Following the marvellous performance of Eyenigma Variations at Darwin College Cambridge on 29th 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.
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| Picture credit: Roland Deschain |
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