STEM ARTS: MUSIC AND BIOLOGY

As far as key moments in the development of the piece go, a couple things come to mind. The project’s very first meeting – where Dr. Olga Zhaxybayeva gave a presentation on the evolutionary process – got me thinking about how I could structure the piece from a timeline-based perspective. Another moment came when we visited Dr. Deborah Hogan’s lab, and she happened to show us some beautiful pictures that were captured from the microscope. They reminded me of the abstract indie short films that are accompanied by contemporary music, which I love. So I got thinking that these images could be an effective way of giving the audience another way to connect with the music. Finally, the previously mentioned visit to the NICU helped me further shape the structure of the piece based on the process of human life, from birth to death. In contrast to evolution, which is on a much larger timescale, human life is brief and intense, and also dramatic and emotional.

Question: Tell us about the piece as it stands now. What are the main ideas you're exploring? What can we expect to hear?

Wang: The piece will be presented from two different perspectives. One is "time", which is a storyline-based narration that relates to the evolution of human microbes. Olga and I had also discussed some ideas about the movements: in ancient times, how antibiotics were used as weapons in bacterial warfare; how humans, as big complex superorganisms, evolve in cooperation with microbial communities; human diseases and the suffering they cause; and finally, in modern times humans use antibiotics to fight pathogens. The other perspective is "space": this is about portraying the microbes' motions that might follow the visual work, not necessarily completely accurately, but with some crucial elements related. The two processes run concurrently and are introduced by the same materials.

Question: What do you want the audience to hear and experience when they come to the concert?

Wang: My music tends to use continuously changing instrumental combinations to create intense colors and gestures. I can’t guarantee that everyone will like it, (since it’s impossible to write a piece that everyone likes) but my hope is that the audience is never bored, and that even people with no musical knowledge can still feel the dramatic expressions, the complexities and the beauties of colors during the 15 minutes. In terms of staging, my original thought was setting the instruments up in the shape of a human body on stage, like some sort of art installation. But now I’m not sure - we’ll see what ends up working the best. Another idea that I think will end up in the final version is to have a few performers with movable instruments in different parts of the hall, maybe the back corners and the sides. They’ll gradually walk from offstage and gather onstage as the piece progresses. I’m also planning to perform a voice part in the piece, which the other instruments will follow. In a way, I’ll be like a conductor that holds the group together. Conceptually, having the musicians move onstage imitates the behavior of microbes, cells or bacteria. Some of them won’t move - as I saw in Salvador’s research, some bacteria stay in the intestine, while others move around quickly. But in any case it’s a direct and visual way of showing the audience how bacteria move around. Hopefully it will also make the audience feel more involved in the action “onstage”, since in a way the entire hall will be a stage, and the audience will hear sounds coming from many different directions.

Question: How has working with scientists affected you? In what ways has learning about the way scientists work affected your creative process?

Wang: Scientists are very patient! They deal with the same materials and same subjects everyday, and every experiment takes a very long time and a lot of work for only one result. But it’s very similar to how musicians develop a piece from small ideas, and eventually make them into a single complete work. In certain sections of the piece, I also want to use a recurring music subject, with very subtle differences each time, as a reflection of the scientists’ working process. This was partly inspired by our visit to the evolution lab, where Mr. Craig Layne showed us how they compared soil samples under different temperatures. So this idea of one recurring subject with slight differences will also one of the concepts that’s included in my piece.We also visited Dr. George O’Toole, Deborah’s husband, who talked to us about some big-picture things: the role of the researcher in society, how he works with students in his lab, and the history of microbial research. He compared microbes to five-year-olds: they might be quiet and shy when they are by themselves, but act differently when you put them all together in a group. Similarly, microbes behave differently in communities than they do on their own. He also compared the scientist’s way of approaching the world to the artist’s, saying that the best scientists are able to think analytically while still making intuitive moves.

Question: Why do you think it's important or interesting to make connections between music/the arts and science?

Wang: Nowadays, people talk about cross-genre all the time, not only between different musical genres, but also between different fields. In the contemporary classical music world, there are composers such as Pierre Boulez or Iannis Xenakis, who started out in mathematics and architecture, respectively, and use that that experience to structure their music. In the rock music world there’s also math rock. I can’t think of many examples of combining music with biology, but Bjork, one of my favorite artists, made an album called Biophilia, which involves many different musical languages, and connecting them to biology, cells, natural world etc. with various ways of expression. Microbiology is a more specific field since it includes two ideas: small and life. It is actually very good material for contemporary classical music to be based on, since we have room for music that doesn’t work in a traditional ways. Contemporary music can be about the concept: how you organize small, seemingly random materials into a art for the ears, and then letting the audience understand those sounds in their own ways. The sounds are tiny and can’t exist on their own: they’re like nothing. This is similar to microbes - on their own, they’re tiny, invisible organisms, but together they can make organs, or even a beautiful human body. I think that’s how microbiology relates to contemporary music.