Anna joins conductor Oliver Zeffman and others for a concert at the Science Museum. Stephen Hawking’s scientific explorations delved into the nature of time itself and our perceptions of it. For composers, time is the medium through which their works are experienced by performers and audience alike. Bach’s fugues create coherence out of interlocking musical lines, each of which is independent of the others and moving in its own timeframe – yet which make perfect sense in combination. Birtwistle’s Tragoedia combines different groups of instruments to achieve the opposite, with each player in his own temporal world. Terry Riley’s hypnotic 1964 work In C is scored for any number of musicians, and is often cited as the first significant minimalist piece of music. Ordered chaos – not unlike the concept of entropy used so frequently in theoretical physics – is a key component of this piece, which takes shape thanks to the whim of the performers. 53 musical segments, all based on a few notes of the C major scale, are repeated any number of times, each musician moving at their own pace; it is almost wilfully random, yet there are moments of synchronicity and order.

Music x Museums presented by Viking is an immersive new concert series, inviting audiences into London’s most iconic cultural institutions to experience performances blending classical music with the capital’s most impressive architecture and collections of art.

Particularly when all the arts have been so badly hit over the last two years, collaboration between different art forms and institutions is more important than ever. Music x Museums presented by Viking aims to be a meaningful way of reigniting cultural activity and bringing audiences back to the heart of London.

Programme

• George Benjamin—’Canon & Fugue’ (from Bach The Art of Fugue)
• Harrison Birtwistle—’Tragoedia’
• William Marsey—New commission
• Terry Riley—’In C’

This concert is supported by Wert and Async.

Seated tickets are available for the Making the Modern World gallery on level 0, with standing tickets in Medicine: The Welcome Galleries on level 1, overlooking the performance.

A pop-up bar will open in the Exploring Space gallery from 18.30, with the concert commencing at 19.30. The programme duration is 75 minutes.