Rice University’s Year of the Nano celebration for its 25th anniversary of the buckminster fullerene discovery launches this Sunday, October 10, 2010 with a gala and a special piece of music, a ‘nanosymphony’.  From the news item on Nanowerk,

[Anthony] Brandt, an associate professor of composition and theory at Rice’s Shepherd School of Music, thought of atoms as notes and molecules as motifs when he wrote the nanosymphony.

“When I was asked to do this, I almost immediately saw what I wanted,” Brandt said. “I wanted to write a complete symphony orchestra concert with a tuning segment, an overture, a modern piece, a piano concerto, the intermission, a symphony on the second half and an encore — all in about the length of a commercial pop song.

“It’s a complete evening’s worth of music on the scale of a single piece.”

Brandt’s mini-masterpiece is one of two commissioned for the Buckyball Discovery Gala. The other, a musical tribute to Richard Smalley, who was a University Professor and the Gene and Norman Hackerman Chair of Chemistry at Rice until his death in 2005, was written by Houston composer Todd Frazier and will feature a narrative by former Rice President Malcolm Gillis.

The discovery of the buckyball led to a Nobel Prize for the team of Smalley, Robert Curl and Sir Harry Kroto, along with graduate students Sean O’Brien and Jim Heath. What they found on a summer day in 1985 laid the groundwork for the still-growing field of nanotechnology.

The musical works’ genesis goes back to Smalley himself, said Wade Adams, director of Rice’s Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology. “I had wanted something like this for a long time, since it was a conversation — actually, an argument — between Rick Smalley and my wife, Mert, that turned Rick on to the emotional power of music. I had conversations with people at the Shepherd School several years ago, and I was delighted when Tony and Todd stepped up to write these fabulous pieces.”

There are more details about the music and how nanotechnology concepts were incorporated into the compositions at Nanowerk. The conference (which follows the gala) website is here.