by the reemergence of literacy, the discovery of visual perspective, and the reawakening of scientific inquiry, two inventions transformed music. The first was the standardization of written notation*, which allowed the components of melody to be read like the letters of the alphabet. The second was Johann Gutenberg's amazing new printing press, which made possible the rapid and widespread dissemination not only of the written word, but also of written music, which soon became so commonplace that by the end of the fifteenth century, music could challenge Latin as the primary pan-European language.6 (f.n.: Musical notation, having been invented in the eighth century, was continually refined in the ensuing centuries. It varied from one locale to another, however, because of poor communication between them. The printing press rapidly ironed out these local differences, creating a widely accepted standardized form of musical notation.) 

Literacy in both the printed word and music brought about the rise in the importance of the hand and the eye at the expense of the voice and the ear. Before the Renaissance, European music and knowledge depended for the most part upon an oral tradition that was written on the wind. But in the fifteenth century, what had been ephemeral became permanently transfixed by ink and sight: music and speech became visible. As Marshall McLuhan has pointed out, the Renaissance citizen traded an ear for an eye.2 

Musical notation allowed the invisible vibrations of sound waves to be synesthetically converted to black marks on white paper. As a result, an individual versed in this specialized language could compose a piece of music without making a sound other than the scratchings of pen on paper. These transcribed sheets could then be given to another musically literate individual who would be able to reconvert the notations imaginatively, from the visual to the auditory sense without making a sound. All this could transpire without a single audible note -- truly the sounds of silence. 

As a result of notation and the press, then, music could at last break out of the narrow confines of the here and now. Monodic melody, the narrow-ribbon highway for the transportation of music, developed a long fracture on its surface. Vast tracks of time and space seeped into the crack. Printed scores allowed any complex piece to be performed many miles away from, and many years after, the place and moment of its origin. The functions of composer and performer could definitively become separate. 

Once music could be seen, its transitory, undulating essence could be stilled and analyzed. Much like the anatomists who were their contemporaries, fifteenth century composers began to dissect harmony in an attempt to learn the nature of its underlying structure. They teased apart its components and carried out experiments until they perfected polyphony. 

 


 In the Renaissance, as we have seen, art first and then science, discovered the third dimension of depth; so, too, did music. Chords -- multiple notes struck at the same time -- deepened the richness of music, and allowed music, like perspective in art, and the Copernican system in science, allowed it to be truly three-dimensional: Music could now be considered a three-dimensional aural geometry that was structured by the flow of time. Perspective enhanced depth in art and chords deepened the timbre of music. The incredibly expressive possibilities inherent in a music that was not only melodious but also polyphonic and harmonious lifted the curtain on a new age beginning in the late sixteenth century. 

In order to prevent chaos, composers constructed their intricate new musical compositions on a grid consisting of the upright of key and the crossbeam of counterpoint. These two sturdy supports provided the great composers the means to scaffold simple motifs and melodies into towering aeries which would rival the Music of the Spheres. The Great Age of Music had begun. 

The invention and dissemination of musical notation continued to create many different branchings within music. The most significant was that which split speech from song because it hastened the development of two separate new art forms: instrumental music without words, and poetry without melody. 

In the oral tradition, poems were mostly sung and songs were in verse. Musical notation signaled the end of the age of minstrels and troubadours. Once written language could be conveyed in silence, the melody in poetry died away like a fading echo. The bleached-out remnant of the song became known as verse. In the fifteenth century, as the importance of song in Western culture diminished, poetry became ascendant. * (*f.n.: It is notable that in the modern era the cycle appears to have turned a complete revolution and we have witnessed songs' rebirth and a decline in poetry's general appeal. Byron's, Keats's and Shelley's romantic poetry has been supplanted by the songs of Cole Porter and the Beatles. More people know the lyrics of Bob Dylan than they do the verse of Dylan Thomas. Very recently, however, it appears that poetry is enjoying a resurgence as songs seem to be in decline.) 

If the lyrics of songs became poetry, then the pure melody, the other half of song, was transformed into a wordless achievement known as instrumental music. Before written notation, music was rarely composed without including the human voice. The oral tradition had been so pervasive that hardly anyone had ever thought to compose a piece of music without words. In the sixteenth century, however, coincident with the beginnings of the great age of European poetry, music was composed primarily for instruments alone, and from that time until the twentieth century, except for operas, masses and song poems, words disappeared from music sheets altogether. From the sixteenth century onward, words and music would begin to go their separate ways. 

The disappearance of the written word from music took place at the same time writing disappeared from art. During the Dark Ages, when literacy was at its nadir, what there was of art concerned itself with the letters of the alphabet. People invested the ability to read with magic and made the word an object of worship. Written language became the reverential subject of art. Monks in monasteries illuminated manuscripts, such as the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells, which in and of themselves were works of art; and calligraphy, the art of lettering, superseded drawing, the art of image. 

In the Renaissance, Gutenberg's press again made words common enough that they ceased to be the icons of religion. The printing press, which had squeezed the melody from verse, began to grind the calligraphy from script. Clear, spare, Carolingian letters, briefly used in the ninth century, reappeared to replaced the filigreed, crabbed Gothics of the medieval period. During the period that composers wrote songs without lyrics, artists returned to making visual images without words. Then, from the Renaissance until the advent of modern art, words remained virtually absent from inside the picture frame, even though they appeared in a painting's title which was outside the painting itself.* (Footnote: It was not until Picasso and Braque reinserted fragments of writing into their twentieth century Cubist paintings that calligraphy reestablished itself in art.) 

  
 


 Coincident with the invention of the printing press, emphasis on analysis informed all disciplines. Around the same time that composers began using notational scores, artists began to rely on sketchbooks and scientists recorded their observations in notebooks. Leonardo and Alberti wrote treatises for young artists on the science and mathematics of art, and urged them to use their powers of observation and to study their subjects from nature, not from imagination. Meanwhile Francis Bacon outlined a new scientific methodology, which was also based on precise measurement from direct observation. And the vocabulary of measurement also appeared in music's new lexicon. Words such as "scales," "measures," "meters," "parts" and "pieces" were used in music as they were in science.* (*Footnote: The apotheosis of this trend in music was reached in the early nineteenth century when the metronome, essentially an upside-down timepiece, became commonplace in music just when the measurement of absolute time was at its height in science. 

Music, art and physics shared other important parallels, chief among which was the organization of all three based on an intersecting horizontal and vertical. Soon after artists began laying out the coordinates of horizontal and vertical, the basis of perspective, composers refined the coordinates of musical notation, key and counterpoint, using horizontal bar and vertical staff. Almost simultaneously, scientists were greatly aided in their work by the widespread use of scientific graphs which plotted functions, otherwise not visual, on an abscissa and ordinate. 

A single, favored point of view became fundamental to all three disciplines. In perspectivist art, the entire canvas was designed to be seen by a passive spectator, standing in the favored location several feet in front of the painting. In physics, an external reality could be measured because the observer was peering at it through a telescope from a favored position of absolute rest. In music, the principle of a single point of view became manifest in the form of key. 

The discovery that key could unify a composition came about in reaction to the florid exuberance of polyphony, which had transformed music in the late medieval period and was reaching a crescendo climax in the Renaissance. As composers attempted to create compositions of ever greater complexity, music became increasingly disjointed. But late in the sixteenth century a group of innovative Italian artists and composers formed the Camerata, intending to resurrect pure linear Greek music in response to polyphonic compositions that, to their ears, was beginning to sound cacophonic.9 They called themselves the Camerata because they met "in camera" behind closed doors (camera in Italian means room), and they met clandestinely because during the Inquisition an attempt such as theirs to free music from the Church's authority could still be considered subversive. 

In accord with the rise of Humanist sentiment, and the need to hear individual voices, around 1600 the Camerata introduced the idea of the basso continuo -- a shorthand indication of bass line harmony running through a piece of keyboard music usually accompanying the singer -- which returned clear organization and Greek linearity to musical composition. Basso continuo was like a thin stiff rod thrust through the entire length of a composition that lent to the piece a certain sense of unity. As with perspective in painting, the basso continuo served as a horizon line in that it created a regulative framework in which to fit the different melodic lines. A series of harmonic chord progressions were explicitly defined and sounded by the basso continuo. 

The idea of a home key arose in musical composition about the same time and embodied the same unitary principle. The basso continuo contributed to composers' early recognition of the importance of a unifying key. Key became the favored and privileged tonal center of a composition, corresponding to the perspectivist viewpoint in art and absolute rest in science. One of the founding members of the Camerata was the peppery theorist-composer, Vincenzo Galilei, the father of Galileo. The elder Galilei played an important part in introducing the concept of basso continuo which contributed to the acceptance of a home key. A single key corresponds in principle to the inertial rest frame in science coincidentally discovered by his son! 

From the time the concept of key was established, beginning in the late sixteenth century, and continuing well into the nineteenth, a composer selected a specific key for each composition and rarely ventured far from this unifying construct. The single home key, like the focal point of perspective and the concept of absolute rest, represents a world whose point of view is monocular and mathematically organized. This principle allowed each discipline to order the parts of any of its compositions into a hierarchical and coherent set of relationships. Alberti's perspective, Newton's Principia, and J.S. Bach's Art of the Fugue each manifest this singular notion, and all represent nothing less than the reordering of thought itself. 

  
 

 As the Camerata stressed individuality, so the voice of the single performer unequivocably stood out in the Renaissance for the first time in the history of Western music. From the Greek chorus to Gregorian Chant, singing had been largely communal, but as the individual was separated from the chorus, a form evolved to accommodate the solo voice: opera. The first opera, Daphne, by the Italian composer Jacopi Peri was performed in 1594. 

The Renaissance citizens were eager to delve into all the pursuits of knowledge and creativity now available to them. Since great public libraries did not exist, every Renaissance Humanist who aspired to assemble one had to create a room in which to house these artifacts of the new age. The personal library emerged as a consequence, a special room in which to learn and study. It was also a place in which each Humanist could develop his own individuality. Along with the requisite shelves of books, a proper library was equipped with a writing table, where the newly literate individual could express his private thoughts in words. In another corner stood the telescope, a device owned by all who considered themselves part of the new age. The telescope, like the microscope invented around the same time, offered the inquiring eye a way to increase its observational power. These devices were singular: Only one Humanist at a time could peer through either. Gazing at the moon or examining a paramecium was as solitary an endeavor as reading or writing. 

Another prominent item in the Renaissance Humanist's library was an earth's globe, which represented the triumph of the new Copernican perspective and offered its owner a God's-eye view of the spherical planet any time he was so inclined. 

Easels were fairly common as well, since the invention of stretched canvas and oil-based paints had allowed painting to become a portable hobby, and virtually every literate person practiced draftsmanship. To be able to draw from direct observation was not only a highly esteemed skill, it was also another way for the Renaissance Humanist to express his singularity. The credo of Humanism, "See the truth and be the complete man," expected nothing less. Thus the library gradually expanded to contain the means to define each person's individuality. 

The Humanist's library would not be complete without music. Since reading, writing, gazing and drawing were all solitary pursuits, it is no surprise that the Renaissance imperative to individuality gave rise to the most versatile musical instrument ever invented for one player: the keyboard clavichord. At the outset of the Renaissance, small claviers had been developed for personal use. Their sound was tinny because the player had no control over the force with which each string was struck by the hammer; nevertheless the arrangement of the presently used keyboard, common to all later pianos, dates from the early fifteenth century.* (Footnote: The beginning of the modern piano had to wait until 1709, when Bartolomeo Christofori, employed as a full-time keeper of Ferdinand de Medici's harpsichords, invented a mechanism which moderated how each hammer struck each string. This innovation, later refined in Germany, would permit the piano to become an instrument of great range and versatility.) 

The keyboard clavier-piano was a most perfect instrument. While it could be incorporated into a larger composition, it could also be played alone for one person's solitary enjoyment. On it, one could play chords, different simultaneous parts, and complex pieces, while leaving one's voice free to sing, too. Due to its versatility, it has had composed for it the largest body of eclectic music written expressly for any one instrument; yet, in recognition of its place in the secular sphere, almost none of that music has been sacred. 

Now the room was complete. The symbol of the Humanist's musical individuality, the clavier-piano, occupied a central place in the library. It joined the writing table, telescope, globe and easel. These devices, along with the books lining the shelves, constituted the heraldry of a new separateness. The Catholic Church, Western civilization's organizing force for a thousand years, discovered a formidable assemblage of new icons arrayed against it. As a result of the ensuing struggle, Christianity was to undergo its own revolution: The Reformation, the crux of which was the belief that an ordinary congregant could read and interpret the Bible without the help of the Vatican. 

  
 
 With all the options available to them at the beginning of the sixteenth century, composers were naturally drawn to themes and their variations. As scientists used the rules of logic to construct detailed explanations of the world's workings, and artists created complex paintings organized about the laws of perspective, so composers explored development in music. In this form of musical analysis the composer states a theme, and then exhaustively explores its variations. The complicated scaffolding of a single theme in the diverse compositions of Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms was possible because they all accepted certain agreed upon conventions of music, the most basic of which was the unity of key. Mozart, and later, Beethoven, were masters of the intricate manipulation of theme and variation. The seventy-piece symphony orchestra emerged early ih the nineteenth century to serve as a vehicle for this unique form. 

One result of this pervasive mind-set was that the observer was split off from what he observed in science, the viewer was separated from the landscape in illusionist art and the audience was divorced from the performer in music. Classical music listeners sat in neat rows that resembled the repetitive lines of type on a printing press and behaved like silent viewers standing outside the frame of a perspectivist painting, or scientists quietly observing the sky through a telescope. The rules of etiquette demanded that audience members of a musical concert sit passively and not tap their feet, sing, move, or even cough. The music we think of today as classical included no audience participation; there were no operatic sing-a-longs. 

The singular point of reference that expressed itself as the central home key of a composition beginning in the late Renaissance reached the epitome in the late eighteenth century in the person of an orchestra's conductor. The one person in the orchestra who did not play any instrument, he was yet the focus of the music. The entire orchestra was placed in such a way that the sound issuing forth from each instrument converged upon him. In this regard, the conductor resembled the viewer of an illusionist painting in that all lines of sight converged on one point. These works were planned as if they were to be seen by a monocular eye. The conductor of an orchestra was this eye's counterpart, a cyclopean ear, as it were. Like the sun in the Copernican system, he stood in the very center of a musical system, the orchestra cupping him on one side and the audience on the other. 

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the respective citadels of art, physics, and music each had as its foundation a comprehensive hierarchical structure that seemed secure. Startling new discoveries in all three fields would change them radically. Both the composer and the artist anticipated the trumpet blast that would bring down their walls. The modern painter introduced a solitary musician playing a Dionysian reed instrument. Featured first in a work by Edouard Manet, The Fifer , and developed further in one by Henri Rousseau, The Snake-charmer , this figure was soon resurrected by many different artists playing the haunting monodic melody of mythological times. The lone musician became the leitmotif of the new age. While the public was still applauding Beethoven's complex crescendos, the visual artists had presciently intuited the coming upheaval that would revolutionize art, music, and physics. As we shall see, composers, too, insinuated into their music the beginnings of this radical change. 

In the early years of the twentieth century, music was caught up in the same turmoil that enveloped art and physics. These changes were so profound that the Western world would never again be the same. While the principal events of the Renaissance were scattered over a two-hundred year span, a profound compression took place in the few years around 1905. In 1899 in Vienna, a chamber group performed the first major composition by the young Arnold Schoenberg, a string sextet entitled Transfigured Night that contained an unusual programmatic nature and strange harmonies which outraged conservative program committees. Schoenberg developed atonality in his 1909 Opus 11, No. 1, the first composition ever to dispense completely with "tonal" means of organization. 

Atonality was a dramatic departure from previous forms of music because it destroyed the central unitary principle of a home key. In an atonal composition there is no key. Each note has the same relative importance as all the others. As a result, dissonance becomes harmony. A Viennese critic called Schoenberg "a man either directly devoid of sense or one who takes his listeners for fools.... Schoenberg's opus is not only filled with wrong notes... but it is a fifty-minute-long wrong note."11 Thus it was that Einstein pulled the stool out from under the stationary observer in science at the same time Schoenberg finally dethroned the two-century reign of King Key. Since Picasso and Braque soon replaced the singular viewpoint in art with the multifaceted vantage of an insect's eye, relativity found concurrent expression in physical theory, the visual arts and music. 

Like relativity and Cubism, atonality did not emerge from nowhere. It was the conclusion of a progression that had begun with Beethoven, who experimented by wandering away from a home key in his later works. Later in the nineteenth century, Richard Wagner began to modulate from one key to another, disconnecting his motifs much as CÈzanne was doing in his still-life compositions. In the 1880s, fascinated by Eastern music, Claude Debussy began to compose music that departed from the unifying influence of central tonality. His musical "Impressionism" in PrÈlude ý l'aprËs-midi d'un faune (1894) ran parallel with the impulse of painters of the same era. 

  
 
 Richard Strauss assaulted the citadel of key from another direction, combining many different keys all at once. Inasmuch as each key constitutes a unique musical perspective, his use of polytonality can be likened to the principle of Cubism. A century of musical trends culminated in Schoenberg's "special (musical) theory of relativity," which was consonant with Einstein's democratic principle regarding the Galilean inertial frames of reference in time and space. Einstein had declared all frames equal; Picasso and Braque had shown all vantages to be equally correct; and Schoenberg sounded the equality of all tones and keys. 

Schoenberg carried this egalitarian principle to its logical extreme. In l921, he imposed a new restrictive set of rules for atonal music with his twelve tone method or dodecaphony. In this variation he asserted that no tone in the scale, including both sharps or flats, could be repeated until all twelve had been played. In dodecaphony, not a single tone could be said to be favored because each note would have to be heard before any other one could be played again. 

The atonal composers also tampered with time. Anton Webern, a student of Schoenberg, compressed one piece into 19 seconds,12 and focused the listener's attention on the element of time. Since the Renaissance, musical time had obeyed a linear rhythm. Intervals for the most part had a regularity that was reassuringly predictable and fit right in with Newton's ideas about invariant time and determinism. Igor Stravinsky, the other great innovator to match Schoenberg, radically revised this by abruptly varying any semblance of a predictable tempo. He juxtaposed rhythmic dissonances with sudden changes so startling they unsettled his listeners. The first audience to hear this musical heresy became, as might have been expected, disoriented. In 1913, at the premiere of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps, the audience erupted in a riot during the performance. This sort of outburst was so rare, so seldom witnessed in the staid concert halls of Europe, that everything degenerated quickly. While members of the audience traded punches, the composer escaped into the night through a rear window. Among the other various reasons for this riot, Stravinsky had dared to challenge the idea of absolute metronomic time. The audience's reaction to a musical tempo that alternately and dissonantly compressed and then dilated is a replica of how difficult it has been for the public to understand Einstein's notions of relative time. 

Concurrent with these developments in classical music, Dixieland jazz emerged out of America and took Europe by storm with its recollections of medieval polyphonic music and the art of the mosaic. In Dixieland, many musicians play separate melodies within a single complex piece. The melody, broken into multiple, distinct, and seemingly disorganized fragments resembles nothing so much as a Cubist painting. 

The innovations introduced by the new composers of classical music and jazz were variations in the form and content of music. At the outset of the twentieth century, however, the most fundamental change to occur in music was in its process, that is, in the way that music was propagated through space and time. In the entire history of music, this transformation was the most profound. 

Since music is sound, and sound cannot exist in a vacuum, music must therefore be transported on the wind. Until this century music had been mediated only by air. Sound waves are made up of tiny oscillating individual molecules and atoms. Although a wave, sound depends on corpuscular atoms of oxygen and nitrogen which comprise the entity we call air. The kinetic energy of music dissipates over very short distances. As anyone sitting in the last row of the third balcony knows, air tires easily, and the music it carries soon dies out, to be lost forever among the jumble of the other colliding atoms and molecules which constitute the atmosphere. 

Einstein, in his stunning 1905 tour de force had elevated light to a preeminent position as the true constant of the universe. Minkowski also revealed that space and time are alloyed into a unity by the connecting shaft of pure light. It was at this time that music ceased to be a "thing" composed of oscillating molecules and instead became a "process" that glowed incandescently. Music converted into light. 

The foundation for this amazing transmutation began in 1886, when Heinrich Hertz, a German physicist, detected the presence in the atmosphere of an electromagnetic wave that had an exceedingly long wavelength. The wavelength of visible light (the distance between peaks), is measured in nanometers, which are each 1/25,400,000th of an inch. The distances between peaks of Hertz's newly discovered waves could be measured in yards or even miles. They confirmed James Clerk Maxwell's l873 pronouncement that electricity, magnetism and visible light were just different manifestations of radiant energy. Hertz called these long, gentle undulations "radio waves". Although radio waves are at the far end of the electromagnetic spectrum and are invisible, they are a form of light. When reporters asked him what practical application his new radiowaves might have, Hertz replied that he didn't know, but he was sure someone would soon find a use for this invisible form of light. He could not anticipate that soon this light no one could see would become music everyone could hear. 

  
 

 In 1895, Guglielmo Marconi converted agitated, compressed molecules of sound into pure light in the form of radiowaves. So transformed, the sound of music could then hitchhike a ride on these silent waves. Marconi put sound through a metamorphosis that began when sound waves struck sensors in the diaphragm of a microphone. These sensors converted the crowded waves of air into a varying electric current which traveled deep into the innards of his technical marvel called a radio transmitter. These signals then rushed up a tall thin metal rod called an antenna, from there they propagated into space as an insubstantial radiant light that could cross empty space without needing any medium. Marconi's radio transmitter generated sound which had been converted into light. 

The antennae of radio transmitters are shaped exactly like the previous millennium's Gothic cathedrals' spires that reached for the heavens. But the spires of Chartres are mute, and this new scientific creation vibrates at a frequency consonant with the silent music that is now light. It can traverse a vacuum and can penetrate soundproof walls. It spreads out from the antennae like the ripples on a pond at 186,000 miles per second in all directions. Because the ionosphere reflects these radiowaves back toward the earth, they even reach over the curvature of the globe. 

The radio transmitter's antenna is only one tine of a tuning fork, however. Its ethereal emanations must find the other tine before they can be converted back to sound. In other words, these radio waves must strike another antenna, whose tuner is set to the same frequency. By simply turning on a radio that has an antenna and scanning the different frequencies on the dial, we allow the magical, soundless music to find its voice, which is what we hear emanating from our radio speakers. The cycle of transubstantiation is now complete. What began as air is once again air. What was broadcast miles away can be heard as if distance did not exist. 

Because of music's transubstantiation into light, space has contracted like an accordion, and a vast, invisible electromagnetic net has been silently cast over all of humankind. Wherever we move, wherever we go, we are immersed in this gossamer veil we can neither see, smell, taste nor hear. It appears to travel with impunity right through our bones, heart and brains. Every cubic foot of space on this planet is alive with the scintillating dance of crisscrossing electromagnetic waves carrying broadcasts of every imaginable kind of music, language and message. To borrow an idiom of the 60s, we need only to "turn on and tune in." 

As part of our species's search for intelligent life in the universe, the United States flung a Pioneer space probe containing a graphic message far out beyond our solar system in 1972. The scientists associated with it hoped that it would be intercepted by some galactic beachcomber after it left our corner of the cosmos. Newscasters speculated upon how it would find its way to some distant planetary system to be turned over in prehensile limbs we cannot imagine. 

Of course, Marconi had already done the same. Seventy-six years earlier, a small percentage of the magic light from his first radio broadcast did not get reflected back to Earth but passed on through the ionosphere and escaped into outer space. Unlike sound, light is capable of spanning the void. It takes eleven days for sound to cover the distance light travels in a second. From 1895 onward, then, the incoming light from distant stars has had to pass through our outward-bound radio wave transmissions. 

Imagine the excitement that will be generated when some lone radio ham, on a distant planet orbiting a different sun than ours, one night just happens to turn on and tune in to Earth. What a surprise will unfold, because it is all there -- the entire history of the twentieth century as well as music since the Renaissance. Our new radio audience will be able to listen to all our electromagnetic radio transmissions falling on their planet as light from their sun falls on ours. They will hear our extraordinary talents and momentous events as they arrive encoded in these waves. Out somewhere beyond Alpha Centauri, there exists in an ectoplasmic state, the messages of Amos and Andy, Adolph Hitler and Bishop Fulton Sheen, and the music of Ludwig van Beethoven and Bing Crosby. Beginning in the Renaissance, music was recorded through notation. Because of it, the constraints of time were overcome. Now, as a result, we can listen to the ensuing centuries' music. Radio has superseded the constraints of space as well because by converting music to light, Bach and Mozart will resound in outer space forever. 

Anyone receiving our early broadcasts would be tuned to musical trends and historical events that have already happened here on Earth. Because of the time it takes light to traverse space, they will not know the outcome; having to wait in nail-biting suspense, like children at a Saturday matinee, to find out who wins World War II or the answer to the crucial question of whether we ultimately destroy ourselves in an environmental Apocalypse. 

  
 
 With the advent of television we have dramatically increased the outpouring of light-as-information. Now our stellar audience can see what we look like as well as how we sound. The soap opera called The Twentieth Century has expanded out from the earth in a bubble of ghostly light. If, as some astronomers have speculated, there are many different planets out there capable of containing intelligent life, more and more planets will tune in as our programs fan out across space, and soon music and our story will be heard and seen at different times in different places from one end of the universe to the other. 

Since the dawn of the age of radio astronomy in the 1960s, we have been able to detect all kinds of hitherto unseen objects in space, some of which emit prodigious amounts of energy. Of course, in the short span of ninety years, we have become a hot spot in space ourselves. As radio and TV transmitters continue to proliferate all over the globe, the earth has started to twinkle as a new item in the intergalactic T.V. Guide. 

On the day our electronic net is cast upon the shores of an alien intelligent planet, so too might that be the precise moment their early broadcasts would reach us. If they know enough to receive ours they would already have sent us their version of As The World Turns -- whatever that may be. If this were to happen, our planet's community of Homo sapiens would enter a new phase of evolution: Our solitary existence will have come to an end. 

Life's first experiment was as a one-celled organism. Gradually, over billions of years, these cells formed a network to become a primitive, multicelled organism. Although every cell retained its own individuality, each cell was part of the greater whole. They were connected to each other by a primitive nervous system that consisted of electromagnetic and electrochemical signals. Perhaps we can think of our earth as a one-celled organism that one day will become part of a larger organism, enmeshed by the electronic net of each other's transmissions. 

The eerie part of this highly likely statistical probability is that the reciprocal civilizations and planets from which the messages originated will have vanished by the time these messages are received. The music, people, networks, towers and possibly the earth itself that generated all of our transmissions may also have ceased to exist. Yet all the programs will live on because of the length of time it takes for each transmission to cross the far reaches of outer space. The legend of the lost continent of Atlantis will be born again, but this time it will apply to civilizations that are not under the waves of water but exist only as radiowaves of light. Because of the constraints of Einstein's special theory of relativity we will never know if they still exist and they too will puzzle over this unanswerable question. We will all shimmer, like poltergeists, in the ??elsewhere?? of each others' Minkowskian spacetime diagrams. 

For centuries, poets, lovers, and mystics have been praising one form of music or another as eternal. These paeans were premature since sound only lasts a few seconds. But when the first radiowave music escaped the earth's ionosphere, it literally did become eternal. As it filtered out through the earth's atmosphere, light began a journey into the places between the stars. Music, in this century, has been converted from sound into the clarity of pure light. 

Another revolutionary implication of the conversion of music into light is that it can be stored, either as a light interference pattern on a magnetic tape or on a laser disc. Either way, listeners no longer have to sit passively waiting for the orchestra to begin a scheduled performance. By simply choosing from their tape or compact disc collection, music lovers can recreate more music at their whim than all the orchestras that existed in the nineteenth century put together. Furthermore, the listener chooses the time and place for the performance. Now, the audience can actively participate in the phenomenon of music which, of course, is identical to the core principle found in the world of the atom: observer-created reality. 

Thirty-five thousand years ago a solitary Paleolithic tribesman blowing across his reeds set in motion a holy vibration. Its reverberations against the cold, dark walls of the cave set up a resonance we call music that has carried forward throughout the ages. Much later, the monodic music of the Greeks followed the line of Euclidean geometrical principles. In the medieval period, music intertwined in the tapestry of that spiritual age. Beginning in the Renaissance, the composer organized music along the identical principles existing in perspectivist art and Newtonian science. In the twentieth century, music has been transformed in style, content and form at the same time these changes were taking place in art and physics. The transubstantiation of music into light is the grande finale that expresses Einstein's enthronement of light as the quintessence of the universe.