Quantum Mechanics and Avant-Garde Music - Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin ****

This is a fascinating and unique book about the parallel development of, and occasional interactions between, modern physics and contemporary classical music. It’s also a far easier and more enjoyable read than its narrowly academic-sounding title might suggest. If it had been called ‘Music and Quantum Physics’ then I suspect far more people would be motivated to check it out – and, for the most part, I think they’d get exactly what they were looking for.

I deliberately moved the word ‘music’ to the front of my version of the title, because that’s what the book is primarily about – with physics being a background thread, rather than vice versa. Equally, Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin is essentially a professional musician with a sideline in the history and philosophy of science – a far less common combination than the other way around. He also seems to have been something of a musical prodigy, mentioning physics-inspired compositions that he wrote as far back as 2013, when he was just 14 years old. Originally from Kazakhstan, he was at least partly educated in Britain, where he seems to have rubbed shoulders with numerous scientific luminaries as well as musical ones. Among the famous people he recounts conversations with are David Deutsch, Ian Stewart, Brian Josephson, David Politzer and Tony Leggett – the last three all being Nobel prize-winners. 

Unlike some of his predecessors (Stockhausen comes to mind here) Abdyssagin doesn’t make any grandiose claims about the equivalence of musical composition and scientific discovery. Instead he focuses on thought-provoking analogies between the two – ‘poetic, figurative, imaginary, metaphoric and artistic correlations’, as he puts it. Examples range from the fairly obvious – such as comparing probabilistic quantum states with the use of probability functions by composers like Iannis Xenakis and John Cage – to the more exotic, such as likening modern multiphonic playing techniques (e.g. simulating chords on otherwise monophonic wind instruments) to quantum entanglement.

While there are numerous cases of composers being influenced by ideas from science and mathematics – Milton Babbitt’s appropriation of set theory to musical ends being another good example – direct influence in the opposite direction is much less common. One striking instance that I was unaware of till I read this book dates all the way back to the 18th century and Leonard Euler. As I’ve just confirmed from Wikipedia, ‘Euler established the application of binary logarithms to music theory, long before their applications in information theory and computer science became known’.

As far as quantum physics is concerned, music’s main impact on it simply lies in the fact that many of its pioneers were great music lovers. The man who invented the very concept of quanta, Max Planck himself, was a gifted pianist, organist and cellist, who even wrote his own compositions from time to time. Einstein, who made important contributions to quantum physics as well as his own theory of relativity, was an amateur violinist (a ‘relatively’ good one, according to a professional whose opinion he sought). But the musical physicist that Abdyssagin spends most time on – two whole chapters – is Werner Heisenberg of uncertainty principle fame. The author describes visits to two of Heisenberg’s offspring, where he learns about the various musical gatherings organised by the great man, and even gets to play the Blüthner piano that Heisenberg bought with his Nobel prize money (not quite a career high point, though – another scene in the book sees Abdyssagin giving a public recital on Tchaikovsky’s own piano).

All in all, this is a thoroughly engrossing book for anyone interested in the cultural and intellectual overlaps between science and music. As I said at the start, it’s nothing like as hard-going as the title might suggest. There’s no specialist scientific jargon, and very little on the musical side either – even in the last few chapters where Abdyssagin discusses some of his own compositions. Of course, not all fans of quantum physics will be into classical music – and vice versa – but those who are will find plenty to interest them in this book.

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Review by Andrew May - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here