That box of hamsters? Percussion instrument.

I spent today working in the Aldrich reading room of Harvard's Paine Hall as Trevor darted in and out between classes. I attended his first seminar of the day: Chris Hasty's musical critique and theory class, which was populated with a few of the composers I met on Saturday plus music theoreticians and musicologists. The discussion turned on the idea of cross-disciplinary collaborations, and the thought that we have inherited a common intellectual heritage, which is both enriching and encumbering at the same time. We come together to explore our differences, and yet a strong binding thread and starting point is often common ground and the exploration of common problems. As a biologist, I can find fault with a deterministic view of the gene as a simple string of chemicals reproducibly encoding the same molecular output the same way that Trevor can argue that music is not just the structure set down in a score. Dr. Hasty cited and recommended the work of Susan Oyama for further exploration of this specific question. By extension, the dialectic of genetic/epigenetic control of the cell is a philosophical parallel to score/interpretation in musical performance. Which is a better comparison, perhaps, than the hardware/software analogy often used.

On the subject of intellectual tradition, we discussed the limitations that academic writing currently imposes on thought across the art-science spectrum. One classmate commented that in the humanities it is frowned upon to be "goal oriented" in an approach to a problem or to state subjective truths: "musicologists feel torn between the desire to say something and the fear of doing so." Biological statements of truth are bolstered by objective, quantifiable, and reproducible observations. However, perhaps influenced by decades of government grant proposals and the need for tangible demonstrations of "returns on investment", biologists often have to present a hypothesis driven linear approach to an only incremental point of progress. Most statements are goal oriented and lack the "whimsy" that is better tolerated in the humanities. And yet some of the most interesting and important discoveries in biology have been predicated on whimsy.

Most notably, perhaps, Francis Crick's formulation of the Adapter and Wobble hypotheses. From Crick's What Mad Pursuit:

"The main idea was that it was very difficult to consider how DNA or RNA, in any conceivable form, could provide a direct template for the side-chains of the twenty standard amino acids. What any structure was likely to have was a specific pattern of atomic groups that could form hydrogen bonds. I therefore proposed a theory in which there were twenty adaptors (one for each amino acid), together with twenty special enzymes. Each enzyme would join one particular amino acid to its own special adaptor. This combination would then diffuse to the RNA template. An adaptor molecule could fit in only those places on the nucleic acid template where it could form the necessary hydrogen bonds to hold it in place. Sitting there, it would have carried its amino acid to just the right place where it was needed."

On the subject of structural constraints in communication, Trevor feels that the limitations to describing time-related events such as music are not stylistic but rather perhaps a fundamental limitation of language itself. Time is not a visual object. Do we even have the linguistic tools to describe certain aural experiences?

Perhaps not. And in that case, what is the solution (or in a humanities paper, perhaps I would say "alternative")? To borrow methods for describing space/time from physics perhaps? To become more graphical, create new symbols?

Taken much further, this becomes a full circle. Starting with music and, in an attempt to describe it, transforming it into a non-transferable and non-intuitive set of visual symbols: words, graphs, charts, pictures. The same types of data representation I am arguing would be more easily communicated through music and sound.

In the end, it struck me that the musicologist or theorist suffers from the same dilemma, in trying to describe and communicate to others about music, that the composer does in struggling to bring it to life through performance. What tools can I use? Do I use a cello, but test the boundaries of the cello like in Kristian Ireland's piece on Saturday? Or do I make a new instrument all together?

That box of hamsters on the stage? Percussion instrument.

Goblin of a tongue

I'm in the last days of finishing up an article about the types of materials that I've developed for the flute in each of my pieces since about 2004. And the writing has proven rewarding in an unexpected way: I've become much more aware of feelings centered strongly within the body as I've chipped away at my own understanding of what it is that goes into the breath, the fingers, the muscles of the face, and on and on in the production of many of these sounds. An excerpt:

The tongue extends forward in the space of the mouth. Apical tip in contact with the ridge of the gums, the blade becomes imperceptibly taut and the muscle takes on the function of a lock, sealing the vocal tract and blocking the expulsion of air from the lungs. In this small fraction of a second the tongue transitions from lax to ready, waiting, as it were, at attention, pressed up and into the alveolar ridge, fixed just between the hard palate and the upper row of teeth. A goblin of a tongue --- imbued with a magic agency --- might wonder at this. Pink skeletal muscle. Arbiter of bitter, sweet, sour, savory and salt. But confined to darkness and unable to see. Would such a tongue wonder at the boundaries of its world? At its root buried past the the glossopalatine arch? At the hardness of the gums against which it presses?

The language has wound up as a mix of the partially poetic and the partially exploratory, in all cases centered on direct sensation of the body, or of parts of the body. And this has been, for me, something of a revelation.