That a scientist and a musician choose as a theme a “conversation around silence and error” might seem like a provocation. On the contrary, it is an invitation. An invitation to look beyond appearances, to welcome pauses into our lives, to consider the other, to open ourselves to listening, to evaluate life not in performative but exploratory terms. Accept that you don’t always win, stop when necessary. “Before every note there is silence,” he says Mario Brunello. «Error is at the basis of our evolution», he replies Piero Martin. Now, imagine an audience of students with two passionate popularizers in front of them. Martin is a professor of experimental physics at the University of Padua and currently works on a fusion research program at the B. Segre Interdisciplinary Center of the Accademia dei Lincei and on the DTT Frascati experiment. Brunello is a great cellist. The occasion for the dialogue is a lectio magistralis at the University of Tuscia, invited by the rector Stefano Ubertini. Martin has recently published for Laterza Memorable mistake storieswhile Brunello a few years ago wrote a book entitled Silence, published by Mulino. This long chat took place via Zoom shortly before the event.
Error seems to be a matter contrary to science, silence to music. Why start from here?
Mario Brunello: «In music, silence is essential. It is from silence that music comes to life.”
Piero Martin: «What interests us, I think I speak for both of us, is the social value of silence and error. Bombarded with stimuli, we have become incapable of solitude, of reflection. Silence is a pause, it is also useful to make us recognize our mistakes.”
Can silence be described?
MB: «Think about the ticking of the clock. Listen to him carefully. Between one tick and another there is a silent space, a backbeat, which normally escapes. In music that is the space of freedom. Typically in a ternary rhythm, the third beat is the freedom beat. The waltz has this third step compared to a march, which is a binary rhythm. Jazz which is improvisation, lives in error, seeks something unexpected, unusual, surprising.”
PM: «In your book you quote a phrase by Renzo Piano that I find perfect: “Silence is like darkness, you have to have the courage to look at it and then little by little you begin to see the outlines of things”. Indeed, darkness is essentially the basis of great scientific discoveries. We start from not knowing and little by little we end up questioning the most accepted theses.”
MB: «In music, from Bach to John Cage, a path has been followed that has led to reversing the importance of the roles between sound and silence. In John Cage silence becomes the structure itself, almost three-dimensional. It is the silence that makes us realize what is around the sound.”
PM: «I spoke of silence as darkness. The image of the total eclipse comes to mind. Since ancient times, that darkness combined with a sudden cold that envelops everything has been experienced with terror. But it was precisely thanks to a total eclipse that Einstein’s theory of general relativity was confirmed in 1919. The eclipse then becomes the experimental proof of the scientific theory. The English astrophysicist Arthur Stanley Eddington presented the results to the Royal Society in London.”
And what does error have to do with all this?
PM: «It has to do with silence because it comes from listening to others and to oneself. Those who don’t listen don’t recognize mistakes. Today it may seem strange, we don’t like the error, it is something we try to hide, losing its generative effect, brilliant in its etymological meaning. In Latin genius is the “natural productive force”.
MB: «I lived one of the most beautiful experiences of my life with the guys from the Atelier dell’Errore, a collective from the neuropsychiatry healthcare companies of Reggio Emilia and Bergamo. I have worked with them several times, following a path of freedom, which means not correcting the error but using it to generate new thought. It doesn’t matter if in the kids’ drawings the front door is inside the fireplace. You can always think about getting out of the roof.”
PM: «Speaking of errors and sounds, or rather noises. As Mario writes in his book, today a sort of “background music” creates the homogeneous fabric in which we are immersed, as if we had lost the ability to welcome the disruptive power of noise. And yet it is that power that made it possible to measure cosmic background radiation in the 1970s. In fact, the first image of the newborn universe, almost 14 billion years ago. Two physicists, Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias, the latter who passed away last January, arm themselves with patience to detect the emissions coming from the Milky Way but their measurements are disturbed by an annoying background noise, a uniform signal that seems to come from every direction. Their laboratory is in New Jersey, about forty kilometers from New York. Only at the end do they understand that that disturbance is nothing other than the noise of cosmic background radiation. It happens in 1963, in 1978 they will win the Nobel”
Is the history of music also full of brilliant mistakes?
MB: «There are endless legends about the birth of much music from mistakes, some intentional. It is said that Beethoven, in order not to let those who passed by his apartment hear his inventions, of which he was very jealous, dirtied them with noises. While she played his melodies on the piano with her left hand, she pressed keys with her right to disturb them. From this, legend has it, the Piano sonatas where there is the mark of his paws.”
Martin opens his book with a sensational mistake by Sting.
PM: «While he was recording Roxanne, Sting absentmindedly sat on the piano keyboard thinking the lid was closed. He then decided to keep those weird notes that came out by mistake in the song. If you listen to the song in slow motion you perceive something that has nothing to do with the melody.”
MB: «Too often, mistakes and silence have been shrouded in negativity. We grow up with the idea of punitive silence. The teacher grounded us and forced us to keep quiet.”
You, Brunello, also played on the tops of mountains, in deserts, in monasteries. What were you looking for?
MB: «I didn’t want to do something different, or assert some originality. I just wanted to look for the space that silence generates. Every era has its silence. Every place has its silence. The silence of the mountains is vertical, it has to do with solitude, that of the desert is horizontal, it is openness, the search for sharing. When I tackle a musical work I try to go to the silence that generated it. And I wonder: was the first note a mistake? I need to feel the silence that exists before each execution.”
PM: «Today the imperative is speed. Study quickly, don’t make mistakes. And instead we should give kids the freedom to make mistakes. The mathematician Federigo Enriques wrote: “The teacher knows that understanding the errors of his students is the most important thing in his teaching art”. And let me also quote Karl Popper: “Avoiding errors is a petty ideal: if we do not dare to face problems that are so difficult as to make error almost inevitable, then there will be no development of knowledge”».
We too are the result of an error in our DNA.
PM: «Life is a mistake. If there had not been DNA duplication errors we would probably all be identical cells. From the mistake Beethoven can be born or a cancer can grow. This is life. I often give kids the example of Enrico Fermi who didn’t understand that he had observed the fission of the nucleus. His mistake led eight months later to the discovery of Lise Meitner, Fritz Strassmann and Otto Hahn. Fermi recognized this, so much so that he wanted to insert an errata corrige in the speech given on the occasion of the Nobel award in Stockholm.”
MB: «The other thing we should safeguard, alongside error and silence, is amazement. Today we want to know everything beforehand, predict everything. It seems to me that we have lost the ability to be amazed, to be human.”
PM: «It is essential to study the equations, but everything comes from the amazement you feel when looking at a rainbow or a blue sky. Before anything there is wonder.”
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– 2024-03-31 21:39:25
