A Symphony in Geometry: Stanisław Lem’s Cosmic Tunes

nasa_unveils_celestial_fireworks_as_official_hubble_25th_anniversary_image.jpg, default, The Westerlund 2 star cluster in the Milky Way galaxy, photo: NASA, ESA, A Symphony in Geometry: Stanisław Lem’s Cosmic Tunes

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For a man who claimed he couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, Stanisław Lem’s writings contain remarkable musical visions – and they have provided a rich source of inspiration for several contemporary composers.

What does space smell like? The opinions of the 170 astronauts who have passed through the International Space Station thus far are divided. Donald Pettit, an American biochemical engineer who went into Earth orbit on the STS-113 mission, informed that it’s very pleasant: sweet, like metal oxidising during welding. Others associated the odour of the cosmos with soot, the stench of meat burnt on a grill, smoking tyres, or burning hot gunpowder. Volatile fragrance molecules ‘stuck’ to the spacesuits and equipment during the astronauts’ spacewalks. Combining with oxygen inside the station, they changed their structure, creating completely new aromas. That’s why it’s difficult to establish how space smells ‘on the outside’, particularly since, depending on the chemical composition of celestial bodies, every inch of our galaxy smells differently – to say nothing of the billions of other star systems, with their unique arrangements of dust, gases, and dark matter.

And what does space sound like?

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Spacewalk on Mars, 2018, photo: NASA / Wikimedia Commons

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In his philosophy, Pythagoras distinguished between three types of music: the ordinary, audible music accessible to the human ear; inaudible music, which resounds inside each of us, expressing harmony or dissonance between body and soul; and finally the music of the cosmos, the harmony of the spheres, of beauty beyond all human imagination, generated by celestial bodies moving in perfect motion, ideally harmonised with each other. According to the Pythagoreans, this music can’t be heard either: either we have been so integrated into it that our sense of hearing has stopped registering it, or we simply aren’t wired hear it.

Thumbnail — The tuning of the world, a woodcut from 'Utriusque Cosmi Historia...' by Robert Fludd or Flud, 1917, source: Wikipedia.org

There’s some truth to this. After all, interplanetary and interstellar space is almost a vacuum. All mechanical waves, including sound waves, ripple through an elastic medium through the transmission of vibrations. In a vacuum, there are no molecules that could be induced to vibrate. Cosmic space is either silent or it reverberates with some other kind of music, inaccessible and incomprehensible to limited earthly creatures. But sound can travel through the atmospheres of other planets. When a storm rages on Venus, and sulphuric acid rain falls from the sky, lightning bolts certainly crackle around the area. But does anybody hear them? On one of the moons of Saturn, waves of liquid methane break on the shores of the seas. Do any creatures sit there on the beach, intertwined in a romantic embrace of cilia or other plasmic protrusions, and profess their undying love for each other under the flaming orange skies?

Where there is no atmosphere, electromagnetic waves travel: ultraviolet rays, infrared radiation, radio waves, microwaves, visible light, gamma rays, and X-rays. Using the laws of mathematics and special instruments, we can ‘translate’ them into sound waves. In 2003, John G. Cramer, professor of physics at the University of Washington in Seattle and co-author of the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics, used data from NASA’s WMAP satellite, which went into orbit 1.5 million kilometres from theEarth, to create an image of the cosmic microwave background – a sort of a ‘recording’ of the rhythm in which the universe emerged. Encouraged by a certain curious 11-year-old, who had asked whether it was possible to recreate the sound of the Big Bang, Cramerenlisted the help of a powerful calculation program and converted the waves into the music of the beginning of the universe. To make it audible, he had to increase its frequency 100 septillion times – and even so, the 1.5-minute, scratchy glissando gradually fades into nothingness. Whatever this is, it’s almost 14 trillion years old.

Sonification

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NASA - Song of Earth (Voyager Space Sounds)

Since then, hundreds of such sonifications have been made in the attempts to convert data from space into sound. A powerful hurricane near Jupiter’s Great Blue Spot howls like the heart of Isaiah over Moab. The solar wind whistles like a blackbird seeking to attract a partner. Saturn’s radio waves sound like a non-existent piece for a male choir from Penderecki’s middle period. Stardust crackles like sparklers. And all of that is an untruth, or a kind truth not yet familiar to us, because the sonification process can also be applied to a Rubens painting, James Joyce’s Ulysses, the administrative map of Guadeloupe, or the contents of the suggestion box from a corner shop – all with equally intriguing effects.

Stanisław Lem, Kraków, 1993, photo: Krzysztof Wójcik/Forum — Stanisław Lem, Kraków, 1993, photo: Krzysztof Wójcik / Forum

For some time now we have been witnessing a true flood of ‘cosmic’ music, referring – most often loosely – to the classics of science fiction literature. Curiously, even Stanisław Lem, who used to say he couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, nevertheless often wove musical themes into his work, the latter of which defies all attempts at categorisation. For instance, he took a whole philharmonic orchestra – along with soloists and a choir – aboard the huge ship Gea in his novel The Magellanic Cloud. In his graphic description of the cytoplasmic ocean on Solaris, he informed that ‘above and below, beyond the limits of perception or imagination, thousands and millions of simultaneous transformations are at work, interlinked like a musical score by mathematical counterpoint’ [trans. Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox]. A careful reader will no doubt notice that Lem treated music as a metaphor for the infinite cosmos. Kris Kelvin, the protagonist of Solaris, said of the mysterious planet’s ‘symphony in geometry’ that we are its deaf listeners.

It can’t be ruled out that Lem was a deaf listener to perfectly human symphonies, but he respected their incomprehensible potential and saw in them the key to the mysteries of the universe. But, to be honest, I’m not really convinced by this coquettish story about his lack of musical sensitivity. The narrator of The Magellanic Cloud, upon hearing Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, experiences a genuine shock:

I stood there defenseless, open; I was like the bed for a terrible current that rolled deeper and deeper, cutting a groove and collapsing the banks, turning and striking with redoubled force, and in this storm a repetitive, incessant cry began to resound – I was being called by a superhuman voice.

[Trans. NE]

I’m a full-blooded opera animal, and I know that ‘Trurl’s Machine’ – my beloved story from Fables for Robots – conceals within itself some truly Verdian potential. The tragic story of an intelligent calculator, which, to the dismay of its inventor, turned out to be not only completely unintelligent but also stubborn as a mule, is material for a surefire tearjerker. It contains everything an opera needs: unrequited love, impossible situations, violence, and death under a rockslide.

Lem-inspired music

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A scene from a performance ‘Cyberiada’ (The Cyberiad), directed and choreographed by Ran Arthur Braun, photo: Katarzyna Zalewska / Grand Theatre in Poznań

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I still remember the first time I read the following words:

just then the machine made a faint, barely audible croaking noise and said, for the last time, ‘SEVEN’. Then something snapped inside, a few stones dribbled down from overhead, and now before them lay nothing but a lifeless mass of scrap.

[Trans. Michael Kandel]

I started sobbing like a child (which I was), and I didn’t stop hating Trurl until after I read ‘A Good Shellacking’. Because this time I felt sorry for him.

Meanwhile, ‘The Story of the First Defrosted’, originally published in the short story collection The Mask, is a true Baroque-scientific oratorio, both in terms of language and subject matter. The grotesque metaphor of Poland’s political reality from the time of the late Gomułka government or the early Gierek (the late 1960s and early 1970s, respectively) plays out on a planet-orchestra, in the state [in Polish Baństwo, a phonetic play on państwo, i.e. ‘state’, ed.] of Hafnu, which attained ‘the scores of the Spheres, their Harmony’. The disturbing similarity between the orchestra rehearsals and the plenary sessions of the parliament of the People’s Republic of Poland shows through in every sentence of the narrative, ringing out in every word of the ornamental prose:

Now comes a forte, the copper thunders, but as if lined with a trembling, and Goryllium opens the wardrobe, airs it out, sits on the threshold, belches loudly, like the Bellringer, O mighty God, O Harmony of the Spheres! And from the belching, because why else, the strings fell out of key, and how will the pianist not be confused by this trembling, oblique quaking! The horn bandmaster grimaces as if he had swallowed a frog – oh, it’s bad, such instruments and this bad, twisted, disgusting non-music, aren’t you ashamed, lazy rogues? One more time!

[Trans. NE]

If Lem couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, nevertheless his attempts uncovered in the writer inexhaustible layers of musicality.

Lem-inspired tunes

No wonder, then, that composers constantly return to Lemian themes. At the latest, it started with Krzysztof Meyer’s Cyberiada (The Cyberiad), an opera written in 1970 and performed for the first time 16 years later in Wuppertal. Among those who took on the mystery of Solaris was Germany’s Detlev Glanert, whose opera by this name premiered in 2012 at the Bregenzer Festspiele. The Finnish conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen wrote Floof (Songs of a Homeostatic Homer) for soprano and five instrumentalists, based on motifs from ‘Trurl’s Elektrybałt’.

To this day, I can hear the predatory dialogue between the piano and the marimba as well as the ‘unearthly’, overexposed tone colour from Aleksandra Gryka’s ballet Alpha Kryonia XE, inspired by the story ‘The Three Electroknights’. On the 10th anniversary of the writer’s death, the first ever performances of the Lemian works by Krzysztof Wołek, Artur Zagajewski, Paweł Hendrich, and Cezary Duchnowski resounded at Wrocław’s Musica Polonica Nova festival.

This year [2021, ed.] marks the 100th anniversary of Lem’s birth, celebrated with a special concert by Klangforum Wien, featuring compositions by the two winners of the Science of Fiction competition: Żaneta Rydzewska and Mikołaj Laskowski. Rydzewska addresses the problems faced the protagonist of the novel Return from the Stars, the astronaut Bregg, who returns home to a completely different Earth after a 127-year journey. Laskowski presents a musical ‘machine for contacting’ alien intelligence. During the concert, we’ll also listen to compositions by Cezary Duchnowski and Aleksander Nowak. Lem would be thrilled! Today, he’s surely in a place where the spiral sleeve of the local nebula folds. And, to paraphrase the Defrosted once more: he had perfect pitch, and he loved the thunder of the music.

Originally written in Polish by Dorota Kozińska

Article written in collaboration with Tygodnik Powszechny

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