‘Eyenigma Variations’ quartet is based on
themes from my choral settings of passages from Origin of Species, Voyage of the Beagle and Autobiography by Charles Darwin. I began collecting them in March
2008 when, after hearing a modern concert setting of a bloodthirsty passage
from Isaiah, a Guardian pamphlet reproducing famous passages from the Origin literally dropped into my lap. I
wondered why no-one had – apparently – tried to set the grandeur of Darwin’s
world view in a musical context.
Darwin faced head-on the gravest ‘Difficulties
on the Theory’ in Chapter VI of Origin:
‘Organs of Extreme Perfection’ – of which the Eye was his prime example, the
equivalent of Paley’s watch. I found a musical start-point in mid-Victorian
creationist hymns, written to counter the free-thinking evolutionist current of
the time. Darwin had no clear idea of a mechanism of heredity and variation and
had to rely on an intellectual faith that something would turn up ex machina. He posits that an eye ‘very
imperfect and simple’ might have existed: and we now know the simplest version
would be a photoreceptor protein such as rhodopsin.
On hearing the bell-ringers of my local church I was reminded of G’s, A’s and
C’s used to notate both the musical scale and the genetic code and looked up
the published code sequence for rhodopsin.
 |
| Rhodopsin photo-receptor protein |
|
The genetic code is arranged in threes – which
give a natural jig or waltz rhythm.
Guanine, Adenine and Cytosine give an obvious mapping of G,A,C, but Thymine
is a free choice. I thought that T sounded like ‘Ti’ in do-re-mi which would be
‘B’ in C-major: hence G,A,B,C. To make
it more musical and avoid the tedium of the apparently random natural sequence,
I used a feature of the genetic code which allows mutation without changing the
end result. It is usually possible to change the third letter (or note)
in every three and still produce a valid ‘variation’ on rhodopsin, but one staying in a musical harmony! So a short
section of the eye-protein sequence could produce melody, harmony and
rhythm.
I saw a delicious opportunity for a dialogue
between mutations on a creation-upholding hymn-tune, Bright and Beautiful, and a theme derived from a genetic
explanation for something Darwin had to take on faith: that there was an
underlying encoding to explain heredity and variation. The association of codes
with music, especially the insertion by BACH of his own name in The Art of Fugue (celebrated by Douglas Hofstadter
in Gödel, Escher, Bach), seemed to demand its place to
represent the traditional world-view, given Bach’s central place in faith-based
music. And so the various coded musical elements in Eyenigma engage in a continuing debate, for which a string quartet
seemed the most appropriate form. The work ends in closing statements from both
sides with the BACH theme providing the final cadence but finishing in the final
bar with my note-rendition of Thymine, Adenine, Guanine (T-A-G): the genetic
code for STOP, THE END.
‘Eyenigma’
was performed amongst the dinosaurs in the Oxford Museum of Natural History in
September 2015 at a private university function with the generous help of Professor Ian Brown, and honouring the famous Oxford Debate of 1860 which took place
in the same building.
