Avoiding an unholy marriage

To enjoy free access to all high-quality "In depth" content, including topical features, reviews and opinion sign up

Dec 1, 2010

Physicist-turned-composer Edward Cowie has long believed there are deep connections between mathematics and music. Michael Banks finds out what inspired him to produce a homage to the great Ernest Rutherford

Hanging on the bare-brick walls in the small, dimly lit basement of St George's concert hall in Bristol, UK, is a series of 24 artists' prints by the composer Edward Cowie. They appear in the aptly named Crypt Gallery, where visitors gather before shows, and were drawn especially to accompany each piano piece of Cowie's latest work Rutherford's Lights – a set of 24 "studies in light and colour for piano". But as well as bringing together art and music, Cowie's latest work seeks to marry together physical theories of light with music. Indeed, the inspiration for each of the 24 piano pieces came from the classic physics textbook The Theory of Light by Thomas Preston, which was first published in 1912.

Wave Motion (the 1st movement)Edward Cowie talks about the first movement of Rutherford's Lights. Music performed by Richard Casey.

Cowie is no stranger to physics, having studied the subject at Imperial College London. Speaking to Physics World in the Crypt Gallery, Cowie shoots from the hip when talking about the many attempts to fuse physics and music. He says he likes to recite one of his favourite poems called "The Unholy Marriage", written by the English poet David Holbrook, which describes a fateful crash when a motorcyclist takes his girlfriend for a ride around town. Holbrook, rather morbidly, describes the pair as having been "married" together by the high-speed collision.

"I would say that a lot of partnerships between art and science are the David Holbrook version," says Cowie, 67. "If you put a scientist and a composer in a food mixer, would you say they have collaborated?". One example of such an "unholy marriage", in his view, was Constant Speed performed by Rambert Dance Company, which was inspired by Einstein's scientific achievements and was commissioned by IOP Publishing (which produces Physics World) in 2005. "It was a fantastic thing to do and was very inventive," says Cowie. "But if they ever claimed one was about the other, then they were wrong – the ballet was not about Einstein; the ballet was about ballet and the music was about entertainment."

Cowie is hopeful that Rutherford's Lights, released on CD last month by UHR and for which IOP Publishing paid him a composer's fee, will not be seen as a David Holbrook version of an art–science collaboration – but rather as a musical piece that takes inspiration, as he puts it, from the "language of science". "I wouldn't say that physics influences my music," says Cowie. "But I could not have written the work without my training in physics."

Rutherford's Lights has recently been on tour around the UK, including being performed at St George's and culminating in a performance at the National Portrait Gallery late last month. The work, however, began its journey on the other side of the world, when Cowie was in Australia as director and founder of the Australian Arts Fusion Centre at James Cook University, Townsville. While in Queensland, Cowie was browsing in a bookshop when he was surprised to stumble across a copy of The Theory of Light. But he was in for an even bigger shock when he opened the book to find a message written in 1904 and signed by the nuclear physicist Ernest Rutherford himself to one of his students. Cowie promptly snapped it up – and for only $4.

Preston's book, which remains one of Cowie's most treasured possessions, is central to Rutherford's Lights, and is integral in each of the 24 pieces. "It is a homage to Rutherford," Cowie says. Each piece in Rutherford's Lights is, however, based on a specific chapter from Preston's book. The work is meant to be a journey through the book, beginning with simple descriptions of transverse waves at the beginning to more complicated theories of light later on. "There was an incredible division between the chapters in the book that I could see they were each separate pieces," says Cowie. "What I liked about Preston's book is that it is not dry. How he has constructed the language to describe physical properties is beautiful, almost musical."

Compounding of Simple Vibrations (the 3rd movement)Cowie speaks about how the piano can illustrate "complex expressions of the theories of light".

The first piece in Rutherford's Lights is called "Wave Motion". Sitting in St George's, Cowie pulls out a musical score of the piece in which the opening parts looks like a wave propagating along the page. "It is not difficult to talk about propagation and think acoustically," says Cowie, who calls Rutherford's Lights a "major breakthrough" in his music. Indeed, he says he would just sit at the piano with a chapter of Preston's book open and just attempt to put the equations and meaning of Preston's words into music. He would study the formulas and attempt to give their musical equivalence. "I am trying to make a piece of music whose quantity and quality is connected to light and its propagation," he says.

Edward Cowie was born in Birmingham, UK, in 1943. By the age of seven, he had started teaching himself music and the piano. But it was the influence of his parents, who wanted him to do a "proper vocation", that meant he went to Imperial to study physics. Cowie was still learning the piano and violin in his spare time, as well as doing the odd performance, which earned him money to pay for his education. "I didn't really see a difference between physics and music," says Cowie. "Everything has a numerical basis: music is about numbers just as much as maths is." But Cowie's love of music was still his driving force, and while at Imperial he also went to the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London to study painting as an external student.

After doing a Bachelors in music, in 1973 Cowie completed a PhD at Leeds University, which included studying music, physics and genetics. He was also awarded a Doctorate of Music by Southampton University in 1976. In the music world, Cowie obtained early recognition with the 1975 BBC Proms commission Leviathan for large orchestra, followed by popular works including the Piano Concerto (1976), the opera Commedia (1976) as well as Concerto for Orchestra (1982).

Various academic appointments in Germany and the US followed, eventually leading Cowie to take up a position as head of the School of Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong in Australia in 1983 and, six years later, as director of the Australian Arts Fusion Centre at James Cook University, Townsville. After losing funding for the centre, he finally returned to the UK in 1996 as director of research at Dartington College of Arts in Devon.

Following his retirement in 2008, Cowie is now hoping to foster more collaborations between science and the arts, beginning with Rutherford's Lights. "The divisive language between arts and sciences are artificial," says Cowie. "What we need is a bridge dialogue between them." Cowie is currently in discussion with the Oxford University particle physicist Brian Foster about making a set of violin pieces that will trace a "timeline" for the subject of particle physics.

Like many composers working in the early 1970s, Cowie came under the influence of the music of the "Second Viennese School". This included a method of musical composition invented by the Austrian-born composer Arnold Schoenberg. It employs a row of 12 different notes in the chromatic scale – a musical range with 12 equally spaced pitches, each a semitone apart – that can be permutated and combined to enable a kind of "lattice and grid approach" to the placement of musical pitches. Schoenberg's pupil, the composer Anton Webern, extended the idea further by applying combinatorial mathematics.

Natural Lights (the 18th movement)Cowie outlines how he applies the mathematics of light to natural phenomena such as rapidly moving water.

In adopting these techniques, and with his understanding of mathematics, Cowie was able to write complex music. However, he felt that his music at that time was too "system based" and he abandoned the technique in the mid-1970s. However, the use of mathematics in music fostered the notion that they are inextricably linked. "Physics is about patterns, written through equations – the language of mathematics" says Cowie. "Music is also about patterns, so you can relate and link them."

To demonstrate the links between music and mathematics, Cowie recalls the time in 2003 when he was commissioned by the BBC to produce a "sound portrait" of the Cambridge University physicist Stephen Hawking for the 125th anniversary of the National Portrait Gallery. Cowie travelled to Cambridge to meet Hawking to discuss the piece, who he knew liked music. After talking about music and physics for more than four hours, Hawking concluded that contemporary music had lost its way – it had no structure, he complained – and that he had no time for it. Cowie naturally did not agree. "If music has lost its way, then hasn't mathematics as well?" he asked. After a pause from Hawking, he slowly typed "Touché".

Born: Birmingham, 1943
Education: BSc physics, Imperial College, London (1961–1964); Bachelor of music, Southampton (1970); PhD in music, Leeds University (1971–1974); Doctorate in Music, Southampton University (1976)
Career: Professor of composition, University of Lancaster (1973–1983); head of the School of Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong, Australia (1983–1988); director of the Australian Arts Fusion Centre at James Cook University, Townsville (1989–1994); director of research at Dartington College of Arts in Devon (1996–2008)
Family: Married, two daughters
Hobbies: Reading, sailing, bird-watching

View the original article here