a famous flautist

Some thoughts on

Friedrich der Große: Musiker und Monarch
Sabine Henze-Döhring
CH Beck 2012

Published in the year of Frederick the Great’s 300th birthday, this is a thorough appraisal of what we really know about the Prussian king’s music making. It turns out that all the anecdotes and the widely reproduced images such as the painting by Adolph Menzel appearing on the cover of the book and below, of the king playing a recital to an attentive audience, aren’t corroborated by any hard evidence.

Flötenkonzert Friedrichs des Großen in Sanssouci (painting by Adolph von Menzel, 1850–1852)
Source: Wikipedia

Typically, the author maintains, he will have played the flute in the company of his paid court musicians only, with no audience. Said musicians included his flute teacher, the composer Johann Joachim Quantz (at the right margin of the painting), as well as JS Bach’s son CPE Bach (at the harpsichord). Which is why Bach senior paid that very famous visit to Friedrich’s court. And given the circumstance that nobody could really go on record with judgements on the reigning monarch, we can’t really know how accomplished his playing was. So, it’s all a bit frustrating on the flute front.

What we know a lot more about, however, is his role as an impresario of professional and public concerts (in which he didn’t play), as well as court opera, where he championed the opera buffa as a new form imported from Italy, as well as star castrato singers also coming from there. The simple reason that we know a lot about these is that these musicians needed to be recruited and paid, which already involved correspondence and record keeping. And once they were doing their thing, Frederick liked to write letters about their music making to his relatives - and to Voltaire, obviously. As you do.

I also learned that, after he fought three wars against Austria over the possession of Silesia (which Prussia gained in the process), shared musical interests enabled he king to reconnect with Maria Theresia’s son, the future Austrian Emperor Joseph II. Music saves lives, again.

PS I missed the memo when this came out but discovered it on a recent visit to Potsdam where Old Fritz used to toot his flute.

an asynchronous quartet

some thoughts on

Quartet: How four women changed the musical world

Leah Broad

Faber & Faber 2023

I’ve been a huge fan of Rebecca Clarke’s sonata for viola ever since I first heard a student playing part of it at the Oxford Music Festival quite a few years ago. Which is why I pounced at the opportunity to hear this and more music by her at the Jacqueline DuPre Music building on International Women’s Day this year, performed by Rosalind Ventris (viola), Laura van der Heijden (cello) and Libby Burgess (piano).

There was a pre-concert talk held by Leah Broad, who was there to promote her brand-new book, a group biography of four female English composers, including Clarke. It was all really lovely and inspiring so I bought a copy of her book on the spot and started looking for further female composers to add to Cowley Orchestra's music library. When I got the chance, I started reading Quartet at chapter 3, where Rebecca Clarke comes into the story. The four composers are different generations, and Clarke is the second to make her appearance. One could object to the title giving the misleading impression of four musicians performing simultaneously.

To give a brief overview, we’re talking about

• Ethel Smyth (1858-1944): known for her operas in her lifetime
• Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979): best known for her chamber music
• Dorothy Howell (1898-1982): piano and sacred music
• Doreen Carwithen (1922-2003): prolific film composer

I was a bit sceptical of the whole concept of a group biography where the lives concerned span very different times, but I came around to acknowledging that it kind of works in this case, seeing that as rare “woman composers” in the fairly limited scene of English classical music, they were all handled as curiosities, and their works were sometimes billed together in concerts or radio broadcasts. And they faced similar dangers of being forgotten as soon as they were no longer able or willing to fight for their music to get airtime. So in the end, I returned to reading the bits I missed at the beginning, and learned a lot about the other composers too, of whose work I had been entirely unaware.

In a way, it was interesting to see Rebecca Clarke’s life woven into the lives of other women who have faced similar challenges before and after her, and I’m a sucker for everything about the Bloomsbury set, to which Ethel Smyth was connected through Virginia Woolf, and I was pleased to learn that Doreen Carwithen played a cello called Perky. However, at the end of the day, I’m sticking with the Rebecca fandom and would like to see her autobiography published (and/or a full-scale biography). I should really learn some of her cello work, and perhaps also the viola sonata (of which the composer also prepared a cello adaptation).

Blackwells

Update 8.3.2025: There are another eight woman composers in the book "Sounds and sweet airs" by Anna Beer (2016), which I discovered recently and haven't read yet. Watch this space.

October crop

the roundup of German pieces in October has philosophical insights gained in mitochondrial research, RNA scaffolding in synthetic biology, crop protection, and an appreciation of the conical flask / Erlenmeyer flask on its 150th birthday.


Die Energie der Mitochondrien und ein bewegtes Forscherleben, Spektrum der Wissenschaft 2011, Nr 10, 100. (review of "Feuersucher" by Gottfried Schatz)

RNA-Gerüst bringt Ordnung in die Zelle, Chemie in unserer Zeit 2011, 45, 351
restricted access to PDF file

Ungestörtes Wachstum erwünscht, Nachrichten aus der Chemie 2011, 59,966

Eine schräge Geschichte, Nachrichten aus der Chemie 2011, 59, 936



Erlenmeyer's original design drawing, apparently. Source: wikipedia

Niko's mischievous experiments

review of

Niko's Nature
by Hans Kruuk
Oxford University Press 2003

Together with his German colleague, friend, and fellow Nobel laureate Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen counts as a founding father of the science of animal behaviour, ethology. The most remarkable thing about his scientific legacy is how simple and elegant his experiments were, and yet they often revealed something profound about why animals behave the way they do.

Tinbergen would use felt pens to paint spots on stickleback fish that use this kind of colour stimulus in mating, move landmarks that he thought wasps might use to find their nests, and paint birds’ eggs in different colours. These experiments, which often gave the impression of originating from the mind of a mischievous child, answered many important questions on how animal instincts work.

Given the nature of his science, which is relatively easy to grasp even for the completely uninitiated, it is not surprising that he also wrote books for children and grown-up lay readers. This may or may not have some connection to the fact that two of his co-workers from his post-war years at Oxford’s zoology department went on to become highly successful popular science authors in their distinct ways: Desmond Morris and Richard Dawkins.

Hans Kruuk, also a former PhD student from the Tinbergen lab (and an early observer of the famous badgers of Wytham Woods) has written a highly readable account of the intertwined life and science of “the Maestro” as his co-workers used to call him. There are only moderate amounts of war-time drama in an otherwise settled and stable life, but the unusually accessible nature of Tinbergen’s research means that this biography is a rare opportunity for non-scientists to understand how a scientific mind works.

PS I should have reviewed this book 5 years ago when I read it. I’m somewhat disappointed to see that OUP still hasn’t reissued it as a paperback, which doesn’t bode well for the sales.




PS (10.4.2019): The Nobel foundation featured the Tinbergen brothers on the occasion of siblings day, yesterday, linking to this article about them by an economist. Which reminded me of a very interesting letter to the Guardian written in 2013 by Niko's son Dirk Tinbergen, remembering post-war food shortages:

"Helen Keats's story of roof rabbits (Letters, 12 February) reminds me of my father and uncle debating whether it was worth "investing" breadcrumbs to try to catch sparrows for the pot."

It is an example of the family trait that Hans Kruuk refers to as "pathological modesty" in his biography - the letter writer forgot to mention the hilarious fact that both participants in the sparrow-catching discussion went on to win Nobel prizes in fields related to the subject.

a house and a family

The trend this summer seems to be to publish a book about the house you live in. Bill Bryson tried it, but I’ve read mostly bad reviews about his attempt to make the history of the world revolve around his Norfolk rectory.

Now Charlotte Moore, known to people in the UK interested in autism as the author of the Guardian column “Mind the gap” and the book George and Sam about her two eponymous sons with autism (she also has a son without), has a new book coming out on Thursday (1.7.):



Hancox: A house and a family. (Viking / Penguin 2010)

Judging by the snippet that appeared in the Guardian this weekend (All under one roof), I find it a lot more promising than the Bryson book. Her house has been in the family since 1888, and its inhabitants seem to have the genetic disposition to keep things, especially everything that has any kind of writing on it. (At that point I was beginning to wonder whether that phenotype is actually linked to the autism genes, or whether the author is a long-lost relative of ours.)

So using the documents and other memorabilia that her relatives have stashed away in the house for 120+ years, she traced the history of both house and family. I’m really looking forward to reading it. Maybe I can get a review copy ?

PS just discovered, there's also an appreciation of the place by her brother in the Observer: Hancox: so much more than just my home and a photo gallery.

the dark energy of William Shakespeare

Literary types around here are falling over themselves to assert that the guy from Stratford really did write those plays. There is a new book out that ridicules all other theories, and it's got glowing reviews everywhere.

Not knowing much about this whole debate (or non-debate, as the Stratfordians hasten to call it), I am getting the impression that they do protest too much. The fact is that we know far too little about the biography of the Stratford man to be sure about how the plays came into being. And as with scientific problems, where there is an embarrassing lack of information, the field is open to wild speculation. Someone on "The Review Show" compared the Shakespeare "non-debate" to the evolution debates in the US. This comparison is outrageous, as we have tons of data confirming evolution, but virtually no data about Shakespeare's intellectual life.

If we're looking for an analogy in science, I would suggest the dark matter / dark energy conundrum. Current knowledge very clearly tells us (via several independent lines of evidence) that we know nothing about some 97 % of the mass-energy content of the Universe, and scientists have come up with a whole zoo of hypothetical exotic particles and other tweaks to the known laws of physics (eg modified versions of Newton's laws) to address this problem. All are speculative, but they can guide research that may one day find the missing bits.

Similarly, we have a > 90% knowledge vacuum concerning the inner life of Shakespeare and where he may have found inspiration for his works. So I, as a literary-minded scientist find it quite natural that this vacuum gives rise to wild speculation, which may inspire research that may one day resolve some of the mysteries surrounding the bard.

public enemy

Ulrike Meinhof: Die Biographie
Jutta Ditfurth
Ullstein 2007

Ulrike Marie Meinhof, who would have turned 75 today, was West Germany’s public enemy No. 1 from a fateful day in May 1970 through to her death in a purpose-built high-security prison six years later, and indeed well beyond the grave. Together with Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, she was seen as the co-founder of the organisation that was to develop into the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF), built on the mistaken belief that it could trigger a revolution by starting urban guerrilla warfare against a state they saw as increasingly oppressive. The group killed a total of 34 people, and its own casualties, combined with the random ones killed by police forces going over the top, were on a similar scale. What it eventually achieved was exactly the opposite of what it set out to do – it made the state more oppressive. Many democratic rights and civil liberties were cut and undermined by the social democrat / liberal democrat governments of the 70s striving to be seen as tough in their fight against terrorism.

With all the panic and witch-hunting that marked these “years of terror”, few people realised that the biographies of the failed revolutionaries were completely at odds with the public image spread by government and media. The RAF was probably the only political organisation of its time that was dominated and led by women. Among the male recruits, there were adventurers who got a kick out of the idea of playing war with real guns (the name Andreas Baader springs to mind). Most of the members, however, and the women especially, came to the movement from social engagements, either working with marginal groups of society, or, in the later stages, motivated by the ill treatment of the first generation of RAF prisoners.

Ulrike Meinhof also had a track record of helping the weakest and most marginalised groups of society (e.g. teenagers in care homes), but beyond that she also was one of the country’s most talented political journalists. As a columnist for left-wing magazine Konkret, she was the most eloquent critic of German politics in the 1960s, from the remilitarisation through to the “Notstandsgesetze”.

How somebody of that intellectual standing, who commands a significant audience, can turn their back on society and take up arms in a struggle that was doomed from the start is a very important question that justifies a major biography. While there have been shorter volumes on Meinhof (e.g. by Peter Brückner, Mario Krebs), Jutta Ditfurth’s magnum opus is much more ambitious in scope.

Herself a lifelong dissident, the daughter of science writer Hoimar von Ditfurth dropped the aristocratic “von” from her name and became a founding member of Germany’s Green Party, which she left after a few years as it drifted away from the radical idealism of its founders. With hindsight, it makes perfect sense that Ditfurth should have been drawn to this subject.

And what a success she made of it. It shows on every page that, while she doesn’t agree with the violent path that Meinhof took, Ditfurth does understand perfectly well what made her tick, and how she felt that society had taken a wrong turn. She uses the pivotal liberation of Andreas Baader in 1970, after which Meinhof had to live undercover, as an opening scene, she tells the life essentially in chronological order, from the background of her parents, who both died young and left Ulrike in the care of her mother’s friend, the academic Renate Riemeck, through to the prison years and the controversial death, which the authorities hastily labelled a suicide. Conspiracy theories implying that she was murdered in her cell at Stuttgart-Stammheim have never quite been quelled, and Ditfurth returns an open verdict on this prickly question.

The family and political networks that shaped her life before 1970 come alive on these pages and make make the ensuing tragedy all the more dramatic. There are gaps in the post-1970 knowledge, which is inevitable because of the clandestine nature of the RAF operations, which have never been unravelled in court. (Typically, all members caught were convicted on the basis of being members of a terrorist organisation by the very same judges that had previously rejected any guilt to be associated with membership of Nazi organisations, one of the many bitter ironies in this story.)

Jutta Ditfurth has delivered the definitive account of the life of somebody who could have been one of post-war Germany’s most admired intellectuals and instead turned into its most-hated (which, of course, requires a great deal of courage from the author, as some of that residual hatred will surely be reflected in her direction). The poet Erich Fried called Meinhof the most important German woman since Rosa Luxemburg. The way both women perished should concern us all.

exploring bohemia

a new review of an old book -- I have no idea how I managed to miss this when it came out, nor how I could live without it :)


Virginia Nicholson: Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939

Penguin paperback 2003

Virginia Nicholson describes the citizens, customs, and traditions of a country that doesn’t exist, but which is instantly recognisable: Bohemia. Using the lead metaphor of a virtual country of which Bohemians of the early 20th century were the inhabitants, she gives us a very detailed and colourful account of what life was like in that virtual place and real time.

Nicholson is, of course, supremely qualified to serve as Bohemia’s ambassador to the modern world, as she descends from a family of Bohemian celebrities. She’s not called Virginia for nothing: Virginia Woolf was her great-aunt, Woolf’s biographer Quentin Bell her father, and Woolf’s sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, her grandmother. (Oh, and Julian Bell, whose adventures in China inspired Hong Ying was Quentin's brother. What a family.)

Considering these family connections, it would have been easy for her to explore the faraway realm of Bohemia through the eyes of its best-known citizens. Instead, she turned her attention to the lives and times of the less successful artists and writers, to those for whom the move from “normal” England to Bohemia often meant a descent into real hardship.

Like an anthropologist describing the customs of a remote pacific island population, Nicholson studies the minute details of everyday life in Bohemia and devotes separate chapters to elementary aspects of the lives of the natives, including money, love life, education, interior decoration, clothes, food, housework, travel, and partying. Being an anarchistic place by definition there is no section on hierarchy or power.

These chapters are populated with a swirling cast of painters, models, and writers ranging from the almost famous to the long-forgotten, so the “Dramatis Personae” in the appendix becomes the most valuable part of the book, as one gradually learns to navigate the social networks of 1920s Bohemia. There have been many memoirs and biographies of the people involved, so there is no shortage of brilliant quotes to liven up the proceedings. My favourite one has to be the (unattributed) geometric description of the Bloomsbury set as a circle of friends who lived in squares and loved in triangles.

As additional material to make the sheer visual wealth of Bohemia more palpable, I recommend to consult the book “Charleston: a Bloomsbury house and garden” (Frances Lincoln 2004) as well, which Nicholson wrote together with her father, and which contains many wonderful photos by Alen Macweeney of the country house where Vanessa Bell and various associates lived. Additional visualisation help is provided by the movie Carrington (about the various love triangles involving the painter Dora Carrington and the writer Lytton Strachey), which is now available on DVD.

In all of this, the very endearing Bohemian philosophy of life shines through, which essentially implies that for each individual their art, love, and friendships are infinitely more important than the ten million rules and regulations that Victorian society imposed on its members. Living in a society which in many ways is closer to Bohemia’s jurisdiction than to Victoria’s, we are bound to find the Bohemian rule-breaking and mischief-making amusing, even in instances which contemporaries must have considered truly shocking.

Therefore, the whole makes for a highly entertaining read, but it also provides food for thought and self-questioning. Many of Bohemia’s battles against Victorian norms have been won by now – for instance, women can wear their hair short, and men theirs long without shocking anybody. And yet, people with any kind of creative inclination still face the age-old dilemma whether they can afford to put their art (in the widest sense) first, or whether they have to make bourgeois compromises to ensure they can pay their bills. Today, there isn’t a separate country called Bohemia any more. On the sliding scale between Bohemian and Bourgeois, everybody has to find their own place.

scientists' lives

In an essay accompanying Nature's autumn books section, science writer and biographer Georgina Ferry deplores the lack of interest in biographies of scientists:

A scientist's life for me
Georgina Ferry
Forty years after the publication of James Watson's The Double Helix, Georgina Ferry asks why the life stories of so few scientists make it into the bookshops.
Nature 455, 871-872 (16 October 2008) | doi:10.1038/455871a; Published online 15 October 2008

which is probably true. I've been pondering related questions, as I've written 24 short biographies of scientists in the last three weeks (only two bios still to do!). There are many deserving subjects out there who don't have a printed biography, and some don't even have a decent wikipedia entry.

But hey, it's the same as with other popular science books -- we scientists feel that people should read them, but most people just choose not to. Not much we can do about it (short of radical dumbing down, which in my opinion doesn't help, as it throws exactly those things over board that you want people to know about!)

Exciting new angles at scientists' lives may be a way out, as may be shorter formats. Or more eccentric scientists -- there's never a shortage of books about Einstein or Feynman.

PS

Some of the full length scientists lives I found inspiring are those of:

Niko Tinbergen (Hans Kruuk)
Marie Curie (Eve Curie)
JD Bernal (Andrew Brown)
Darwin (Desmond/Moore)
Erdos (Hoffman)
Dorothy Hodgkin (Ferry)

a plodding life

During my week off, I read Georgina Ferry's biography of Max Perutz, who solved the crystal structure of haemoglobin in an epic quest lasting over 3 decades, and who set up the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, which I understand has produced more Nobel laureates than France or Canada in the time since it opened.

All this makes for an exciting story, even though the protagonist is anything but a glittering star. Perutz was a very patient and persistent "plodder" who, while eager for success and recognition, was never seen as a genius and never had the over-sized ego that often comes with such a label. The persistent plodding won him the haemoglobin structure and the Nobel prize, while his modesty allowed him to quietly run a world-leading institute where he had to handle primadonnas like Francis Crick.

Obviously, the book is a must for anybody interested in proteins. For everybody else, I was worried a bit that it might turn out a bit boring as I knew that Max was a less than glittering person. But I think the author has managed the trick to turn his plodding life into a compelling story, which should be interesting for non-specialist readers as well. The main lesson for the general public is, of course, that one doesn't have to be a towering genius of stature of a Crick or Bernal in order to be a successful scientist. Relatively ordinary people can make an impact too.

an apple a day

The lives of mathematician Kurt Gödel and computer pioneer Alan Turing are the subject of a slightly fictionalised biography, reviewed here.

Lots of things I didn't know about them -- have a biography of Turing sitting on the shelf unread and managed only a third of "Gödel Escher Bach" back in the 80s when it was all the rage.

Most shockingly, I didn't know how Turing killed himself: as he was obsessed with Disney's Snow White, he bought a red apple every day. The last one he injected with cyanide. What a story.

PS the book is:
A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines
by Janna Levin
230pp, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, £14.99

being fidel

There is a very nice review of Fidel Castro's My Life by Seumas Milne, who used to edit the Guardian Comment pages in times when they were about the only hope for sanity in this world.
See whether I can find a Spanish edition of that around here ...

Oh, and the DVD I mentioned a couple of times before arrived yesterday, review to follow.

mademoiselle curie

Eve Curie, the author of one of the most popular biographies ever written of a scientist, Madame Curie, has died at the age of 102 years.

I guess there are lots of lessons to be learnt from this, such as:

* working with radiation can halve your life expectancy (even though Nobel prizes are said to increase life expectancy!)

* whatever radiation Eve was exposed to in utero and as a child, seems to have had no ill effect.

I have no idea why the Guardian hasn't published an obituary yet, but there is one in the New York Times

one man and his genome

Following the various press offerings emanating from Craig Venter has been huge fun these days. First he publishes his own genome, then his autobiography, and now he's promising a "new life form". Give him a couple of years more, and he'll be breeding Daleks to colonize our galaxy.

To bring him back down to Earth, here is a response from a biologist who appears to be a bit fed up with him ...

wikipedia

thanks to a faithful reader of my blog, I am now listed in wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Gross_%28science_writer%29.

Not to be confused with the swimmer, the actor, the artist, the medical ethicist, or most dangerously, the author of books about models, Bob Dylan, and a NY appartment block, I come equipped with the job title "science writer".

In the spirit of wikipedia, of course, you can add whatever you consider relevant.

calling all wikipedians

... this glaring omission has now been fixed (see above!):


I have noticed that I'm not yet included in wikipedia, while other science writers of comparable production are. Now I'm not desperately keen on fame, but I think it would be helpful if people who come across some random piece of mine somewhere had the opportunity of looking up my name without ending up reading about the German swimming star or the US music/fashion writer who both share my name.

I hope that doesn't create the impression of terminal vanity. I've looked up the criteria of wikipedia, re. "notability" and the main thing is that there should be non trivial things being written about the person or their work in trusted sources, so I figure that the book reviews in Nature, New Scientist, etc. fulfil that criterion.