Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Sun Rings: Music of the Spheres From the Kronos Quartet

Episode Date: May 13, 2013

The internationally renown string quartet talk about creating and performing Terry Riley's Sun Rings, that incorporates Don Gurnett's space sounds.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to a special arts and science edition of Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, and that's Sun Rings, composed by Terry Riley and performed by the world-renowned Kronos Quartet. We'll talk with the musicians about this magnificent work that features sound recordings from the cosmos, provided by planetary scientist Don Gurnett. But we'll also hear from Bill Nye, reporting from Washington, D.C., and we'll pay a what's-up visit to Bruce Betts, reporting from Washington, D.C., and we'll pay a what's-up visit to Bruce Betts, who will help me determine which of you out there is going to have the science guy greeting callers to his or her voicemail. We begin with Planetary Society Senior Editor, Emily Lakdawalla.

Hey, Emily, great to catch you just before you leave for this trip to Washington that Bill Nye is going to tell us about in a second. But let's talk about this May 9th entry in the blog. And the first thing that I thought when I saw it was, oh my gosh, that Chinese lunar lander is huge. It's absolutely enormous. It's one of actually two landers that they're building, the same way that they did with Chang'e 1 and eventually Chang'e 2. They're building two spacecraft. Their nominal mission is to launch and land one on the lunar surface

to do various kinds of sampling. And they're also going to deploy an opportunity-sized rover onto the surface from the top of the lander. But they got a second one, so they're probably going to launch the second one, assuming the first one works well. And they'll wind up with two lunar landers. This is Chang'e 3 and Chang'e 4. Chang'e 3 is supposed to launch in December currently, but since it's a lunar mission, they're pretty

flexible as to the launch date. And I don't know when Chang'e 4 is supposed to launch. But these two are going to pave the way for their next mission after this is going to be automated lunar sample returns. So the Chinese really have a pretty amazing lunar program going on right now. And if you look at these images on this May 9 entry in Emily's blog at planetary.org, you will see this large rover sitting on top of this much larger base in a gigantic vacuum chamber that could obviously... That's right. Go ahead. I was going to say, it looks like it could hold something a lot bigger too. It could hold something a lot bigger. too. It could hold something a lot bigger.

Maybe even something large enough to carry humans to the lunar surface. Yes. In fact, you speculate about that in this blog entry, and so do some other people who comment on what you've written. Yeah, that's just speculation at this point, but it's really hard to imagine that that's not where they're headed, considering that they've also got Space Station and Earth orbit and stuff going on right now. So they seem to have a pretty clear goal with this program. Well, the photos are great, if you can ignore the incredibly obnoxious watermarks that the Chinese, apparently a Chinese magazine, put over these images. But they are well worth looking at.

They will knock your socks off. And NASA, I hope you're taking notice. Do indeed have a great time in D.C. with others of our colleagues there, and we'll turn to Bill in a second to hear more about what's going to be going on. Thank you very much for joining us. All right. Thank you, Matt. She is the senior editor for the Planetary Society and our planetary evangelist, headed for D.C. now to do some advocacy work and also meet some members of the public there,

particularly members of the Planetary Society. You can also see her work as a contributing editor in Sky and Telescope magazine. As promised, here is the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye. Welcome, Bill. Tell us why we're talking to you on a cell phone in Washington, D.C. Well, I'm going between meetings. The Planetary Society is holding a lunch and learn to once again communicate to Congress and especially Congress members, staffers, the importance of planetary science, what a great value it is and how it enriches our society, moves us forward technologically,

makes discoveries to change the world. And yet there are people who want to cut the budget $200 million when it would be much more appropriate, in our opinion, to keep it at the level it was back in 2012. And that, it's this thing where one set of congressmen set it up this way, then the Office of Management and Budget cuts it down. The Office of Science and Technology restores it. Then they get cut down. Then the Congress passes another thing. This has to do with the sequester appropriations and the authorizations committees. It is just a complicated mess. And if you want to find out the details, check out planetary.org and read Casey Dreyer's blog. Casey, who's our political analyst,

Jen Vaughn, the COO, and I are going to visit several Congress people tomorrow, and then we're going to have a lunch and learn where we try to change the world. We already heard that Emily Lakdawalla is joining you for a couple of days as well. Yes, and Bobak Ferdowsi, the Mohawk man. Bobak Ferdowsi, the Mohawk man. That and free food for these Congress members and their staffs.

I hope we'll pull in a nice crowd. Oh, yes. There's nothing like a box lunch in the neighboring building. No, but Matt, this is what the Planetary Society does. We are working to influence space policy. So I'll give you an update next week. Thank you, Bill. Give them hell.

Thank you, Matt. He's the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye the Science Guy. We'll be right back with the Kronos Quartet and sun rings in just a moment. Earth Chorus. That was planetary scientist and space sound discoverer Don Gurnett of the University of Iowa. We featured Don and his eerie yet captivating collection back in June of 2011. Here's another selection from his library. Jovian electron cyclotron emissions. Don did not suspect when he began collecting his cosmic audio signatures that they would one day both inspire and become part of an amazing

musical composition that would be performed throughout the world by the Kronos Quartet. Last March, the quartet brought Sun Rings to the Carpenter Performing Arts Center at California State University, Long Beach in Southern California. I was invited to moderate a conversation with the quartet just a day before the multimedia concert. What you are about to hear are excerpts from that fascinating, more than an hour-long conversation with Kronos founder and violinist David Harrington, violinist John Sherba, violist Hank Dutt, and cellist Jeffrey Ziegler.

We were also joined by CSU Long Beach's Area Director of Composition and Music Theory, Dr. Alan Shockley. The complete discussion is on this week's show page at planetary.org slash radio. I began with this question for David Harrington. Can you talk about the genesis of this piece, Sun Rings? Did you ever think that you would get a call from NASA? No, I did not ever think Kronos would get a call. And what happened was that I got a call from Janet Calverthwaite, our manager, and she said, I just heard from the arts program director at NASA. And his question was, would Kronos be interested in including

some of the sounds recorded on the Voyager expeditions in any of their concerts. It didn't take me a tenth of a second to say, well, I didn't know there were any sounds. But if there are or were or if they're available, I need to hear them right away. And so by the time we got back from that tour, there was a little, believe it or not, from NASA, a cassette. And this was in 2000. So I put it on, and all of a sudden here I am hearing

something that sounded like nature to me, but not like a nature that I'd ever heard before. like nature to me, but not like a nature that I'd ever heard before. Like many before him, David was utterly captivated, and he immediately saw the opportunity presented by Don Garnett's sounds. He turned to a composer who had collaborated with the Kronos Quartet for many years, a man known as the father of the minimalist movement in music. And that was Terry Riley. in music. And that was Terry Riley. But what I really wanted to do was see his face

when I played the sounds for him. And then I would know for sure if this was going to work. And so there was a moment at one of our recording sessions, and I had the opportunity to introduce Terry to these sounds. It was instantaneous that the desire to somehow find a way of bringing these sounds and have space into this piece, into a piece. He began to have this idea of making this piece

that would kind of celebrate everything out there. And then September 11th happened, 2001. And then September 11th happened, 2001. And then September 12th happened. And on the radio on September 12th on KPFA, one of our great poets, Alice Walker, was chanting over and over again, one earth, one people, one love. And Terry heard that.

And shortly after that, I got a call from Terry, and he said that he began to rethink the whole piece and that it was going to take a different form. Riley's new concept of the piece would place great demands on the talents of the quartet's musicians, as well as on anyone who chose to stage the piece. An 80-voice choir, complex multimedia and lighting, and Don Gurnett's sounds of space triggered by the quartet's hands moving over sensors.

Gurnett became an active partner in the project, along with famed stage and lighting designer Willie Williams. Don Gurnett, Willie Williams, Kronos, Terry Riley, and then the University of Iowa heard about it, and they have a great choir program. So everything began to kind of take shape, and that's where the piece came from. And I'll add to that, both Terry and I visited Don's studio laboratory, and each of us had six or eight hours with Don Burnett. And both of us had exactly the same feeling, that by the end of that six or eight hours of talking to Don,

we felt we could explain the universe to our loved ones. And so I called up my wife and I said, I just had this amazing experience with Don Gurnett. He was telling me all about space. And I couldn't remember a damn thing he said. And Terry had exactly the same experience. That moment with Don, Those moments with Don, really, it enlarges your mind, and for an instant you feel like you kind of get it.

But then to be able to describe it to anybody else, it vanishes so quickly that you're speechless, and that's what happened. Almost sounds like trying to describe a transcendent artistic experience. I think that's perhaps the connection that we're ultimately talking about. He spent the whole day just exactly like that, and Whistler's, and he's a musician. He uses sound all the time. I mean, he's a musician. He uses sound all the time. I mean, he's a wonderful person,

and he makes these mysteries so tangible and real and fun. David Harrington of the Kronos Quartet talking about the creation of sun rings, a composition that includes the space sounds collected by planetary scientist Don Gurnett from our own planet and others in our solar system. We'll continue the conversation after a break. This is Planetary Radio. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here, CEO of the Planetary Society, speaking to you from PlanetFest 2012,

the celebration of the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity landing on the surface of Mars. This is taking us our next steps in following the water and the search for life to understand those two deep questions. Where did we come from, and are we alone? This is the most exciting thing that people do, and together we can advocate for planetary science and, dare I say it, change the worlds. Hi, this is Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society.

We've spent the last year creating an informative, exciting, and beautiful new website. Your place in space is now open for business. You'll find a whole new look with lots of images, great stories, my popular blog, and new blogs from my colleagues and expert guests. And as the world becomes more social, we are too,

giving you the opportunity to join in through Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and much more. It's all at planetary.org. I hope you'll check it out. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. This week we're at the intersection of art and science, two disciplines that have more in common than many imagine. We're going to return to California State University, Long Beach for more of my conversation last March with the Kronos Quartet. Kronos came to the university to perform Terry Riley's Sun Rings, an evocative piece that incorporates sounds drawn from natural phenomena throughout our solar system and collected by Don Gurnett of the University of Iowa.

I tell you to go buy a recording of Sun Rings, but I can't. More than ten years after its premiere, Kronos has still not recorded it, largely because when they do, they want to get it right. But you say it should be a DVD or maybe a Blu-ray because the visual elements are so important to the piece? Yeah, and all the behind-the-scenes stuff. I mean, like our crew is over there right now

getting this piece going, And then, of course, this evening we're going to be rehearsing with the choir. And there's just all sorts of things that need to be known. And then the Jet Propulsion Lab provided all kinds of things for us. And I remember the day I went down there. And then Terry and I went to a launch. I was not expecting the feeling that I had. I mean, not only does the earth literally rumble and the alligators come up and the birds fly away and all that, but as a person, as a father, as a husband,

as a sentient being, I was incredibly moved. Somebody was being projected by essentially a bomb, projecting out into space. It was thrilling. I mean, I was weeping. Let me just put it that way. It was incredibly inspiring.

And I'll never forget it. And I think that's something that everybody ought to be able to experience. I'd like to see it continue and develop. The great thing about NASA is basically it's available. It's kind of like the Smithsonian or something. You start finding out what you can have access to, and every one of you can have access. It's beautiful. Sun Rings continues to evolve as it has from the beginning. Though it wasn't part of composer Terry Riley's original intent, the piece even includes the last person to walk on the moon.

The piece even includes the last person to walk on the moon. You'll hear the amazing voice of Eugene Cernan. I think he's... Yes, yeah, Gene Cernan, one of the Apollo astronauts. Yes. Well, it was Willie Williams that brought that quote into the beginning of One Earth, One people, one love. And at first, Terry, he thought it was kind of an intrusion. Well, it is an intrusion, but when you hear it, and I don't know anything about him,

Eugene Sinner. He commanded one of the Apollo landing missions. Yes, I knew that. I don't know where he's from, but he sounds to me like he's from the Midwest somewhere. And he sounds like he probably had about ten cups of coffee right before he said this.

And so in your mind, you have to slow this man down a little bit. But if you listen to what he says, it's one of the great prayers that's ever been, that I've ever encountered in my life. It's so beautiful. And he talks about what it's like to turn around and

look at the earth from space. And he talks about the vastness and the blackness and the beauty of this place that we have and how nothing's holding it up. There's no strings. And he's talking so fast, and you think, what's going on with this poor guy? But what he says is just miraculous. I love it, and every time I hear it, I'm inspired by it.

Also contributing to the conversation was Alan Shockley of the university's Bob Cole Conservatory of Music. Alan listened with us to a few of Don Granat's sounds and made this observation. Listening to those sounds, I'm thinking about how music and astronomy have been connected since the beginning, really. This is very, very new, very, very late 20th century, 21st century, to be able to hear the sounds from outer space. But from ancient times

from Pythagoras we have someone who's theorizing about musical tones in a scale and at the same time theorizing that there's a similar relationship between the sounds that the planets and the moon and the sun the heavenly bodies make.

The music of the spheres? The music of the spheres or the harmony of the sun, the heavenly bodies make. The music of the spheres? The music of the spheres or the harmony of the spheres, as Pythagoras called it. So it's a very old idea that we're only now having the technology to capture. It's kind of bringing music back to its beginning. It's bringing music back to where Plato thought it should be. Astronomy and music for Plato were two sides of the same coin, one appealing to the ears and one appealing to the eyes, but with the same basis. So it's kind of an exciting thing that Kronos is working with Terry Riley

to make Plato's vision happen, or Pythagoras' vision happen, from ancient times to now. Kronos Quartet violinist John Sherba found similar purposes in the efforts of musicians, composers, scientists, and even organizations like the Planetary Society. We all explore. Ultimately, it's a search. You're searching. And that's kind of what NASA and your organization is doing, continuing being curious and searching. This has just been delightful.

It has been wonderful to sit here with some of my heroes. Alan, thank you so much for being part of this discussion. Please, for Alan Shockley and the Kronos Quartet, let them know how much we've appreciated this. Hope to see all of you tomorrow evening. Hope to see all of you tomorrow evening. at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center, Dean of the College of Engineering at California State University Long Beach, Forazan Gulshani, and Dean of the College of the Arts, Chris Miles.

I'll return with Bruce Betts after we enjoy a few more moments of sun rings. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 Thank you. It's time for What's Up on Planetary Radio, and that means that we're going to be talking with Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, who comes in each week to tell us about the night sky and maybe give some stuff away. We're going to give away Bill Nye's voice again on somebody's answering machine. Hello, and happy post-Mother's Day.

Hello, and same to you and more of it. Thank you. Thank you. What's up there in the sky for mom? Bright stuff. We've got Venus starting to get higher and higher after sunset in the West. Still may be a little tough. It's still very low. But you can pick out Jupiter looking super bright in the west shortly after sunset. And over the next two or three weeks, those two, the two brightest of the planets, are going to get closer and closer as the weeks go on towards the end of the month. So cool sight to see.

And then Saturn still coming up in the east. You can check it out also in the early evening, but look over in the east. It's yellowish and not so bright. May I just jump in to say that we were visiting Mom out in the Southern California desert. We came out of a movie. There above the mountain ridge was this tiny sliver of the moon. And a ways above that, I believe it was Jupiter. Am I correct?

Yes, you are. Wow, what a sky. It was just a lovely juxtaposition. Yes, there will be juxtaposing going on all month. All right. All right. This week in space history, it was 40 years ago that Skylab was launched, the first U.S. space station. And it was quite a space station. It's a shame that we didn't build on that beginning.

But now we've got a much bigger one. Yeah. Okay, we move on to random space fact. He's back. Back and better than ever. Cepheid variables. That's what I've got, Matt. But I'm taking antibiotics, and I hope to be better soon.

No, Cepheid variables are a certain breed of variable star, actually. They come in a couple different breeds. But what's really cool about them is people figured out that their brightness is related to how they pulse, how their brightness goes up and down,

which is what a variable star is. And so since you can determine its period, you can then figure out its absolute brightness. And if you know the absolute brightness of something, then you can figure out how far away it is based upon what its apparent brightness is, how bright it looks like in the sky. And the man, the myth, the legend, Edwin Hubble used this and lots and lots of other people have used it since to figure out how far away things are in our galaxy and other nearby galaxies. So they're used as a way to determine distance. nearby galaxies. So they're used as a way to determine distance. And then he tied that to the redshift he was observing and started to develop that whole crazy expansion of the universe

theory. All because of some stars that dimmed and got brighter again, Cepheid variables. Very interesting. Exactly. And some clever observations. Fascinating. Thank you. Good one. Thank you. Let's go on to the trivia contest where I tried to make everyone feel good by bringing up everyone's favorite doublet, the sodium doublet in the visible spectrum. I asked you, what is the center line of the sodium doublet that, for example, is seen as two absorption lines in the visible spectrum of the sun. How'd we do, Matt? Wow, way to hold down entries, Guy.

Yes! So that was your goal. The most entertaining entry came from David Kaplan, who was completely thrown. At least he tried to give the impression he was. He said, a sodium doublet. Isn't that a waistcoat made of sodium? Wrong definition, I think, David. Yeah, pretty sure.

Actually, I think he knows. But no, we did. This was a good week to enter if you took the trouble to look it up because there must have been a lot of people intimidated. Thanking you for all of this is our winner this week, Wojtek Navilek from the Czech Republic. Cool. Wojtek said that the answer ranges from 588.9950 to 589.5924 nanometers, or I hope he says this one was a tough question, unquote. But I think he got it, right?

Yeah, it gives quite a pretty good range variability. But I think he got it, right? Yeah, it gives quite, you know, pretty good range variability. But yeah, that's ballpark. Ballpark 589 nanometers. Yellow stuff. 589.29 is what I have, but he's got that range. Let's go with the winner

and get Bill's voice into the Czech Republic. By the way, Wojtek does say they had a great show and podcast. He listens to it anytime he can. Car, walking. It's nice to know you can be walking along there in the Czech Republic and be enjoying planetary radio. We also heard from Randy Bodum of Ontario, Canada.

He got it right. He also mentioned that it's also known as the Fraunhofer D-line. Yeah. Fraunhofer D-line? Yeah. He says he's partial, though, to the redder C-line of hydrogen alpha, smiley face. Oh, well, that one is nice, but I just enjoy the sound of the Fraunhofer D-line. All right.

So what do you got for next week? Something totally different. Who was the only astronaut to fly on consecutive missions? This being a NASA astronaut to fly on consecutive NASA missions. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest and enter the contest. And what are they trying to win, Matt? Bill Nye's voice on your answering system. I hope everybody understands that Bill customizes this message for you. We let you take a first stab at it, do a first draft. He has great fun doing these for people. Oh, by the way, those are due to us on the 20th of May. That'd be May

20, Monday at 2 p.m. Pacific time. All right, everybody. Go out there, look up the night sky, and think about the thickest book you have ever read. Thank you, and good night. Does the Yellow Pages count? I haven't finished it. I thought I'd wait for the movie. If you finish it, then it counts.

Otherwise, no. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, and he does join us each week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation and by the harmonious members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies and sweet sounds. Thank you.