Exploring the classical cosmos with Professor Brian Cox

Later this month (30 July – 4 August) London’s Royal Opera House will host an unusual form of musical exploration. Symphonic Horizons sees physicist Professor Brian Cox join forces with conductor Daniel Harding and the Britten Sinfonia to combine the music of Mahler, Strauss, Sibelius and Hans Zimmer with complex questions about humanity’s place in an infinite universe. I caught up with Cox between media appearances to find out more about how his imaginative new concert format helps us understand where we fit within the cosmos.

© Professor Brian Cox / Daniel Greenan

You have a background in rock music as keyboard player with Dare and D:Ream, but where does classical music fit into your music experience?

I discovered classical music slowly and organically later in life. Obviously, in school I'd listened to the usual things like Holst’s The Planets and things like that, but I really began to explore classical music and truly fall in love with it through meeting a few great musicians. Violinist Jack Liebeck is a very good friend of mine, and so is Daniel Harding, who will be conducting the Symphonic Horizons concert. We'd been talking for a long time about classical music, and I'd written in my book Human Universe back in 2014 about one of the pieces that I love very much: Mahler’s Ninth symphony.

I specifically loved the Bruno Walter recording from just before the Second World War, because the context was so important to the way the musicians played and the way that piece was conducted and performed. When I wrote about it, I speculated about how much information there is in a performance like that? Obviously, the score is dots on the page and that's the information that's there, but the life experience, feelings and thoughts of the musicians and the conductor – and the audience – make it mind-bogglingly complex how a particular performance turns out. I’d written about that, and Daniel Harding read it and got in touch with me and said he'd been thinking about similar things so we ended up collaborating, putting together the ideas of cosmology and astronomy with Mahler in a small concert in Stockholm.

I became interested in Mahler from the mid-90s. I was doing my PhD in Hamburg and it was the 100th anniversary of the premiere of Mahler's second symphony in the city. It was one of the most overwhelming things I've ever seen. The more I listened to it, the more I found that particular period of time (around 1900) harmonically interesting.

How did the Symphonic Horizons concept come about?

We first presented the programme at Sydney Opera House with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra last year. The idea is that there are questions raised by cosmology, by science, by astronomy, that really are not answerable by science. The question we’re tackling with this concert is: ‘What does it mean to live a finite, fragile life in an infinite, eternal universe?’. Music provides a different way of approaching these questions and the whole idea of concert really is to set up the conversation between the modern science. Whatever the central reality of nature is, I think science, music, and for that matter, philosophy, theology, the arts, literature each shine different lights on it and offer us, in a platonic sense, access to the shadows.

The idea of Symphonic Horizons is to try and bring these different lights together and shine them on this question to try and get more insight. It's not the usual thing I've done. I’ve done projects in the past where the music is more of a background or a way to show some nice pictures of planets, but this is definitely not that, it's an integrated show with both science and music in conversation with each other.

Does putting these well-known works in this new scientific context affect our understanding of the music?

When we did it at Sydney, one of the players in Sydney Symphony Orchestra came offstage after performing Mahler's Fifth, set against these ideas of the truth, immensity, scale and beauty of the universe with images of galaxies from the James Webb Space Telescope and the Hubble, and said, ‘You need to stop making us cry, because we can't play.’ The orchestra had played it hundreds of times, but when you put it in this new context the music can start to be about something else, it can start to raise new ideas. In the rehearsal process I always ask that I can give the musicians my talk about the ideas that this music is going to mesh with before it's played in the rehearsal room. The idea is that hopefully it changes the way that the conductor and the musicians interpret the piece, so you get something new.

© Professor Brian Cox / Daniel Greenan

The concert combines your narration with images from space and a programme of Mahler, Strauss, Sibelius and Hans Zimmer. Can you talk us through the ideas behind the programming for the concert?

I got quite obsessed with putting this show together. Almost all I did last year was write this show for Sydney. Then I immediately wanted to do it in London because I love it so much. It's my favourite thing that I've done by some margin.

The orchestra is going to be visible, the players won’t be in the pit, because I think that it's important to see the physicality of it, especially if people are not used to going to orchestral concerts (we hope a lot of people will be coming for the first time).

We start with the third movement of Sibelius’s fifth symphony, which is the piece I used to open the big arena shows that I've done in previous years. Famously it’s inspired by swans taking off from a lake, but it's also about the underlying beauty and power of nature. We then have the premiere of a new Hans Zimmer piece (that he generously says I collaborated on), called Meditation On Eternity.

The intellectual heart of the concert is the second act, which is most of Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra (inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophical novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra). The piece is my resolution to the problem that cosmology presents us with – that we feel absolutely insignificant when we see the true scale of the universe. Throughout the evening, I make the argument that, given what we know about biology and the evolution of life on earth, then a good guess would be that we are the only civilization present in our galaxy at the moment. If we're the only place where intelligence and meaning exists, then it's our responsibility to share it. The idea of the character of Zarathustra dancing up to the cosmos at the end of Strauss piece, this transformation, this ascent to the stars which is represented so beautifully in that music, becomes an imperative. It becomes the only thing that we should focus on as a civilization, and it flips our insignificance and presents us as unimaginably valuable in this ocean of stars. So that’s how the whole the narrative works.

For your upcoming Symphonic Horizons concert you’ll be collaborating with conductor Daniel Harding and Britten Sinfonia – how has your experience of partnership within the classical music world differed from your broadcasting and research career?

We’re putting these incredibly challenging ideas about the reality of our place in the universe up against some of the greatest music ever written. Nietzsche’s book and Strauss’s music are both about the question of how we can justify our existence when facing the unlimited power of nature. When you put these geniuses together, you get something that's so far beyond a television programme, intellectually and emotionally and artistically, there's no comparison for me.

When you implant these ideas into the Symphony Orchestra, then out comes something that is almost unpredictable. It's a much more exciting live experience than just me on my own – even if it's me in an arena with massive screens – the idea is it's supposed to be something more than the sum of its parts.

Daniel and I have been intending to collaborate together for a long time and it's very hard because we’re both extremely busy. He's interested in aviation and space flight and science, so he's got this dual approach to the world as well. He loves the intellectual challenge of something like this and he's very passionate about bringing new people to this music. Strauss’s Zarathustra is quite esoteric in parts. It’s an exploration of the challenges that we face as this little lonely civilization on this rock, and it's not the easiest piece to get into, but when you set it against these images and ideas, while it becomes very challenging intellectually, it becomes, I think, easier to get into.

Your broadcasting projects bring physics to the UK’s living room, making complex concepts palatable for every viewer. With music learning occupying an ever-narrower segment of the UK education system, classical music in particular can feel unreachable – what can the classical music world learn from broadcasting?

Like physics, I think people often think that classical music is just ‘not for them’. Of course that's nonsense, it's not true, but there is a lot to be said for opening the door, offering a way in. Once you've gone through that door there’s this tremendously rich world that you wouldn't get anywhere else. What lies waiting for you is a voyage of discovery with some of the greatest art ever created.

However, I think also it is important to not leave new audiences at the door. Those accessible ways in are important, but I think ultimately, they can be unsatisfying if you don't follow it up with an exploration of the depths. Television can be a frustrating medium because by nature it's instinctively superficial because programmes are short. With every new series that you make, the overwhelming instinct of the broadcaster is to spend a lot of time on that doorway, and not so much time in the landscape beyond. Getting that balance right is hard. The Symphonic Horizons concept is pretty unashamedly beyond the door, we don't underestimate the audience. Everybody has the capacity to understand and appreciate some of the deepest ideas in science or music if you present it the right way.