Congratulations to Trevor for the East Coast premier of Lidércfény and his debut concert as a doctoral student at Harvard. And compliments to Joshua Modney, Elizabeth Janzen, and Steve Beck of the Talea Ensemble for a breathtaking performance.
With both of us back on the same continent, Perpetuum mobile is gaining momentum. I traveled up through the blizzard from New York City to observe Trevor in his academic habitat and learn about the preparation that goes into a contemporary music performance.
Upon arriving, I parked with my luggage quietly in the back of Harvard's Paine Auditorium to observe my first music rehearsal. Rehearsal is spelled with the word "hear", which had not occurred to me before. I jotted a couple of first impressions down on the DNA mismatch repair article I had been reading on the train: for one, the musicians spoke to and interacted with each other much more than with the composer. Trevor was a humbled observer rather than the proactive "maestro" that I was expecting. This dynamic was reiterated with other composer/musician pairs in the dress rehearsal the next day. It was clear that a lot more power resides in the virtuoso talents that perform the music than my biases had programmed me to expect. The musician-composer dialectic seems a balanced symbiosis, truly each party dependent on the other. I was also struck by the remarkable level of focus and intensity both Trevor and the musicians had while on stage. After the rehearsal, I got a chance to interact with the musicians. I am grateful to Elizabeth Janzen, who took the time to show me the mark ups on her score. She explained that color coding and notation helps her act on instinct during the performance rather than having to remember or process all the levels of complexity embedded in the piece.
Afterward, I got the opportunity to speak to one of Trevor's instructors, Prof. Christopher Hasty, who kindly agreed to let me audit his critical theory class while I am here this week. He shares our interest in exploring the question of how to achieve true interdisciplinary collaboration. What are the barriers that prevent a scientist from musical expression? Or a composer from using, as a creative point of departure, aspects of the natural world that are beyond the scale of human senses.
Trevor and I agreed that a central goal of our project is to expand access, 1) for scientists to communicate through sound, which is a fundamentally more intuitive and finely tuned sense for comprehending small frequency fluctuations and differences than the eye and 2) for composers to draw inspiration from the natural world that is currently only accessible through high tech or cryptic intermediaries such as microscopes or genomic sequences.
Do these barriers exist for a good reason? If not, how do we start to dismantle them?
The flight of the bumblebee, post-genomic redux.
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