How do you stop a nuclear war? The first step is listening

Apollo Frequencies is a series exploring sounds that seem to come from another world. In this week’s edition, Raphael Helfand attends a Kronos Quartet performance at the end of a summit for nuclear disarmament.

The nuclear age began in earnest on July 16, 1945. In a vast expanse of New Mexico’s Jornada del Muerto desert, the United States Army detonated the first plutonium bomb. 80 years later, roughly 20 Nobel Laureates and about 60 leading nuclear experts convened at UChicago from July 14–16 to discuss potential solutions to the ever-increasing threat of a nuclear apocalypse and sign a document expressing their concerns to the general public and the powers that be: 13 calls to action collectively named The Nobel Laureate Assembly Declaration for the Prevention of Nuclear War.

On the assembly’s final evening, laureates, physicists, diplomats, activists, professors, and students gathered to watch Kronos Quartet’s concluding performance. The modern classical group’s program of pieces — some angry, some tender, some heartbreaking — reflected on the urgency of the crisis we face, and the weight of history building to it. After three days of talking, it was time to listen.

“I’m on the edge of my chair in São Paulo,” Kronos Quartet leader and violinist David Harrington tells me on an intercontinental video call held Sunday, July 13, three days before his long-running group is set to perform at the Nobel Laureates Assembly for the Prevention of Nuclear War. The following night, he and his three bandmates — Gabriela Díaz on violin, Ayane Kozasa on viola, and Paul Wiancko on cello — will board a redeye to Chicago. There, the group will have two short days to rehearse for one of the most important shows of their lives.

Their July 16 concert will consist of 14 short pieces — in many cases excerpts from longer pieces — performed by the quartet. Four of these pieces will be accompanied by readings of documents from past nuclear crises. The planned finale of the performance is a rendition of Bob Dylan’s 1963 song “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” Kronos' version of the classic, allegorical track will be released that day, featuring an astonishing ensemble cast of guest singers including Iggy Pop, Laurie Anderson, Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq, and many more. The record's first and final verses are led by Allison Russell, who will be the sole singer present at the July 16 performance.

“I started Kronos in 1973 because I heard Black Angels by George Crumb on the radio, and I knew I needed to play that piece,” Harrington says. Hearing it taught him how music can reflect the most urgent crises of a cultural moment — in the case of Black Angels, the Vietnam War. He hopes those who hear “Hard Rain” will be inspired in the same way: They’re going to think, “OK, now I know this can be done. I want to be a part of that in whatever way I can.”

Concertgoers mill around in the lobby of the University of Chicago’s Logan Center for the Arts. The auditorium downstairs is not huge but spacious, with a wide stage and plush reed seats. I’m seated close to Saul Perlmutter, who won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering that the universe’s rate of expansion is accelerating. Perlmutter is also a violinist who, earlier in the week, had a long talk with Harrington about their shared love of the instrument and its quartet context. “I don’t know if there is a documented relationship between musical and scientific thinking, but there certainly seem to be shared elements,” Perlmutter writes in his Nobel bio.

The Kronos Quartet walk to their places and begin to explain the sounds we’re about to hear. They begin with Terry Riley’s “Good Medicine” — a dynamic, engaging piece that ends with a chaotic crescendo. Keeping the energy high, they move to their remix of Tanya Tagaq’s bruising anthem “Colonizer,” which features several startling beat drops (I’d never heard the track and was genuinely taken aback).

The music Kronos play behind each of the readings is relatively quiet, allowing the speaker space to command the room. But each possesses its own unusual character, one that plays a major role in helping each speech achieve maximum effect. Laurie Anderson’s “Flow” is both the shortest and, ironically, most classically minimalist piece they play all night; despite its brevity, its gradual motion allows the most brutal parts of Professor Tatsujiro Suzuki’s reading from the diary of Reverend Tanimoto, a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing, to sink in.

In Kronos’ string rendition of Hildur Guðnadóttir’s choral piece “Fólk fær andlit,” the minor harmony hovers millimeters from resolution, creating the tension necessary to accompany an ominous letter from Nikita Khrushchev to John F. Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis, the most heated moment of the Cold War. Performing Philip Glass’s grandiose closing music for Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters feels appropriate next to Scott Sagan’s somber playacting as he reads from the transcripts of declassified Saddam Hussein tapes documenting the Iraqi leader’s famously unfulfilled pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Even moments that appear to be thematically dissonant reveal their relevance over time. The traditional Swedish folk song “Tusen Tankar” provides a glowing canvas for the reading of a speech by General George Lee Butler, who was placed in charge of our nation's nuclear arsenal but became a fierce nuclear weapons abolitionist following his retirement. The gravity of the subject matter makes the soundtrack initially feel incongruous, but by the speech’s end, the two components merge; it’s as if the piece itself is marvelling at the wild combination of luck, skill, and fate that has kept society from teetering over the edge so many times.

Before the program’s closing piece, Kronos play their Terry Riley/Sara Miyamoto collab “Kiss Yo Ass Goodbye.” The strings are live, of course, but the voices of Sun Ra’s Arkestra play from a backing track, repeating the titular phrase as well as other parting terms like “farewell” as the song rumbles to a close. A dose of Ra’s wry humor loosens the air in the auditorium, allowing us all a moment of exhalation.

Allison Russell’s climactic performance of “Hard Rain,” backed by Kronos’ swelling strings, is far more stirring live than it is on wax. It’s raw, visceral, delivered with a pain that grows deeper with each verse. For its final chorus, Russell goes all out in a way I’ve seen few singers do. “It’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall,” she repeats again and again, swinging her whole body as she shouts into the mic while somehow staying pitch perfect. As I watch the crowd exit the room, some lingering a while to process what they’ve witnessed, I notice red eyes and tearstained cheeks. It’s clear that something — whether Russell’s performance, a reading, or a simple musical phrase —has moved some of the world’s most serious scientists.

Back in San Francisco two days after the performance, Harrington is still buzzing. An assembly of experts on the most dire situation facing our society has ended on a high, resonant note — not a happy note, per se, but a hopeful one. “It's a real point of lift and buoyancy in the face of great danger,” he tells me with a contagious smile. “I now see the work we’re doing in terms of Before July 16 and After July 16.

“I felt like the music did its job, and I felt like we did our job as musicians,” he elaborates. “As musicians, we train ourselves and we're trained by our teachers to listen and listen carefully, and the assembly allowed us to do that.”

This is not to say that a concert, or even an assembly of some of the world’s smartest people, can alone save the world, or even alter it substantially. But a union of the two can put the stakes in a new context. “The combination of science and music is especially potent,” Daniel Holz — who chairs the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board and was the July 16 performance’s organizer and MC — writes to me days later. “The consideration of nuclear war is fundamentally inhumane, and it is critical to be reminded of our shared humanity. During the Assembly, the Nobel laureates and nuclear experts were wrestling with facts and numbers and technical issues. One can try to use words and reasoning and equations to capture the spark that makes humanity worth preserving, but art has the power to viscerally convey the deep knowledge of what makes us human.”