Ideas - Nine Minutes that Changed the World

Episode Date: March 29, 2024

In 1876, the poet Stéphane Mallarmé published a poem entitled "The Afternoon of a Faun." He doubted anyone could set it to music successfully. But composer Claude Debussy did exactly that. The music runs only about nine minutes long, but it helped give birth to the modern era as we know it. *This episode originally aired on May 30, 2017.

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas, I'm Nala Ayyad. As the 19th century was coming to its grandiose end, French composer Jules Massinet wrote this music to celebrate Paris' 1889 Universal Exposition. You can hear its optimism, even a touch of arrogance, a bit like the exposition itself, which was symbolized by that steel tower built for the exhibition's entrance, the one designed by Gustav Eiffel.

But even as people all over the world marveled at the Eiffel Tower and Edison's first phonographs, another sound was being created, another spirit signaling the new century. This sound. Claude Debussy's Prelude to the After just another famous piece of music. It stands at the beginning of the world we still inhabit. at the beginning of the world we still inhabit. It's a sonic guide to the political, social, moral, and geopolitical changes that ended the 19th century and created the 20th. These intervals of the octave are at the core of how composers for centuries

structured sound into logical forms. And so when you diverge from that, you're straying from the true path and you're developing things which cause unease. Ivar Torrens is the director of Tafel Music and knows the prelude intimately. For over a decade, he's led conducting classes at the University of Toronto on this seminal work. at the University of Toronto on this seminal work. On Ideas today, he's joined by contributor Robert Harris as they take us on a tour through this new world created by the notes, rhythms, and sounds

of Claude Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. We're calling this episode Nine Minutes That Changed the World. So, Ivars, we're dealing with maybe the most famous opening, one of them, in the history of music, right? The simple little flute line. So sinuous and languorous. And then this thing comes and then Debussy waits a whole bar of silence

a whole bar and then he does it all over again. You know, I don't think it's an exaggeration, and if it is, I'm going to do it, to say that the 20th century began with these notes. The 20th century began with, it was written in 1894, and why I'm saying that is that, you know, the nature of that sound is so new in Western music. And then it goes to this, which is older. But this, it's mysterious.

What does it mean? And it opens up a whole world. You know, one of the things that I know that we're going to have to remind people over and over again is that music is more than just sound. It's more than just a way of entertaining ourselves or giving ourselves pleasure. You know, the ancient Greeks understood this. If you read Plato's dialogues, he talks about modes that you should be playing that are appropriate for education and modes that shouldn't be played and some that should be banned. And you say to yourself, why would anybody ban a piece of music? Or an interval.

Or an interval. But, you know, the ancient Greeks understood, as did most cultures except for our own, is that music builds character. Music in its mysterious way is more than just sound. It's ideas without language. Well, they're there. They're there and they resonate. So this is an idea.

It's not just a chord, right? And this is an idea. And this is an idea. So that chord is so different, you know, from the chords we heard at the beginning, the chords of that Jules Massonet point. So who start like this? All in C major, right?

Glorious. Yeah, this organ, I'm just playing on piano. So majestic, right? Yep. All very straightforward and nothing... But that doesn't sound at all like this. No. So why not? Why doesn't it sound like this? What's the difference?

Well, our whole sense of tonality has been shaped and colored by the foundations of harmony and melody that were developed over the five centuries of Western music. So what do you mean by tonality? Well, if we consider the major scale, we are so locked into that system and what it implies, and then the harmonies that go with it. Our ears have been tuned so to speak to hear these logical progressions of and then so it's all based around one the fifth degree the fourth and one. You know what interests me about tonality is that's so much more than just chords, you know?

That is a way of life. That's Europe before Darwin. You know, that's everything in its place. Everything fits, you know? It's a magnetic force, I think. And it also has the implication that one must lead to a finality, to be leading somewhere so that we end up where we began. And so these intervals of the octave, of the fifth, and of the third, are at the core of how composers for centuries

structured sound into logical forms. That is such an amazingly powerful metaphor for Europe at the end of the 19th century. It is. So when you listen to that, you know, that Esclermon, again, not to make too much fun of Puro Massany, you know, it's all of those thirds you're talking about.

It's exactly what you're talking about before right so we talked about those chords those escarmont chords you know and almost at exactly the same time here's another set of chords that i'm going to play for you and this is a set of chords um that um a student at the Paris Conservatory wrote down as Claude Debussy was noodling away at the piano in 1890 playing these chords,

these very chords, and his harmony teacher, and that's Juro, very well known, very famous, came into the room and basically started a conversation with Debussy.

And so thankfully, it was recorded. He recorded it. So we're going to play that. You're going to be Debussy, and I'm going to be Ernest Giraud. So here's Debussy playing these things, you know, and just noodling around. And some of them are, even by our standards, pretty weird. They are.

And so the guy who was transcribing it has Giraud saying, what's that? And I'm pretty sure he did not say what's that. I'm pretty sure he said, what the hell? What are you doing? And then Debussy says, incomplete chords, floating. Il faut noyer le ton, which means you must drown to flood the sound.

One can travel where one wishes and leave by any door. Greater nuances. So interesting. It's exactly what you were saying, that in the old system, you can't leave by any door. There's one door to go through. There's another door to come. And Debussy says, incomplete chords, you know, floating, you know. So interesting.

He explains himself better than you or I ever could. Okay. And so Giraud says, okay, okay. But when I play this, it has to resolve. And what he means by that is, if I, those things, you just have to move. To that. You have to move to that. You have to go to something, right? And Debussy says, I don't see why it should.

Why? Why? Why? Yeah. So to me, that why is one of the great moments in Western culture, right? Because it's the same why if somebody says, well, you know, a family must be made up of a man and a woman. Parents. And someone says, why?

You know? And it's not a simple question. It's so powerful. You know? And it's so powerful. Okay. And then Giraud is now getting, in my opinion, exasperated. And he says, well, do you find this lovely?

And he picks the most banal thing he can find. Right? He says, you find that lovely? Debussy says, yes, yes, yes. Pourquoi pas? Driving Giraud nuts, I am sure. And finally he says, okay, well, how would you get out of this? He's like a Houdini.

He's like wanting to show him. And then he says, I'm not saying that what you do isn't beautiful, but it's theoretically absurd. And Debussy answers by saying, there is no theory. You have merely to listen. Pleasure is the law. But, you know, what's interesting, because you and I have looked at this score, is that Debussy is lying a little bit because, you know, to say pleasure is the law

suggests that sort of a... Anything can go. Anything goes. It's Oscar Wilde. It's, you know, Dorian Gray. You know, it's pleasure for its own sake and that's absolutely not the way he wrote this piece. And the thing that struck me

when I actually started to analyze the score is how intricate it is. Everything connects with everything else. Completely. It's like a crystal and you turn it and you see something new. So let's just take that opening again. So there's hidden in there these two notes.

And that's what we call a tritone. And what that is, it's an interval in Western music, reluctantly, that doesn't fit. It's the devil's sound. The devil's, and it was labeled as such

in medieval times. And so for Debussy to use it, he's using it because it is ambiguous. It is neither major nor minor nor sits as a fifth or a fourth. It sits exactly halfway between the octave.

And you'll find in this work that it pops up all over the place. It's like, where's Waldo? Exactly. You find it, and we'll point it out, you find it in the most places where you'd never expect it. And the other interesting thing, of course, is because that interval is ambiguous,

Debussy can harmonize. In other words, he can put it, think of that as an object. It's a musical object, right? And he places it in different contexts, and in every context, it changes its character. I mean, talk about a modern idea. Talk about a modern idea is that there's nothing fixed anymore.

Everything can be anything, right? So the first time we hear it, it's by itself. The next time we hear it, it's harmonized against the D major chord. Which gives us a different feeling, completely different color. It's the same notes, right? You know, this comes back what, 11, 12 times in the piece? Yeah. And every time, not quite every time, but every time it appears, it's a different character. It is constantly changing in front of our eyes, yet it is the same. You know, Evers, you and I,

we were talking about absolute music before, and there's no text to this, but there is a text to this. There is, a particular one. It's not an an isolated piece of music it was based on a poem and this and that feeling of languor that's part of this you know that feeling of sensuality that is part of the sound world of the prelude has to do with the very fact that it is a setting, in effect, a musical setting of Mallarmé's Afternoon of a Fawn. One of the most famous poems in the history of French literature.

It is. So who was Mallarmé? Like, where does he fit into all of this? Well, let's step back and first look at what French culture is doing at that point. It's really a hotbed of discovery, of discussion, and Mallarmé is one of the French poets that is at the forefront of what is being called symbolist. And what does that mean? Well, they were rejecting the whole idea of realism, and many composers at the time in France were excited. Debussy, one of them, was excited by what Mallarmé was doing in poetry.

Arthur Rimbaud called this style of writing verbal alchemy, the transcendence of mere words into something new. So it's taking a very simple word and by implication, through an evocative way of dealing with it and suggestion, giving all sorts of other possibilities the same way that we heard in that Debussy chord.

Where is it going? And what it does is it allows our imaginations to explode out of that bounds of one, four, five harmony. It's so interesting, that they're so similar to one another. The notion that the connection between a word and a thing, a single thing that that word represents, he wanted to break. Without, again, trying to overstate this, but such an important idea in the history of 21st century intellectual thought. And Mallarmé was one of the first who really took on this challenge. And as Mallarmé said himself, to give music back to poetry.

That had been lost along the way, and he wants to bring that sense of musicality, of color, of tone, of implication, of ambiguity back to poetry. And one of the ways he did this was by setting a faun. I mean, the subject matter of Afternoon of a Faun, the poem,

is a faun and nymphs and it's languorous and it's the midday heat. So he had a conflicted view of the notion of putting this to music. It's Paul Valéry who reported that Mallarmé himself was unhappy. He said he believed that his own music was sufficient and that even the best intentions in the world, it was a veritable crime to juxtapose poetry and music, even if it were the finest music there is. Now that's until he actually heard Debussy's composition. And he was overwhelmed.

He went to the premiere, and after the premiere, he wrote a letter to Debussy. I have just come out of the concert deeply moved. The marvel, your illustration of the afternoon of a faun, which presents a dissonance with my text, only by going much further, truly, into nostalgia and into light, with finesse, with sensuality, with richness. I press your hand admiringdo, you know, as I mentioned before, we both mentioned that there's the Where's Waldo, you know, that. The Psy-Tone. You know, and we just heard this bit in the music. There it is back.

Yeah, which sounds completely different, right? It's a change of mood. Yeah. And as it turns out, that's a G, and this is a C sharp, right? Exactly the same two notes that he starts with. So, you know, again, more evidence that this is a guy who thought through this piece so carefully, you know? It's not arbitrary in any way, you know? But it's the sound world. But what's interesting is at this point of the sound world, for the first time, we get out of this.

And we move into this beautiful But you told me, you know, that when you conduct that, at this point in the music, you see vision. I do, I do. I get to that beautiful melody, and I immediately feel like I'm flying. I get the sense I'm in this incredible, cloud-swept landscape, sun-dappled.

It's like those wonderful watercolors of Turner, and it's no coincidence that Turner had the same idea of let's push those boundaries and just get feeling in color, in motion. And so throughout the piece I will be going through it and having these sensations, an impression if you will. Which maybe ties in with the whole idea of Debussy being labeled an impressionist composer. It's sort of the same idea in visual art

of tonality in musical art. Exactly, and so let's leave behind the academic schooling that we have of Bach and Beethoven and Mozart and Brahms and let us find a new language. Of course, you know, we're talking about Debussy being at the center, the nexus of so many different things that were going on. So his piece of music is modern.

You know, he's allied himself through the afternoon of the poem with modernism in literature. And he clearly, whether he means to or not, has allied himself with Impressionism, with what is modernism in painting, you know, because the thing is so visual. I mean, and most people that I know who listen to this immediately think of those Impressionists. It just sounds like that. And we know now, having looked at the Mallarmé poetry, that he was aligning himself with what was happening in another branch of this new expression in art, symbolism. Well, I think a lot of people don't recognize

that they're two different things. Because they happen, not quite, but more or less at the same time. The Impressionist painters are a little, I guess, decades or so. But, you know, so what's the difference between Impressionism and Symbolism? Well, I brought some pictures here, and I know this is a radio audience, but I just want to kind of fly these by you, and I'm going to be describing it to you. And they'll be up on the website if people want to see them as well. CBC.ca slash ideas. Right.

So we have the traditional, the academic school, painting beautiful shepherd girls and mythologies and historical scenes. And it's very realistic. The colors, it's meant to be as real as possible in the shading, in how things are developed. And then all of a sudden you get chaos in the idea of let's make an impression of something. So right now I'm looking at a nocturne in black and gold by Whistler.

This was described as almost like someone throwing up on canvas. Well, it looks that way. It's like almost impossible. It's just black. There's, you know, blotches of color. It's almost impossible to say what it's... But if you realize this is fireworks, then you go, oh. And then, of course, we have Monet creating these wonderfully vague...

Yeah, this is a sun or a setting sun. Setting sun and his Rouen Cathedral. Where it looks like someone has taken a picture out of focus. And this is where the Impressionists were looking not at realism again, but by seeing color and how color plays against other colors. And form is created by the contrast of two colors together. Debussy does a version of the same thing. Exactly, but this is just one branch we have then people starting to experiment so if I put if I put the Monet next to this

these paintings by Gauguin you go oh my goodness. They look completely different. Very, almost like folk art-ish. Folk art-ish, but the colors, the saturation is so brilliant. But you also see in Gauguin's paintings the beginnings of weirdnesses. There are paintings like The Spirit of the Dead, where you have shapes and forms. There's a woman reclining on a couch and behind her looks like a horse's head. There's another phantom

figure. This is Mallarmé territory. Exactly. Mallarmé wasn't trying to create an impression. He was creating these vivid colors in words and hoping that that clash in your mind would create... And Debussy is in that world.

You can see that. He's taking individual notes and creating different colors with different instruments. So it's an exploration like the post-impression. It's like the Fauvists. We're using these incredibly intense colors, or shades, or Whistler in grays, you know. It's Henri Rousseau. Yes.

It's Henri Rousseau. You. It's Henri Rousseau. You know, that's maybe one painting people would know, the lion looking. And it's not realistic. Not at all. It's like folk art. It's hyper, but it's hyper real, you know? Yep. And Debussy was doing the same thing.

I mean, it's harder to hear because it sounds so gauzy, you know? And yet also, when we hear Debussy's music, And yet also, when we hear Debussy's music, we are drawn to what we visualize in Impressionist art because he's dealing with color, and he was very much of the idea that a chord isn't so much important in terms of its relationship to other chords, but because of its color.

It's all color-based, but it isn't random. Monet didn't just start slapping paint onto a canvas. It's all worked out meticulously how those colors will relate one to the other. Manipulation of color to create form. You're listening to 9 Minutes That Changed the World on Ideas. We're heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on Sirius XM and around the world at

cbc.ca slash ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA. The news you got to know and the conversations your friends will be talking about.

Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401. Check out This is Toronto wherever you get your podcasts. This is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. Conductor Ivar Storrens and contributor Robert Harris are convinced that Claude Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun is the piece of music that created the modern world. They've associated it with literature and painting, but there is more to come. So when we talk about color in music, there's another section here that you've talked about again in terms of this beautiful melody, right? That's such a beautiful moment. And, you know, Debussy, for all of the things we're saying about his modernism,

clearly had a hand and had a foot in romantic music. And you can hear it there, but it's interesting that in the midst of that texture, there's something, there's a real evocation of another piece of music. Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet fantasy overture, right? Yeah. It's a fantasy overture, right? Yeah. So here's this, the Debussy melody.

It's expansive. It goes... It's passionate, right? It's an arching theme. And against that, the winds have this incessant sighing motif. But let's go back to what that rang a bell in my brain. The main melody in the Tchaikovsky is remarkably similar. So we have in the Tchaikovsky... remarkably similar. So we have in the Tchaikovsky a nice melody.

That's one thing. But then there is a horn panting away in semitones. away in semitones. It's exactly the same musical idea. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 So we're now going to get into something that may be a little esoteric because it's the way musicians talk.

So we just talked about this section. That's in D flat major. Now, what does that mean? So it's the way we write the music down on the paper. So if you take C and you go to the black note just above it, we call that C sharp. Yep. That's the way it's written down.

The C with that sharp, which is like a hashtag symbol. So, and that's the idea of that you take a note and you want to go up. You sharpen it. Yep. And if you even look at the symbol, that hashtag, it's sharp. Now, another way of getting to that same note is to go to D and go down a half step, right? Yeah. Because exactly the same notes are coming into your brain.

But unfortunately, yeah. So why does it make any difference? It's a huge difference to us. How is that possible? It's the same notes. Also emotionally. Because you hit on it when you said the sharps sharpen and the flats kind of release something. That's the other thing I forgot to mention, of course, is the symbol for a flat is a B.

A B. It's rounded. So there's these characteristics being given to these two families. Now, yes, we have arrived on this one note which represents a C sharp and a D flat. C to C sharp, D to D sharp. We get this idea of hard-edged, brighter something that's ascending. and a D flat. C to C sharp, D to D sharp, we get this idea of hard-edged brighter,

something that's ascending. But the flats represent passive soft edge darker. Now you have a whole system built on sharp keys on one side, and you have a whole system of flat keys on another, and they do not mix. And in the rules of progression, we talked about magnetic force of 4, 5, 1, and where are we going to go. Anything in the sharp keys has to still stay in that key. It cannot go to the other family. Debussy exploits this

possibility of changing the name of a note. So we think we're arriving on C sharp in a cadence and he says I'm gonna switch to the other side and now we're gonna call that a D flat. Written the way he writes it in the score. The way he writes it in the score. And that allows the music free passage to the other side, so to speak, which is what the theorists were screaming about, what his teachers said. You can't do that. It makes no sense. And that's a sense of fitting in, which is such a complex idea, I think, in music.

So we talked before, obviously, the old ways of what fits. We're really simple. You're in, you're out. That's a tritone. Can't do that. That's band. This is OK. You can't move this way.

You can't move that way. You can't turn this way. And in painting, same thing. It's got to look like a tree, et cetera, and in poetry. And it's the modern idea, I think. I really do think it's the modern idea. What fits and what doesn't, which a piece of music in 1894,

you know, oddly enough, opened up the possibility of. And for us musicians, seeing that change from sharps to flats creates a strong emotional response. Musicians often say that a certain key has a color. That's what we were talking about before, about color. A color in keys. And the same with that transition to that beautiful passage

with the gorgeous melody in D flat. He is in D flat, not in C sharp. Exactly. And so throughout the whole piece, not only do we have this idea of motifs and where do they sit in keys, but we have this very carefully thought out discussion of which side are we going to end up on? Are we going to be in the sharps, in the sharp camp, in the flat camp? In the end, he goes for E major that he implied in the beginning.

First bar. Yeah. First bar. So he starts on a sharp. He moves to flats for that gorgeous melody. And then works his way back to an E major, that simple little E major cadence. So, Ivar, as we have now situated on the prelude to the afternoon of a faun

in the history of Western harmony. We have situated it at the cutting edge of literature with Mallarmé. We have situated it at the cutting edge of visual art with the impressionists and the symbolists. And you've given us this mind-boggling, you know, emotional state of whether I see a sharp or a flat in front of my notes when I'm reading it. And there's one more thing. We're not done yet. Because, you know, we started off way back at the Paris Exposition of 1889, where the Eiffel Tower was built. But the most important thing

from our purposes of that Paris Exposition was the fact that we heard non-Western music for the first time. And specifically, Javanese gamelan. Exactly. And it just blew Debussy away. And it blew everyone away. And so every day, numerous times of the day, they would perform. But Debussy went regularly. He didn't just go once to experience this. He went regularly, as did his colleagues.

It's an ensemble with instrumentalists sitting lotus position in front of various sizes of gongs. And it's a music like no other that Western civilization had heard. It has a mesmerizing quality. The whole concept of gamelan music is not just entertainment. It represents, in a way, timelessness of the fact that civilizations may come and go, generations will

live and die, but there will always be this eternal music of the sphere so to speak. Debussy's friend Robert Godet wrote, Many fruitful hours for Debussy were spent in the Javanese Kampong, that's the pavilion in the exhibition, listening to the percussive rhythmic complexities of the gamelan with its inexhaustible combinations of ethereal flashing timbre. He wrote himself... this is Debussy, Javanese music is based on a type of counterpoint by comparison with which that of Palestrina is child's play.

And if we listen to it without being prejudiced by our European ears, we will find a percussive charm that forces us to confess that our music is not much more than a primitive, barbarous kind of noise fit for a traveling circus. This is what I find interesting. He is essentially saying to us, as citizens of a country, as human beings, it's time to abandon the old rules because they were too confining. So what he has done in this piece so brilliantly is to create a new set of rules. It's what we're trying to do in society now, honestly.

It's what we're trying to do, you know, dealing with new cultures. How do we take our values, which we thought were so solid and we knew where everybody fit, and then there are all these people and they don't fit, but we want to fit them in. And Debussy, in this odd way, is doing this in music. Later in his career, I mean, this is 1889. Yes.

And these notes were written 1910, 1913. And that's exactly the time when he was very clearly putting this in his music. And you can hear it in something like Pagode. Thank you. So that is gamelan music. There's no question, I think, that Debussy was mimicking that, and more than mimicking it, bringing those ideas into it. But you don't hear sounds like that in the prelude. Why do you think it's there? I argue that you do, because the construct of the idea of languorous timelessness,

he achieves by taking these small motifs. They are not things that go anywhere. They are arabesques within themselves, and then he will repeat them. So you'll get one motif. They're repeated. He is, in a way, illustrating that languor, that noonday sun which just keeps on beating down, the faun's dreamless state.

These things, I believe, he was inspired by the gamelan music that he heard. He started utilizing them in the prelude and then certainly was using them later on in his life. Okay, so, you know, it's fascinating to me. The more we talk about it, we go on for hours, actually, of this 10-minute piece of music. Because what's interesting to me is that at one and the same time, you've made a very convincing argument that Debussy wrapped up all of the things that were current in 1894.

In other words, it was a piece very much of its own time and at the same time opens up for the future so many possibilities. But it's on the cusp of something. At the same time that it's completely in itself. Yeah. It's so interesting. So here's what I want us to do. I want us to be you, a professional conductor, going through this score.

We've mentioned many little things, but what I'd like to do is play it from beginning to end, and then you just point out whatever you want to point out. I may throw in, but I may not. Just reminders of the things we've been talking about, and just to take us through it now that we are sort of educated. Fantastic. Does that sound like a good idea? Excellent. Let me go get my score.

Okay. Okay, we both have our scores. Yes. So here we go. The flute. The flute of Pan. of pan. So there's that tritone, C sharp to G. Yeah, and this suspension. Ah, and now, tonality, are we in E major? Ah. Horns are so lovely.

And they're imitating the call, the notes of the flute. And they toss it back and forth. Suspension. And now here we are with a D in D major. And a beautiful feeling of repose in D major. It works. But he's not going to stay there for very long. He's going to start shifting, and we're back in E major. Now the oboe takes over.

Important secondary instrument in this piece. Now, here's the repetition I'm talking about. One more time. And now reduce it, and repeat. And another time. It's too hot in the noonday sun. I have to lie down and dream some more. So that's the gamelan influence. And we're back with our melody.

Now against an E in the bass. Beautifully in the repose of E major. And little arabesques. And you see how we have these pedal points. It just sits in long lengths of harmony. Oh, but are we going anywhere? No, we're going to come back again. Timelessness. Now he'll take that motif and he's going to spin it.

And again. and again maybe this is the two nymphs because we never leave the faun we never leave Mallarmé's sensuous world ever not at all now here's a transition point

so this is the one place where we change character right Now here's a transition point. So this is the one place where we change character, right? Now this is the, that's a G, and this is a C sharp. There's definitely some serious chasing going on here, I think, in the reeds. A bit higher now. We've moved up a step.

And now it moves into this beautiful theme of the oboe. This is the one that you love. Oh, this is it. This is me in the landscape. I'm flying. Here we go. Soaring. And the clouds. And without you knowing it,

we have moved Mr. Harris into the flat keys. And here the gamelan figure, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, just repeat it and repeat it to this new blissful state. And slithery notes in the violins reminiscent of the flute. And here we are. D flat major. D flat major with his glorious melody.

There's the dissonance. Now he's going to move. And there's the panting sighing motif. all the strings in unison and repetition as it dissipates and fractures. And you can just feel the heat come out of it. Now violin solo. Reminiscent of that beautiful melody. And here we're going to go into a very special garden room.

There's a transition here, so delicate, right here. And the flutist is now playing this melody on an E, an E. Back to some chasing. Or dreaming of the chasing of the moon. New key. We're back in flats. And you feel how it settled? Yeah. It kind of went into a couch a little bit deeper.

Oh, some splash of water breaths. Yes. And unwind and unwind. And now we have antique symbols. Yeah. There we are at the Javanese pavilion. We have these beautiful little bells. Langriss. And here we're back to our motif again.

There is the flute theme. And the harp is slower now, right? Yes. And the cello has joined the flute for color. The cello has joined the flute for color. And now it'll dissolve with repetition. One, two, three, into a new space. Ah! Our opening flute melody, now on oboe, some deep colors.

But we have landed peacefully in E major. The last notes of Pan's Pipe. You were listening to Nine Minutes That Changed the World with Ivar's Torrens of Tafel Music and broadcaster Robert Harris. You can let us know what you think of this program or any other at our website, cbc.ca slash ideas, where you can also see the artwork Ivar's and Robert were talking about. Technical production, Danielle Duval. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer. The senior producer is Nikola Lukšić. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayyad.