The Project

It came as a great surprise to hear that stars produce ›music‹ – at any rate this is how the asteroseismologist Conny Aerts described the existence of acoustic vibrations in stars during her lecture entitled Kosmische symfonieën [Cosmic Symphonies] (Nijmegen 2005). In doing so, she perhaps unintentionally created a connection between the inaudible sounds of the stars, that only exist in scientific measurements and models, and our (musical) imagination.

It has become apparent that sound plays an important role not only in the life of stars, but also in the formation of structures in the universe. By analyzing these sounds it is possible to obtain knowledge about the internal structure of stars and the evolution of the universe in exactly the same way that sonologists are able to lay bare a tone’s structure, which would otherwise remain concealed from us.
In Sternenrest an attempt has been made to integrate a number of scientific results from asteroseismology, cosmology and sonology into music. The varying scales of the structures here concerned are rendered audible, visible and recognizable by combining instrumental music with electronic music. The audience is surrounded by instrumentalists and 192 loudspeakers.

The composer Willem Boogman developed the project in close collaboration with the philosopher Chris Bremmers, the video maker Mateusz Herczka, and with the scientist Conny Aerts, who answered all questions about ›her‹ star HD 129929 with great dedication, providing the measurement data and the required interpretation of it.

The subtitle Stars don’t make music gives rise to the question in what sense do stars and the night sky possess an aesthetic dimension, and how can this be made accessible to us and be expressed in music and other art forms. From the very beginning Chris Bremmers embedded Sternenrest in a reflection on diverse aspects of the relationship between science and art and the relationship between science and the observation of stars in everyday life.

The various ways of discovering and observing stars and the night sky and their interrelationships make up the theme of this interdisciplinary project.

The Music

GLAS (based on the star HD 129929) occupies a central position in Sternenrest. Its music is modeled on the measurement data and results of the research into the star HD 129929, as formulated by Conny Aerts in the scientific magazine Science (2003). The measurement data includes six star frequencies and details about the star’s various rotation layers and rotation speeds. Thanks to the possibilities inherent in the Wave Field Synthesis loudspeaker system, the audience can imagine itself inside the star, from which position the sound waves and sound movements of the star can be followed. This movement deals with the star’s development from her first light until the point that she explodes (supernova). The discovery in 2006 that acoustic sound plays a decisive role in a star’s supernova phase also played a part in the music’s development.

The preceding part, Seeds of Structure, can be regarded as a musical reverie at twilight, as the stars begin to appear in the night sky. But the surface of this piece also reflects the formation of the universe and the birth of a star, in which sound plays an important role, as hypotheses and recent discoveries in cosmology and astronomy have shown.
In the development of the music I have followed the hypothesis that the distribution of matter in the cosmos is not random: stars and galaxies emerge in an essentially empty universe on the edges of vastly inflated and congealed sound waves that were already present in the primeval soup just after the Big Bang. These sound waves were imprinted as minuscule ripples in the otherwise smooth cosmic microwave background radiation. They act as the seeds of large-scale structures in the universe such as galaxies. In this part of Sternenrest small and large-scale structures form a close relationship with each other.
Finally, out of a nebulous environment a star is formed.

The last part, entitled Liminale, starts just after the ›explosion‹ of the star, in which her core is ›kicked out‹ and her remnants gradually disperse throughout the universe. The core continues to exist as a pulsar, gets a little sister, whereby a double-pulsar system is formed. The two pulsars spiral slowly towards each other, finally coalescing to form a black hole.
The music here is based on the data of the double-pulsar system PSR J0737-3039.
All these developments take place on a large scale in the electronic music, above the heads of the six musicians. The ensemble is spatially positioned and plays chords which are constantly changing in colour, thus completing a cycle which represents the alternation of day and night here on earth – but then earth as seen from space, almost transparent and vulnerable.
The composition ends with the break of day, as it were.