Wichita Symphony Orchestra’s next concert aims to satisfy both the right and left halves of the brain.
“What Music Is,” next Sunday at the Century II concert hall, is a multimedia convergence of science, art and sound that scientifically explains our attraction to the art form.
“This is 20 years of research combined into an entertaining and educational show that reveals a new theory for what music is doing for our species,” said Bill Barclay, the creator of the project and narrator of the performance. “It is not a tour through fun facts; it is a story of science from beginning to middle to end.”
Barclay collaborated with a neuroscientist and an astrophysicist in creating “What Music Is,” which will result in a book with a 2028 publication scheduled.
“It gives the audience, for the first time ever, a radically new understanding of why music is essential, and why these orchestras, who are under threat, must stay a part of our ecosystem while we digitize,” Barclay said from his home in New York City.
Barclay, artistic director of Concert Theatre Works, which produces 30 different performances, said he was following his own curiosity when creating the project.
“I was mostly fascinated by the way there were musical relationships between speeds of planets in our solar system. I thought it was a coincidence, and I asked astronomer friends of mine who said it was a coincidence,” he said. “But I wasn’t happy with that.”
That idea of entrainment — incorporation rhythms — is a general physical concept which is immediately understandable to anyone who has ever danced along to a piece of music, Barclay said.
It’s applicable for those who are musicians or those who feel like they can’t carry a note.
“Most people have grown up to feel music is too complicated or they’re not good at it or they have a terrible voice or they’ll never understand it,” he said. “I really think there’s been some exclusivity to music theory that is unhelpful. There have been bad teacher situations that make people think they’re not musical. And we have a larger project to make sure everyone feels like music is a space that they can be a part of.”
Aimed at middle schoolers through adults, “What Music Is” is designed to give scientific meaning to music.
“A lot of people in the audience who have felt vaguely traumatized by feeling at the altar of musical meaning can emerge with a very strong sense of, ‘Oh my God, I really got that,’” Barclay said. “If the hearer really gets it, we can get in the spaceship and go on a journey where the universe does exhibit these strange, exotic instances of order. Those moments of consonance don’t get as much PR as entropy and chaos and randomness and chance.”
“What Music Is” had its debut performances in February by sister orchestras in Durango, Colo., and Farmington, N.M. Those orchestras are conducted by Thomas Heuser, who will lead the performance by the Wichita Symphony.
The visuals come from animator Shawn Feeney, whose resume includes work for Industrial Light & Magic at Lucasfilm.
“It’s designed to dazzle and also give you something you’re going to hold onto forever,” Barclay said. “Our ambition is just to change people’s relationship to music so that their curiosity is piqued and they start to think about music to enhance their lives.”
The music that accompanies the animation and Barclay’s narration includes Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,” Elgar’s “Nimrod” from the “Enigma Variations,” “Jupiter” from Holst’s “The Planets,” “Starburst” by new composer Jesse Montgomery, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Kaija Saariaho’s “Asteroid 4179 – Toutatis.”
“We’ve got a wild variety of famous pieces from composers who sell tickets on their own,” Barclay said. “It works. It’s a great suite of music.”
“It’s very thought-provoking, and really it’s about a new theory of music in the universe,” he said. “We’re promoting it hard, because everywhere we’re really seeing a trend for confusing us, randomizing us, telling us things are going in tangled directions — towards violence, towards misinformation, towards technocrats controlling everything.
“But we do all have, as human beings, this predilection for music and consonance and we do not share an appreciation for music that is highly disordered, highly dissonant.”
Barclay said he hopes to utilize the Wichita Symphony to help him in creating viral videos designed for Instagram to help promote the project.
“We have doled out some of the information in snackable formats,” he said.
‘WHAT MUSIC IS’ BY WICHITA SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
When: 3 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 16
Where: Century II concert hall, 225 W. Douglas
Tickets: $29-$85, from wichitasymphony.org, the WSO box office and 316-267-7658
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