C4| Saturday/Sunday, October 19 - 20, 2019 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
This Year’s
NobelsHave
Cosmic Reach
FROM TOP: ILLUSTRATION BY GLUEKIT; GETTY IMAGES (5); ALAMYWILCZEK’SUNIVERSE
FRANK WILCZEK
TOMASZ WALENTA
LAST WEEK, the Nobel
Prize in Physics went to
James Peebles for theo-
retical contributions to
physical cosmology,
along with Michel
Mayor and Didier Queloz for their
work on exoplanets—distant planets
that orbit stars other than our sun.
These lines of research both shed
light on the universe and our posi-
tion in it, but they do so from very
different perspectives. Modern
physical cosmology reveals that the
universe started out amazingly sim-
ple and homogeneous, while the
study of exoplanets reveals that at
present it is complex and diverse.
That contrast poses a big question:
How did the complexity emerge?
Early in the history of the uni-
verse, all the matter in it was hot,
dense and very nearly uniform. It
was also rapidly expanding. Those
ideas are the heart of the standard
Big Bang model, which lets us ac-
count for many observations, in-
cluding the fact that distant galax-
ies are moving away from us and
the relative abundance of different
chemical elements.
Notably, the model predicted the
existence of a lingering Big Bang af-
terglow—the so-called microwave
background radiation that fills all
space. That afterglow was duly ob-
served, providing a snapshot of the
early universe. Dr. Peebles pulled
those lines of evidence together into
a coherent scenario of the history of
the universe and spelled out its con-
sequences for the size, shape and
distribution of galaxies.
The early hot gas that filled the
universe was completely random in
its molecular motions and chemical
mixing. It was, to a very good ap-
proximation, in the condition physi-
cists call “complete thermal equilib-
rium.” Ordinarily, once systems
reach complete thermal equilibrium
they stay there. They remain uni-
form and featureless; they do not
develop structure or “come to life.”
Our universe escaped that dismal
fate primarily because gravity, act-ing over vast reaches of space and
time, makes uniformity unstable.
Gravity wants things to clump. Thus
the material in the universe, at first
highly uniform, fragmented under
the influence of gravity into vast
cloudlike structures.
At first, the clouds were tenuous
and wispy, but over time, under the
continuing influence of gravity,
their material condensed further.
The matter in the universe gradu-
ally evolved into its present config-
uration: galaxies hosting stars and
planets, all separated by yawning
regions of nearly empty space.
Planetary matter, cool and dense,
then began to host another level of
fragmentation and diversification:
the emergence of complex chemis-
try and even—in at least one case—
intelligent life. Because planets are
relatively small and emit no light of
their own, it is very hard to detect
them from far away. Dr. Mayor and
Dr. Queloz pioneered the delicate
technologies that have quickly taken
exoplanetary astronomy from sci-
ence fiction into a thriving, data-
driven enterprise.
This is a very broad-brush ac-
count of how the complex universe
that we inhabit today could have
emerged. Though many crucial de-
tails need filling in, the outlines are
straightforward and widely ac-
cepted: The emergence of abundant
complexity from simple beginnings
and simple laws takes a long time
and requires lots of matter (but
maybe nothing else). Thankfully, our
universe is blessed with plentiful
supplies of both.REVIEW
A Greek vase from 380 B.C. depicting
a musical contest.Islamic world. These songs entered Europe via
the Iberian peninsula, and their distinctive po-
etic themes were adopted by the nobility, who
often sang about being enslaved to love. The
idea that a feudal lord could be a slave seems
incongruous, until you realize that actual slaves
originated this style of singing.
As these examples suggest,
such visionary outsiders are even-
tually imitated and assimilated by
cultural elites. Sometimes, if they
live long enough, they become
elites themselves. In the 1960s,
many parents were shocked by
their first encounters with the
Beatles and the Rolling Stones—but those bad boys eventually
were knighted and turned into Sir
Paul McCartney and Sir Mick Jag-
ger. Bob Dylan was a leader of the
counterculture in 1966 but hon-
ored as the Nobel laureate in liter-
ature in 2016. The album “Straight
Outta Compton,” by hip-hoppers
N.W.A., was banned by many re-
tailers and radio stations in 1988
and was even denounced by the
FBI. But in 2017, the album was
chosen by the Library of Con-
gress for preservation in the Na-
tional Recording Registry for its
cultural merit.
These humble origins can be
traced in almost all song genres.
In the early days of the U.S. music industry, re-
cord labels had to undertake field trips to the
most impoverished areas of the South whether
they were seeking out blues musicians for black
audiences or country stars for white audiences.
And the same linkage can be seen in other parts
of the world, in the history of Jamaican reggae,
Brazilian samba, Argentine tango, Greek rebe-
tiko and a host of other world-changing song
styles.
Alas, the very process of legitimization in-
volves distortion—obscuring the origins of mu-
sic and repurposing it to meet the needs of the
powerful. Today, the most popular songs still
come from outsiders—just look at hip-hop or
rock or R&B or outlaw country music and see
how the same pattern plays out in different
contexts. Whether we are dealing with the trou-
badours, the Beatles or Snoop Dogg, an offi-
cially cleansed public image is
promulgated while the disrepu-
table past is shuffled offstage
and out of view.
The institutions that sanction
and preserve musical culture
will never be able to guide us,
however, to music that is new or
different. The purified musical
heritage that they preserve may
be highly respectable, but it
leaves out too much.
Outsiders are especially well positioned to dis-
rupt old traditions and create new ones, for the
simple reason they have the least allegiance to
the prevailing manners and attitudes of the soci-
eties in which they live. In music, we crave this
disruption and the excitement it brings. Again
and again, we turn to bohemians, rebels and oth-
ers who operate on the margins of society to pro-
vide us with songs we can’t find elsewhere.
For the same reason, we ought to celebrate
diversity—not because it’s fashionable or politi-
cally expedient but because it brings creative
outsiders into the musical ecosystem. We often
fear strangers arriving in our midst, but they
serve as catalysts that spur new forms of artis-
tic expression. Just look at the port cities and
multicultural communities, from Lesbos to Liv-
erpool, that have played a key role in the his-
tory of song.
In a sense, the internet has turned all of our
neighborhoods into virtual port cities, giving us
immediate access to a world of sound outside
the purview of powerful interests. We shouldn’t
take that for granted: It’s almost certainly
where the next musical revolution will begin.This essay is adapted from Mr. Gioia’s new
book, “Music: A Subversive History,” pub-
lished by Basic Books.Music’s
‘low’ origins
are often
obscured or
ignored.P
opular songs are big
business nowadays,
the driving force be-
hind a $10 billion in-
dustry. But it all
started in the humblest way pos-
sible. The first documented song
in the English language came
from the mouth of an illiterate
cow herder. More than 1,300
years ago, the Venerable Bede, a
medieval scholar known as the
“father of English history,” wrote
down the words sung by Caed-
mon, who tended animals at a
Benedictine monastery in North
Yorkshire. Bede marveled over the miracle that
allowed an untutored servant to create such a
remarkable hymn.
Caedmon’s song might have seemed like a
miracle, but in the long history of music, this
kind of surprise is actually the rule, not the ex-
ception. Innovative songs almost always come
from outsiders—the poor, the unruly and the
marginalized.
The scholars Milman Parry and Albert Lord
confirmed this fact in the 1930s, when they set
out to trace the origins of ancient epics like the
“Iliad” and the “Odyssey.” Their research took
them to Bosnia, where they met Avdo Mede-
dović, an illiterate peasant farmer they dubbed
the “Yugoslav Homer.” Accompanying himself
on a one-string instrument, Mededović per-
formed a single story-song that took seven
days to complete and went on for 12,311 lines—
roughly the same length as the “Odyssey.” He
performed entirely from memory, aided by pat-
terned improvisations of the kind used by jazz
musicians.
Parry and Lord later declared that every one
of the great singers of tales they encountered
during their field research was illiterate. The
ability to sing an epic poem was not only a skill
that couldn’t be taught in college, but a formal
education would almost certainly destroy it.
Other researchers have found similar per-
formers, almost always among the poor and out-
cast. Song collector John Lomax was so im-
pressed with James “Iron Head” Baker,
discovered during a 1933 visit to record prison-
ers at Huntsville Penitentiary in Texas, that he
later described him as a “black Homer.” Or con-
sider the case of the Russian epic singer Vasily
Shchegolenok, who amazed Leo Tolstoy in the
1870s with his storytelling and influenced the fa-
mous novelist’s own writing style; or the herder
Beatrice Bernardi, who astonished the famous
art critic John Ruskin in Tuscany in the 1880s
with her ability to sing lengthy tales by memory.
History books sometimes acknowledge the
“low” origins of our more popular genres of
music. The association of musical innovation
with enslaved people, for instance, is well
known in the Americas, where the descendants
of slaves shaped the provocative sounds of jazz,
blues, samba, salsa, reggae, soul music and nu-
merous other genres. But in many other in-
stances, such origins are obscured or ignored.
Most music students are taught, for instance,
the Lydian and Phrygian modes, invented by
the ancient Greeks, without ever realizing that
these terms came from the ethnicities of the
enslaved performers who created these sounds.
Likewise, the love-song tradition associated
with the troubadours of southern France actu-
ally originated with female slave singers in theBYTEDGIOIAFrom ancient Greece to
rock and roll, musical
innovation has come from
those on society’s margins.The History
Of Song
Is All About
Outsiders
Clockwise from top left:
Muddy Waters, Mick Jagger, Dr. Dre,
B.B. King and Bob Dylan.