Snob: Tatiana Chernigovskaya to play and win
’I have never thought of anything like that!’ said a 10-year-old boy when he heard classical music for the first time. ’What do you mean by "that"?’ his parents asked. ’Such serious, big things.’
The Pryamaya Rech lecture hall managed to make a breakthrough in the organisation of lectures. The Tchaikovsky Hall had a full house for a lecture discussion devoted to the following issues:
How and why do people listen to music?
What does it give them?
How does a sound wave turn into a deep emotion?
How do people listen to music during cataclysms?
Etc.
All these issues are not that directly pressing, are they?
And the respected speakers did not even promise to give exact answers. They are doctors of science after all, not some cybergypsies. And they honestly admitted in advance that there are no exact answers yet.
Alexander Kaplan, Tatiana Chernigovskaya and Iaroslav Timofeev came there to talk about music from the point of view of its perception by the brain. Iaroslav Timofeev also provided piano accompaniment to the discussions. And 1,500 people came there to listen to it on Monday evening in Moscow.
They were not passive listeners, tired "after work". They were involved. They willingly sank in and applauded to complex theses, hypotheses, Sergei Rachmaninoff and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. They laughed in response to scientific jokes and sharp moments of the dispute. This was the case when you want to applaud the audience itself.
I have become very tired of words. Of what they carry and of the fact that they help people substitute real meanings. It has become difficult for me to exist in their environment, but then I realised that not everyone reads and listens to words. There are people who listen to pieces of music all day long, and it is much easier to hide from reality there. And it is much easier to create your own reality, no less real, but a more comfortable one. And to live in it.
Words are false, but music never is.
So the musical issue turned out to be pressing not only for me. We know from experience that the audience chooses not only the lecturer but also the topic. No matter how influencing the speakers are and no matter how talented a lecture hall is in popularisation, it is the topic that rules. This time, it ruled in the Tchaikovsky Hall. Let us plunge into music when it has become difficult to plunge into anything else! That was what the speakers and their fifteen-hundred audience decided.
There were lectures in the Tchaikovsky Hall before, but they only accompanied the music and served as an attachment to it. And during the 83 years of its existence, until last Monday, it had never been the other way around. Yet it happened finally.
Two scholars, a psychophysiologist and a psycholinguist, discussed with a musician what happens when a person is listening to music? And, by the way, we found out that, as usual, everything happens in the listener’s head (and only if the listener is a sapiens), although there is also "music as such", without a performer and without a timbre.
’Amazing, right?’
as Tatiana Chernigovskaya often says. And the viewers understand that they are thinking about something for the first time. And this is a rare, tickling, and exciting thing to think about anything for the first time, to understand how many meanings there are behind a new thought, how many layers and reasons are revealed.
Here is her famous phrase:
’If humanity disappears, will music remain? What about mathematics?’
Not only for answers, but also for such questions, an enlightened viewer goes to such a lecture. To think about something other than basic needs, to think about big and complex things with pleasure and admiration before the mysteries of the universe, as scholars can do.
’What do I need to strain inside myself in order to concentrate on music? And it is really hard to concentrate.’
Oh, it is a problem of concentration! The problem of not only modern people, as Tatiana Chernigovskaya noted. And we thought otherwise.
She insisted that music is a different language, while Iaroslav Timofeev resisted the word "language" with all his might.
’It is much better to listen to opera in a language that you do not understand, not turning music into a language,’ he insisted.
Each of the participants had their own view on all issues, as it should be with a discussion. But if we consider the discussion as a competition, it seems to me that Tatiana Chernigovskaya won it with her talent to make people fall in love with her. And Alexander Kaplan, a psychophysiologist and one of the most renowned experts in brain research in Russia, peacefully allowed that to happen.
Tatiana Chernigovskaya is a phenomenon. Not only thanks to her broad scientific knowledge that she "brings to the people", but also thanks to her freedom, cheerfulness, and courage, including the courage to make mistakes, talk about herself, share personal things, demonstrate her emotions, and question such seemingly unshakable things like Darwin’s Theory and everything in a row.
Like intellect, a lecturer is not a mere sum of knowledge. A lecturer is the sum of knowledge plus the ability to apply it and present it in an exciting "personal" form.
’Am I saying something wrong?’ Tatiana Chernigovskaya asks the host.
’You immediately seized the bull by the horns! I have just asked...’
’I cannot do it any other way.’
And all those questions that she formulates and throws into the hall. Like, here you are! Figure it out, think for yourself, and maybe you will come to something! And by the way, it does not exclude at all that we will be able to offer our own version of where the perfect pitch, which all children are born with, gets lost.
She called the science hitmaker Steven Pinker stupid. She repeated it several times, adding ’And do not let him visit us’, because he had compared music to a cheesecake. That is, he called music a dessert and not a main course, like speech. To him, music is something optional ... In the meantime, she dropped that ’Last night, I read Musicophilia, a book by Oliver Sacks.
My God, when could I read a book in just one night?’
Tatiana Chernigovskaya laughs, puts forward risky assumptions, and gives equally vivid reactions to what is happening in the hall here and now, and to what is written in scientific and near-scientific works, on the stage of the Mariinsky Theatre, or in a text by Marcel Proust.
Tatiana Chernigovskaya argues, hooligans, sprinkles scientific facts, and gives simple human examples from real-life experience, including her own. And she can calmly admit that ’I was mistaken here. In general, I often make mistakes.’
Kudos to Tatiana Chernigovskaya!
My favourite musicologist was Manashir Yakubov. He devoted many years to studying the musical heritage of Dmitri Shostakovich and publishing his works. I had the audacity to ask him why musicologists are needed at all. He said they are for joy. Literally.
I wrote down what he had said.
’Of course, you can listen to music unconsciously, through perceiving, experiencing, and obeying the emotions that it gives. Yet your acquaintance with musical, historical, and biographical contexts makes this process enriched, more meaningful and interesting. It turns listening into a process of a higher level than the unconscious one.
Acquaintance with the subtexts enables you to admire the skill of the author, realise how masterfully they solved this or that topic and conveyed this or that state or mood, either their own or that of a whole generation, a whole historical period in the life of the country. Finally, it enables you to fully appreciate how perfect their creation is! This is the occasion for a truly joyful experience. Can an occasion for joy be out of place?’
’Let me leave here’ the thoughts from the discussion in the Tchaikovsky Hall that I set aside for myself to consider with pleasure later.
Alexander Kaplan:
’A human being is a playful creature. Playing hide and seek and making predictions.’
’Music is the only way to keep an organised sound world in yourself. This is important because the visual world is an organised one, while in the sound world nothing is organised.’
’Each language is a new world, a new designation of external objects. If you speak several languages, you live in several worlds at the same time. And music is just another huge world. Elderly people inevitably lose their cognitive abilities, but they will last the longer the more worlds there are in their heads. Words serve as supports here.’
’ Henri Poincaré chose for consideration the idea that he liked best from an aesthetic point of view and which he enjoyed.’
Iaroslav Timofeev:
’Music is sound waves that a person listens to for pleasure and not for the sake of benefit.’
’And the last thing I would like to say in favour of music is ’from Tatiana Chernigovskaya’:
’There are experimental works confirming that people who played music in childhood postpone the risk of developing Alzheimer’s by years, regardless of their results, regardless of the fact whether they became musicians or not, whether they studied music later or not.’
The Pryamaya Rech lecture hall promised to organise once again a discussion of such unique format and composition both in Moscow and in St Petersburg. After all, many questions, including questions from smart viewers, remained undiscussed that evening.