Cosmic chords

For his epic touring shows, physicist Brian Cox has returned to his musical roots to capture the wonders of the universe, as he tells Clifford Hall

- Clifford Hall

At the start of his new show Emergence, Brian Cox – the 1990s keyboardist turned eminent physicist – skips the equations and starts with a snowflake. It’s a question borrowed from Johannes Kepler, who in the winter of 1610 was crossing Prague’s Charles Bridge when he noticed one land on his coat: why six corners, and not five or seven? The answer eventually leads to quantum mechanics. But as the floor-shaking opening of Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’ Symphony fills the arena, Cox’s real argument begins to surface. Science can reveal the architecture of the universe, but it takes music to make that architecture feel like anything.

The relationship between the two isn’t decorative. Mahler, Strauss and Sibelius aren’t in the show for atmosphere – they’re doing the same work as the physics, just in a different language. ‘The music I’m drawn to is music at the turn of the 20th century,’ Cox tells me. ‘It is art that’s going alongside a revolution in physics – quantum mechanics and relativity.’ He cites a friend who put it plainly: ‘How can we justify our existence when faced with the unlimited power of nature? That’s what that music is.’ Cox isn’t being glib as he mentions Mahler’s famous brushoff – asked what his symphonies meant, Mahler said if he could have said it, he wouldn’t have written the music – but means it as a precise description of what music can do that science can’t.