Björk: When Björk Met Attenborough

Björk.

After 20 years of making music, selling millions of albums

and challenging every kind of musical convention,

she is embarking on her most ambitious project yet.

To change the way we see, hear, think about and make music.

'This is probably, like, very ambitious

'and sort of, in a way, a very grand project.'

Bringing together nature, technology and music,

she's called her album Biophilia.

# I shuffle around

# The tectonic plates... #

And she has a surprising collaborator.

'Welcome to Biophilia. The love for nature in all her manifestations.'

# Like a virus... #

In a very special encounter, Björk and Sir David Attenborough

will discover what happens when their two worlds come face to face.

A song grows sort of a bit like a crystal.

Like, this would be a 6/8 kind of song. -Yes.

There's a mathematical basis, isn't there? -Yes.

And there's a mathematical basis to crystals. -Exactly.

Björk will explore the science of sound,

invent incredible instruments,

create new forms of musical notation

in her quest to use nature and technology to help us

understand musical structure in a radical new way.

Seems to be around this... about age that I am now

that you have to make a spiritual statement.

With Biophilia, Björk is seeking to discover a more natural

and intuitive way for all of us to make music in the 21st century.

'We are on the brink of a revolution

'that will reunite humans with nature.

'Prepare. Explore. Biophilia.'

# No-one imagines

# The light shock I need

# And I'll never know. #

'A lot of my sort of inspiration

'and how sort of music and sound function,

'is very much built upon when I was a kid.

'I would walk 40 minutes to school and back, any weather,

'and my little way of dealing with that was just to sort of sing.

'And that would be when I was walking in nature, kind of on my own.

'So, for me, the line blurs so easily between music and nature

'because that's almost like the same thing for me.'

# Scrape those barnacles off me. #

Iceland, November 2010.

And early choir rehearsals are under way

in preparation for a three-year world tour.

For, for. For, for.

Even Björk's all-female choir is unconventional.

Many have trained together since they were six years old.

They've been chosen for their remarkable sound and precision.

The scope of Biophilia is vast,

travelling from the outer reaches of the solar system

to the inner worlds of cells.

For me, this project is about the sound of sound

and celebrating how sound works, in nature.

Björk wants to redefine how we can make music in the 21st century.

But to do that, we must first go back to understand its origins.

She has come to London's Natural History Museum,

where a fan has offered to give her a guided tour.

How nice to see you.

Good to see you.

Do you like this place?

- Yes. It's very epic. - It's a great place.

There's everything here, from microbes to man to minerals. Everything.

It looks like a cathedral. Isn't it?

The first director was very keen that it should be

a cathedral in praise of creation.

With 58 million animals and nine million fossils,

it's the biggest natural history collection in the world.

And those are birds of paradise. Isn't that extraordinary?

That's a headdress nearly three times the length of your body.

- You've probably done that! - Yeah, definitely.

Björk is here because of what we can learn

about the evolution of singing from the animal kingdom.

By and large, the more beautiful the bird, the simpler its music.

The simpler its call. And there's the lyrebird.

- See the beautiful tail it's got. - Yeah.

The lyrebird song is probably the most complex bird song ever.

Is that the one you see on YouTube imitating mobile phones and sirens?

That's the very one.

Because part of the way it shows off to the female how clever he is,

how wonderful he is,

is not only by making music but by imitating everybody else's music.

So that if you listen in the bush in southern Australia,

you may think you're surrounded by ten different species,

but they're all actually made by that lyrebird singing its songs.

And the lyrebird doesn't just mimic other birds.

Its repertoire includes car alarms...

..and chain saws.

Not unlike Björk, it's developed a phenomenal vocal range

which offers a clue to the importance and purpose of singing.

Your voice is a very odd voice, Björk! I mean really.

The fact that your larynx

can produce this extraordinary range of sound.

It can't be just an accident.

That range of sound was at one time or another valuable and functional.

And that you are exploiting it in a way

which would have made sense ancestrally.

That makes a lot of sense.

Actually, the human larynx is capable of so much more variety

of sound than is required for language.

That, to a biologist, would mean that there was a function

of the human voice which preceded language.

So that it's actually singing is more fundamental to us

than speaking.

So we're actually born all free-jazz singers

- ..but we're just chatting away. - Yes, yes, it is.

So how do you think music works for us now, the modern people?

Well, one is absolutely clear, and that is the sexuality of music.

I mean, in, as it were, classical times,

troubadours singing up to their lady loves up on the balcony,

"come and join me" or "let me come in".

But in our own culture now, I mean, pop music is hugely sexual,

there can't be any doubt about that.

And that's why it is so popular amongst people between 15 and 30.

That's the peak of sexuality

and it's the peak of the passion about music.

But it's not just about sex.

Even our animal cousins are expressing something less functional.

Gibbons have one of the loveliest songs

and loveliest animal music in the whole animal kingdom.

When a male and female get together, a pair forms

and when that happens, they sing together.

And the great song of the gibbons is highly complex

and both male and female take part in it.

And I find that very touching.

But whether it's touching or not, it seems to me incontrovertibly beautiful.

They don't know it's beautiful, they're just exulting.

The mystery to me is how music has been used by humanity

to take us beyond territory, beyond sexuality,

into something that is transcendental.

After three months of rehearsing,

Björk's choir are getting closer to mastering her compositions.

But this is just the beginning.

Björk still has to find a way to turn her ambitions for harnessing

the power of the natural world into a radical musical performance.

You know, this project's about, like, the universe and the galaxy

and lightning and, you know, it's like, it's so mega.

But I'm sort of, I calm myself down and I think, OK, this is going to be

the once in a lifetime that I'm going to even attempt to go there.

Takk.

APPLAUSE

MUSICAL NOTES PLAY

March 2011 and Björk is in a small metal workshop

near the Thames estuary.

She's come to meet Henry Dagg, a sound sculptor

who's created one of the world's most unusual instruments -

the Sharpsichord.

# I feel

# You compress her

# Into a small space... #

This solar-powered instrument is a cross between a harp

and a barrel organ. It's taken him five years to build.

It's programmed by putting pins into a steel cylinder.

With 11,500 holes to choose from,

it takes a day to programme just a minute of music.

# That will make her shine

# Tell her that you love her... #

I didn't do right the phrasing.

No, I think you were a bar behind.

- Yeah, I know. I know what... - In the B section.

I have to... I'll work it out. Yeah.

It's in the same key and it would harmonise with that extra line

so, erm, I can run it until it ends.

"Sacrifice" by Björk

# Why can't you give her room?

# Respect her spatial needs

# I feel you compress her

# Into a small space... #

WIND BLOWS

All our senses come from nature, our reactions come from nature.

The obvious stimulus that you can think of in nature

or the inspiration that comes from nature,

is because you feel that flower is beautiful,

or you feel that that bird soaring in the sky is beautiful.

It's not nature, it's the feeling of the composer about nature.

And if you had a composer who was insensitive to the beauties of nature,

didn't matter how photographically

he reproduced the sounds, it wouldn't be worth a tuppence.

WAVES CRASH

"Sea Interludes" by Benjamin Britten

This music is from the Sea Interludes by Benjamin Britten.

OBOE PLAYS AN ARPEGGIO

That seems to me clearly to represent the rivulets,

the waves just trickling up the shore and then trickling back.

And that, presumably, is the mighty ocean behind.

It's not just painting a picture of nature, it's much more important than that.

It is a human being talking to a human being.

It is not a human being talking to a landscape or a mountain.

It is Britten speaking to you.

"Crystalline" by Björk

But Björk isn't just inspired by how nature feels.

She's inspired by what it is, how it's structured.

Overturning convention,

Björk wants to bring nature itself into her compositions.

With this song, Crystalline, Björk uses the similarities

between musical structures and the structures of crystals

to create a song which mirrors the form of its subject.

And what better place to explore them