Let’s Hang Out With Björk and David Attenbörough for 47 Minutes

Attenborough and Björk: The Nature of Music premiered on British TV’s Channel 4 this past Saturday, and a full cut has since appeared online. (Working link here, though I’m not sure how long it’ll last.) It’s totally fascinating and also puts two of the greatest speaking voices of modern history in conversation together. Here’s an exchange the two have while observing a crystal at the Natural History Museum (at about the 17-minute mark); “Crystalline,” embedded above, is the song that inspired this particular chat:

NARRATÖR: Bjork wants to bring nature itself into her compositions. With this song, “Crystalline,” Bjork uses the similarities between musical structures and the structures of crystals to create a song which mirrors the form of its subject.

BJÖRK: For me it’s quite interesting how the range of crystals, how, like, totally different they can look — really hard and merciless, but then really fragile and pretty. You know?

ATTENBORÖUGH: But this six-sided basis, I mean, the basis of mathematics lies at the heart of crystals. And doesn’t mathematics lie at the heart of many of your songs — doesn’t it, really? Because it’s about the spheres, it’s about the universe, it’s about the fundamental things like mathematics.

BJÖRK: Yea, and kinda has our inner logic to it.

ATTENBÖROUGH: A basic structure, yes. But also, of course, I mean, beats in the bar. I mean, you can have three beats in the bar or two beats in the bar or four beats in the bar, and there’s a mathematical basis, isn’t there?

BJÖRK: Yea.

ATTENBÖROUGH: And there’s a mathematical basis to crystals.

BJÖRK: Yea, that’s why it sort of seems a very natural fit. Like this [gestures at crystal] would be a 6/8 kind of song.

NARRATÖR: In “Crystalline,” Bjork has turned the structure of crystals into an unusual combination of time signatures.

BJÖRK: The verses are in 17/8, and then in the chorus it sort of goes into 4/4, and then it’s like a square — more like a square.

ATTENBÖROUGH: Absolutely. Or — or in this instance, it’s a cube.

BJÖRK: Yea!

Yea. [YouTube]