A Man Looks Forwards and Backwards – for March 3rd

With the statue of Edward Elgar in Great Malvern, Feb. 2024. My great-grandma sang in his choir in Malvern

I wrote in my last post that, in the next one, “You’ll hear Darwin singing”- his (nearly verbatim) words sung. This post happens to fall on the first weekend in March, a significant one for me. A chap can be permitted a bit of Looking Forwards and Backwards around his birthday. I did that last year and referenced some of my favourite March 3^rd-ers.

I started this blog to coincide with the performance of my ‘Eyenigma Variations’ (based on Darwin’s words on the Eye, Chapter 6, Origin of Species, vocal rhythms etc) at Darwin College, Cambridge, on 29^th Oct 2022. Hey, a first truly public performance is a Big Day for a composer – especially if billed alongside Vaughan-Williams, Fanny Mendelssohn and Cheryl Frances Hoade and even more for someone coming to composition late. It took all my persuasional skills to create the concept for the concert  with Darwin College, plus the guilty conscience of the thief who stole, then returned ‘HappyEaster Librarian’ the Tree of Life notebook – thereby handing us a marvellous publicity opportunity. Hence the concert and hence this blog.

Science music is still a tricky sell. There’s still some mutual incomprehension of how scientific ideas can inform both the ‘warp and the weft’ of music – providing starting points for musical phrases and gross structure, as well as a ‘meta layer’ of context and understanding for the piece, without straight-jacketing the ability of the composer to produce a piece which, well, makes the grade with professionals and the public. Which is slightly crazy, since composers have been using the entirety of Christian theology and Gospel incident imbued at every level of their compositions for four hundred years, and still produce great – inspired – music. I will be taking the part (only eight notes “I am not..”) of Faithless Peter, denying that he knows Jesus, in a performance of J.S. Bach’s St John Passion this Easter to raise money for an outdoors passion play later this summer in Abingdon. Going through the bass parts of choruses and chorales, Bach doesn’t miss a trick to encode ‘sin’ and ‘death’ in miserable descending chromatic passages, rising hysteria in the crowds with ascending chromatic, and references to salvation in leaping major intervals. And it works just fine.

I was delighted when choral director and professional singer David Crown agreed to record some segments of ‘Three Soliloquies’ with me last year. This is meant as a calling card to publicise the work and - ‘calling all concert promoters’ – the honour of a World Premier is up for grabs. It was great to work with a true professional even for just an hour to hear the composition come to life. In the end it should be an easy sell to get Darwin’s marvellous and uplifting words to an audience of modern, scientifically/humanist/philosophically thinking people as long as the music does justice to the grand themes. The excerpt I’ve chosen for this first public posting is from Darwin’s discussions on the origins of morality – surely an important counterweight for those who fear that science is somehow lacking, or subtractive from, the human element which religion rightly emphasises.

I’ll leave it to you to decide whether the music does justice to Darwin’s wonderful prose (as close to verbatim as I could get it, and true, I hope, to the meaning and emotion intended). Just one composerly trick that I’m pleased with. The word ‘Desires’ is used by Darwin in a neutral, observational sense; but in our knowing and self-conscious age it carries a bit of freight. I’d been listening to Elgar Dream of Gerontius before writing this. There’s a marvellous and touching bass solo, ‘Go Forth Christian Soul’. If you like Elgar, see if you can spot the leap that I use on the word ‘desire’ (which, being a long note, has to swell up/down in volume). And there’s some discordant stuff on the bass strings of the guitar inspired by ‘Mars, Bringer of War’. I hope that Elgar, and Bach, would say it all passes muster.

If you want to hear more excerpts from my Darwiniana project, open the tab. If you’d like to hear public performances of the vocal settings, the string quartet, or the full oratorio and would like to be put on a mailing list for events or crowd-funding opportunities then please get in touch – and feel free to comment!

Photo credit: D Gahan, Gt Malvern Feb 2024. 

A Visit to Malvern: for Darwin Day, 12th February 2024

St Anne's Well, Great Malvern

Taking up the Blog again after absence (for good musical reasons, see below) of a few months. The Malvern Hills featured in this blog last year with a visit to the grave of Edward Elgar, whose great ‘coded’ work inspires the name of this blog and of my Darwinian string quartet ‘Eyenigma Variations’. Great Malvern itself has strong and poignant Darwin connections, rather beautifully described in this Zoonomian blog by excellent science communicator Tim Jones. On a visit this weekend to the beautiful Malvern Priory in the centre of town – the stained glass is the most magnificent exposition of the Bible in the country after York Minster – we paused for a sad moment at the grave of Charles and Emma’s daughter Annie (see Tim’s blog for a picture and description). Charles took Annie there in a desperate attempt to cure her ill-health, as many have over centuries to ‘places of healing’. His scientist’s willingness (or faith?) to at least try new methods and critically evaluate them didn’t play out; fashionable water-cures and hydrotherapy were no match for the tuberculosis bacillus, scourge of the Victorians and only isolated in 1882. He had to leave his daughter in the churchyard,  170 miles from home.

At least Malvern did have good claims to be a healthy, life-affirming environment. I don’t buy the theories that Darwin had a ‘mysterious stomach illness’. Sheer terror at upsetting the conventional world-view with his comprehensive treatise on Evolution (and our modern knowledge about stress-related conditions) is quite enough to explain his symptoms. But the mere sight of real mountains -and they are real mountains! – must have lifted his spirits and tired his legs for the first time since his Andean climbs and briefly, later, UK geological tour. And the water is very good. Hundreds of springs gush from fissures in the impermeable pre-Cambrian rock all along the ten-mile ridge. The picture above is Katherine at the probably the most celebrated ‘pilgrimage’ well: St Anne’s Well.  It’s at the top of the ‘Ninety-nine Steps’ – plus a stiff climb – from the town (C.S. Lewis’s ‘Narnia Lantern’ is at the bottom, when one is returning to civilisation and the pubs). We filled up three litres from HaySlad well and it’s jolly good.

So, Malvern was the best he could do for himself and poor Annie. It must have been a time of mental turmoil for him, only to get worse up to the publication of ‘Origin of Species’ eight years later. But he won through the turmoil to a contentment and peace: “As for myself, I believe that I have acted rightly in steadily following, and devoting my life to Science”. And, “If he acts for the good of others, he will receive the approbation of his fellow men and gain the love of those with whom he lives… the highest pleasure on this earth.”

You’ll hear ‘Darwin singing’ this extract in my next blog post. And Happy Darwin Day!

Enigma Wrapped in an Eyenigma: for Edward Elgar’s Birthday

 

Edward Elgar: St Wulstans' R.C. Church, Little Malvern, at bluebell time

For those who raise an eyebrow at my thieving (or ‘Reproduction with Variation’ to use Darwin’s term) of Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations title - both for this blog and my string quartet on Darwinian themes concerning the Eye – some belated justification and also my homage to the great man.

My great grandmother Margaret Delaney sang in his choir at the Catholic church in Great Malvern (so family legend says) and I also was suffused with the theology behind his greatest work, the setting of Cardinal Newman’s poem The Dream of Gerontius, the journey of the soul after death. I sang this with Imperial College Choir in ~1983 and absolutely love it. Although no longer a believer (by Occam’s Razor) in anything beyond nature, I greatly appreciate the Adventure of Faith: an effort to extrapolate beyond what we know (from a firm and reasoned foundation) in many areas of life and thought.

Charles Darwin had to do such an extrapolation, “These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life and from use and disuse…”  He had to take on faith that a mechanism would be found for the bit in bold. The first edition of Origin of Species contained a (wrong) guess that something he called ‘gemules’ would pass on information from parents to embryo encoding information about useful/harmful behaviours - pretty much Lamarckism – which he later disowned. If he had wanted a complete theory he would have had to wait for another hundred years for the elucidation of the DNA/RNA/protein mechanism. That’s why I included the genetic code of the Eye protein into Eyenigma variations even though anachronisitic. The enigma had a solution and Darwin’s faith was justified.

I’m sure they would have got on, Elgar and Darwin, despite differences in outlook on religion. Elgar might even have given Darwin a start since, “A study of the composer’s papers reveals that for most of his life he was fascinated by cryptography. His letters and music scores, for example, are dotted with codes and anagrams.” New Scientist. The dedication to Gerontius is AMDG: Ad maiorem Dei gloriam  "For the greater glory of God", similar to J.S. Bach’s S.D.G (only for the glory of God) dedication on most works (and of course he encoded his own name BACH in the Art of Fugue, which I take as a theme for Eyenigma Variations).

Elgar’s most famous coded work is the delightful Enigma Variations itself. The fourteen variations all have coded initials, but these are meant to be easily ‘cracked’ as names of his close friends - amateur music makers, collaborators and family. But the underlying melody: “The Enigma I will not explain – its "dark saying" must be left unguessed”; he kept that secret to his grave (above). Here’s one proposed solution: I rather like that one, and Elgar may have liked my returned compliment in the Victorian hymn tune I cryptically embed (transferred to Lydian mode) in Eyenigma.

I have my own faith that the whole Darwiniana oratorio will someday get performed; here’s an extract (rendition) promised some time in my piece about the Southern Stars (it will get a detailed write-up another time). But there’s no doubt that Elgar’s faith is still an inspiration. I used a figure from his mighty aria Proficiscere, Anima Christiana as an input for Darwin’s words on ‘A Man Looks Forwards & Backwards’ and for the ascent of the holy mountain of Science (in Darwin's case), and the Gerontius demons (everyone’s favourite!) make a brief appearance in a location I’m sure of which Elgar would approve. So, hats off to him for his birthday (actually 2nd June - 'fat fingers' had added another digit).

From 'Three Soliloquies for baritone and c. guitar': spot the Demons!

Picture credits: Katherine Langrish, Little Malvern; David F Gahan (composition copyright)