Other Composers do DNA Music (2)!

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

‘Evolution Day’ 24th Nov, Other composers do DNA!

 

Greg's Missa Charles Darwin, a great present for polyphony lovers

Nice to hear BBC Radio 3 celebrating ‘Evolution Day’, November 24^th, the anniversary of the Publication date of Origin of Species.

Along with a lovely extract from George Fenton’s ‘Blue Planet’ music, the main intellectual offering was the final movement from American composer Gregory W. Brown (and a good musical friend)’s Missa Charles Darwin (somewhat provocatively titled!) and the inspiration for Dan Brown’s thriller Origin (and yes, they are related!).

The 150^th anniversary of publication date of Origin of Species was a stimulus to broad swathe of composers – classical, popular, folk – and divers people with a creative bone, me included, who wanted to celebrate this marvellous scientific-cultural theme. Greg’s was egged on by his pal Craig Phillips, the bass in New York Polyphony a cappella ensemble who’d got the Darwin bug and collected the texts.

Dan ‘Da Vinci’ Brown hits the nail when he says: “I’ve always been fascinated by the interplay between science and religion; Missa Charles Darwin is an ingenious fusion of the two”.  And not only that: is Science itself a Faith? To be provocative, Science does have elements of faith in its practice. Charles Darwin rightly thought that Natural Selection was utterly, totally evident from observation, but it did depend on the reality of ‘descent with modification’, and he had no idea how that worked (a bit like we have no idea how gravity really works, ie, down in the guts of it). He had to take it on faith that a solution would emerge ex machina. Ta-Da! DNA appears about 100 years later. I think that’s why composers who want to ‘do Darwin’ inevitably get drawn to the DNA aspects, even though anachronistic. Darwin’s faith was rewarded. It makes me smile when my favourite clergymen talk about ‘people of NO FAITH’, a slightly loaded expression.

Greg’s response to the DNA temptation was quite similar to mine in Eyenigma. He chose a sequence from Platyspiza Crassirostris (one of Darwin’s Finches); his note choice for that troublesome ‘T’ (thymine) was B-flat, so four neighbouring notes G,A,B-flat,C. One place you find few, closely spaced notes is in Gregorian chant, the absolute bedrock of Western music, spiritual and secular. It was a short step from that to arranging definitive Darwin extracts onto that wonderful format, the Latin Mass, the exposition of the essentials of 1,600 years of Catholic and Orthodox Christian thought. (The Kyrie eleison introduction takes its melody from the 'finch' code: GAAATCC). Provocative? Slightly, maybe, but as Greg says, “For some listeners Missa Charles Darwin might seem inherently subversive, but that can be part of the conversation. It doesn’t take anything away from religion to also celebrate Charles Darwin.” And it invites the question: is Faith a choice, and how does it relate to Reason?

Missa got its (spectacular) European premier European debut in March 2013 at the Dinosaur Hall of Berlin’s Museum für Naturkunde (like Eyenigma, first performed under the dinosaurs in Oxford). A mixed-choir version was performed in London thanks to Robert Hugill’s initiative in 2014. It’s clearly part of a growing canon-and-collection of music related to the Darwins, DNA and Evolution, plenty enough for the enterprising concert promoter to put together. But as a c. guitarist, I’m also going to plug his Nine Bagatelles for guitar trio.

I’ll write next time about other composers using DNA and Codes!