‘Primal Message’ sends out a cosmic greeting through the galaxies

It's hard to believe that 48 years have passed since scientists at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico packaged a “Hello!” to the universe. The greeting is aimed at a bright spot in the constellation Hercules called the M13 globular cluster, which consists of hundreds of thousands of stars. The very essence of a long shot, this hello could convey the idea of Earth’s people to that region's life forms if they exist, although delivery, at the speed of light, will take 25,000 years or so. 

The Arecibo greeting was the inspiration for Primal Message, an 11-minute musical reverie for harp, celesta, percussion and strings by American composer Nokuthula Ngwenyama, who wasn’t yet born when the Arecibo message left Earth.

Born in Los Angeles, of Zimbabwean-Japanese parentage, Nokuthula Ngwenyama (No-koo-TOO-lah En-gwen-YAH-mah) goes by the nickname Thula (TOO-la). Of potential interest to all ages, her Primal Message will performed Oct. 27 to Nov. 1 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, led by conductor Xian Zhang, who has developed a reputation as one of classical music’s pathbreakers. This will not be Zhang’s first time with the piece. She has already conducted it with the Detroit Symphony in 2020 and the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2021, and she’ll lead it in February 2023 with the London Symphony.

Music has been with Thula from the start. She emerged as a pianist at 4, and a violinist at 5. At age 12, she fell so much in love with the honeyed sound of the viola that she crafted one as a do-it-yourself project by taking her grandmother’s French factory violin out of the attic and rejiggering it with viola strings.

Ngwenyama won the Primrose Viola Competition at 16, the Young Concert Artists competition at 17 and was named a Fulbright Scholar soon thereafter. She credits her high school theory and harmony teacher, a former student of the French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger, for telling the teenager straight up what she really was: a composer.

Even so, Ngwenyama earned a degree in theology from Harvard. She went to divinity school originally to explore the relationship between music and spirituality, and to study belief systems, including those of her Japanese and African ancestors outside the Judeo-Christian tradition.

M13 Hercules Globular Cluster, are you listening? Ngwenyama may be an ideal ambassador for Earth at this time in our planet’s young life. Her Primal Message takes advantage of music’s very close relationship with mathematics to express what might be understood as the composer’s own “hello!” to whoever’s out there.

Ngwenyama felt due caution as she composed it, especially after coming upon a 2017 New York Times Magazine article by Steven Johnson titled “Greetings, E.T. (Please Don’t Murder Us.).” It speculated about the risks involved in making other intelligent beings aware that humans exist. She settled on some primal message concepts that were also present in Carl Sagan’s novel Contact, and the movie of the same name. She is conveying her ideas in melodic, harmonic, rhythmic and formal ways that reflect prime numbers and evolving shapes that might be understood as reflecting deliberate intent.

“This article captivated me,” she said in a 2021 interview with the site violinist.com. “I thought, 'What should we put in a message that we're sending 25,000 light years away? What would I imagine putting in there, if it could be a musical message?' Her mind went to the numbers, the intervals, the harmonic progressions. “I thought, what about working with some prime numbers — 2, 3, 5, 7. I started thinking about having seconds, descending in seconds, going in thirds. Harmonic structure is very easy if we go around 5-1-5-1, that's very primal harmonic progression. ... I just started having fun with the idea of what a 'Primal Message' would sound like.”

Along with demonstrating empirical evidence, she wanted to ask, “What could we convey about our emotional intelligence? And are we really ready to connect to another life form, when we're having such a hard time connecting with each other?”

Meanwhile, she still performs on viola in the chamber music realm when she can. In fact, Primal Message started out as a small chamber work for viola quintet (string quartet, plus an extra viola) and then grew into a work for string orchestra, later fitted with a richer orchestration, adding harp, celesta and percussion, as her concept evolved along the way.

Here she is (second from the right), performing her chamber version of Primal Message with the Dover Quartet, at the time of its world premiere in 2018.

Ngwenyama then recalibrated Primal Message for ever larger ensembles, and the work took on a luxurious expansiveness. Here’s her expansion for string orchestra in 2021.

The lush version that the Chicago Symphony will perform with harp, celesta, percussion and strings is the work's latest expression. Mindful that the first blips from the Arecibo Observatory half a century ago were only about three minutes long in total, but that they conveyed a map and a diagram of human DNA, Ngwenyama has seriously engaged the question of what, in musical terms, might be recognized as evidence of our humanity.

What a distant galaxy makes of our musical reveries, we will of course never know. Our enjoyable mission is simply to experience Primal Message in the here and now.