The Tyndall Effect
Presented by Professor Grainne Mulvey (TU Dublin)
ABSTRACT
Light and colour have long been a fascination of mine. The titles of many of my works—Shifting Colours, Diffractions, Parallel Light, Tunnelling To Light—bear witness to this. Discovering that John Tyndall—a highly-respected and influential Victorian scientist, born in my home village—was one of the pre-eminent pioneers in this field, it was natural that I would try to find out more about him, and inevitably, this research impacted my own work, and over the last few years I have been drawing inspiration from his work in a number of pieces.
The Tyndall Effect is a CD bringing together five of these works, coupled with an extended essay on Tyndall’s life and work by Dr Norman “Mac” McMillan, for whom restoring Tyndall to his rightful place in the scientific pantheon has been a life’s work. From Mac, I learned much more about the historical, political and social context of Tyndall’s work, in particular the deliberately provocative Belfast Address of 1874, a polemical rallying call for the separation of religion and science.
I was naturally particularly drawn to Tyndall’s work on light and sound. There are obvious parallels that can be drawn between light and sound: both are wave (or wave-like) phenomena; both allow us to map our surroundings; both are mediums of communication; both can be used to create art…
However, analogy is not equivalence; for the creative artist, it’s a way to spark imagination. We are creating art, not lab demonstrations. While the scientist is seeking—and governed by—a universal set of laws, with each new work the artist is creating an entirely new universe, subject only to the limits of the imagination. Every work brings us back to Genesis chapter 1—and we get to play God!
Extra-musical inspiration is just that—something outside of music that stimulates the imagination. In my case it’s often something visual: the constantly changing shapes of a murmuration of starlings or shoal of fish; a meteor shower; an auroral display; the colours of the sunrise and sunset; the blue of the sky—and it was Tyndall who explained why the sky is blue!
Colour is important in my music, both literally, in the sense of timbre, but also metaphorically, as a way of working with musical material. Every time we see a rainbow, we are seeing how white light can be split into constituent parts. Those colours can be recombined in an infinite variety of ways to produce new colours.
So it is with sound: individual musical parameters can be separated and recombined to produce new “hybrid” material, which can then undergo the same process to produce yet more new material—and so on.
The five works in this collection display this process in very different contexts: mapping the colour spectrum to the piano keyboard in Calorescence, the dangers and delights of Alpine exploration in the Cello Concerto “Excursions and Ascents”, the emergence of order from primordial chaos in LUCA and Diffractions, and the electronic expansion of the piano sound world in Sun of Orient Crimson with Excess of Light.
Having been invited to contribute to a book Mac is writing on the history of Irish optics, the parallels with light and sound continue to inspire me—in the recent Light Scattering, for violin and piano, as well as two works in progress: the Solstice Prelude for flute and electronics and Rosette for orchestra—named after the Rosette nebula, which we see today as it was at the time Newgrange was being built.
