Click on each module below to learn more about Anthony Brandt’s Diabelli 200.
THE DIABELLI VARIATIONS
DIVERGENT THINKING
NEURAL SYNCHRONY
DIABELLI 200
Click on each module below to learn more about Anthony Brandt’s Diabelli 200.
THE DIABELLI VARIATIONS
DIVERGENT THINKING
NEURAL SYNCHRONY
DIABELLI 200
In recent decades, scientists have begun asking: how does creativity work in the brain? Thanks to a composer and publisher named Anton Diabelli, musicians got a head start on this question two hundred years ago.
Diabelli wanted to celebrate the composers of his native Austria. So, in 1819, he invited fifty-one composers around the country to write a variation on a waltz theme he’d composed. Today, it would be like asking fifty-one bands to do covers of the same song.
In response to Diabelli’s call, fifty composers contributed one variation each.
Ludwig van Beethoven sent in thirty-three.
We now consider Beethoven one of the greatest Western composers who ever lived, and his “Diabelli Variations” one of his towering achievements. The variations written by the other fifty? They’ve largely been forgotten.
Why? What is it that makes Beethoven’s variations so special? And what can that tell us about how creativity works in the brain?
It turns out that Beethoven took a very unusual approach. In traditional Western music, a melody is generally supported by a harmonic progression: that’s what you hear on a Karaoke machine when the vocal line is stripped away. When you wrote a variation back in Beethoven’s day, you generally kept the same progression as the theme. In answering Diabelli’s call, that’s what eighty percent of the other Austrian composers did. Here are four variations that all follow Diabelli’s progression.
What about Beethoven? Surprisingly, he never exactly followed Diabelli’s progression. Not only that, he never repeated himself: instead, he wrote thirty-three different progressions—each one loosely related to Diabelli’s theme. In doing so, Beethoven exercised his harmonic imagination more than the other fifty composers combined.
It makes for great music. And it also makes for a great example of divergent thinking, one of the cornerstones of the science of creativity…
Turning on a light-switch, opening a window of the fridge, unlocking a door. Those actions don’t take much thought. We just want to carry them out as effortlessly as possible and get with our day. Our brains accomplish this by stream-lining neural networks.
Creativity calls for something completely different: it asks to unleash ourselves from our routines and habits and contemplate alternatives. Scientists call this divergent thinking. Unlike turning a key in a lock, divergent thinking problems don’t have one right answer—they have many possible solutions. To handle this, the brain has to behave in a new way: rather than dedicating a single neural circuit to a task, many regions in our brain start talking to each other.
No species does this with as much facility as human beings.
Scientists measure divergent thinking by asking four questions: how many options were generated? How diverse are they? How well worked out? And how unusual?
Beethoven’s "Diabelli Variations" are an extraordinary display of divergent thinking: thirty-three unique solutions—all contributing something new, and all unlike anything Beethoven’s peers came up with.
How does Beethoven do it? The answer: he keeps changing which portions of Diabelli’s harmonic progression to keep and which to alter. That way, there’s always some connection to the source—but those connections keep changing. Sometimes Beethoven stays close to Diabelli’s original; sometimes he leaves hardly any of the original intact at all. By varying what to preserve and what to change and going different distances from the source, Beethoven generates a huge number of options. Here are three more of Beethoven’s variations. The last one, Variation XX, is one of the adventurous harmonic progressions Beethoven ever wrote.
Divergent thinking happens all of the time in labs, workstations, and studios. However, that mostly happens behind closed doors, where we can’t see it. Beethoven’s "Diabelli Variations" broadcasts divergent thinking. When we’re listening to it, we’re not only hearing great music—we’re also getting an inside look at the creative process. Beethoven is giving us a road map for divergent thinking—one all of us can follow.
To illustrate this, Musiqa’s Artistic Director Anthony Brandt has written his own set of thirty-two variations on Diabelli’s theme. He follows the same approach as Beethoven: none of his variations exactly mimic Diabelli’s harmonic progression, and all of them are different. While Beethoven’s piece is for solo piano, Brandt adds an ensemble of flute, bass clarinet, percussion, violin and cello, allowing for more timbral variety.
Photo by Melissa Taylor
Dr. Anthony Brandt’s Diabelli 200 - commissioned by Performing Arts Houston - uses Diabelli’s waltz and Beethoven’s approach as inspiration for his own variations, scored for flute, clarinet, piano, percussion, violin and cello. The performance of this work was done in collaboration with neuro-engineer Dr. Pepe Contreras-Vidal.
Contreras-Vidal, director of the University of Houston’s BRAIN Center, outfitted conductor Molly Turner and pianist Yvonne Chen with special caps that monitored the electrical activity in their brains as they rehearsed and performed. The caps have 32 electrodes, which are targeted to brain regions associated with planning, movement, hearing, and more. Contreras-Vidal and his team are taking a close look at how the musicians’ brains synchronized with each other. Neural synchrony is thought to underlie many of our social interactions and shared experiences. Because it often involves tight rhythmic coordination, a musical performance like Diabelli 200 is a revealing way to study this. Diabelli 200 marks the first time a conductor has ever worn neuro-imaging equipment in a public concert.
The data from the caps was interpreted in real time by composer and digital artist Badie Khaleghian. Khaleghian’s visualizations begin with a more literal representation of the data—just as a scientist would see it. As Brandt’s variations get further and further from Diabelli’s theme, Khaleghian’s projections get more and more abstract and colorful.
Thus, Diabelli 200 presents two ways of exploring the human mind—one musical, the other scientific. Khaleghian’s projections represent their meeting point: the projections are a series of visual variations based on the scientific data.
Photos courtesy of Melissa Taylor and Performing Arts Houston