‘Evolution Day’ 24th Nov, Other composers do DNA!

 

Greg's Missa Charles Darwin, a great present for polyphony lovers

Nice to hear BBC Radio 3 celebrating ‘Evolution Day’, November 24^th, the anniversary of the Publication date of Origin of Species.

Along with a lovely extract from George Fenton’s ‘Blue Planet’ music, the main intellectual offering was the final movement from American composer Gregory W. Brown (and a good musical friend)’s Missa Charles Darwin (somewhat provocatively titled!) and the inspiration for Dan Brown’s thriller Origin (and yes, they are related!).

The 150^th anniversary of publication date of Origin of Species was a stimulus to broad swathe of composers – classical, popular, folk – and divers people with a creative bone, me included, who wanted to celebrate this marvellous scientific-cultural theme. Greg’s was egged on by his pal Craig Phillips, the bass in New York Polyphony a cappella ensemble who’d got the Darwin bug and collected the texts.

Dan ‘Da Vinci’ Brown hits the nail when he says: “I’ve always been fascinated by the interplay between science and religion; Missa Charles Darwin is an ingenious fusion of the two”.  And not only that: is Science itself a Faith? To be provocative, Science does have elements of faith in its practice. Charles Darwin rightly thought that Natural Selection was utterly, totally evident from observation, but it did depend on the reality of ‘descent with modification’, and he had no idea how that worked (a bit like we have no idea how gravity really works, ie, down in the guts of it). He had to take it on faith that a solution would emerge ex machina. Ta-Da! DNA appears about 100 years later. I think that’s why composers who want to ‘do Darwin’ inevitably get drawn to the DNA aspects, even though anachronistic. Darwin’s faith was rewarded. It makes me smile when my favourite clergymen talk about ‘people of NO FAITH’, a slightly loaded expression.

Greg’s response to the DNA temptation was quite similar to mine in Eyenigma. He chose a sequence from Platyspiza Crassirostris (one of Darwin’s Finches); his note choice for that troublesome ‘T’ (thymine) was B-flat, so four neighbouring notes G,A,B-flat,C. One place you find few, closely spaced notes is in Gregorian chant, the absolute bedrock of Western music, spiritual and secular. It was a short step from that to arranging definitive Darwin extracts onto that wonderful format, the Latin Mass, the exposition of the essentials of 1,600 years of Catholic and Orthodox Christian thought. (The Kyrie eleison introduction takes its melody from the 'finch' code: GAAATCC). Provocative? Slightly, maybe, but as Greg says, “For some listeners Missa Charles Darwin might seem inherently subversive, but that can be part of the conversation. It doesn’t take anything away from religion to also celebrate Charles Darwin.” And it invites the question: is Faith a choice, and how does it relate to Reason?

Missa got its (spectacular) European premier European debut in March 2013 at the Dinosaur Hall of Berlin’s Museum für Naturkunde (like Eyenigma, first performed under the dinosaurs in Oxford). A mixed-choir version was performed in London thanks to Robert Hugill’s initiative in 2014. It’s clearly part of a growing canon-and-collection of music related to the Darwins, DNA and Evolution, plenty enough for the enterprising concert promoter to put together. But as a c. guitarist, I’m also going to plug his Nine Bagatelles for guitar trio.

I’ll write next time about other composers using DNA and Codes!

Eyenigma Variations – Extract on Soundcloud!

Following the marvellous performance of Eyenigma Variations at Darwin College Cambridge on 29^th October by a quartet led by Paul Warburton, I’ve had many requests to hear the piece.  The concert ‘The Darwins and Music’ was a miracle of organisation with so many memorable elements – but too complex for a recording to take place, or to be fair to the musicians who gave their time serving up this wonderful collection of Darwin-related music.

Now Eyenigma has had its public premier, in the company of pieces by Cheryl Frances-Hoade, Haydn, Fanny Mendelssohn, Frédéric Chopin and Ralph Vaughan-Williams, it’s probably time to put and extract on Soundcloud (‘robot rendition’ directly from the software).  I’ve chosen the smokey ‘Tranquillo’ section through to the frenetic end, with warring codes and a final genetic STOP!  You’ll miss out on the mysterious beginning ‘Morse Codes and Torchbeams’ (flashlights!) and Variations on an anti-evolution hymn, but so soon after hearing flesh-and-blood musicians bring the whole thing to life I haven’t the heart to let the robots play the whole thing.

The Tranquillo is one of my favourite sections.  It was originally a vocal passage setting Darwin’s words describing how the Eye might have come to be, “from one very imperfect and simple” and so gets a very simple and calm melody.  The ‘cello comments on this and then adds the genetic code setting of the Eye protein rhodopsin, eventually rising up the scale – of complexity?  The violent and feroce coda reprises all the themes, but just audio lacks the fun of seeing the quartet really physically attacking the last few bars!

Hopefully if this gets a few hits (and comments!) I’ll add more clips to Soundcloud, including the (rendered) vocal/classical guitar settings “Glories of the Vegetation of the Tropics”, “I Gradually Came to Disbelieve” etc, and maybe some of the larger works.

Picture credit: Roland Deschain

Eight Billion on 15th November, extinct by 5,400C.E.?

 

"Just your friends making reasonable choices"

The UN has named Tuesday as ‘Eight Billion Day’, see: 8 Billion Day 15 Nov 2022 - Population Matters. Clearly this is the forcing function for all our environmental problems (proportional to ‘N’) and a good many of our wars.

The best response to 8bn is to spread a pointed message: “if you don’t like your first two children, have a third”, and have smart, humane tax and migration policies. But I’ll save practical suggestions for another time (it would include a bollock tax for individuals like Boris Johnson and… *see below!).

Demographers are now seriously considering ‘peak human’ and started to map out various scenarios of decline – but all far enough away not to affect current economics. An exception is Elon Musk* Elon Musk IsTotally Wrong About Population Collapse, who is dead right about the collapse but only worried because it spoils his dream about him being the enabler of humankind’s expansion out of the Solar System (he’s dead wrong about that, see AMiTe page on this blog).

But the collapse, yes. I started thinking about this twenty years ago after many years business in Japan.  With a female friend experiencing professional sexism and ‘expectations’ around marriage, and making some consequent choices, I was interested-but-not-surprised to learn of the very low Total Fertility Rate in Japan and Korea and also noted the low Western Europe rate of 1.6. I did a thought-experiment extrapolation at the time and have been banging on about “the human race dying out in 5,400CE due to lack of interest!” ever since. See the graph above which I published in a scientific paper in Feb 2021 (see AMiTe page for its unusual context and link to the full paper).

TFR = 1.6 might sound impersonal but think of it in the following way. How about where your friendship group of [ten] all pair up, let’s say for life; four couples have 2 kids each (or 3,2,2,1), and one couple just decides not to. Ten parents, eight kids. That’s TFR of 1.6, just by your friends’ choices. Sound familiar? Try your siblings & cousins as a check. Repeat for a few generations. TFR = 1.6 is also the average of OECD countries and 40 countries are at that rate or below.

Those thinking that something will turn to reverse this trend had better sharpen up their arguments; Matt Reynolds deals with it pretty well in the Wired article using France as an example. See also my personal French famille nombreuse discount card below from 1995, another failed government attempt to stimulate breeding. This population collapse is an example of ‘de-Darwinization’ – departure from Natural Selection – a phenomenon implicitly recognised by Charles Darwin and explicitly by Daniel Dennett: see From Bacteriato Bach and Back, eg p148. Darwinian evolution and de-Darwinization neatly link two of the subjects of this blog!

Since bringing a child into the world is now, or is becoming, pretty much a matter of absolute choice, the driving force is individual happiness in a modern (constrained) society rather than Natural Selection.  

But there’s plenty of time before my log graph reaches the ‘last humans’ – over 3,000 more seasons of the Premier League and Strictly Come Dancing. I included the population graph in the AMiTe paper to show that, while there isn’t likely to be time enough for humans to reach the Stars, there’s plenty of time to get the technology right to get the Stars to come to us.

My discount card from 1995 - valid for two children!

'The Darwins and Music' - what a concert! 29/20/22

 

David with quartet members Paul, Bruce, Juliet, Helen and concert organiser Francis Knights

Fabulous concert ‘The Darwins and Music’ at Darwin College, Cambridge on Saturday 29^th October, brilliantly put together by historian of science Edwin Rose and Francis Knights, head of music at the college. So many wonderful choices of music to illustrate talks on various Darwin generations, and great performances by the string quartet, Trinity Street Consort (led by Tammas Slater), Carola Darwin (soloist) and Marie-Noëlle Kendall (piano).

The quartet (Paul, Bruce, Juliet and Helen) gave the first public performance of Eyenigma Variations to a capacity audience of ~200 and played with great spirit and physicality, from the mysterioso beginning (the mystery of how Evolution could account for The Eye) to the ff feroce (fierce…) final bars, closing the argument. Given the fabulous other music on offer, from Cheryl Frances-Hoade and Francis Knights to Chopin and Vaughan-Williams (a Wedgewood-Darwin), I was delighted with the excellent performance and with the audience reaction.

I'd taken the opportunity earlier to go round the Darwin Correspondence Project exhibition at Cambridge University Library (joint sponsors of the concert) to see absolute gems of letters and communications casting a lovely light on this most likeable of scientists, the fascinating intellectual web of which he was the centre and his relations with family and the public (and also the famous Tree of Life - purloined & returned! - notebooks). I hope I’ve done some justice to the human aspects that came across in the letters in my ‘Three Soliloquies’ for baritone and guitar (see Darwiniana tab).

NB: no recording was possible due to the complexities and multi-strand nature of the concert.