Music and emotion through time - Michael Tilson Thomas
[Music] [Applause]
Well, when I was asked to do this Ted Talk, I really chuckled because you see, my father's name was Ted. Much of my life, especially my musical life, is really a talk that I'm still having with him, where part of me that he continues to be. Now, Ted was a New Yorker—an all-around theater guy, and he was a self-taught illustrator and musician. He didn't read a note, and he was profoundly hearing impaired, yet he was my greatest teacher.
Even through the squeaks of his hearing aids, his understanding of music was profound. For him, it wasn't so much the way the music goes, as about what it witnesses and where it can take you. He did a painting of this experience, which he called "In the Realm of Music." Now, Ted entered this realm every day by improvising in a sort of Tin Pan Alley style like this. But he was tough when it came to music. He said there were only two things that matter in music: what and how.
The thing about classical music, that what and how, it's inexhaustible. That was his passion for the music; both my parents really loved it. They didn't know all that much about it, but they gave me the opportunity to discover it together with them. I think inspired by that memory, it's been my desire to try and bring it to as many other people as I can to sort of pass it on.
Through whatever means and how people get this music, how it comes into their lives really fascinates me. One day in New York, I was on the street, and I saw some kids playing baseball between stoops and cars and a fire hydrant. A tough, slouchy kid got up to bat, and he took a swing and really connected. He watched the ball fly for a second and then he ran around the bases. I thought, "Go figure! How did this piece of 18th-century Austrian aristocratic entertainment turn into the victory crow of this New York kid? How was that passed on? How did he get to hear Mozart?"
Well, when it comes to classical music, there's an awful lot to pass on—much more than Mozart, Beethoven, or Tchaikovsky, because classical music is an unbroken living tradition that goes back over a thousand years. Every one of those years has had something unique and powerful to say to us about what it's like to be alive.
The raw material of it, of course, is just the music of everyday life. It's all the anthems, dance crazes, ballads, and marches. But what classical music does is to distill all of these music down to condense them to their absolute essence. And from that essence, create a new language—a language that speaks very lovingly and unflinchingly about who we really are. It's a language that's still evolving.
Now, over the centuries, it grew into the big pieces we always think of, like concertos and symphonies. But even the most ambitious masterpiece can have as its central mission to bring you back to a fragile and personal moment. Like this one from the Beethoven violin concerto. [Music]
It's so simple, so evocative. So many emotions seem to be inside of it. Yet, of course, like all music, it's essentially not about anything. It's just a design of pictures and silence and time. The pitches—the notes that you know—are just vibrations. They're locations in the spectrum of sound. Whether we call them 440 per second A or 3,729 B flat, trust me, that's right—they're just phenomena.
But the way we react to different combinations of these phenomena is complex and emotional and not totally understood. The way we react to them has changed radically over the centuries, as have our preferences for them. So, for example, in the 11th century, people liked pieces that ended like this, and in the 17th century, it was more like [Music] this.
And the 21st century now, your 21st-century ears are quite happy with this last chord, even though a while back it would have puzzled or annoyed you, or some of you running from the room. The reason you like it is because you've inherited, whether you knew it or not, centuries worth of changes in musical theory, practice, and fashion.
In classical music, we can follow these changes very accurately because of the music's powerful silent partner: the way it's been passed on—notation. Now, the impulse to notate—or more exactly, I should say, to encode music—has been with us for a very long time. In 200 BC, a man named Seikilos wrote this song for his departed wife and inscribed it on her gravestone in the notational system of the Greeks. [Music]
All [Music] across. And a thousand years later, this impulse to notate took an entirely different form. You can see how this happened in these excerpts from the Christmas Mass "Puer Natus Est." [Music] Born. In the 10th century, little squiggles were used just to indicate the general shape of the tune, and in the 12th century, a line was drawn like a musical horizon line to better pinpoint the pitches' location.
Then, in the 13th century, more lines and new shapes of notes locked in the concept of the tune exactly, and that led to the kind of notation we have today. Well, notation not only passed the music on; notating and encoding the music changed its priorities entirely because it enabled the musicians to imagine music on a much vaster scale.
Now, inspired moves of improvisation could be recorded, saved, considered, prioritized, made into intricate designs. And from this moment, classical music became what it most essentially is: a dialogue between the two powerful sides of our nature—instinct and intelligence.
And there began to be a real difference at this point between the art of improvisation and the art of composition. An improviser senses and plays the next cool move, but a composer is considering all possible moves, testing them out, prioritizing them until he sees how they can form a powerful and coherent design of ultimate and enduring coolness. Now some of the greatest composers, like Bach, were combinations of these two things. Bach was like a great improviser with the mind of a chess master. Mozart was the same way.
But every musician strikes a different balance between faith and reason, instinct and intelligence. Every musical era had different priorities of these things—different things to pass on, different whats and hows. So in the first eight centuries or so of this tradition, the big what was to praise God, and by the 1400s, music was being written that tried to mirror God's mind, as could be seen in the design of the night sky.
The how was a style called "polyphony," music of many independently moving voices that suggested the way the planets seemed to move in Ptolemy's geocentric universe. This was truly "The Music of the Spheres." [Music]
This is the kind of music that Leonardo da Vinci would have known, and perhaps its tremendous intellectual perfection and serenity meant that something new had to happen—a radical new move—which in 1600 is what did happen. [Music] [Applause] [Music]
This, of course, was the birth of opera, and its development put music on a radical new course. The what now was not to mirror the mind of God but to follow the emotional turbulence of man, and the how was harmony—stacking up the pitches to form chords.
And the chords, it turned out, were capable of representing incredible varieties of emotions. The basic chords were the ones we still have with us—the triads—either the major one, which we think is happy, or the minor one, which we perceive as sad. But what's the actual difference between these two chords?
It's just these two notes in the middle, right? It's either E natural at 659 vibrations per second or E flat at 622. So the big difference between human happiness and sadness is 37 freaking vibrations! So you can see, in a system like this, there was enormous subtle potential of representing human emotions.
In fact, as man began to understand more his complex and ambivalent nature, harmony grew more complex to reflect it. It turned out it was capable of expressing emotions beyond the ability of words. Now, with all this possibility, classical music really took off.
It's a time in which the big forms began to arise, and the effects of technology began to be felt also because printing put music— the scores, the code books of music— into the hands of performers everywhere. New and improved instruments made the age of the virtuoso possible.
This is when those big forms arose: the symphonies, the sonatas, the concertos. And in these big architectures of time, composers like Beethoven could share the insights of a lifetime. A piece like Beethoven's Fifth essentially witnesses how it was possible for him to go from sorrow and anger, [Music] [Applause] over the course of a half an hour—step by exacting step—of his route to the moment when he could make it across to joy. [Music] [Applause]
And it turned out the symphony could be used for more complex issues, like gripping ones of culture, such as nationalism or quest for freedom or the frontiers of sensuality. But whatever direction the music took, one thing, until recently, was always the same. And that was when the musicians stopped playing, the music stopped.
Now, this moment so fascinates me. I find it such a profound one. What happens when the music stops? Where does it go? What's left? What sticks with people in the audience at the end of a performance? Is it a melody, or a rhythm, or a mood, or an attitude? And how might that change their lives?
To me, this is the intimate personal side of music. It's the passing-on part. It's the why part of it, and to me that's the most essential of all. Mostly it's been a person-to-person thing—a teacher-student, performer-audience thing.
And then around 1880 came this new technology that first mechanically, then through analogs, then digitally created a new miraculous way of passing things on—albeit an impersonal one. People could now hear music all the time, even though it wasn't necessary for them to play an instrument, read music, or even go to concerts.
Technology democratized music by making everything available. It spearheaded a cultural revolution in which artists like Caruso and Bessie Smith were on the same footing. Technology pushed composers to tremendous extremes, using computers and synthesizers to create works of intellectually impenetrable complexity beyond the means of performers and audiences.
At the same time, technology, by taking over the role that notation had always played, shifted the balance within music between instinct and intelligence way over to the instinctive side. The culture in which we live now is awash with music of improvisation that's been sliced, diced, layered, and God knows distributed and sold.
What's the long-term effect of this on us? Or on music nobody knows? The question remains, what happens when the music stops? What sticks with people now that we have unlimited access to music? What does stick with us?
Well, let me show you a story of what I mean by really sticking with us. I was visiting a cousin of mine in an old age home, and I spied a very shaky old man making his way across the room on a walker. He came over to a piano that was there, and he balanced himself and began playing something like this.
And he said something like, "Ah, me boy, uh, Symphony B B." And I suddenly got it, and I said, "Friend, by any chance are you trying to play this?" And he said, "Yes, yes! I was a little boy—the symphony—Isaac Stern—the concerto! I heard it!"
And I thought, "My God! How much must this music mean to this man that he would get himself out of his bed, across the room, to recover the memory of this music that, after everything else in his life is sloughing away, still means so much to him?"
Well, that's why I take every performance so seriously. Why it matters to me so much—I never know who might be there, who might be absorbing it, and what will happen to it in their life. But now, I’m excited that there's more chance than ever before, possible of sharing this music.
That's what drives my interest in projects like the TV series "Keeping Score" with the San Francisco Symphony, that looks at the backstories of music; and working with young musicians at the New World Symphony on projects that explore the potential of the new Performing Arts centers for both entertainment and education.
And of course, the New World Symphony led to the YouTube Symphony and projects on the internet that reach out to musicians and audiences all over the world. The exciting thing is all this is just a prototype.
There's a role here for so many people—teachers, parents, performers—to be explorers together. Sure, the big events attract a lot of attention, but what really matters is what goes on every single day. We need your perspectives, your curiosity, your voices.
And it excites me now to meet people who are hikers, chefs, code writers, taxi drivers—people I never would have guessed who loved the music and were passing it on! You don't need to worry about knowing anything.
If you're curious, if you have a capacity for wonder, if you're alive, you know all that you need to know. You can start anywhere! Ramble a bit, follow traces, get lost, be surprised, amused, inspired—all that!
What all that how is out there waiting for you to discover its why—to dive in and pass it on. Thank you.