“I am afraid.” Ominous notes from a massive organ set the imagination in motion and make our hearts pound. But what does the anatomy of music really look like – what are the notes that flow from the organ’s many pipes, from the bassoon or from our throats? And how do these notes relate to one another? And then we have the notes themselves, which resemble a magical coding language, but which are no more difficult than learning to read or write with the alphabet. If anything is truly magical, it is how rhythms and sounds, and shifts in the atmosphere, can give us goosebumps. 

In this episode, we hear music by Johann Sebastian Bach, Camille Saint-Saëns, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Richard Strauss, Elfrida Andrée, Charles-Marie Widor and Per Nørgård.

Mankind and Music is a series about western classical music with various themes. Why does music exist? What happens to us when we listen to music, and how are we affected by playing an instrument and making music with other people?