I have to confess that there is not much folk music in my iTunes library, but last week my copy of the Darwin Song Project CD arrived. And I am impressed!
Even though it incorporates the Annie hypothesis, my favourite song on the album is the Dylanesque "Kingdom Come", which investigates how differences in religious belief divided Charles from his wife Emma. It opens with what must be a unique first line--an account of the life cycle of ichneumonid wasps, parasitic wasps that lay their eggs in the flesh of living caterpillars and which troubled Darwin!
Another delight is this mock-Country number, "We'll him down". I dedicate this YouTube link to all my friends from Dover, Pennsylvania (Lauri, Cyndi, Tammy and Nick)! Let's hope their Creationist compatriots realise that the song is ironic!
What was that we were saying about forgetting about Darwin? What nonsense! In fact, readers might be interested to know that Darwin's rooms in Cambridge are being nicely restored for the bicentenary. Read John van Wyhe's ongoing accounts of the process here:
With luck, I might get to see the rooms when I visit Cambridge a week today, leading a "Darwin's roadshow" party of visitors, which will include two hip-hop artists, Baba Brinkman and Greydon Square and two people involved with the Dover trial, Lauri Lebo and Cyndi Sneath (one of the plaintiffs).
We will be doing a bit of Darwinian tourism before the show in the evening. The show will include one hour on "The Devil in Dover" from Lauri and Cyndi and then will conclude with the world premier of "The Rap Guide to Evolution".
I have seen some of the early drafts of the material from Baba and it looks very exciting, particularly as Baba has grafted some of the evolution material on to existing hip hop tracks. For example, here is a snippet of the lyrics from Baba's I'm a African (which draws on a Rap song of the same name by Dead Prez--if you follow the link, watch out for explicit lyrics).
I’m a African, I’m a African And I know what’s happenin’ I’m a African, I’m a African And I know what’s happenin’
1 No I wasn’t born in Ghana but Africa is my mama 2 ‘Cause that’s where my mama got her mitochondria 3 You can try to fight if you wanna, but it’s not gonna change me 4 ‘Cause it’s plain to see, Africans are my people 5 And if it’s not plain to see then your eyes deceive you 6 I’m talkin’ primeval; the DNA in my veins 7 Tells a story that reasonable people find believable 8 But it might blow your transistors; Africa 9 Is the home of our most recent common ancestors 10 Which means human beings are all brothers and sisters
You can pick up a sample of Baba's music here: a track called Natural Selection here (complete with samples of Dawkins as Darwin!).
After Cambridge, we take the show (and our Darwinian tourism) to London (Tues 10th), Birmingham (Darwin Day itself) and Shrewsbury (Fri 13th). The shows are aimed mainly at schoolkids and students, but if anyone lives near these venues and wants to come along, let me know. It is going to be an awesome bicentenary celebration!
Oh and I must remember to thank the British Council for making this all possible!
The Rough Guide to Evolution contains a whole section on music related to Darwin and evolution, from classical to hip-hop, and features the ultimate evolutionary playlist. But only now after the book is finished, I have just come across this hopeful contender for a place on the playlist (maybe it'll make the second edition):
Definitely comes with a parental advice warning and perhaps rather puerile in places (well, all the way through!), but I found it entertaining and amusing! Frustratingly cannot find any MP3s of the songs yet: film maker, please release them!
This song in particular is an nice addition to nerdcore parodies of biblical literalism:
In particular, it perfectly complements MC Frontalot's aka The Reverend Front Aloud's Origin of The Species:
Lyrics here with some brilliant cheeky geeky lines
"Do you, do you really believe that we were nothing but them monkeys swinging up in the trees? Don't it seem a little likelier that Adam and Eve did a lot of humping, and that was the origin of the species?"
"This is still the curse of Copernicus that we suffer, secular thought ought not overrun its buffer..."
Yesterday I received the proofs from the last chapter of narrative text from the Rough Guide to Evolution, on evolution's influence on Philosophy and the Arts. Because of a re-jig it won't actually be the last chapter in the book but third to last (the books ends with a consideration of creationism and religion).
But I am pleased with the latest chapter, as is Joe Staines, the editor at Rough Guides who has been working on it, who commented yesterday
"Think chapter works well as a mixture of the serious and the lighthearted (probably not often that Matthew Arnold and Suzy Quatro get mentioned in the same context)."
Today have been rather bone-headedly forcing the Resources material that was initally appended to each chapter into a final coherent section. Nearly done!
An inevitable consequence of trimming the Philosophy and the Arts chapter on grounds of space and coherence is that some of the material on evolutionary poetry and music that I compiled won't be appearing in print...
So, let me share it with you here!
I don’t have time to mark everything up with links to poems or MP3s, but you should be able to find most things via Google or iTunes. But remember these are just the offcuts—for the very best stuff, you will have to wait until you can get hold of the book in print!
Poetry
In recent times, many poets have woven evolutionary themes into their poems; examples include
Neil Rollinson’s My Father Shaving Charles Darwin,
Rita Dove’s The Fish in the Stone,
Christopher Reid’s Amphibiology,
John Updike’s The Naked Ape,
Michael Donaghy’s Touch,
Richard Wilbur’s Lamarck Elaborated
Amy Clampitt’s The Sun Underfoot among the Shadows.
In The Evolutionary Tales (1993) Ron Ecker echoes Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, presenting commentaries on evolutionary themes in rhyming iambic pentameter.
Several poems in The Human Genome: Poems on The Book of Life (http://www.thehumangenome.co.uk/), by Scottish poet Gillian Ferguson, deal with evolutionary themes—examples include All Life is One, Comparative Genomics, Shall I dare to believe the mouse is my brother.
Drama
Recently, Robby Cleiren, Frank Vercruyssen and the Belgian theater company Tg STAN (www.stan.be) used transcripts from the Scopes trial to recreate the court case on stage as The Monkey Trial, while Americans Frank Megna and Bob Ladendorf provide a fresh treatment of the Scopes trial, together with the Dover trial, in their one-act piece Darwin's Nightmare.
In his 2007 play, Trumpery, American writer Peter Parnell explores Darwin’ life before and after publication of The Origin, highlighting the trials of Darwin’s home life and Wallace’s contribution to the conception of evolution, with a climax focused on Darwin’s attitude to spiritualism. The title comes from a phrase in the letter Darwin wrote to Lyell asking what to do with Wallace’s letter: “This is a trumpery affair to trouble you with.”
In Darwin's Wings, first broadcast on Australian radio in 2006, Danish-born playwright Mette Jakobsen places Darwin in a dialogue with the mythical character Orpheus, as he tries to come to terms with the loss of his daughter.
Floyd Sandford wrote, and acts in Darwin Remembers, a one-actor living-history piece, first performed in Iowa in 2000.
British dramatist Craig Baxter worked with the Darwin Correspondence Project to create a theatrical piece Re:Design (http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/content/view/99/83/) from a nearly 40-year series of letters between Darwin and his American friend Asa Gray. Baxter’s piece re-creates on stage the two men’s intimate discussions of the impact of their scientific discoveries on their personal and religious beliefs.
Many more pieces of Darwinian drama are likely to surface during the bicentenary year—watch out in particular for Darwin’s Worms (http://darwinsworms.blogspot.com/), a piece focused on Darwin’s relationship with the smallest of creatures, currently under development in Manchester, England.
Evolutionary Art and Music
For the past two decades, evolution and aesthetics have collided in the production of art and music, exploiting computer programs and human choices to evolve pleasing auditory or visual artefacts. Drawing on evolutionary computing, these approaches rely on repeated rounds of reproduction, variation (recombination and/or mutation) and selection to improve on a starting population of images or sounds. The fitness function usually depends on the viewer or listener making an explicit choice as to which variants they prefer, although attempts have been made to use unconscious cues (e.g. time spent looking) or to take humans out of the loop entirely (The Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium evolves images from financial data).
John "Al" Biles is a pioneer of evolutionary music, entering the field in 1993 with his GenJam program, which evolves improvised jazz music. Biles plays alongside GenJam to human audiences as the Al Biles Virtual Quintet. In a recent evolutionary art study, American computer scientist David Oranchak extracted colours and textures from popular photos from the photo-sharing site Flickr and then used these to breed abstract images that would appeal to humans. Flickr is even home to its own Generative & Evolutionary Art group.
In the Electric Sheep project (http://www.electricsheep.org/), fractal images, together with the software that drives their evolution, are distributed to networked computers, which display them as screensavers. Viewers vote for their favorite “sheep”, which live longer and breed more successfully, allow the global “flock” to evolve more pleasing animations for its worldwide audience.
Prog-rock’s homage to evolutionary traditions continues with Evolution, a five-piece, female-fronted band from Devon; Staten Island-based band Simple Evolution and Darwin's Radio, based in southern England.
Soul and pop: American soul band Earth Wind & Fire included the track Evolution Orange on their 1981 album Raise!, while British soul singer Des'Ree released her Darwin Star on the album Supernatural in 1998.
More rcent examples of entertaining evolutionary pop music include the bouncy Ape Man from Liverpool-based “horror rock” band Zombina & The Skeletones and Evolution from West Coast Jewish hippy Hyim.
Hip-Hop meets eugenics in Darwin’s Folly, a track by Los Angeles rapper Avatar, with a chorus line “some people shouldn’t procreate, if they have to put paper bags over their faces to fornicate.” By contrast, East-coast Hip-Hop troupe Raw Produce stress the minus side of social Darwinism in Negative Darwinism.
Classical, Sound Tracks and Electronic: In 1989, American composer Wendy Chambers created a large-scale music event, Symphony of the Universe, which included a movement devoted to evolution.
English composer Martin Simpkin explored evolutionary themes in his album Birth Part 1.
In his 2006 album Piano, American rockster Dexter Romweber turned his hand to classical music with Evolutionary Etude (an allusion to Chopin’s Revolutionary Etude). That same year, legendary American composer Philip Glass provided the music for a multimedia exploration of evolution Life, a journey through time, created by Dutch photographer Frans Lanting (www.lifethroughtime.com).
The classical-music soundtrack to the 2001 movie Evolution is worth a listen, as it the soundtrack to the cult TV show Heroes (particularly the show’s haunting melody Natural Selection).
Evolutionary themes also pervade electronic and dance music. In 1992, Scottish electronic music group The Shamen released Re: Evolution, in which they mix evolution with shamanism and Tipler’s Omega point.
A few years later English techno band Opus III released the dance track Evolution Rush.
A range of artists have released dance tracks entitled Evolution (e.g. Miro, Remote & Roger Eno, Beautiful World and Ram Trilogy) or Human Evolution (e.g. Blank & Jones or Cosmosis).
If you want something a bit trippier try anything by Darwin Chamber (stage name of Mark Greenfield, who was such a fan of Charles he adopted his name) or the album The Genome Project by Swedish psychedelic trance band Chromosome.
In the Rough Guide to Evolution, I was keen at the outset to have a section that documented popular music that had been influenced by, or that celebrated, Darwin and his theory of evolution. Even before my proposal had been accepted I found what I though must be the ultimate concept album on evolution—a little known progressive rock album called “Darwin!”
I was encouraged by the commissioning editor’s assurance that this would definitely earn me brownie points with the founder of Rough Guides, Mark Ellingham, who is a great fan of progrock. But unfortunately, this all counted for naught, as Ellingham left the company just as I signed up.
So, let’s start with the caveat: progrock is an acquired taste, not for the faint-hearted. Although my musical tastes have veered off towards reggae, dub and world music, I still hold a nostalgic affection for progrock, which was the music to listen to when I was a teenager in the early 1970s.
“Darwin!” was released in 1972 as the second album by Italian progrock band Banco del Mutuo Soccorso. The album cover features the lead singer of the band in a psychedelic landscape within the face of a watch (presumably a reference to Paley’s watchmaker?).The album is held in high regard among progrock fans. See, for example, these reviews:
Over the years, Banco, or BMS as they are called, have re-recorded and re-released various tracks from the album. You can listen to a medium-quality mono version of a more recent and shorter version of the opening track here on youtube:
However, purists still cling to the vintage 1970s feel of the original, which UK readers can buy from iTunes here.
NB: for some reason, Darwin! is not available in the US iTunes store, but US readers can buy an overpriced CD of the original album from Amazon.com or try their luck with a DVD of a live performance (but this will be regionalised). I will e-mail the band to complain about lack of availability in the US!
BUT, all is not lost: BMS are performing live next month in North America, here in Montreal!
The original album opens with a long track, L’evoluzione (“Evolution”), which lasts for fourteen minutes and encompasses a range of musical styles, from mellow to frenetic as it re-tells the origin of life on Earth.
The lyrics are, unsurprisingly, in Italian, which makes the track less accessible for an English-speaking audience. But I append a translation, which is a joint effort between myself and my colleague Barbara Bordalejo. Anyone with better translation skills, feel free to submit your own version!
Later tracks in the album include
"La conquista della posizione eretta" Conquest of the upright stance
“Danza dei grandi rettili”: Dance of the great reptiles
"Cento mani e cento occhi"A hundred hands and a hundred eyes
"750,000 anni fa ... L'amore?" 750.000 years ago ... Love?"
"Miserere alla storia" The psalm of history
"Ed ora io domando tempo al tempo ed egli mi risponde ... Non ne ho!" And Now I wonder time to time and he answered me ... I have not!
Last year I contacted BMS letting them know that the Darwin bicentenary year was coming. Iaia de Capitani, Banco’s manager e-mailed me back to say that
Actually Banco is working on a new Darwin project looking forward to the Darwin Bicentennial. The new work is "L'evoluzione" of the evolution.
I tried to get the organizer of the Shresbury Darwin Festival interested in having BMS play l’evoluzione in Darwin’s home town on Darwin’s 200th birthday, but he thought there wouldn’t be enough interest among English festival goers :-(
So, in conclusion, there is no doubt that Darwin! is a strong contender for greatest concept albums yet created on the theme of Darwin and evolution—some progrock fans see it as the best progrock album ever! But, as we shall see in a subsequent post, there is at least one other serious contender...
A week or so ago, before I had my own blog, I tried to comment on this interesting post from John Wilkins on his blog Evolving Thoughts: Why are there still monkeys?
For some reason, the comment never made it through, but what I said was:
