[music sound effect]

TERRANCE MCKNIGHT: This is the Open Ears Project.

[MUSIC: Lux Aeterna from Mozart’s Requiem]

It's a piece that's always appealed to me both for its extreme ambition and loftiness, but also the sort of bittersweet fact that it was never finished.

I find that that resonates with my impression of what life will ultimately always be like: the striving for something absolutely unattainable and that it will never be finished.

I'm Janna Levin, I'm an astrophysicist and an author. I'm mostly interested in the Big Bang, black holes, shape of space time, extra dimensions… and I've chosen music from Mozart's Requiem. 

Something about Mozart's quirkiness and irreverence really appeals to me in his character and the not-fitting-in-ness of it, the kind of madness of the pursuit, and so that leap of feeling completely outside of the normal scaffolding of society, I definitely relate to. I'm in no way going to compare myself to Mozart, but I always felt that he was in pursuit of, like, this platonic ideal.

Like he was going to uncover in the music, something that was mathematical and true, but only exists in our minds.

So the example I give to people is a circle. We all know what a circle is and we can talk about something whose circumference is 2-pi the radius. But there's never been a circle in reality and never will be. There are only flawed and poor approximations.

And there was this madness about Mozart that made me feel like he was pushing past the approximations. He was trying to get to that kind of platonic ideal.

I think that we are so interestingly limited and-and limits aren't all bad. So some of the greatest ideas came out of realizations of limits. The limit of the speed of light led Einstein to the entire theory of relativity, which led to the Big Bang understanding, which led to black holes being revealed, so limits aren't intrinsically bad. 

But I think that realizing that - just taking that step back for a second and realizing, “oh a circle will never exist” is kind of… gives you pause because we all share it because it can exist in anybody's mind, the idea of the circle. And that says something very interesting about the structure of our minds and what is shared between us, and the mathematics that we inherit from the universe, which is very much a part of music.

What we're really doing is we're imposing a certain set of axioms - rules, and it's like inventing a game like monopoly. And in the context of that game, you just have to play it right and faithfully and you will reveal things and music is similar in that, you know, this is in D minor. These are the rules and the structures and we have octaves and we're going to play in this set of rules, and from those sets of rules, you have this near infinity of possible combinations and things that you can invent and create.

And again, this idea of limiting actually becomes a source of expansiveness within this limited structure of octaves, majors and minors and, you know, the rules of the game. You have the ability to, to speak volumes and to, to write creatively and to invent something the way Mozart did. 

But Mozart wasn't always on top, you know, he was in and out of favor, he was very scrappy to survive, and he's fortunate actually that history has had the sense to record him in this way as this great genius, but in the reality of his times, there was no such simplicity of hindsight. And then there were people like Salieri who was a wonderful composer, not of Mozart's level, but a professionally wonderful composer, and the confusion at the time of being able to distinguish between the Mozart and the Salieri and what a terrible thing for history to have split that divide so clearly like Salieri, he was the careerist in some sense and Mozart was the mad genius, and we all love the mad genius.

And I think that that very much is something that I have thought about since I was very young in the field to now: that feeling of a careerist success versus something riskier. And I haven't, I haven't gotten there, like, if I'm hit by a bus tomorrow, I'm not going to feel like I left my great works behind. So there is always a sense of, “no, I didn't do it yet. I haven't done it yet. It hasn't been accomplished yet.” 

So people have wondered about the connection between music and math and cosmology, but there's actually now a very direct link. We have actually recorded the closest thing to sounds from space that is conceivable. 

And there was this 50 year campaign to build this kind of insane cosmic recording device. It’s called LIGO. It's a four kilometer long instrument. There's two of them on two different coasts. With like 1000 people working on it for 50 years. 

But the ambition was to record the ringing of space time itself. 

So in this huge experiment they have store-bought conventional speaker systems in the control room that they just listen to the machine hum, all the time. And every once in a while, it does something a little more. So the first detection which blew people's minds was the collision of two black holes 1.3 billion light years away.

So far away in another galaxy, two black holes collided. Space was ringing around them. Imagine mallets on a drum, banging the drum, the drum rings and that ringing of space emanates through the universe for 1.3 billion years.

And it becomes this race with these crazy people building this instrument, you know, it enters the solar system, it's only hours off and they're like banging with their tools, they lock the instrument, and within an hour [wssht] washes over the instrument, it's recorded and it skims across the continental us and is recorded by the second instrument in Washington State. And they wake up that next morning and they're in the logs. They've recorded the first sounds from space. It's like adding a soundtrack to the universe.

When they first recorded this first collision of black holes on the centenary when Einstein first proposed this possibility, umm, there was a sense of just, almost more wonderful to enjoy somebody else's accomplishments. And so it was just a very celebratory time.

So Einstein first publishes the general theory of relativity, which is a description of curved space time. He thinks this is not something we'll ever detect or perceive. 

And I was reminded that Einstein's favorite composer was Mozart, and often when he was stuck - it's one thing to be stuck on a calculation, it's quite another thing to be stuck on writing down that first sentence, that mathematical phrase from which all other things drop out and he-he struggled very hard with the general theory of relativity, and Mozart was his favorite composer and he would go and play violin, and play Mozart to try to kind of unlock and commune a little bit with the music to find a way in. 

And I very much identify with that struggle and I've had very dark episodes where I thought, to save myself, I would have to leave or I have to stop, and I felt this weakness that, that, well, why would I save myself and not continue in the pursuit?

It's, it's scary and it's isolating, and yet - like the music, like this piece - when you have those breakthrough moments, they're just so extraordinary and exceptional and unlike anything else.

I think one of the stories about this piece that's always, umm, intrigued me is that it is a Requiem, and it's unclear what's true in the history, but at some point, Mozart convinced himself he was writing this for his own funeral and in fact, dies with the piece unfinished.

And there's something again about that madness of grasping for something bigger than yourself, but in some sense, all of us putting ourselves in the center of that. So even Mozart grasping for this, this perfect flawless piece - it's so extraordinary. 

Math might exist. Music might exist. Somebody else can compose within the set of rules. Somebody else, in an infinite machine that just generated composition from this set of rules, would eventually have made the requiem in the infinity of combinations. But it was him and I think there is this-this magical tension between saying but I am here and it is me thinking about these things versus I am reflecting something greater than myself.

I think music gives my mind a break in a way. I like that I don't analyze music in the way that I do mathematics. I like that I hear the structure of it and - but that I like that it's working me in an unconscious way. So music like this, I think especially Mozart, it has, it has this technical virtuosity, but it also has this almost taunting playfulness and the delightfulness you feel Mozart had making it for you.

You know, I know it's a requiem, but it's joyous. It's, it's, it's the kind of requiem you would write for yourself.

It's not this ponderous, respectful ode or, you know, it is a kind of insanely joyous celebration of something. I think it’s extraordinary.

TERRANCE MCKNIGHT: That was cosmologist and professor Janna Levin sharing her admiration for Mozart’s Requiem Mass. Stay with us. We’ll be playing the Lux Aeterna from that piece just after the break. 

[MUSIC: Lux Aeterna from Mozart’s Requiem]

TERRANCE MCKNIGHT: Friends, I’m sad to say that this season of The Open Ears Project has come to a close. Thanks so much for listening with me and the rest of the show team here at WQXR these last few weeks. We’ve appreciated your ratings, reviews, and emails. Keep ‘em coming. If you have a story about a piece of classical music that’s meant a lot to you, let us know. You can write to us at open-ears-at-wqxr-dot-org. And be sure to follow WQXR on Facebook and Instagram: we’re gonna share some of those listener stories in the coming weeks. 

And if you’re looking for another great music podcast now that Open Ears is over…? Might be a good time to listen to the first season all over again, or you can head to our website, WQXR.org. We’ve got a lot of shows to share with you, like Aria Code, which breaks down some of the most famous arias in opera – and another podcast hosted by me called Every Voice, that’s all about uncovering the hidden voices in classical music. While you’re there, you can sign up for the WQXR mailing list, make a donation, or become a supporting member of WQXR. As a public radio station, it’s important for us to make our music and programs free and accessible for all — and your support really goes a long way in making that possible. 

Thanks again. for listening. I’m Terrance McKnight. I’ll see you next time. 

Season two of The Open Ears Project was produced by Clemency Burton-Hill and Rosa Gollan. Our technical director is Sapir Rosenblatt, and our project manager is Natalia Ramirez. Elizabeth Nonemaker is the executive producer of podcasts at WQXR, and Ed Yim is our chief content officer. 

I’m Terrance McKnight. Thanks for listening.

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.