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A conversation with Keaton Henson for New Scientist,\u00a016 July 2018<\/a><\/p>\n What inspired your new\u00a0composition\u00a0Six Lethargies<\/em>?<\/strong><\/p>\n Keaton Henson\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/strong>Sad songs are something we all understand. I wondered if, instead of bringing people to tears, which can be quite cathartic, I could give them a direct musical experience of my anxiety disorder. When I used to perform live, I would distract myself from my anxiety by watching my audience \u2013 this group of 3000 strangers \u2013 and how they reacted to certain chord changes and certain inflections in my voice. You can really feel this happening. I became fascinated by the mechanisms of empathy.<\/p>\n And music is one of those mechanisms?<\/strong><\/p>\n KH<\/strong>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0For sure. Every culture we know of dances around a fire. Our heartbeats sync up, we all follow this one rhythm, and we feel the tribe unite. If I explain my break-up in words, say, you will be able to understand to a degree what I\u2019m going through. But if I write a piece of music and play it to you, you might just start crying, and that\u2019s totally incredible because I\u2019m not giving you any framework. I\u2019m not necessarily reminding you of something from your past. It\u2019s purely those patterns that are bringing you to tears.<\/p>\n KH<\/strong>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0The Britten Sinfonia\u00a0are performing a piece in six movements, and five of these movements simply explain how I feel. But there\u2019s also a movement that\u2019s designed to elicit those feelings in the Barbican Hall audience, which is where Brendan comes in.<\/p>\n KH<\/strong>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Brendan\u2019s kit is set up so that a tiny pore on someone\u2019s fingertip will control the hall\u2019s huge lighting rig, in real time. It\u2019s an amazing thing, and very beautiful. It can be a very uniting and comforting thing to be surrounded by people. At the same time, being surrounded by people you don\u2019t know is a perfect breeding ground for anxiety. The more anxious you become, the more you feel, \u201cOh God, I\u2019m anxious again, and everyone will notice!\u201d Well, we\u2019re going to be projecting people\u2019s anxiety through the entire lighting rig of the Barbican Hall. This perfectly represents what anxiety is like.<\/p>\n And the more anxious the audience is, the more anxious you\u2019re going to make them\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n BW<\/strong>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Yes. In the movement I\u2019m working on, we\u2019re not just trying to communicate. We\u2019re trying to actually elicit a state of anxiety. We\u2019re talking about having quiet rooms and ways to extract people if they feel panicked at any stage.<\/p>\n KH\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>\u00a0I\u2019m hoping that Friday\u2019s performance at the Barbican will be the first of many. We\u2019re interested in trying different things for each show, including varying the type of data we gather, and who we choose to gather data from.<\/p>\n How much research went into this piece?<\/strong><\/p>\n KH<\/strong>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0In particular I went to Canada to meet with a cognitive neuroscientist called Jessica Grant who studies the relationship between music, rhythm and emotion. But I\u2019m a massive science nerd, and I\u2019m wary of crossing too far into the realm of research. I wanted to use scientific thought and theory to help express what I\u2019m feeling. I didn\u2019t want *Six Lethargies* to become manipulative or sterile.<\/p>\n How did you go about composing\u00a0Six Lethargies<\/em>?<\/strong><\/p>\n KH<\/strong>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0I kept asking myself, what\u2019s the exact opposite of what I\u2019m trying to achieve? It\u2019s probably baroque music, because that\u2019s all about resolving tension, again and again. It delivers these constant hits of relief. I don\u2019t want to give too much away about the show, but a lot of it is going to be about what people think they\u2019re going to get next \u2014 and what I can do to stop them getting it.<\/p>\n You could simply not turn up\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n KH\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>\u00a0I\u2019ve given myself certain limitations! For instance, I\u2019m composing purely for string orchestra \u2013 believe me, you can do some really weird stuff with strings. And\u00a0Six Lethargies<\/em>\u00a0is a tonal composition. Atonal music is everyone\u2019s go-to method for inducing anxiety. But I\u2019m a singer-songwriter. I write pop songs. I work with intervals and scales. I decided I would try to make an anxious piece while hitting all the proper notes.<\/p>\n \u201cProper\u201d for whom?<\/strong><\/p>\n KH\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>\u00a0Music is built out of the melody of speech, and the way our speech patterns convey emotion. We assume Western music is a sort of universally understood music that can convey emotion intuitively to all cultures, and as it turns out we\u2019re not altogether wrong. Pretty much everyone around the world will hear the Moonlight Sonata and think, Wow, Beethoven must have been really sad when he wrote that.<\/p>\n Do people expect anxiety to sound a certain way?<\/strong><\/p>\n KH<\/strong>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0A lot of people have been talking to me about Bernard Herrmann\u2019s theme music for the film\u00a0Psycho<\/em>. And, naturally, I\u2019ve avoided any suggestion of that in this project. I want to avoid anything that people might expect to hear. Anxiety is all about not knowing what is going to happen next.<\/p>\n Is that what it\u2019s like to have your anxiety disorder?<\/strong><\/p>\n KH\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>\u00a0In horror movies, when the terrifying thing bursts out of the door, you\u2019re given this horrible fright which lasts a millisecond and is immediately followed by\u00a0a sigh of relief. You\u2019re pulling on a string and then releasing it. For me, that tension is never released. It\u2019s like an infinite rollercoaster, just building up, and up, and the higher it gets, the more you realise the drop is going to be very steep indeed\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A conversation with Keaton Henson for New Scientist,\u00a016 July 2018 What inspired your new\u00a0composition\u00a0Six Lethargies? Keaton Henson\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Sad songs are something we all understand. I wondered if, instead of bringing people to tears, which can be quite cathartic, I … Continue reading \nWhat can we expect from the performance?<\/strong><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\nBrendan Walker<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0I\u2019m best known for my work helping design roller-coasters. More generally, I\u2019m playing with the synergies between bodily rhythms and patterns in nature that have an emotional impact. Think, for example, about breathing rhythm, heartbeat, and why we find calm in the sound of waves crashing on a beach. For\u00a0Six Lethargies<\/em>we\u2019re gathering electrodermal activity data from a portion of the audience. The electrical conductivity of the skin is the physiological trait most closely associated with the state of anxiety and the one that\u2019s most easily decoded.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n![\"2nd\"](\"https:\/\/d1o50x50snmhul.cloudfront.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/16152530\/2nd-800x533.jpg\" "\\"\\"")
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