In a surprising and inspired collaboration, the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, Music Director Edwin Outwater, and the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing have created an exciting exploration of the parallels between music and science. This mash-up of art and the quantum world reveals that, like everything else, music operates at nature’s tiniest and most fundamental level – the quantum level – and that art and science have always followed a parallel course: by turns ruled by order and tradition, then by innovation, then by new rules and paradigms.
Accompanied by narration and video, the storyline moves from Newton’s falling-apple physics to the counterintuitive world of the quantum realm, with the help of classical Mozart, contemporary Webern, and avant-garde works by Xenakis and Cage.