Music major composes orchestra symphony on black holes
Rory Bricca ’26 presented his piece on Active Galactic Nuclei during the Annual Astronomy Department Jamboree, sourcing inspiration from a Yale astronomy course.
Courtesy of Rory Bricca
Music major Rory Bricca ’26 spent this past summer being sucked into music.
Attending the Brevard Composition Institute in the Blue Mountains of North Carolina, he decided to write a symphony orchestra piece on Active Galactic Nuclei, also known as black holes. Featuring an ensemble of 15 different musical instruments, Bricca tried to answer: how do you represent a black hole in music?
Bricca found inspiration for his piece from a course last semester titled “Introduction to Relativity and Black Holes,” taught by Professor Charles Bailyn ’81. The class is specifically designed for students not majoring in physics, astronomy or related fields.
“[Bricca] really absorbed some scientific ideas and then completely transformed them through his musical vision. I think it’s both powerful music in itself and also a very impressive synesthetic connection between ideas and art,” Bailyn wrote to the News. “I think it’s a wonderful example of the things that can result from the distribution requirements.”
Many other artists have previously enrolled in Bailyn’s courses.
One such alumnus of his courses, Bailyn recalled, is Lia Halloran ART ’01, who has since made a career out of visual art inspired by astronomical concepts. In 2023, Halloran published the book, “The Warped Side of the Universe: An Odyssey Through Black Holes, Wormholes, Time Travel, and Gravitational Waves” in a nearly two-decade collaboration with Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist Kip Thorne.
Bricca was also inspired by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s, or NASA’s, simulation demonstrating the point of view of an astronaut plunging into the event horizon of a black hole. Bricca deemed this would be the perfect ending.
He explained many composers prioritize writing the music first and then tying a concept or a title to their piece later in the process. That was not the case with his piece.
“First and foremost, I wanted to convey the emotion of awe,” Bricca said. “The visceral nature of these fascinating objects is difficult for music to portray concepts scientifically. What music is really good at is portraying emotion, the emotion you get thinking of these objects.”
Similarly, in a 2024 documentary titled “Listen to the Universe,” NASA explored applications of sound to represent astronomical data with “sonifications,” translations of data into sound. NASA sonification projects have included black holes, galaxies, nebulae, planetary orbits and space telescopes. Data representation in sound is especially vital to allow access to information for blind and visually impaired individuals.
In September, Bricca’s piece premiered at the Annual Yale Astronomy Department Jamboree.
Professor Earl Bellinger, an astrophysicist and an avid musician, was present at the Jamboree. Bellinger routinely forms the connection between how stars make “music” in their pulsation brightnesses in the form of acoustic waves akin to NASA’s sonification work.
“I think [the piece] was wonderful in showing the connections between art and science,” Bellinger said. “The piece was well composed and I could hear the drama of switching between the two sections of the piece. I thought it was a great subject to write about, there’s not too many songs about black holes.”
Bricca is scheduled for a Yale Symphony Orchestra, YSO, Composition Reading next semester.