Music from an orbital perspective

If you stare up at a clear night sky you are likely to see the International Space orbiting around our planet like a gliding star. It is a remarkable vehicle with an unlikely origin, having grown out of a Cold War collaboration between the United States and the Soviet Union, before finally incorporating the combined effort of 15 nations.

The station's internationalism is motivated not simply by idealism, but a pragmatic realisation of the limits of knowledge and expertise of any single nation. In his book The Orbital Perspective, NASA astronaut Ron Garan describes that while the Soviet Union had greater expertise in building space stations, the United States had unique knowledge and experience from its shuttle program. Both had to overcome mutual suspicion, cultural misunderstandings, and a lack of a shared language to create a relationship that would allow this far reaching ambition to materialise.

I derive a certain comfort from the ISS’s perpetual orbit around us, symbolic that while the culture we are born into has limits, we can seek collaboration with people across the world to overcome this. In my case this led me to Chennai, India, in search of answers to questions my own culture could not provide.

Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu 2019. Image by Lucia Molina Pflaum

Being prepared did not prevent it - the shock hit me the moment we stepped out of Chennai airport into the late night.

My wife and I were immediately surrounded by numerous taxi drivers competing for our business. A moment later we were speeding into the suburbs of the city. Even in the depths of night I sensed an environment much greener and lusher than my more arid expectations. We passed silhouettes of tall trees that towered and entangled themselves around the human-made.

Half an hour later we arrived at our apartment in Chennai’s southwestern Nungambakkam neighbourhood. We had warned our hosts that we would arrive late, but nevertheless our phone calls were not answered, and we were left standing in the dark backroads of an apartment block with an increasingly impatient taxi driver whose kindness was the only thing keeping him from driving off. After ten minutes without an answer, the driver offered to take us to his friend’s hotel a few miles away. With no other real options, we accepted.

At this point I wondered, had I made a mistake? Was it wise to come to a city of 11 million knowing only a handful of people?

The trip was motivated by years of interest and study in South India’s Carnatic Music tradition. As a composer and percussionist I was raised in a European music culture that venerated harmony, but treated rhythm as a more intuitive and less cerebral practice. From a young age I wondered why rhythm had not been systemised in the meticulous manner that harmony had with its intervals, scales, and chords. For years the question bothered me at an almost existential level. Then one Saturday afternoon I attended a music workshop, and discovered that rhythm had in fact been painstakingly systemised for millennia, though not in Europe, but India.

The phone rang. It was our hosts, apologetic that they had slept through our calls. We turned around and headed back to Nungambakkam, this time to be greeted by an elderly, energetic couple who warmly welcomed us into their apartment.

We were shown to a cosy room with walls covered in bookshelves that would be our home for the next month. A fan rotated calmly on the ceiling over a bed with only a thin sheet for a cover — more than sufficient for Chennai’s winters, which I discovered are hotter than London’s summers!

Before heading to bed I opened the window and stared into the darkness, absorbing the new soundscape, accentuated and amplified by the night: an incessant honking of horns, the voices of unfamiliar birds, and the steady pulsing of chorusing insects came through the window. I tried to imagine the view I could not see.

A few hours later I would wake to a metropolis in the midst of a months-long festival of South Indian classical music, with concerts spread across venues all over the city, and some of the world’s finest musicians playing from morning to night.

The sun rose, morning came, and for the next month I was absorbed into Chennai’s multifaceted culture of music, dance, and food. I took lessons, attended concerts, and explored the city, shoreline, and surrounding areas. I felt the unfamiliar become familiar, and the familiar become more distant and foreign. In that short time I was transformed, and my approach to music changed irrevocably.

Atlanta, Georgia from the International Space Station. NASA

This trip represented the end of a decade-long process of reaching beyond the music tradition I was raised in and becoming, to borrow a term from ethnomusicology, “bi-musical”. Shortly after my return to London I had the opportunity to reflect on this process when I and billions of others were confined to our homes as Covid spread like fire across the planet. The alarming spectacle of witnessing the world plunged into uncertain danger was redeemed only by the inspiring global effort to recover and emerge from it, imperfect though it was.

It became clear that the long-term recovery and stabilisation of our planet would require imagination as much as pragmatism, and what could be better suited to this than music with its unique, almost magical ability to bypass differences and bring people together. In the 1960s-70s when similar risks were posed to world stability music gave hope, transmitting images and ideas of a more beautiful world. It was a time of global artistic collaboration, with few better examples than the Indian sitarist Ravi Shakar, who worked across borders and genres with artists as diverse as The Beatles, Philips Glass, and Yehudi Menuhin. 

During this same period huge shifts occurred in western classical music as composers such as Terry Rielly, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass drew inspiration from musical traditions as diverse as Indonesian gamelan, Ghanaian drumming, and Indian classical music, and by doing so challenged previously unshakable tenets of western classical music - not least of all being that harmony should always be treated as the supreme quality of music.

Some people are understandably wary or resistant to such ideas, concerned that they could lead to a potential erosion of local and national traditions, reawaken colonial exploitation and appropriation, or simply lead to a general cultural homogenisation. These are rational concerns that should not be dismissed, but history equally shows that when cultures come together in respectful collaboration new cultures are born, as demonstrated with musical styles such as tango, flamenco, and jazz, and with cities such as Cordoba, Rio de Janeiro, New Orleans, London, and New York.

The orbital perspective that Garan and many other astronauts experienced seems relevant to a time when digital technology is shrinking the physical world, in such a way that communication and collaboration with musicians from geographically distant traditions no longer requires moving to a metropolis or long-distance travel. The technology has arrived, so the question is: what do we do with it? 

Broadly speaking, two potential futures seem possible: one where unregulated big tech, appropriative artificial intelligence, and an addictive social media both dominate and impoverish culture, leaving us with a mechanistic dehumanised sense of ourselves, and another where the diverse spectrum of humanity is celebrated, allowed to flourish, and where once distant cultures are brought closer together, opening the door for new previously unimagined possibilities. In the end it will be human choice, not technological determinism, that decides what future we create.