Minimalism? Discuss.

Question posed to P, forwarded to Trevor:

Science and music together reminds me of John Adams or Phillip Glass (whose stuff I love). Unfortunately, he's a horrible podium speaker who can't really articulate what he's trying to acheive in his compositions, but they are wonderfully complex, especially the symphonies (not so much the operas). They make for good background music for writing. Is your work of a minimalist structure? Would you call it chamber music?

Trevor response:

The style and texture of the music that we will together be building may, in many ways, work and move in ways that are *exactly opposite* to the masterworks of Glass, Reich and their followers working in the New York scene today. Glass's pieces are a pleasure to have on while writing: he departs from (and returns to) repetition as the embodying texture of his music, hence, perhaps, the comfort of writing in the presence of the music. In our case we will be looking through real data from real science at the bench with what we might describe as a hyperattentive eye for *disparity of patterns*; that is, our research together finds both patterns and *different types of* patterns to be a virtue. The resulting music hopes to project a weave of these patterns, one after the other, with gaps in between, and frequently on top of each other all at once. In some sense maybe this sort of work looks at the patterns of Glass, Reich and the minimalist masters and asks "what of a simultaneous, nonsensical understanding of *all these* patterns at once, and even more?"

P back to Trevor:

Beautifully elaborated as always. And exactly the dichotomy between bulk steady state enzymology versus non-equilibrium single molecule enzymology. Glass would be the former, an averaged pattern that is intuitive and sensical. In our work there may be a crowd, but of juxtaposed individuals.

Coda back from Trevor:

*bing!*

that would be it, precisely.