Eyenigma Variations: A Fantasia on Codes for String Quartet

 

 

‘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.