On her first night, she regales the king until dawn with a story (one of the thousand myths of Arabian Nights). The king is moved to awe and begs for an ending to the story. And then another the next night. Scheherazade is saved by telling stories of awe. She repeats this pattern for one thousand nights, and the king and Scheherazade fall in love. He marries her and makes her his queen, and they have three children. For Adams, the story is about oppression, the violence women face at the hands of men, and the power of the female voice.
That night of the performance, Adams arrived onstage, followed shortly thereafter by the violinist Leila Josefowicz, whom Adams had in mind when he composed the piece. She played standing close to Adams, in a flowing, diaphanous outfit (with biceps bulging). The symphony has four movements, charting how Scheherazade tells her first story, falls in love, fights back against the threats of men, and flees and finds sanctuary.
For most of Scheherazade.2, I struggled to find my feeling. Like many, I love specific veins of music but can’t explain why. Listening to many contemporary composers leaves me in a wordless state, lacking concepts and language to discern what life patterns may be symbolized in their sounds.
As the symphony begins, the voice of my default self is loud: it nags me about why I never wear the right clothes, how I’m a fish out of water at highbrow events like these, what time my flight departs tomorrow, or how in seeking to feel awe in music I undermine the very possibility.
The piece starts with loud drums. They hit me like the sudden strike of a breaking wave or roar of thunder. My heart slows—the orienting reflex to the new. I am still, transfixed, silent, motionless, and aligned with the people next to me. Our porous bodies have shifted, our shared attention fixed on the stage.
In the movement “Scheherazade and the Men with Beards,” written to capture how women fight patriarchal oppression, Josefowicz’s high-pitched, rising notes of protest are countered by deeper, louder, domineering sounds from the strings—the voices of men condemning her alleged adultery, threatening honor-killing. These are the sounds of a universal life pattern, the struggle between the powerful who subjugate and the powerless trying to survive and find forms of resistance.
I feel agitated and on edge, made uneasy by the violence of power. Images move through my mind. An unexpected trip to the ER in the Sierra foothills—Rolf’s cancer had put him into a near coma. He was rushed to a small hospital, where he recovered, regaining blurry consciousness. During my stay, we walked the fluorescent-lit halls, passing two parents whose son was reeling from a psychotic break. Rolf weighing 148 pounds, walking with blue gown on, stooped, slowly moving in a sterile beige hall. Uncertain footsteps, scuffing thin white hospital-issued slippers. Light-hearted comments: “I guess I’m not what I used to be, am I? . . . I almost left that time.”
As the symphony arrives at its end, Scheherazade flees and finds sanctuary. Josefowicz’s playing is soft. It soars in places, and then ends in gentle, elongating notes of serenity. The struggle of a single outspoken, brilliant woman speaking truth to power with a gift for stories of awe is over. At the end of struggle and subjugation is peace, felt in Adams’s composition in slowing, appreciative sounds whose notes drift off into space. Out of the quiet of the performance’s end, the crowd roars. I sense tears and a fast rush of goose bumps.
After the show, I give Yumi a big hug in the lobby and head into a torrential downpour. Headlights stuck in traffic project beams of light that illuminate millions of drops of rain, all making their way from the sky to the ground and then vanishing in ricochets off the asphalt, dissipating in radiating rings of water molecules. People run to Ubers and cabs with programs and coats draped over their heads. Clad in slacks and dresses and high heels, they shout familiar sounds—aah, wow, whoa, and woo-hoo. And laugh as they drive away.
I don’t know a soul around me. I go the wrong way trying to locate my hotel. I get drenched, embraced in torrents of rain, creating such luminous light filled with droplets on the streets. But I feel located in the world, surrounded by the blanket of the evening’s sound and the movements and shared rhythm of the people around me.
EIGHT SACRED GEOMETRIES How Our Awe for Visual Design Helps Us Understand the Wonders and Horrors of Life
A great deal of art, perhaps most art, actually is self-consoling fantasy. . . . Art, and by “art” from now on I mean good art, not fantasy art, affords us a pure delight in the independent existence of what is excellent. Both in its genesis and its enjoyment it is a thing totally opposed to selfish obsession. It invigorates our best faculties and, to use Platonic language, inspires love in the highest part of the soul. It is able to do this partly by virtue of something which it shares with nature: a perfection of form which invites unpossessive contemplation and resists absorption into the selfish dream life of the consciousness.
• IRIS MURDOCH
Jurassic Park is a visual paean to the wonders of life. Its high-spirited narrative careers through encounters with overpowering nature—the waves of a tropical storm—big ideas—gene editing, chaos theory—dinosaurs, and, like so many of Steven Spielberg’s films, the moral beauty of children. In the movie these wonders are imperiled by capitalists seeking to commodify awe.
When eleven-year-old Michael Frederickson first saw the brontosaurus in that film, he was awestruck. For those in the world of CGI (computer-generated imagery), that slow-moving, tree-trimming dinosaur is an act of Iris Murdoch’s “good art,” allowing “pure delight in . . . what is excellent.” It is, for CGI artists, like the Lascaux cave paintings, Giotto’s frescoes, the Dutch masters’ portrayal of domesticity and light, Hokusai’s paintings, and Cézanne’s cubism-inspiring apples: a new way of seeing the world. With the magic special effects, Spielberg and his team created tyrannosaurs, triceratops, stegosauruses, and brontosauruses that we, as viewers, feel are real.
To explain to his parents how Jurassic Park moved him so, Michael bought the film’s soundtrack and played it one night during dinner. As they sat listening, Michael burst into tears. His parents thought he was depressed. A year later, in sixth grade, Michael was given this essay prompt: What is the best day you could ever have? Michael’s answer: “After lunch, do computer animation for Pixar.” After studying computer science, where he often found digital awe in the patterns and systems of code, he would in fact make his way to Pixar and begin a career in visual awe.
Today, Michael is a “set artist” at Pixar. He uses the latest advances in computer graphics, big data, and machine learning to create the visual worlds of Pixar films—the streets of Paris in Ratatouille, the reef life in Finding Dory, and the interiors of Riley’s mind in Inside Out.
For Michael, Inside Out allows its viewers to reflect upon loss and the search for identity. Working on it led him to insights about his own life, but once it was released in theaters, he felt adrift. As he tells me this, he quotes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick: “in landlessness alone resides highest truth.” Awe does leave us in a “landless” place, unmoored and unconstrained by the default self and society’s status quo. He began giving a talk around Pixar, which he shares with me over a cup of coffee. After some pleasantries Michael opens his laptop to his first slide, “The Sixth Emotion.” That emotion is awe.