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Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin Five Way Interview

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin (born in 1999) is a distinguished composer, concert pianist, music theorist and researcher. Three of his piano CDs have been released in Germany. He started his undergraduate degree at the age of 13 in Kazakhstan, and having completed three musical doctorates in prominent Italian music institutions at the age of 20, he has mastered advanced composition techniques. In 2024 he completed a PhD in music at the University of St Andrews / Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (researching timbre-texture co-ordinate in avant- garde music), and was awarded The Silver Medal of The Worshipful Company of Musicians, London. He has held visiting affiliations at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and UCL, and has been lecturing and giving talks internationally since the age of 13. His latest book is Quantum Mechanics and Avant Garde Music.

What links quantum physics and avant-garde music?

The entire book is devoted to this question. To put it briefly, there are many different links and connections — ranging from interrelations in chronological perspective to metaphoric correlations between fundamental phenomena in quantum mechanics such as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the Pauli exclusion principle, quantum superposition, quantum entanglement etc. and their reflection in the structure of selected music compositions by Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage, Arnold Schönberg and others, as well as in the specific extended techniques of performance. In addition, there are also figurative interpretations of how space-time curvature and time dilation in Albert Einstein’s general relativity can be seen as an instrument to analyse the compositional techniques of Iannis Xenakis, Gyorgy Ligeti, Edgard Varese, Giacinto Scelsi, Alexander Scriabin and other great composers. The book is also about the place that classical music occupied in the lives and work of great scientists.

Why this book?

I am a professional musician, and I have always been interested in the role of music in the development of society, the relationships between music and other areas of art and science. This topic has interested humanity since ancient times, and I am no exception. I have been interested in interrelations between science and music for a long time.

 11 years ago, when I was 14 years old, I published a short book 'Mathematics and Contemporary Music'. It led to the final conclusion that zero in mathematics is an analogue of void if physical space and silence in music. Since that time, my research evolved into the investigation of correlations between quantum mechanics and avant-garde music, and gave an impulse to my creation of music compositions, including Shadows of the Void, Tears of Silence, The Space of Resonance, Serenade of Invisible Stars, 13 Notes from the Parallel Universe, Quantum Reality, and The Sacred Universe of Particles. I am glad that my book is beginning to resonate with the readers around the world, as evidenced by the number of accesses/ downloads.

Both avant-garde music and quantum physics can be challenging, but music and physics have very different roles. We expect physics to give us answers to questions of how things are, while we expect listening to music to be pleasurable - something many don’t experience with avant-garde music, where we can all see the benefits of quantum physics in technology. Is this a major difference between the two?

Yes, it is impossible to draw an equals sign between music and physics. But there are certain metaphoric correlations. The medieval scholar Abu Nasr Al-Farabi (who was also a music theorist) said: 'Music of the first kind simply gives pleasure. Music of the second kind expresses passions. Music of the third kind excites our imagination'. Avant-garde music is the music of the third kind.

There is a view that science (physics in particular) is absolutely objective while art (music in particular) is absolutely subjective. Nevertheless, this is not the complete picture. Natural science is not nature itself, it is our view of nature. The emergence of style or technique in music is not an accident, but is determined by global processes that shape the relevant level of evolution of the human mind.

As Werner Heisenberg wrote, ‘the two processes, that of science and that of art, are not very different. Both science and art form in the course of the centuries a human language by which we can speak about the more remote parts of reality’. During our recent meeting, Nobel laureate Gerard ’t Hooft said that ‘quantum mechanics is a language’. And music is also a language. Concluding, we can say that science (physics) and art (music) are different languages in which humanity communicates about the universe.

What’s next?

There is still a lot to explore at the intersection of quantum physics and music, science and art. There are some exciting developments in the field of quantum technologies. Colleagues at Moth Quantum (a London-based quantum technology company) investigate applications of quantum information science and quantum computing into the arts. Currently we are working together with Bob Coecke (Oxford Quantinuum) on 'Quantum Concept Music' — the conceptual formalisation of music through the prism of quantum physics.

And of course, I continue my musical activities as a professional composer and pianist.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

One of the fields of my research is the applicability of formal logic and set theory into avant-garde music analysis. In music, where pitches and rhythms are dominant and eloquently present, application of logic, mathematics and geometry is fruitful and has already been researched to a substantial extent. What my approach takes into consideration is the sonoristic direction of avant-garde music, where timbre-texture is the fundamental co-ordinate, while pitches and rhythms are emergent.

I also introduce new and innovative concepts and investigate the applicability of logical space and possible worlds into music structure, as well as vagueness and ambiguity of timbres and the role of epistemicism in music. I am also interested in how probabilistic logic can help define the timbral structures in music.

I gave the presentation 'Logic of Sound and Silence' at the universities of Cambridge and Oxford and at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam. I was also very pleased that the talks gathered genuine interest among specialist researchers.

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