Changing the Times, for JS Bach’s Birthday 31st March

Final Rehearsal for Bach's St John Passion, Abingdon, 30th March 2024

On this Easter Sunday, the ‘time changed’ in the U.K./Europe to Summertime and it was also the birthday of JS Bach - in our new system that is (he would have called it 21^st March since they followed the Julian system them, codified by J.C. himself (Caesar, of course). I wrote in my post A Man Looks Forwards and Backwards that I was going to be singing as ‘Faithless Peter’ (I suspect I was chosen for my Darwinian views) in a 300^th anniversary performance of the St John Passion in Abingdon to raise money for the triennial Passion Play – in which I have performed in the past (as a less sympathetic character).

I wrote in the last piece on Bach’s mastery of using all his skill to tell the story, and begins with a mighty chorus that takes us down the ‘Tunnel of Time’. He intended this to be to the time of Christ (and the Caesars) but it also takes us to the certainty of 1724, truly a time shift. While the faith of Bach and the gospel writings might give problems to some, that would be in a modern context and Bach’s amazing storytelling is a thing of beauty, for myself as a scientific thinker as well as a Jewish member of the choir.

This is a short post to put up a picture. I’ve written enough about how Bach’s music has inspired my Darwin writing and next (musical) post I’ll put up a piece directly using Baroque, the musical language of Faith, to tell a story of scientific faith. Bit for the meantime, Happy Easter (as the thief said to the librarian!) 

Photo credit: D Gahan, Abingdon 30^th March 2024

A Man Looks Forwards and Backwards – for March 3rd

With the statue of Edward Elgar in Great Malvern, Feb. 2024. My great-grandma sang in his choir in Malvern

I wrote in my last post that, in the next one, “You’ll hear Darwin singing”- his (nearly verbatim) words sung. This post happens to fall on the first weekend in March, a significant one for me. A chap can be permitted a bit of Looking Forwards and Backwards around his birthday. I did that last year and referenced some of my favourite March 3^rd-ers.

I started this blog to coincide with the performance of my ‘Eyenigma Variations’ (based on Darwin’s words on the Eye, Chapter 6, Origin of Species, vocal rhythms etc) at Darwin College, Cambridge, on 29^th Oct 2022. Hey, a first truly public performance is a Big Day for a composer – especially if billed alongside Vaughan-Williams, Fanny Mendelssohn and Cheryl Frances Hoade and even more for someone coming to composition late. It took all my persuasional skills to create the concept for the concert  with Darwin College, plus the guilty conscience of the thief who stole, then returned ‘HappyEaster Librarian’ the Tree of Life notebook – thereby handing us a marvellous publicity opportunity. Hence the concert and hence this blog.

Science music is still a tricky sell. There’s still some mutual incomprehension of how scientific ideas can inform both the ‘warp and the weft’ of music – providing starting points for musical phrases and gross structure, as well as a ‘meta layer’ of context and understanding for the piece, without straight-jacketing the ability of the composer to produce a piece which, well, makes the grade with professionals and the public. Which is slightly crazy, since composers have been using the entirety of Christian theology and Gospel incident imbued at every level of their compositions for four hundred years, and still produce great – inspired – music. I will be taking the part (only eight notes “I am not..”) of Faithless Peter, denying that he knows Jesus, in a performance of J.S. Bach’s St John Passion this Easter to raise money for an outdoors passion play later this summer in Abingdon. Going through the bass parts of choruses and chorales, Bach doesn’t miss a trick to encode ‘sin’ and ‘death’ in miserable descending chromatic passages, rising hysteria in the crowds with ascending chromatic, and references to salvation in leaping major intervals. And it works just fine.

I was delighted when choral director and professional singer David Crown agreed to record some segments of ‘Three Soliloquies’ with me last year. This is meant as a calling card to publicise the work and - ‘calling all concert promoters’ – the honour of a World Premier is up for grabs. It was great to work with a true professional even for just an hour to hear the composition come to life. In the end it should be an easy sell to get Darwin’s marvellous and uplifting words to an audience of modern, scientifically/humanist/philosophically thinking people as long as the music does justice to the grand themes. The excerpt I’ve chosen for this first public posting is from Darwin’s discussions on the origins of morality – surely an important counterweight for those who fear that science is somehow lacking, or subtractive from, the human element which religion rightly emphasises.

I’ll leave it to you to decide whether the music does justice to Darwin’s wonderful prose (as close to verbatim as I could get it, and true, I hope, to the meaning and emotion intended). Just one composerly trick that I’m pleased with. The word ‘Desires’ is used by Darwin in a neutral, observational sense; but in our knowing and self-conscious age it carries a bit of freight. I’d been listening to Elgar Dream of Gerontius before writing this. There’s a marvellous and touching bass solo, ‘Go Forth Christian Soul’. If you like Elgar, see if you can spot the leap that I use on the word ‘desire’ (which, being a long note, has to swell up/down in volume). And there’s some discordant stuff on the bass strings of the guitar inspired by ‘Mars, Bringer of War’. I hope that Elgar, and Bach, would say it all passes muster.

If you want to hear more excerpts from my Darwiniana project, open the tab. If you’d like to hear public performances of the vocal settings, the string quartet, or the full oratorio and would like to be put on a mailing list for events or crowd-funding opportunities then please get in touch – and feel free to comment!

Photo credit: D Gahan, Gt Malvern Feb 2024. 

A Visit to Malvern: for Darwin Day, 12th February 2024

St Anne's Well, Great Malvern

Taking up the Blog again after absence (for good musical reasons, see below) of a few months. The Malvern Hills featured in this blog last year with a visit to the grave of Edward Elgar, whose great ‘coded’ work inspires the name of this blog and of my Darwinian string quartet ‘Eyenigma Variations’. Great Malvern itself has strong and poignant Darwin connections, rather beautifully described in this Zoonomian blog by excellent science communicator Tim Jones. On a visit this weekend to the beautiful Malvern Priory in the centre of town – the stained glass is the most magnificent exposition of the Bible in the country after York Minster – we paused for a sad moment at the grave of Charles and Emma’s daughter Annie (see Tim’s blog for a picture and description). Charles took Annie there in a desperate attempt to cure her ill-health, as many have over centuries to ‘places of healing’. His scientist’s willingness (or faith?) to at least try new methods and critically evaluate them didn’t play out; fashionable water-cures and hydrotherapy were no match for the tuberculosis bacillus, scourge of the Victorians and only isolated in 1882. He had to leave his daughter in the churchyard,  170 miles from home.

At least Malvern did have good claims to be a healthy, life-affirming environment. I don’t buy the theories that Darwin had a ‘mysterious stomach illness’. Sheer terror at upsetting the conventional world-view with his comprehensive treatise on Evolution (and our modern knowledge about stress-related conditions) is quite enough to explain his symptoms. But the mere sight of real mountains -and they are real mountains! – must have lifted his spirits and tired his legs for the first time since his Andean climbs and briefly, later, UK geological tour. And the water is very good. Hundreds of springs gush from fissures in the impermeable pre-Cambrian rock all along the ten-mile ridge. The picture above is Katherine at the probably the most celebrated ‘pilgrimage’ well: St Anne’s Well.  It’s at the top of the ‘Ninety-nine Steps’ – plus a stiff climb – from the town (C.S. Lewis’s ‘Narnia Lantern’ is at the bottom, when one is returning to civilisation and the pubs). We filled up three litres from HaySlad well and it’s jolly good.

So, Malvern was the best he could do for himself and poor Annie. It must have been a time of mental turmoil for him, only to get worse up to the publication of ‘Origin of Species’ eight years later. But he won through the turmoil to a contentment and peace: “As for myself, I believe that I have acted rightly in steadily following, and devoting my life to Science”. And, “If he acts for the good of others, he will receive the approbation of his fellow men and gain the love of those with whom he lives… the highest pleasure on this earth.”

You’ll hear ‘Darwin singing’ this extract in my next blog post. And Happy Darwin Day!

The Blinding of Bach (and Händel) for 28th July

 

The Chevalier John Taylor, oculist extraordinaire...

This blog began with a celebration of codes in music. My Darwinian string quartet, performed at Darwin College Cambridge last October, celebrates codes underlying music and life itself. The faith that Darwin had in an underlying mechanism for heredity was vindicated by the discovery of DNA 100 years later. Darwin took head on ‘Difficulties on the Theory’ by choosing the Eye as the supreme Test Case, the equivalent of Paley’s Watch, and it seemed a good fit to choose his words as inspiration for the melodies:

"and may we not suppose that a perfect instrument might thus be formed, as superior to one of glass as the works of the Creator are to those of Man?" C. Darwin

The question posed, the answer was represented by a musical rendition of the genetic code for the critical photoreceptor protein rhodopsin, the progenitor of all vision. This coded answer was meant to be an analogy to the greatest musical-coder of them all J.S. Bach, who also embodied the high water mark of faith-expressed-in-music with his religious works, signing all of them S.D.G. = soli deo gloria (only for the glory of God), as did his exact contemporary and pretty-much equal Georg Friedrich Händel, eg in his Te Deum. I plundered Bach’s most famous musical code B-A-C-H to set against the genetic melody.

There’s a very strange tale-within-a-tale of a different, and sadder, connection between both J.S. Bach and G.F. Händel with that marvelous ‘Organ of Extreme Perfection’ of the Creator – or Evolution – The Eye. Whereas Beethoven had the misfortune to go profoundly deaf, with no hope of a cure, both Bach and Händel were diagnosed as suffering from cataracts. And there was something that could be done, and they were rich enough (and desperate enough) to try.

However wince-making it appears to us, this was back in the day of the tooth-puller, barber-surgeon, and ‘bite-on-this’ quickie amputations on the battlefield. It’s said that Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, whilst in labour bearing Marie-Antoinette, had all her teeth pulled out to take her mind off her labour-pains, and vice-versa. Anaesthesia? Well, opium was available…

It being the Enlightenment they’d realised that the lens of the eye was fulfilling the same function as ‘one made of glass’ – see my setting of these words of Darwin’s in the choral piece which was the progenitor of the Eyenigma quartet.

A lens clouded by cataract could therefore be replaced (couldn’t it?) by very thick pebble spectacles, if the original were out of the way. This was called ‘couching’ (= laying) and entrepreneurial surgeons saw that there was a market for this, as long as the potential customers only heard the positive sales pitch and that one was miles away by the time the results were in. Enter the Chevalier John Taylor. The story is splendidly told by Jorge Álvarez including Taylor’s own eye troubles The Oculist who blinded Bach. Quite a read!

Bach and Händel, twin giants of the Baroque, composers of the mighty works of faith in the John & Matthew Passions and the Messiah, having to put their faith in a chancer (maybe that rather than a pure charlatan) like Taylor. A bad outcome for them both but nothing happens without a bit of faith, in medicine and science as well as religion.

Bach died on 28^th July 1750, aged 65. R.I.P. (requiescat in pace).

Picture credits: Wikimedia Commons (John Taylor); David F. Gahan (copyright)

World Population Day, 11th July

 

Thailand's 'Mr Condom' Mechai Viravaidya, 82

I’m on the mailing list for Population Matters (patron: David Attenborough) and was sent a press release for ‘World Population Day, 11^th July’.  This blog began just before 8 Billion Day and population is a theme, so I was interested in reading the report.

While I think that it’s inevitable that population will fall steadily form mid-late century, we have a torrid time to get through in our, our children & grandchildren’s time. The Cerberus heatwave around the Mediterranean is looking very ugly and all the bad stuff is linked to human numbers and people’s reasonable aspirations, including to migrate in search of better opportunities (like the great European migration to the U.S.A. in the nineteenth century).

The report is basically encouraging reading and gives case studies on four countries/regions – Thailand, Rwanda, Costa Rica and the Indian state of Kerala. The nutshell message is that family size drops and economic prosperity rises following on from female education and gender equality. All four examples now have higher GDP per capita and lower TFR (total fertility rate) than their neighbours with less enlightened policies. All this is done with emphasis on human rights and not on coercion, and doubtless the neighbours are watching and learning so the important thing is to get the message out and spread best practice.

Rwanda is getting some critical focus in the UK for valid reasons unconnected with its government’s social policies (the report makes interesting reading) but seems to have had something of a turn-around. It was of course the country of the notorious genocide in 1994 where a million people were murdered in a country with a population of just eight million (and a million fled). In the 1980s, the country had a TFR of 8.5 and became the most densely populated country in Africa; it’s hard not to draw an obvious conclusion.

To quote the report, “In the early 2000s, population started to resurface as a policy concern. The National Policy for Sustainable Development was introduced in 2003. The plan identified the importance of addressing population growth as part of a holistic programme for sustainable development, including ensuring universal education for all children, and equal economic opportunity for men and women. Political will was growing, with population action internally motivated, rather than heavily influenced by external donors as it had been in the past.” All pretty sensible so no need to despair in the developed world that Africa isn’t doing its stuff (which would be a racist trope anyway), and get on with putting our own house in order on environmental and equality issues.

But, in a blog which praises a local hero from the 1890s (this village in Oxfordshire), it’s good to see local heroes at work around the globe, such as Thailand’s 82 year old ‘Mr Condom’ (main picture).

Picture credit:  BBC

The Most Famous Punch-up in Science, 30th June 1860

Thomas Henry Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, the protagonists

30^th June, 1860, Oxford Museum of Natural History, the scene of one of the biggest punch-ups in Science.  It was only built in the few years before and opened that year as a demonstration of how Art could reveal the science of the natural world as the Intelligible embodied expression of the Will of God. The British Association meeting of 1860 was therefore an inaugural event, but not as the authorities might have wished. 

Imagine being asked to compose a piece of music for a friend’s retirement in that location (if you happen to be a composer of Darwin-related music). A bit like being asked to put on a sketch or two at La Scala, or maybe a religious service in the Vatican. It was a bit too early for the main oratorio (see below), but a string quartet seemed be lower risk, especially if one had ever written one (I hadn’t). But it was important to rise to the occasion, as Thomas Henry Huxley did. I wasn’t up against a different world view or a skilled orator such as Bishop Wilberforce, but the intellectual history of the place seemed to require some effort.

“As the debate unfolded, Wilberforce taunted Huxley about his possible ape ancestry, to which Huxley is claimed to have retorted: 'If then the question is put to me whether I would rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means of influence and yet employs these faculties and that influence for the purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion, I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.’ Admiral Fitzroy held up a bible and exhorted all to believe God rather than man.” The account is legendary, and probably embellished or distilled, but that’s essentially what contempories made of it.

I wrote last time about the Adventure of Faith in many areas, science, art and religious faith. We can’t always prove things which we believe to be manifestly true. There is no full theory of gravity which includes how it actually works (Einstein’s is the closest we have) but that doesn’t mean that things don’t fall down. But we can ‘clear the weeds’ and remove obfuscation. Huxley had that faith in the correctness of Darwin’s theory – as far as it went – and seemed to want to remove the irrelevant suggestion of social awkwardness of having apes in the family tree. But he didn’t understand the full thing, and neither did Darwin, hence the inclusion of the genetic code in Eyenigma Variations.

The first blog in this series featured the splendid student quartet who played the piece in the setting of the 30/06/1860 debate. Maybe one day a choir and orchestra will perform the full oratorio. I’m grateful to a friend with a good, traditional hand for score writing for copying out the first page of the opening chorus ‘Entangled Bank’ for me. 

Opening chorus 'Entangled Bank', hand-copied score, weighed down by ammonites

Picture Credits: National Portrait Gallery; David F Gahan copyright

Enigma Wrapped in an Eyenigma: for Edward Elgar’s Birthday

 

Edward Elgar: St Wulstans' R.C. Church, Little Malvern, at bluebell time

For those who raise an eyebrow at my thieving (or ‘Reproduction with Variation’ to use Darwin’s term) of Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations title - both for this blog and my string quartet on Darwinian themes concerning the Eye – some belated justification and also my homage to the great man.

My great grandmother Margaret Delaney sang in his choir at the Catholic church in Great Malvern (so family legend says) and I also was suffused with the theology behind his greatest work, the setting of Cardinal Newman’s poem The Dream of Gerontius, the journey of the soul after death. I sang this with Imperial College Choir in ~1983 and absolutely love it. Although no longer a believer (by Occam’s Razor) in anything beyond nature, I greatly appreciate the Adventure of Faith: an effort to extrapolate beyond what we know (from a firm and reasoned foundation) in many areas of life and thought.

Charles Darwin had to do such an extrapolation, “These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life and from use and disuse…”  He had to take on faith that a mechanism would be found for the bit in bold. The first edition of Origin of Species contained a (wrong) guess that something he called ‘gemules’ would pass on information from parents to embryo encoding information about useful/harmful behaviours - pretty much Lamarckism – which he later disowned. If he had wanted a complete theory he would have had to wait for another hundred years for the elucidation of the DNA/RNA/protein mechanism. That’s why I included the genetic code of the Eye protein into Eyenigma variations even though anachronisitic. The enigma had a solution and Darwin’s faith was justified.

I’m sure they would have got on, Elgar and Darwin, despite differences in outlook on religion. Elgar might even have given Darwin a start since, “A study of the composer’s papers reveals that for most of his life he was fascinated by cryptography. His letters and music scores, for example, are dotted with codes and anagrams.” New Scientist. The dedication to Gerontius is AMDG: Ad maiorem Dei gloriam  "For the greater glory of God", similar to J.S. Bach’s S.D.G (only for the glory of God) dedication on most works (and of course he encoded his own name BACH in the Art of Fugue, which I take as a theme for Eyenigma Variations).

Elgar’s most famous coded work is the delightful Enigma Variations itself. The fourteen variations all have coded initials, but these are meant to be easily ‘cracked’ as names of his close friends - amateur music makers, collaborators and family. But the underlying melody: “The Enigma I will not explain – its "dark saying" must be left unguessed”; he kept that secret to his grave (above). Here’s one proposed solution: I rather like that one, and Elgar may have liked my returned compliment in the Victorian hymn tune I cryptically embed (transferred to Lydian mode) in Eyenigma.

I have my own faith that the whole Darwiniana oratorio will someday get performed; here’s an extract (rendition) promised some time in my piece about the Southern Stars (it will get a detailed write-up another time). But there’s no doubt that Elgar’s faith is still an inspiration. I used a figure from his mighty aria Proficiscere, Anima Christiana as an input for Darwin’s words on ‘A Man Looks Forwards & Backwards’ and for the ascent of the holy mountain of Science (in Darwin's case), and the Gerontius demons (everyone’s favourite!) make a brief appearance in a location I’m sure of which Elgar would approve. So, hats off to him for his birthday (actually 2nd June - 'fat fingers' had added another digit).

From 'Three Soliloquies for baritone and c. guitar': spot the Demons!

Picture credits: Katherine Langrish, Little Malvern; David F Gahan (composition copyright)