Back to music! Following the performance of my quartet Eyenigma Variations (extract here) where one of the principal themes is a melody derived from the DNA of the most basic Eye (receptor) protein, I’d like to do a post about other composers doing DNA & other codes in music. Please comment if you'd like to highlight others!
In the beginning was the Book: Gödel, Escher, Bach (Hofstadter,
1979), “A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis
Carroll”; you can tell that there are devious codes in there right from the start!
Although really about the mind emerging from self-referencing in brain
circuits, there are beautiful digressions about self-referencing in maths and music.
Enter B-A-C-H, both the composer and his musical self-reference in The Art of
Fugue. The BACH code pervades Eyenigma, as well.
H? What’s H in music? At the time in Germany, H was
just ordinary B – so what was B then? why B ♭
of course! Just shows you can make any rule, as long as you stick with it. But
Bach has started a trend to code names in music. Dmitri SCHostakovich
stretched a point by coding the bolded letters as D-E♭
-C-B (there’s that H = B thing again, and a weird letter sound eSS becoming E♭).
So I bunged that one in as well, Eyenigma bars 192/3. (One day, I’ll do myself
as DFG(AHA)N (the ‘to the N’ would be a trill).
Douglas Hofstadter couldn’t resist the idea that ‘DNA makes DNA’, referencing itself with the letters GATC (Guanine, Adenine, Thymine, Cytosine) - and makes all living things as part of that loop (the phenotype provides the energy and materials). Give-or-take a ‘T’, that looks musical, similar to the BACH code. DaveDeamer, Prof. at University of California Santa Cruz, inventor of the latest DNA wonder technology and now doing amazing work on Darwin’s ‘warm pond’ origin of life theory, thought the same in 1992: see his Wonderfest lecture here. He uses GAC but assigns the note E to thymine. This gives four notes either in major sixth (CEGA) or minor seventh (ACEG) chords, both loved by jazz improvisers ‘cos everything sounds good with these notes. It’s a great choice if you want direct translation of DNA strings and don’t mind the ‘goes on forever’ aspect. I’ll post more about Dave’s later DNA musical activities in the future.
Dave proposed expanding the idea to choosing notes for
amino acids which would give twenty notes instead of four. This idea has been
expanded by Markus Buehler at MIT – here’s his Soundcloud page. Sounds pretty
good (what do you think?) but again uses the direct translation method so not
much for a human composer to do!
In my setting of rhodopsin, I’d used the translation of
T = B (see oldest/first post in this blog). That gave a ‘leading note’, one of the two
semitone intervals in the diatonic scale (eg E to F, B to C) which allows a
melody to arrive somewhere. I also used the principle of ‘third letter
redundancy’ which allows a composer some harmonic control but ends of with the same
end results –
see Evolution of Redundancy in the Genetic Code. This gave the first theme (melody)
in Eyenigma ; you hear it on the ‘cello in the extract.
Another composer who has written a genetic string
quartet is Deirdre Gribbin – ‘Hearing your Genes Evolve’. This is a great
example of starting from a DNA translation base but using absolutely
contemporary compositional skills to get a fully satisfying result from simple
ideas (I used a more classical Variations structure to tell the story I wanted
of the ‘Eye Debate’ of 1860). I’d love to know what ‘rule’s Deirdre uses –
hopefully she’ll tell me!
Gregory Brown has also used DNA derived ideas in his Missa
Charles Darwin. I wrote about this in my 'Evolution Day' (24th November) post.
Picture credit: DNA-MUSIC Abhijit Bhaduri, Flickr CC
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