Darwiniana: Music

 

David with the quartet and Francis Knights, HoM Darwin College

Some comments following the public performance of Eyenigma Variations at Darwin College, Cambridge on 29th October 2022, extract here :

"The concert was wonderful, and I’m glad you are going on to further events through International Darwin Day. Thank you again for the premier of 'Eyenigma Variations', which I so much enjoyed and had such a great reception at the event." 

Dr Jessica Gardner

University Librarian & Director of Library Services, Cambridge University Libraries

"It was very clear just how much everyone who attended the concert in October enjoyed it, it was a huge success and one of the more interesting events of its kind that I've been to for many years. 'Eyenigma Variations' certainly used interesting and unusual aspects of Darwin texts in a very creative way—and was a highlight of the concert as a whole. The combination of your new piece, Carola Darwin's marvelous singing, and the range of music so relevant to the occasion and the setting, was really memorable."

Professor Jim Secord

Former Director of the Darwin Correspondance Project and Professor of history and philosophy of science within the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge

Enquiries welcome from promoters of science-music and festivals!

Next Performance Project - ready to go with top soloists ready to perform. Enquiries from promoters of science-music and festivals welcome!

Brief extract from Three Soliloquies see Glories of the Vegetation post, also A Man Looks Forwards and Backwards or see my channel on Soundcloud.

Comment on 'Three Soliloquies' from Professor Dan Dennett, cognitive scientist (d.2024), writing in 2017: "You’ve taken a wonderful text and done something excellent with it. I haven’t tried playing it yet, but can read music well enough to get some idea of it. Bravo. DCD" Used with permission.

Three Soliloquies from ‘Darwiniana’

A Man Looks Forwards and Backwards

(for Baritone and Classical Guitar)

                                                               

My new setting of extracts from Darwin’s A Naturalist’s Voyage Around the World, Autobiography and Origin of Species – adapted for a chamber setting from a choral cantata Darwiniana.  It covers an emotional arc from Darwin’s vivid description of the personal impact of the South American jungles and his tearing away from the orthodoxy of his youth, to his older reflections in a deeply inspiring humanist vision. Much has been written about Darwin’s relationship with faith, but his profoundly emotional writing – from his most to his least deist thoughts – has rarely been considered in a musical context.

The intimate physicality of the classical guitar strengthens the emotional connection between voice and setting, from frailty to fury. The Glories of the Vegetation of the Tropics – evoking the rank and humid Brazilian jungle – acknowledges a deep bow to H. Villa-Lobos (notably Prelude No.2), the most distinctive of South American composers. This unmistakeable sound-world illuminates a Garden of Eden to which Darwin was never to return. Darwin’s testamentary disavowal of biblical literalism and the doctrine of damnation, I Gradually Came to Disbelieve (expurgated from his autobiography by his wife) requires a cool music of faith inspired by a Bach lute suite, until his fury boils over and a more passionate guitar tradition breaks through. Had Darwin abandoned anything and did he feel any regret for his momentous affirmation of faith in science? The answer is provided in the third part of the triptych, A Man Looks Forwards and Backwards, where human love and righteous action based on conviction provide ‘the highest pleasure on the earth.’ In Darwin’s final contentment, and love of humanity in old age, the composer finds echoes of deep feelings given expression in such music as Elgar’s Gerontius. We leave Darwin ascending, with lightness of heart and a skip in the step, the holy mountain – not of Sion – but of Science.  

A full cantata version of Darwiniana (from which Eyenigma and Three Soliloquies are extracted for chamber performance) is in development as a work for choir, soloist and orchestra. It is intended to be the first ‘Wikitorio’, to evolve in the community beyond a single composer and perhaps radiate to become a successful clade of adaptations in the musical and cultural world. In its 1.0 form it includes choral settings of ‘Entangled Bank’, ‘Shooting, Dogs and Rat Catching: fugue’, ‘We Behold the Face of Nature’, ‘To Suppose that the Eye’ etc, together with further solo passages.