The Science of Song, the Song of Science
MANCHESTER, England — In one song that
Bjork performed here on Thursday night, the bass lines were zaps of artificial lightning from a Tesla coil in a cage. In another, a sizable Victorian-looking contraption of stainless steel, the
Sharpsichord — part giant music box, part harp, part gramophone — used a rotating barrel to play deep, bonging counterpoint.
For another song, four 10-foot pendulums swung in a computer-maneuvered sequence to pluck delicate,
harplike figures. A gameleste — a celeste with gamelanlike bronze bars replacing the usual sugarplum-fairy notes — and a portable pipe organ, both remotely controlled, pinged and tootled through the set.
A roving 24-woman choir in sequins and gold lamé capes, Graduale Nobili, sang dense, cascading harmonies behind
Bjork, the constantly surprising Icelandic songwriter. In a frizzed-out wig and a sparkly garment that was a robe on one side and a mini-dress on the other, Bjork was performing her new collection of science-minded songs, “Biophilia,” from an album to be released in September.
It was the concert premiere of “Biophilia,” commissioned for opening night and five additional performances by the
Manchester International Festival, which continues here through July 17. Bjork’s concert was staged in the round in Campfield Market Hall, a warehouselike building now used by Manchester’s Museum of Science and Industry; about 1,800 fans were packed in around modest rope barriers, just a few feet from the musicians.
Despite the intimate staging and the unusual instruments like the Sharpsichord and the pendulum harp, the concert — along with the coming album and its associated Web site — is among the more standard aspects of “Biophilia,” a Bjork project that has snowballed with missions and media. By now “Biophilia” has brought together not only Bjork and her recording studio collaborators, but also instrument makers, smartphone app designers, scientists and a musicologist.
“I didn’t intend it to go so big,” Bjork said with rueful pride in an interview before the performance. “It’s the way most complex project I’ve ever done. There’s been like 500,000 million e-mails and meetings.” But from their beginnings, the songs on “Biophilia” had a grand ambition: to unify music, nature (as described by science) and technology.
“Biophilia” is a possible paradigm for the 21st-century album, one that welcomes the interactivity of the Internet and harnesses the power and flexibility of devices that incorporate video, audio and user control far beyond the play button.
The songs on “Biophilia” will also be released as apps — one for each song, to be sold as modules in a larger app for the entire album — for the
iPad and
iPhone. (The developers have not yet decided whether to reprogram the apps for
Android devices.) Along with animated graphics, some of which were shown on overhead video screens during the concert, the apps hold not only detailed analysis of the songs — including both conventional and newly devised music notation — but also gamelike excursions through the music, visions of scientific phenomena and the potential to be used as musical instruments themselves. A listener can hear a song, see its structure, play along or completely disassemble some songs and turn their components into something new.
“What Bjork is doing feels a lot like the birth of cinema or the birth of opera,” said Scott Snibbe, a media artist and leading app developer who managed the “Biophilia” project and whose studio created three of the album’s apps. “We’re entering the age of interactivity. The passive, one-way media will become a blip in human history. Bjork had a complete, unified concept where everything was interconnected. The music wasn’t dominant, the image wasn’t dominant, the interactivity wasn’t dominant. Everything worked together the way a movie or an opera does.”
For instance, the Tesla coil onstage, for the song “Thunderbolt,” finds its digital equivalent in an app that lets users make sounds by gesturing to draw lightning bolts — or swirls or dots or polygons — on the touch screen. Some apps can output MIDI signals that can release any sound in a musician’s library, letting the user apply Bjork’s musical elements and interfaces to create music that sounds totally different. The apps format will allow Bjork to add material to the album after its release; the app visualizes the album as a galaxy, and each song as an additional constellation.
“Biophilia” also encompasses performing residencies in eight cities over the next two years (including, tentatively, New York in early 2012), with music education programs for children at each stop. That’s because the project began with pedagogical intent. Since her own days in music school in the 1970s, before she started making her name in Icelandic punk bands, Bjork had been thinking about music education that would encourage creativity rather than rote and would look beyond classical European models.
“We need to build on other things that are not just major and minor,” she said. “There are a hundred scales.”
Additional performances of Bjork’s “Biophilia” are on
Sunday and Thursday and July 10, 13 and 16 at the Manchester International Festival; mif.co.uk.
Meanwhile the app is fantastic. 
