Darwin Day in Norwich – Pictures‘n’Posts

David explaining the dangers of 'going ape' in 1860's Oxford 

A fun day at the Quadram Institute in Norwich to celebrate Darwin Day a week ago today, just after the great man’s birthday (12^th). 

A good sized audience heard a historical/literary talk from Dr Jude Piesse (Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK) “The ghost in the garden: in search of Darwin’s lost garden” and Dr Anders Bergstrom (School of Biological Sciences, UEA, Norwich, UK) with the talk “The Call of the Wild: the Genetic History of Wolves & Dogs” before listening to my “The Eyenigma Variations: Darwin, DNA & Music. Eyenigma is a recreation of the famous ‘Huxley Debate’ of 1860 at the newly constructed Oxford Museum of Natural History (see above), a building intended to present Science as “Facts, Connected, Illuminated, Interpreted, so as to become the Intelligible Embodied Expression to his Creatures of the Will of God” (Acland). The debate became one of the most celebrated punch-ups in science, which I hope I conveyed in the music (first performed in the Museum in 2015). I finished the talk with three minutes of the finale of the quartet accompanied by a slide-video depicting the journey from “one very simple and imperfect” (Origin, Chapter 6) to a perfect and complex eye, and ending with the audience shouting "STOP" at the STOP codon (the last bar). Nice to have audience participation in a string quartet. My thanks to professor Dan-Eric Nilsson of Lund University for allowing me to use images from his lecture on the subject. You can here the last three minutes of Eyenigma here and see Dan’s full lecture here.

No space to describe the full talk here, and the genetic basis of the music, but it was fun to digress into Douglas Hofstadter’s (birthday: yesterday 19^th Feb!) first proposal of DNA music in 1979 which inspired so many, including Dave Deamer whom I used as the first example of published DNA music. Check out his composition and video of the Insulin gene here.

Eyenigma Intro video - codes

'One very simple' - melatonin, then rhodopsin, the first light sensors

Picture credits:  David Gahan & Mark Pallen

Video credits: Dave & Nick Deamer (follow link, used with permission) and David Gahan 

33-and-Me, Darwin Day, Suzi Quatro – and good luck in Novosibirsk!

Suzi Quatro - godmother of Rock and Charles Darwin fan

Happy Darwin Day – what a good time of year for the Great Man to be born, just two days before that festival of the reproductive urge, Valentine’s Day – a happy time of year with snowdrops and daffodils beautifying our Northern Hemisphere spring. 

At the last count, I was pleased to see 33 events posted on the International Darwin Day website, plus the one I’m speaking at, and playing some music, at the University of East Anglia Quadram Institute in Norwich, England on Monday 13^th (couldn’t resist the 33andMe ‘genetic’ pun, but I believe I don’t have more than the usual 23 pairs of chromosomes). As part of the talk on Darwin, DNA & Music, I’ll be playing Dave Deamer’s transcription of the gene coding for the two chains of the Insulin protein, you can listen to that here. This was featured in Dave’s amazing Wonderfest talk and he’s the grand-daddy of DNA music.

The value of international cultural efforts around Darwin and Evolution in our modern liberal, science-respecting culture is pretty high, and what wonderful opportunities and linkages can arise from them. How else would a 1991 tribute to Charles Darwin via ‘godmother of Rock’ Suzi Quatro, via Darwin Day celebrations in Novosibirsk, Russia have led to a a good chance to share Darwin-music in Norwich?

This is funny. One of the first two events posted for IDD was from the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk – well known stop on the Trans-Siberian railway and a university town. Professor Borodin (no relation to the great composer and chemist whose chain-lengthening reaction pathway is an essential tool in organic synthesis) has been a champion of civilised celebration of IDD for years. We had a nice email exchange and he sent some links of the amazing Darwin tributes and mocumentaries his students have produced some years. Three cheers for civilised science students everywhere, especially musically engaged. 

If you want tears of laughter to flow down your cheeks, get a load of this biopic. I never knew he had so much trouble with those finches! And some very subtle jokes – I’m on your wavelength guys. But imagine my surprise at the opening musical number – Queen Suzi!

Hey Charley, Hey Charley
Did your mind tell your heart what to do
Hey Charley, Hey Charley
Did you know that the world would be looking at you
Ooooh, the way that they do

Where did they find that? I had to know, went googling – but someone had been on the trail before me. Step forward Professor Pallen, microbial geneticist and ruck’n’dubfan. Wow! Someone else on the Darwin music trail. If you want the full low-down on how Suzi Q came to be ‘Number 1 in the Darwin Charts’, read Mark’s entry from his Rough Guide to Evolution. So that’s how I come to be speaking at his Uni for this year’s Darwin Day. 

Picture Credit Suzi Quatro website 

Good Luck: In This Brief Moment, Darwin cantata by Brett Dean

 

Counter-tenor Patrick Terry giving it everything, with CBSO

In a blog dedicated to Evolution & Music, it’s good to note a new substantial work adding to the growing canon of Darwin related music. Today, 02/02/2023 (proximal to InternationalDarwin Day ~ 12^th Feb, now up to 34 events) sees the second performance of In ThisBrief Moment, following its worldwide première in Birmingham on 24/09/2022. I only found out about it from Mark Pallen while arranging the talk I’m due to give on Monday 13^th Feb in Norwich on ‘Darwin, DNA & Music’ (for free registration, if you can make it, book here). So maybe there is a need for a blog on Darwin/Evolution Music!

So, lucky few who attended at Birmingham and tonight’s concert in Hamburg! (including Prague Philharmonic Choir / NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester). An enthusiastic review in the Guardian made the piece sound fun, with a good mix of ingredients as one would expect from a modern synthesis. Dean, based in Germany and also wielding a mean viola and conductor’s baton is (maybe!) Australia’s leading composer; he certainly knows what an orchestra is for, as a few moments listening to any of his available clips will show. It’s perhaps unfortunate that for this subject with potentially wide appeal, it isn’t yet ‘for sharing’, so we’re left with only the reviews and a list of ingredients. I’ll try and find out more.

But it seems like a lot was packed into 45 minutes: “moments of extreme beauty”in the intertwining of the soloists lines, zany cabaret sequence, recorded voiceover and “extraordinary chirruping” sounds made by 24 specially created whirlytubes, and the choir donning black masks, presumably in an ecological connection. I’m all in favour of serious artistic works using visuals, props and even audience participation (just you wait…).

And a nod to that greatest, so far, of all the stories of our Origin told in music, Haydn’s Creation. I sang this with a Parisian choir in 1996, somewhere on the Left Bank. Oh for a Darwin-based work to hold a candle to that… I look forward to hearing Brett’s work and hearing how it holds up.

Picture credit: Guardian Newspapers