This year's Cambridge Science Festival includes several lecture-concerts, performances and events featuring members of the Faculty of Music.
On 17 March, PhD Composer Darren Bloom will co-present a lecture-recital with physicist Joe Davighli, about their collaboration in the creation of a string quartet based on Carlo Rovelli’s bestseller Seven Brief Lessons on Physics.
From using complex cross-rhythms to express the time dilation that occurs as one approaches a black hole, to using aleatoric notation to illustrate Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, Davighi and Bloom, with the assistance of the award-winning Piatti String Quartet, will demonstrate in an interactive and illustrated lecture-recital how their ideas developed from these shared principles into a fully-fledged dramatic musical composition. Audience members will also have the opportunity to participate in the music-making by volunteering to guide the performers through sections of the piece, thus giving them a deeper insight into the physics behind the music. The event will include a complete performance of Bloom's string quartet. More details here: https://www.sciencefestival.cam.ac.uk/events/limited-tickets-available-door-collision
On Thursday 21 March, as part of the celebrations for The Year of the Periodic Table, Dr Edward Wickham will lead a unique musical experience, entitled Mendeleev’s Dream, in which participants can sing or play their element as part of a vast musical ensemble, creating an elemental harmony: https://www.sciencefestival.cam.ac.uk/events/fully-booked-mendeleevs-dream-experience-periodic-table-through-music
Then on 23 March, former graduate student Adam McDonagh will be part of 'Ensembles and Embryos', an interactive exploration of the parallels between making music and making an embryo: https://www.sciencefestival.cam.ac.uk/events/ensembles-and-embryos
All of the above events are free to attend. For more information about the Science Festival, including details of how to book, go to the Festival website: https://www.sciencefestival.cam.ac.uk