Einstein, Tagore & Music: Nitin Sawhney & Nicki Wells at TEDxSalford (Transcript)

He also was trying to figure out, I suppose, how you could actually unite every single theory going, and explain the universe.

So what do you think the first thing was they said to each other when these two amazing giants of the East and the West met? Well, it might not have been exactly what you might imagine. The first thing that was actually said was by Rabindranath Tagore, and he came up with this interesting opening shot to Albert Einstein, which was where he said, “I was discussing with Doctor Mendel today the new mathematical discoveries which tell us that in the realm of infinitesimal atoms chance has its play; the drama of existence is not predetermined in character” which probably would have been quite a surprise to hear as the first thing that someone says when you walk in the door.

So, Einstein would have particularly focused on these four words: “Chance has its play.” And the reason he would have focused on those was because he thought that a chance equated with a quantum theory, and particularly with uncertainty, physicists will know that the uncertainty principle from Heisenberg – the quantum physicist – was that the position and momentum of a particle couldn’t be known simultaneously.

So he felt very uncomfortable with that notion and with quantum physics as a whole as he said: “God doesn’t play dice.” He didn’t believe in random occurrences and the quantum weirdness, it didn’t really work in his mind. It might have put him out of a job and left him looking for other work.

So, just to kind of move on from that. He actually postulated the idea of an elegant universe, where absolutely everything could be explained, and he tried to do that simply through equations. Of course, he came up with the most famous equation of all time, where he equated energy of the universe with mass times the speed of light squared. So, he believed in this idea of universal truths – that’s what he was looking for in equations, and he wanted a universal truth that could explain everything.

If we go to Tagore now and look at the way he thought about the concept of universal truth, he took a very different kind of approach to that. I won’t read you the whole of this, but he said, “Truth, which is one with the universal being, must be essentially human.” He was a humanist. It was in the same way the Italian Renaissance was a humanist movement, so was the Bengali Renaissance. He said, “Otherwise, whatever we individuals realize as true never can be called truth.” So essentially, what he was talking about was subjectivity based on ancient Eastern philosophy.

Einstein, on the other hand, in the same conversation with Tagore, he talked about a hypothetical table in a house and said, “If nobody were in the house, the table would exist all the same, but this is already illegitimate from your point of view, because we cannot explain what it means, that the table is there, independently of us.” So, here he’s talking about objectivity based on Western science.

How does this all relate to music? Well, it’s quite interesting, because first of all, I didn’t know this until a couple of years ago that Einstein was a great classical violinist, and he’d studied violin from the age of five. And in fact, in his later life, he went on to be the vice president of Princeton Symphony Orchestra between 1952 to 1955. So he was quite an accomplished musician and he gave numerous performances. It was said of him that “Einstein relished Mozart, noting to a friend that it was as if the great Wolfgang Amadeus did not ‘create’ his beautifully clear music at all, but simply discovered it already made. This perspective parallels, remarkably, Einstein’s views on the ultimate simplicity of nature and its explanation and statement via essentially simple mathematical expressions.”

You can break that down into two different ideas: the first of which is that he thought of music as having an objective aesthetic that existed beyond human perception, that it was not created. And secondly, that it had a mathematical simplicity. It had a structure and it could be ordered and knowable. So the first idea actually coincided a lot with the way in which Tagore thought about the universe.

He believed in a universal spirit, and this idea of something greater than ourselves being out there that we could tap into. So if we take that first idea and we look at it, we could look at the mathematician, Johannes Kepler, who was a 16th and 17th-century mathematician who followed in the footsteps of Pythagoras – who’d written this book called “Music of the Spheres.” And Kepler went on to write a book called “Harmonices Mundi,” where he said that the harmonic resonance of orbiting planets is intrinsically musical. So he thought that there was a universal musicality, again, that was out there, and was intrinsic in the way everything worked.

The person you’re looking at is the late great Pandit Ravi Shankar who passed away last year, and who I was privileged to know. He once said to me that a musician is a medium through which the raga manifests. I find that quite interesting because it’s this notion that you don’t create the music yourself, you don’t play it yourself, it’s something that you tap into and you gradually expose it. The idea of the raga – I’ll just explain a little bit about what a raga is. A raga is a series of notes; it’s up to seven notes. It’s an exploration of melody, of melodic structure, and it can represent times of day, the seasons, different moods, different colors.

Ragas are very variable, and you can equate them to some degree with modes in Western music, but they differ in lots of other ways. He also said of Tagore, who he actually met once, that he was like the sun. Tagore himself was a prolific musician. He wrote, in his lifetime, 2,000 songs, some of which were influenced by Celtic music as well. A fantastic body of work, and all those songs are still performed, many of them are still performed today in India and across the world.

He also said – a very beautiful quote from him was “Music fills the infinite between two souls.” So, if we look at Albert Einstein here, we’ve got a person who thinks of music in a very objective way. He doesn’t really engage with the idea of creativity – [Wow! I didn’t know I could do that! Amazing!]

So he really kind of believed in the idea that the music was already – (microphone problem) you tapped into it. Excuse me, it’s something Tagore believed in the idea – he was quite intuitive, and he believed in the idea that you should think of music in a much more subjective way.

So two people that I really admired who actually worked together and collaborated in the 20th century, who came from those respective backgrounds, were Yehudi Menuhin, who was a fantastic – as most people know – a fantastic classical violinist, and also one of my heroes, the great Pandit Ravi Shankar, and they really made it work. They really brought together those two traditions, and it was a beautiful kind of – I wouldn’t use the word fusion because I’m not too fond of it – but it was a great synergy that they had. So let’s look at the differences between Western classical music and Indian classical music.

In Western classical music, it’s a written tradition. It’s rich in harmony, it’s rich in melody. It has simpler rhythm. You have 4/4, 6/8, 3/4 time – they’re the most commonly used time signatures. And its objective – it’s set in structure, it has set composition to it and it has a lot of certainty. Even the dynamics of written music are set, so even the interpretation of the music is dictated to by the sheet music itself.

With Indian classical music, it comes from an oral tradition. It’s simpler in harmony, it’s rich in melody, it’s rich in rhythm. You have many time signatures in 11-beat cycles, 17-beat cycles, 12-beat cycles, and so on. It can be much more complex. It’s subjective, it uses a lot of mathematics in the rhythms as well. Oh, right. No one’s heard me the whole time. Anyway, shall I start again? It’s much more subjective. This is great, and I can hear myself now. Fantastic! It’s much more interpretive in structure. It has spontaneous creativity. It’s largely improvised, and there’s a lot of uncertainty, much like this [microphone]. The reason it’s uncertain, particularly, is because each time you perform an Indian classical piece of music, it’s totally different and it varies a lot.

So actually, to give you a demonstration of those two different things, we can bring in the person I’m obscuring totally is Nicki Wells. She’s going to sing for us, first of all, Panis Angelicus, followed by the Indian classical raga [Purvi] (Singing) Panis angelicus Fit panis hominum Dat panis coelicus Figuris terminum O res mirabilis Manducat dominum Pauper, pauper Servus et humilis (Singing Indian classical raga)

Great! Let’s come back to Einstein. He actually said that music like the [inaudible] as we know. He said music, like the universe, is a puzzle to be solved, which is pretty much his approach to everything. And he actually said, in conversation with Tagore, “We want to know whether Western music is a conventional or a fundamental human feeling, whether to feel consonance or dissonance is natural, or a convention which we accept.” So Tagore thought in the very different way, he didn’t think in terms of music to be solved as a puzzle, he thought of it as a painter, that music was like a painting to be expressed.

He said, “Melody and harmony are like lines and colors in pictures. A simple linear picture may be completely beautiful; the introduction of color may make it vague and insignificant. Yet color may, by the combination with lines create great pictures.” So, you’ve got these very different approaches to music, and his approach there was very poetic, which is a shame because Einstein absolutely hated poetry. He hated most things that were creative in the arts, and in fact, he really didn’t like Beethoven very much, for similar reasons. He thought he was way too creative and too unpredictable. As a result, probably pretty much in the same way that he thought Heisenberg’s creativity with the uncertainty principle wasn’t great either. That’s probably how he looked at him.

The reason, partially for this, I think, is because of the fact that he lived in Berlin, which actually was two years before the Bauhaus school was there. The Bauhaus school before that was in Weimar and then Dessau, and it was a movement of structured thinking. It was very ordered, and that came through the architecture, the art, and the design of the Bauhaus movement I think that was the Berlin that Einstein occupied, and that probably fed into his way of looking at everything.

Tagore was a much more intuitive person. He said – and this kind of smacks of unrequited love. He said, “I spent my days stringing and unstringing my instrument, while the song I came to sing remains unsung. He spent pretty much his life in terms of unrequited love, writing songs haunted by the ghosts of a woman who committed suicide over him, and she was actually his sister-in-law. When he married, two months later she actually took her own life, and he was haunted by her for the rest of his life. Another fact about him is although he hated nationality, Tagore actually inadvertently wrote the unofficial national anthem of India which became that after his death.

(Singing) Jana Gana Mana Adhinayaka jaya hey Bharata bhagyavidhata Punjaba, Sindhu, Gujarata, Maratha Dravida, Utkala, Banga Vindhya, Himachala, Yamuna, Ganga Uchchala jaladhi taranga.

Thank you. So just coming back to Tagore’s original statement to Einstein, it seems a bit full on and a bit crazy. But actually, it does refer to quantum physics. It’s likely that Tagore did know quite a bit about quantum physics, not just through their mutual friend, Dr Mendel, but also through another member of the Bengali Renaissance, or another person from that movement, and his name was Satyendra Bose, who actually came up with a Bose-Einstein condensate with Einstein, and who also is the person after whom the boson is named.

So these four words again: “Chance has its play.” I was quite interested in that phrase because for me, as a musician, I’ve always thought that it’s the other way around – I’ll try and spin that in – and that play, as a musician, stimulates chance. Just to give you an example of that. Years ago, it’s quite weird – I’ve had lots of coincidences in my life and career as a musician, and many years ago, I was living in this shared house. I had three flatmates, one guy was called Iqbal, and another guy Hitesh, and another guy’s called Sanj.

And I remember I was looking for a tabla player – tabla is an Indian classical percussion instrument. I was looking for a tabla player to play a gig with me the following week. And I couldn’t find anyone. I remember ringing up my mom because I remember asking her about this kid who I’d jammed with when he was about 11 years old, in this house – a fantastic tabla player. I was about 17, I was playing flamenco guitar with him and he was playing beautifully on the tabla, and I just wondered what had happened to him.

He must still be pretty good. So she actually went to see if she could find him. Eventually, she sent me a letter that she hadn’t opened, and it was just forwarded to me. So I opened it up in the living room in front of my three flatmates, and I was surprised to see that the address inside was my address, so I turned around to Iqbal, and said, “So when you were 11, did you actually jam with this guy, where you were playing tabla and he was playing the guitar?” He said, “That was you?” So, it’s kind of I suppose I’ve had lots of situations like that, but I kind of ultimately think that that is pretty odd.

I guess maybe that’s some of the things that people have been referring today in some of the speeches about some of the quantum weirdness I guess, in reflection on this conversation between Einstein and Tagore, ultimately, I do agree with Albert Einstein that there is something greater out there, and I think Tagore also agreed with that as well – something that you tap into as a musician when you’re playing or improvising or working.

But I also think with Tagore that there is a lot of chance in the way everything works, and that doesn’t just happen in the quantum world. I think, somehow, that feeds its way into the musical world. The more I play music, the more coincidences I find happening in my life. Anyway, thank you very much for that, Cheers Nicki Wells.

Related Posts

• Transcript of JD Vance’s Commencement Speech at the U.S. Naval Academy – 5/23/25
• Transcript of This Is What the Future of Media Looks Like: Hamish Mckenzie
• Transcript of Elizabeth Banks’ Commencement Speech At the University of Pennsylvania
• Transcript of Jon M.Chu’s Speech At USC Commencement 2025
• Transcript of Emotional Intelligence: From Theory to Everyday Practice – Marc Brackett