“ … imagination shouldn’t have boundaries and that insight often comes from the most unexpected places.”
page in Galileo’s laboratory notebooks (folio 107v) that documents his work with inclined planes, Drake concluded that Galileo turned to his thorough musical training to help him equalize short intervals of time, leading him to the revolutionary conclusion that for an object falling freely, the distance from fall is always proportional to the square of the elapsed time. Of course, this is Drake’s personal interpretation of 400-year-old laboratory data, but, as related in Crease’s book (and in Drake’s original research), I found it absolutely compelling and, being a musician,
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HOFSTRA horizons
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began immediately thinking of a way to bring this wonderfully elegant intersection of art and science off the page and onto the stage. With the right kind of presentation, it seemed to me that an audience from either discipline might learn from an important historical example that imagination shouldn’t have boundaries and that insight often comes from the most unexpected places. Actually creating that presentation took several years, but the finished piece has convinced me that my motivations were correct. Galileo’s Muse – a combination of theater, music, and science demonstration – employs the combined forces of two baroque violins, baroque cello, lute and theorbo (bass lute), as well as a modern re-creation of Galileo’s inclined plane. With material from Drake’s writings, Galileo’s notebooks, contemporary accounts, rarely heard pieces by Galileo’s composer father and brother, and other music of Galileo’s time (composers such as Andrea Falconiero, Giovanni Legrenzi, and Tarquinio Merula), along with a liberal dollop of my own imagination to fill gaps in the story, the complete show is about an hour long. During the course of a performance, I wear many hats (though not literally). I narrate Galileo’s thoughts and discoveries, I demonstrate his experiment of the inclined plane, and I play baroque cello in the musical interludes, moving back and forth between all three roles. It keeps me quite busy! Unfortunately, a musical and theatrical performance doesn’t naturally translate onto the page, but, in a considerably shortened form, here is a description of the sights, sounds and some of the narration that you’d experience at a performance of Galileo’s Muse.
Synopsis of the Performance Imagine a stage – violins, lutes, and cello in a shallow semicircle – an inclined plane at the front and to the left. The lights dim. A grainy video fills a screen that hangs across the back of the stage. Astronaut David Scott of the 1971 Apollo 15 mission stands in his spacesuit on the surface of the moon. He holds a feather in one hand and a hammer in the other. “One of the reasons we got here today,” he says, “is because of a gentleman named Galileo a long time ago who made a rather significant discovery about falling objects in gravity fields. And we thought, where would be a better place to confirm his findings than on the moon? So I’ll drop the two of them here and, hopefully, they’ll hit the ground at the same time. [They do] How about that! Mr. Galileo was correct in his findings.” As the video fades and the lights come up, a pair of lutes perform a ricercar composed by Vincenzo Galilei. And then the story begins ... The year is 1583. It is August – a hot summer’s day in the northern Italian city of Florence. A young university student, home for summer vacation, is taking a walk through his favorite city. All morning he has been playing lute duets with his father Vincenzo, a noted lute player and composer. But now in the mid-afternoon heat he is more than happy to be outside. He strolls along the river Arno, crosses it at the Ponte Alle Grazie, and heads towards the center of the city. When he reaches the Piazza della Signoria though, he finds himself surprised by an afternoon thunderstorm. Sheltering beneath a covered gallery of a nearby palazzo he waits there for the storm to pass. As the storm rages our student sees something he has never noticed