Lacus Temporis

Introductus.

Belma Beslic-Gál. 

Personal video logbook, code 3157.

Chaos.

Soon I will have to deliver a lecture regarding my concepts for music composition and performance practices in microgravity. What I’m really asking myself is do we, as a humanity, have any time left to realize ideas like this? Everything is in a state of disarray. The climate emergency, the wars, Artificial Intelligence… The current global challenges seem so overwhelming that I wonder if there is, or even should be, any space for this kind of artistic and/or scientific pursuits.

Anyway.

This is getting very personal…

To stick to the truth: The break-up of Yugoslavia was the birth of my engagement with the otherworldly, the extraterrestrial. Other Worlds as a Refuge, a Place of Hope. 

It all began with Rebalkanacija, a music-theatrical concept from 2002 – United Nations decided to expatriate all of the Bosnians to Sirius Prime, stating that although it is an airless location, therefor not necessarily an ideal one, it was truly peaceful. “They will figure something out”.

What would I do on Sirius Prime? After all, I’m just a pianist, a musician, a would-be composer. As so often is the case, attempting to answer the simplest of questions leads to strange ideas.

“Who is performing the composition?”

“An Ensemble/Orchestra.”

“And where is the Ensemble/Orchestra situated?”

“On Earth.”

“What if this orchestra is not on Earth?”

This got me thinking. I could compose a piece for an ensemble located outside of this world, but then different physical laws would apply. But why not?

It was this reflection that marked the beginning of an entirely new approach to the process of musical conception.

Gradually, chaotic trains of thought were ordered into increasingly clear procedures; and the concept emerged for a composition that could be performed by an Ensemble on the Moon. However, for this composition to be performable in such a context, a radical rethinking was required. Altered natural conditions (such as the absence of gravity in the earthly sense) have an immense influence on the human body – posture, breathing, motor skills, coordination. So how do all these factors affect the compositional decisions, formal structures, temporal processes, performance-technical and music-psychological aspects of a work? While there are clear limitations, this also opens up unimagined new aesthetic and artistic possibilities. 

Several compositions followed, composed for a hypothetical weightless ensemble: “Lacus Somniorum” for a microgravity orchestra (2007, 2008), NGC 3372 Lieder (2006-2001). But I didn’t know enough about the scientific principles behind the subject of human medicine in weightlessness. So, I thought, what the heck, I’ll just write to the leading scientists in the field of music physiology and space medicine and ask if they could help me with references.

What then followed was beyond astonishing for me personally – there were absolutely no considerations or research attempts made in this regard – that is, performing music in microgravity environments.

Prof. (em.) Dr. Otmar Bock from the German Sport University Cologne, one of the leading experts in the field of integrative human physiology, Prof. Dr. Eckart Altenmüller, Professor of Music Physiology and Musicians’ Medicine and Director of the Institute of Music Physiology and Musicians’ Medicine (IMMM) at the Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media, and my humbleness applied for funding for a research project at the German Aerospace Agency with the exciting project name Code 50WB0825 back in year 2012. 

The project was intended to contribute to the DLR research objective “Integrative Human Physiology” by improving our understanding of the functions of the human body, particularly in adapting to weightlessness. Our proposal was also intended to document the dependence of fine motor skills on the context of activity and to shed light on the fundamental role of gravity in the coordination of voluntary movements from a new perspective.  

In the proposed follow-up project, we wanted to transfer our experimental paradigm to available, flight-certified hardware that has already been tested on the ISS. Furthermore, we have planned to prepare the integration of our experiment on the ISS and to investigate the causes of the difference found between laboratory and everyday life in an accompanying ground program. In a supplementary parabolic flight study, we were planning to investigate the influence of weightlessness on an extremely demanding fine motor performance: performing music, in this case, violin playing. Stefan Milenkovic, famous Yugoslav violinist, was also part of this project as a test subject on a parabolic flight.

Our application was not approved because it was concidered to be too experimental. But, someday, the time will come.

Belma Bešlić-Gál [01/2007 – revisited 10/2023]