‘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!