Brianna Smrke
The Silhouette
“It’s the dream that makes artists go on.”
With this line from his novel Flashforward, renowned Canadian author Robert J. Sawyer addressed a crowd of faculty, Trekkies, undergraduates and library staff in Faculty Club’s Great Hall on Nov. 25.
Sawyer was recently awarded his twelfth Canadian Science Fiction ‘Aurora’ award for his novel Watch. He is also the only Canadian ever to win all three of the most prestigious awards for science fiction writing – the Hugo, Nebula and Campbell awards.
Yet, he doesn’t even like the term science fiction.
“I actually like to say that I’m writing philosophical fiction,” said Sawyer, adding, to assorted chuckles, that the moniker Phi-Fi doesn’t seem to be catching on.
Describing science fiction as a literature of ideas, Sawyer stressed that his writings and those of his “intellectual grandfathers” Jules Verne and H.G. Wells should not be dismissed as fantasy.
Instead, they are biting social commentaries, distorted by the lens of science and futurism.
Using the 1969 Planet of the Apes movie as an example, he spoke of science fiction’s ability to draw people into considering ideas like colonialism and race relations without preaching or becoming disengaging.
Speaking out against the ease with which the public dismisses science fiction, Sawyer discussed the freedom to grapple with powerful ideas – fate and determinism, the truth of religion and more – that writing science fiction allows.
Part of his love of the genre, he claimed, came from the ease with which one can “ask big questions” and create imaginative, but realistic scenarios to test possible answers.
His book Flashforward, adapted into an ABC television series in 2009, poked at determinism by describing a world where all people momentarily caught a glimpse of themselves twenty years in the future.
Sawyer concluded his lecture with a reading of an excerpt from Flashforward. He described aspiring creative types – artists, writers, actors – who had glimpsed a future in which their dreams for fame were not realized.
Accepting future mediocrity and normality, they gave up their quest to be different. The reading tied together the themes of Sawyer’s lecture.
The “dream” his character refers to, the ideas that keep painters painting and writers writing, match well to the philosophical ideas that science fiction presents and explores, and are meant to provide visions of the future that encourage readers to question their current lives and world.
Sawyer’s own imaginative world will soon take residence at McMaster. His visit to campus was spurred in part by his decision to donate his archives to the University.
“McMaster has a history of collecting the archives of Canada’s great writers – people like Farley Mowat and Pierre Berton,” said Jeffrey Trecziak, McMaster’s University Librarian, when asked why he had approached Sawyer with this request. “It’s only fitting that Canada’s great science fiction writer takes his place among them.”
The archives will be compiled and transported to McMaster in several instalments over the next few months and is expected to be available by March 2012.
Julia Redmond
The Silhouette
Victor Hugo once said that, “music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.” As it turns out, he was right—the mind can interpret more meaning from music than people might have thought, according to Dr. Stefan Koelsch.
Koelsch, professor of Psychology at Germany’s Freie Universität Berlin, visited McMaster on Nov. 5 to share his knowledge on music cognition. The seventh annual public integrated lecture and concert was hosted by the McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind (MIMM).
“[MIMM] deals with a kind of science we can all relate to, all understand,” said Dr. Gianni Parise, Associate Dean of Research and External Relations for the Faculty of Science.
The concert portion of the evening began with a performance by the piano duo of Elizabeth and Marcel Bergmann. The two have performed together for more than two decades, playing in various cities across Europe and North America, earning much acclaim along the way.
Seated, facing each other, at two grand pianos at the front of Convocation Hall, they performed their first selection: Franz Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz. Koelsch used this as a platform for his introduction of extra-musical meaning.
Koelsch explained that a lot of music tells a story. This is done by providing iconic, indexical, and symbolic meaning. The meaning elicits emotion in the listener, and this reaction is a key element of music cogenics and the central focus of Koelsch’s research.
To demonstrate the significance of emotion in music, Koelsch described an experiment that was conducted on a native tribe from Cameroon in which the participants, who had no prior exposure to traditional Western music, listened to clips of music and had to identify them with photos demonstrating emotions.
The results of the study showed that even with no background knowledge, the participants could properly identify the feeling of the music, lending insight into the universality of music.
Koelsch further explained the neurology behind musical interpretation. The part of the brain that processes music is the same part that interprets semantics, further supporting the concept of music as a language.
The lecture was punctuated with more musical selections. Margaret Bardos, an Ontario-based vocalist, joined the Bergmann duo onstage to perform such pieces as Climb Ev’ry Mountain and Send in the Clowns. Flutist Laural Trainor, director of MIMM, along with McMaster Music professor and flutist David Gerry, played the rather quirky song Cats in the Kitchen, composed by Philip Bimstein.
Even before the show was over, Koelsch brought the audience to their feet, encouraging a physical interpretation of the meaning in music while the Bergmann duo played selections from Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story.
Koelsch extended concluding words of advice, “you don’t necessarily constantly have to think about musical meaning,” he said, “Sometimes you can just enjoy music and your brain can do the rest.”
