Beethoven duo

one of our current chamber music projects is the Duet no. 1 by Beethoven (originally written for violin and viola, I believe). Maybe if I practice hard for a year I can learn to play it at half the speed. Anyhow here is what the first movement should sound like

young cellist’s got talent

I managed to catch the final of the BBC competition Young Musician of the Year on Sunday and was completely blown away by cellist Laura van der Heijden’s rendition of the cello concerto by William Walton. OK, I’ll admit my ignorance and confess that I hadn’t known this concerto before. I realised very quickly that I had missed out on something rather spectacular. Laura duly won the competition – I have no idea how they make comparisons between musicians from completely different instrument groups, but I reckon her choice of an underappreciated but utterly wonderful concerto may have helped, as the other two finalists had chosen more middle of the road composers.

Anyhow, come Monday morning I fired up the computer and internet hoping to find a few more knowledgeable people spreading some insight and enthusiasm about this event and found … nothing. On the BBC website, a search for the name of the young cellist yielded some links to a footballer with a similar name. Searching for the name of the competition yielded the page where you can watch it on the i-player, but not even a statement of the result of the final. At least the Wikipedia page of the cellist had been updated but that may have been done by a family member.

One blogger discussed the event and also bemoaned the lack of impact. Apparently, not a single newspaper in the UK covered the final. Never mind the fact that she won a competition which only happens every other year and may well set her on a course as a successful recording and performing soloist, of which there aren’t all that many (it certainly didn’t harm fellow cellist Natalie Clein to win the competition in 1994), I would have thought that the way that Laura played that concerto at age 15 and a few weeks should have been worth reporting.

At 12:28 the BBC website got out of bed and bothered reporting the event that the corporation itself had broadcast from 6 to 8pm the day before. It was duly tweeted as “breaking news” on the BBC’s breaking news twitter feed. Only 16 hours late.

I hear that on the same weekend, a somebody with their dancing dog won Britain’s Got Talent. I reckon that the result of this competition was reported in every single newspaper, and many of them will have put it on the front page. Not to mention that the prize money at BGT is several orders of magnitude higher than at young musician of the year. And where is the recording contract for Laura (in analogy to the usual arrangements on X factor and similar competitions)? I would buy the CD of the Walton concerto immediately.

I am sure that Britain has got a lot of talent, but right now I am getting very depressed about the way in which Britain does or doesn’t recognise its talent, and about the message that this is sending out to young musicians.

dial M for Milly

Dial M for Murdoch

Tom Watson and Martin Hickman

Like many others, I suppose, I only really started paying proper attention to the phone hacking scandal when the Milly Dowler story broke on July 4th, 2011. Until then, the hacking saga was mainly about royals and some football people being hacked, and I’m not interested in either group of people, and didn’t have a high opinion of the papers involved and their editors to begin with, so there was no surprise element. The Milly moment changed everything, as it demonstrated very clearly how the tabloid folk trampled even on the people they pretended to stand up for (such as victims of crime). And it was immediately clear to me (if not to Rupert M) that this time they would not get away with it.

Luckily, a few brave investigators and reporters including the authors of this book and the Guardian’s Nick Davies pursued this story relentlessly from the beginning and worked hard to make the rest of us pay attention too. For us who missed all or parts of the beginnings, this book is a great way to catch up with the story and learn how all the different threads, including not just the phone hacking but also an unsolved murder case and multiple cases of police corruption, fit together and feed into the tangled web of inquiries we are witnessing today.

Up to and including the Milly moment, the book reads like a gripping thriller, as the quest for the truth looks very much like a lost cause for the fearless investigators who suspected that criminal actions were widespread at NI but couldn’t prove it yet. After the closure of News of the World, as our heroes are clearly on the winning stretch, the book loses momentum a little bit. It quotes from relevant inquiries in detail, even though at least today’s UK readership will remember the crucial moments of the last few months, so they could have been summarised a bit more concisely. It will be different for readers in a few years time, but by then the book will have to be updated anyway, to include new findings and those that are at the moment blocked by legal concerns.

Those lucky enough to live in a country whose media are not dominated by News Corp can read it as a fascinating tale of media power and corruption, essentially a modern day Macbeth. The moral is, if you give someone a bit of power, they will want more, and they will begin to think they can get away with murder.

amazon.co.uk

PS after posting this review on amazon, I immediately got two "unhelpful" votes, which is very untypical (I've been at 84% helpful votes for years now). I deleted the review and reposted an improved version, thinking maybe it was really not helpful enough, and got a fresh unhelpful vote within 12hours. I can only conclude that some NI-friendly troll is keeping an eye on these reviews and marking down those that praise the book.

do protected areas protect species?

My latest feature in Current Biology looks at some protected areas and which measures help to actually protect the threatened species in them. Examples feature Earthwatch research in Madagascar and Belize, as well as the work of Save the Elephants in Kenya.

Full text is freely accessible here:

PDF file

HTML text

Photo: Earthwatch/Ryan Cox.

addicted to you

I'm loving the new Shakira video, which was released just a few minutes ago:

and that wasn't a foregone conclusion, I could name one or two that I hate :) In this one, I'm loving the hat, in particular.

Now for the fun part, watching how UK music channels will completely ignore this. Living in the UK one can quite easily forget that this woman is quite successful in the rest of the world.

roadmap for regenerative medicine

Stem cells, cloning and regenerative medicine are issues on which UK research is doing really well in global comparison, partially due to the fact that the pioneering development of IVF raised awareness here and led to a reasonably sensible regulatory framework.

I've published quite a few pieces on this field over the last ten years or so. The latest feature is pegged to the strategy plan for UK regenerative medicine that the Medical Research Council together with other funding agencies released at the end of March.

A roadmap for regenerative medicine

Current Biology, Volume 22, Issue 8, R251-R253, 24 April 2012
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2012.04.004

Full text is freely available as HTML or as PDF download.

Haydn for cello and flute

Here's a score we prepared earlier (and played last year). It's from a string duet by Haydn, and we adapted it for the flute. It's quite easy to stick together as the rhythm is mostly identical in both parts, and the parts individually are grade 3-4 level I would guess.



Next up is an adaptation of Johann Nepomuk Hummel's trio for piano, cello and flute in A major, op.78, which is essentially a set of variations on a Russian folk song called "Beautiful Minka." As the piano is quite dominant in this work and we don't have a pianist in the house, this one involves quite a bit of rearranging. We did just the theme last year, and I have now added one of the variations. Work in progress here:

Russian theme & variations

how microtubules grow

I helped writing up this PR about research done at Birkbeck College, published in the current issue of Cell:


Research sheds light on magic of microtubule growth

Transport within the cell relies on a system of tracks, the microtubules, which continuously grow or decay at one end, while the other end remains tethered and static. Researchers at the ISMB have now elucidated how some of the proteins that coordinate the building work on a growing end recognise the sites where they are needed.

Research into dynamic cellular systems such as the ever-changing microtubule cytoskeleton is complicated by the fact that structural methods typically require static and stable molecular complexes. The group of Carolyn Moores at Birkbeck Crystallography / ISMB, working together with Thomas Surrey at Cancer Research UK, has created a static model of the dynamically growing microtubule end, allowing them to pin down the structural interactions that hold the building site together.

Protein building blocks (tubulin proteins) that are added to the growing end normally carry the energy-rich substance GTP, which is split up into GDP and phosphate within seconds of incorporation. By offering building blocks with a non-cleavable analogue of GTP, the researchers could create a microtubule arrested in its growth but retaining the characteristics of a growing (GTP-carrying) end. Moores’ group at the ISMB could then obtain detailed images of this structure using electron microscopy at very low temperatures (cryo-EM).

Specifically, their work published in the latest issue of the journal “Cell” shows how a crucial group of proteins needed for the extension of the tip and its interaction with cellular features, the End-Binding (EB) proteins, bind to the building blocks that carry the uncleaved (and uncleavable) GTP. The researchers found that each of the EB proteins bridges two strings of tubulin subunits running the length of the tube structure, the so-called protofilaments. Intriguingly, each microtubule has a “seam” where the protofilaments are connected in a different fashion, and the EB proteins appear to recognise that difference, as they don’t bridge the seam.

“The fascinating behaviour of growing microtubule ends has been tantalising biologists for some time,” says Moores. “The biophysical experiments performed in the Surrey lab were essential in optimising sample preparation for our cryo-electron microscopy structural experiments, but we never anticipated the secrets of microtubule biology we would uncover when we started our collaboration.”


With the help of this model system, further research will uncover more details of the wider context in the dynamic behaviour of the cytoskeleton made up of the microtubules.

“Of course, we now have many more questions about the coordination between EB activity and the ebb and flow of microtubule growth and shrinkage,” says Moores, “in particular,: What do microtubule ends look like in the wider context of the multi-protein complexes which the EBs help to assemble? But our futures studies promise to take us in exciting directions in understanding regulation of the microtubule cytoskeleton.”


Reference:
P. Maurer, Franck J. Fourniol, Gergő Bohner, Carolyn A. Moores, Thomas Surrey:
EBs Recognize a Nucleotide-Dependent Structural Cap at Growing Microtubule Ends
Cell 2012, 149, 371-382, 13 April 2012




Image source: Cell

The strange case of ... Halestorm

I’ve only discovered Halestorm very recently, coming across the video for Love Bites on Kerrang and loving the frantic energy of it. My closest reference point is Within Temptation, whose complete works I love and cherish. Viewed from that direction, Halestorm is a different kind of offering. Where Sharon’s soprano floats etherically above the metal grumble, Lzzy mostly sticks to the lower registers that are mixing right within the instrumental sounds and doesn’t stand out so much. What makes the metal tracks irresistible for me is the mix of crazy energy and bad girl swagger in the lyrics (as witnessed even in the titles, such as: you call me a bitch like it’s a bad thing). The ballads are perfectly nice as rock ballads, though some of them (eg here’s to us) sound like melodies I have heard before.



In other music news, I also ordered “Best intentions” by We are the in crowd at the same time and have played that CD a few times, but find it less addictive. Nothing wrong with it really, I don’t mind playing it, it’s just it doesn’t blow me away.

astrobiology feature

As public interest in all things astrobiology is flying high right now, I have written another feature on the area, focusing on the search for life on Earth and in the rest of the Universe. Featuring exoplanets, Curiosity, Chile's Atacama desert, Lake Vostok, Carl Sagan, Galileo (spacecraft) ...

The feature is out in today's issue of Current Biology, you can freely access the

HTML text

or download the

PDF file.

If that leaves you hungry for more, you could always try to get hold of a copy of this book:



which came out in its second, fully revised and updated edition last year - full details here

Dvorak for cello and flute

the young cellist in my family has arranged Dvorak's famous humoreske (originally a piano piece, but also found in the Suzuki string methods) for cello and flute, so I can play it with her (the limiting factor being, as she likes to put it, that I should first learn to count to four). The score is in noteflight and registered users can view it there, but for everybody else I am now trying to embed it here:



Wow, it actually works (requires Flash, though). If you press the button on the left above the score you can hear an approximation to the music (the cello sound doesn't sound much like a cello, and it's too metronomical for a romantic piece!) Check here for the kind of style we're aiming at :D

Seeing there seems to be very little repertoire available for cello and flute, I may put our other pieces online as well, by and by. They'll be around grade 5 level and are aiming to have a good balance between the two instruments.

halestorm

I'm loving the frantic video for "Love Bites" by Halestorm so much, I've ordered their CD ... watch this space.



Oh, and their cover of Lady Gaga's Bad Romance is also brilliant.