HPLS (2015) 36(3):346–356 DOI 10.1007/s40656-014-0045-7 ORIGINAL PAPER
Music and biology at the Naples Zoological Station Bernardino Fantini
Received: 30 August 2014 / Accepted: 9 September 2014 Springer International Publishing AG 2014
Abstract Anton Dohrn projected the Stazione Zoologica as composed of two complementary halves: nature and culture. This attitude was not only expression of the general cultural background of the nineteenth century cultural elite, for Dohrn both formed a coherent and organized whole. In my essay I will analyse the different levels of the relationship between music and biology. In particular, I will demonstrate that both share similar ‘‘styles of thought’’. In the last part I will show that Dohrn’s most important scientific contribution, the concept or ‘‘principle’’ of Functionswechsel, provides evidence for the link he had established between music and biology Keywords
Anton Dohrn Music Metamorphosis Functionswechsel
1 Music and science at the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn’s ‘dream’, as Christiane called it (Groeben 1985, 2001), was twofold: science on one side and music on the other. The architectural project of the Stazione reflected this double-faced dream, because Dohrn knew exactly what he wanted, and how he wanted it done, and elaborated the plans for the buildings himself. On the first floor Dohrn projected two large rooms, one dedicated to biology, with laboratory space for many scientists, and one, facing the sea, dedicated to lectures, art and music. The latter, the Fresco room, with its statues and allegories, was symmetrical and complementary to the laboratory, with its organisms, aquariums,
B. Fantini (&) Centre Collaborateur OMS pour la Recherche Historique en Sante´ Publique, Universite´ de Gene`ve, Case Postale, 1211 Gene`ve 4, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected]
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microtomes and microscopes. His architectural choices can be explained at three quite distinct though not separated levels. First of all, making and listening to music could be considered as Dohrn’s personal interest and leisure. Music in fact remained very close to his heart throughout his life. He loved in particular Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Brahms, and became an intimate friend of the violinist Joseph Joachim, a close collaborator of Brahms and the leader of the Joachim String Quartet.1 The second level assumes a superficial connection between music and biological research, as distinct parts of the same cultural background and social life. Art and music were essential parts of the life of the cultural elite in the nineteenth century, two complementary aspects of intellectual and social status, and Dohrn, like a Renaissance prince, wanted to have his ‘‘musical laboratory.’’ Therefore, the scientific entrepreneur promoted pleasant and cultivated activities, supporting music and the arts, sharing values and emotions, developing a sense of community and a ‘‘creative atmosphere’’ beneficial for scientific research. Finally, instead of being simply juxtaposed, biology and music could be seen as integrated components of the same cultural, scientific and philosophical endeavour, two different expressions of the same quest, at the same time scientific and aesthetic. Anton Dohrn grew up in a familial and social context in which music played an important role. His father Carl August had wide-ranging contacts with eminent scientists, like Alexander von Humboldt, and musicians, notably the composer Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, who became Anton’s god-father. Throughout his life, Anton tried to cope with his father’s expectations, hoping to win his respect and affection. In 1897, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Naples Zoological Station, he recognized his debt to his father, defined as his ‘‘intellectual protoplasm’’ and he noted that in their family circle it was considered more important to know quotations from Goethe or to recognize Beethoven’s music than to excel in Greek or mathematics (Dohrn 1897; Groeben 1985). In his early childhood, Anton developed his taste for classical literature and music but also learned that art and science must coexist and interact, as they had in the work of Goethe, a poet and a scientist who envisioned a complete integration of both sensibilities. Quite often, Dohrn in his letters to his wife mentioned a passage from the prologue to Goethe’s Faust: ‘‘In the beginning was the deed.’’2 During his formative years, Dohrn was profoundly impressed by Friedrich Albert Lange, a philosopher, pedagogue, political activist, and journalist, who was one of the originators of neo-Kantianism. Dohrn adopted therefore the neo-Kantian attitude, centred on the concepts of form and teleology, in science as well as in art. The model for his scientific and institutional work was Goethe’s ideal of harmonic humanity (harmonische Menschlichkeit), that is, the unity and harmony between 1
In a letter of June 4, 1896 from Naples to his nephew Harold, Joachim mentioned his trips in the Bay and his discussions with Anton Dohrn, ‘‘a most charming fellow’’ (Bickley 1914).
2
Anton Dohrn to Marie Dohrn, Aug. 22, 1888, Hoekendorf, Bd. 543, quoted in Groeben 1985. It is of interest to note that ‘‘deed’’ means ‘‘act’’, and it is used to replace logos (the verb) in John’s Evangel. The logos means also to give form, in the platonic sense, as the essence of things, and it is the form which ‘‘acts’’ in the world.
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what one can do and what one wants to do (Groeben 1985, p. 16). As Dohrn put it in a letter to his wife in 1886: I have told you several times that I made a work of art out of life itself […]. I found chaos before me and have created out of that both a practical organism, the Station, and a theoretical one, the ‘‘protohistory of vertebrates [Urgeschichte der Wirbelthiere].’’ Each step on the path of these two things I have envisioned beforehand, as an artist first sees the complete work of art and then starts to create its parts.3 The active search for form and beauty thus provided a common background for both science and the arts. As Dohrn wrote to Edmund B. Wilson, himself an outstanding scientist and excellent musician, in 1900: Phylogeny is a subtle thing, it wants not only the analytic powers of the ‘‘Forscher’’, of the researcher, but also the constructive imagination of the ‘‘Ku¨nstler,’’ of the artist—and both must balance each other, which they rarely do—otherwise the thing does not succeed (quoted from Fantini 2000, p. 525). According to his correspondence, Dohrn’s motto was ‘‘to create, to organize, to develop—this is my need, even passion.’’4 Still, ‘‘to create, to organize, to develop’’ can be considered also as the main attribute of the living world, according to the Darwinian morphological evolutionary theory. Furthermore, ‘‘to create, to organize, to develop’’ is also the need and the passion of a musical genius in his or her creative activity. This is the core of the epistemic conjunction between music and science, a point I want to explore further in the following.
2 The epistemic conjunction of biology and music The relationships between music and science can be traced at three different levels. The first level concerns the direct use of scientific knowledge in musical theory, for instance the numerical Pythagorean formulations of harmony and consonance, the application of geometrical propositions in the musical treatises of the Renaissance, the physical explanations of consonance and dissonance by the nineteenth-century physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz (Kursell 2008), or the use of computers and of chaos theory in contemporary musical composition. A second level of analysis is found in the scientific study of music’s influence on body and mind and in attempts to explain the reasons for the emotional power of music, based on physiological and psycho-neurobiological models. This subject was already treated in Greco-Roman culture and received great attention from many famous doctors of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, notably in discussions on the effect of music on people suffering from tarantula bites (Baglivi 1700; Budd 1985; Fantini 1999). The search for the reasons behind music and, more generally, sound’s psychological and physiological effects on man and his comportment found its apogee in 3
Anton Dohrn to Marie Dohrn, Aug. 1, 1886, Naples. Bd. 372, quoted in Groeben 1985.
4
Anton Dohrn to Marie Dohrn, Aug. 1883, Stettin Bd. 246.
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Helmholtz’s work (von Helmholtz 1870, 1873), and recently, psychological and neurobiological researches have produced an enormous amount of experimental results and theories (Patel 2008; Juslin and Sloboda 2010; Cochrane et al. 2013). The third, and perhaps more fundamental level of interaction between music and biology is epistemic and concerns the role of similar ‘‘styles of thought’’, the use of analogue interpretive models, metaphors and images (Fantini 2013). The idea of style is wide-spread in musical and musicological treatises, and includes elements of communication, writing and method (forms of notation, social practices, interactions with instruments and with the physiology of performers, to name a few). In music as well as in science, a style is needed that encompasses constructive methods, forms of communication, criteria for the evaluation of results, which are, by definition, necessarily public and collective activities (even at the level of social organization), but allow a great, central space to individual creativity. Metaphors, in this context, are not only rhetorical artifices, but have a heuristic role since they suggest a general interpretative model that can be contradicted by theories or observations (Ricoeur 1975; Ortony 1979; Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Ko¨vecses 2005). According to this point of view, it is useful to break with the historical schema, which tends exclusively to stress discontinuity, discoveries and revolutions, and, on the contrary, to seek the continuity that underlies these changes (Canguilhem 1988). Knowledge consists not only of facts and empirical evidence but also of problems, hypotheses, paradoxes, innovations and surprises. Changes in paradigms and styles during revolutionary moments in the development of science, as in that of art, are also moments of re-evaluation, of re-proposition of old aporias. From the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, medical and biological thought has been dominated, successively, by three different models of the body and its structures and functions. The first model was proposed by humoral medicine, based on the correspondence between four physical elements (fire, air, water, and earth), four bodily humours (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile), and four psychological temperaments (sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, and melancholic). The individual behaviour and the susceptibility to diseases was determined by the particular combination of the four humours in each individual. After the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, the humoral model was gradually replaced by a model of the body as composed of elementary, permanently oscillating fibres (Grmek 1989). This model, built on anatomical and microscopic observations, identified the ‘‘elementary fibre’’ as the ultimate element in the organization of the body and as the centre of all physiological function, including motility and sensibility. Finally, starting from the second half of the eighteenth century, the idea of ‘‘organism’’ became central and represented the theoretical starting point for the creation of biology as an autonomous science. This model explained the essential properties of living organisms on the basis of a complex, harmonious and balanced organization, which constructs itself from a seed. Each medical and biological model played a major role in all three above mentioned levels, in musical theory, in the philosophical discourses about the emotional power of music, and in the practical construction and elaboration of compositional techniques and musical styles. In late Middle-Ages and Renaissance, analogous to the medical humoral theory, a musical composition was a ‘‘body’’
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composed of the four humours and characterized by a good temperamentum (Ficino 1989[1489], p. 10; Boccadoro 2004). In the seventeenth century, the effects of music were explained with reference to objects and exterior movement, like the movement of air provoked by the vibration of strings, imprint vibrations on the elementary fibres that form the nerves and the whole of the body. If during the Renaissance and for Monteverdi love kindled, and the heart burnt and consumed itself, in the seventeenth century humans vibrated with all their cords and quivered with fury. The dynamic between warmth and coldness, typical of humoral medicine and of Renaissance music, was replaced by the dynamic ‘‘tension-release,’’ typical of mechanical interpretations of life and form, and of Baroque music. From the second half of the eighteenth century the new science ‘‘biology’’ emerged, based on new notions of form and function and on the idea of organisms as organic, harmonious wholes which come into being as the result of an essential tension, contained in embryonic form in the seed. Exactly in the same period, a ‘‘Great Divide’’ also took place in music: a new cultural and social role of music was created, linked to the origins of ‘‘absolute music’’ as an autonomous structural and syntactic language (Kivy 1990) and tied to the composers Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Biology and music came to share the same epistemic object, that is, ‘‘form’’ and its construction for the purpose of building up a coherent and individual organism, a living system and a musical work, respectively. The principle formula of the music of this period was the sonata form. The sonata is not built through apposition, as in sinuous Baroques sequences, but ‘‘from inside’’, starting with a ‘‘seed’’ or germ, which represents the ‘‘idea’’ of the final form of the individual composition in its totality (Rosen 1971). The objects (the sounds) themselves are not intrinsically musical. A single tone or a series of tones are musically meaningless as physical elements. Exactly like biology was now understood not as a science of particular physical and chemical objects, but of the relationships between these objects, in space and time, music is made of objects (sounds) but its logic and meaning depends on the relationships between these objects. As a consequence, an element acquires its musical meaning in modern music when it is connected with other different elements, and its function is revealed by this connection. The meaning of music lies in the perception and understanding of the musical relationships within a complex organization. The higher levels of physical organization cannot be fully explained by the sum or mechanical combination of ‘‘atomic’’ or ‘‘molecular’’ elements included in them, in the same way that the behaviour of a living system cannot be fully explained only by the structure and functions of macromolecules. On the other hand, the meaning of the composing structures is not completely determined by the whole form, because a cell in a living system and a sound in a piece of music have their autonomy, and the global meaning and aesthetic value is the result of the interrelation and integration of the different levels of organization, each with its specific autonomy (Meyer 1984). This brief analysis of the concept of form and organization in biology and music up to the time of Anton Dohrn can explain the profound reasons for the building of the two complementary rooms at the Naples Station. Indeed, as I will show in the
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following section, the most important scientific contribution Dohrn gave to biology, the concept or ‘‘principle’’ of Functionswechsel, provides evidence for the link he had established between music and biology.
3 Anton Dohrn and the Functionswechsel As pointed out by Michael Ghiselin in his introduction to Dohrn, there is no straight-forward English equivalent for Functionswechsel, and one is tempted to leave it untranslated (Dohrn and Ghiselin 1994). ‘‘Change of function,’’ indirectly suggested by Dohrn himself in a letter to Charles Darwin, seems appropriate.5 ‘‘Succession of function’’ is adequate, too, since it recalls Stoffwechsel (metabolism), used in the German scientific literature of the nineteenth century for the concept of the ordered succession of chemical processes within a living cell or organism. The idea behind Dohrn’s principle is that each organ can realize different functions in the organism in response to changes in the environment and life conditions. The eventual weakening of the original function and the strengthening of a different one can produce the transformation of the organ (Dohrn 1875, p. 60).6 Dohrn was profoundly convinced that morphology and physiology ought not to be completely separated. Function represented the main attribute of a living system. A form is not an abstract entity, but always linked to a specific function. Morphology must therefore be ‘‘functional’’ and it is the change of function which produces the modification of the form (Maienschein 1994). For Dohrn, morphology was the study of the form of living organisms in their construction (embryology), in their functioning (physiology), and in their environment (ecology, as suggested by his mentor Ernst Haeckel). The continuity of living systems along evolution, a fundamental principle of biology, is not only morphological, but must also be functional. This principle states that organs and functions cannot arise de novo, and Dohrn consistently rejected hypotheses that invoked ‘‘new formations’’ as a way of eliminating explanatory difficulties. The principle of continuity in evolution implies also that there had to be a plausible series of intermediate stages in which an organ with a given function was transformed into an organ performing a different function. Dohrn’s evolutionary thinking integrated traditional morphological and embryological data with an emphasis on functional changes. In such a way the traditional dichotomy form/ function acquired a new and not exclusive meaning: both aspects and their relationships are fundamental conditions for life. The principle of the succession of function was envisaged as a mechanism for explaining innovation and the emergence of novelty in evolving biological and ecological contexts, but it could also be applied, as I argue, to link the various kinds 5
A. Dohrn to Ch. Darwin, Jena, 30. Nov. 1867, in: Darwin and Dohrn 1982, p. 21: ‘‘Isn’t that most striking? Such a change of function?’’.
6
This passage is translated and discussed in chapter 14 of Russell 1916, p. 276. See also Dohrn and Ghiselin 1994.
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of progress and creativity into a more general conception, one that includes science and art, notably music. Physiological morphology assumed the synthesis between form and action (function) and music could be equally defined as the synthesis between form and action (movement). The expression ‘‘succession of function’’ can be used to describe the manner in which composers may change the tempo, rhythm, and notes of a theme to preserve its essential and recognizable characteristics but at the same time to change their function according to the new context these elements or figures are included. Like a living system, a musical work is ‘‘a form in movement’’ and there is no form without function and without development. Romantic science was dominated by the idea of metamorphoses, that is, major changes in the form and the function of a living organism accompanied by a striking alteration in appearance, character, or circumstances. But the idea of metamorphosis has been central in the history of music, too. The principle of variation of a melody or any other musical figure or form is the most powerful aesthetic and architectonic aspect of music. Franz Schubert used the technique of metamorphosis to bind together the four movements of his Wanderer Fantasy. Franz Liszt and Hector Berlioz made an extensive use of ‘‘thematic metamorphosis’’ (or thematic transformation): a theme is repeated throughout a musical work, but it undergoes constant transformations (transposition, inversion, augmentation, diminution or fragmentation) and appears in several contrasting roles or functions. The transformations of the theme will serve the purpose of ‘‘unity within variety’’, the architectural principle of absolute music. In distinction from the classical sonata form, the thematic transformation can accommodate dramatically charged phrases, highly coloured melodies and richer harmonies, favoured by the Romantic composers. The term metamorphosis is often included in the title of important works: Paul Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes by Weber, Benjamin Britten’s 6 Metamorphoses after Ovid, Leopold Godowsky’s Symphonic Metamorphoses on Waltzes and Themes by Johann Strauss, Richard Strauss’ Metamorphosen (which referred directly to Goethe), just to name a few. It constitutes a valuable interpretative model even for contemporary music (Spampinato 2008).
4 Functionswechsel in modern music Music is therefore an outstanding example of Functionswechsel. The idea of ‘‘change of the function’’ is overtly expressed by Arnold Scho¨nberg in his book The Structural Functions of Harmony (1967). In a passage he indicates a change of the function of the 7th degree of B minor by introducing the substitute a#, 7, which acquires the function of a leading-tone (Dudeque 1997, p. 4). A chord can play different functions according to its place in the harmonic progression or in the whole structure of a musical work. The same chord can be considered in its diverse positions as the dominant in a given key and a fundamental chord (tonic) in another. For example, the two triads G–B–D and C–E–G have different harmonic functions in different general contexts: in the key of C major, these cords play the role of the V and I degrees of the harmony respectively, whereas in the key of G major they
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have the role of I and IV degree. The sequence of the two identical chords in the two different keys has different function and meaning. In the former case, the succession V–I is an authentic cadence, felt as a resolutive movement and a closure. In the second case, the same two cords, that have exactly the same physical nature, act as a I–IV progression and this produces a feeling of unfinished and rises an expectation for further developments. Numerous experimental results show that even untrained listeners can react quickly and accurately to the two distinct functions and meanings of the syntactical and formal differences (Bigand 1997; Bigand and Parncutt 1999). According to Scho¨nberg, a transformation of a chord through substitution does not change the root function expressed as a scalar degree of a chord and its relationship to a tonal centre. Thus, a chord can be transformed, for example, from a major triad to a minor, a diminished, or an augmented triad, always keeping its diatonic root but changing its function in the general harmonic progression. The same kind of metamorphosis can be applied to the melodic materials. A melody can have a different expressive force, depending on the harmonic context, the tempo, the instrumentation or the register, acquiring in such a way a different meaning. As a consequence, the same theme or melody can show a sort of ‘‘succession of function’’ according to the form and the environment (style) in which it is involved. The best example of this permanence with variations is the harmonic and melodic theme of the Folia, originated probably in the fourteenth century and used by hundreds of composers until the twentieth century in totally diverse musical and cultural contexts, and with different functions, as the basis for virtuosistic variations, the development of composing skills, the expression of different emotions or as a symbol for Orlando’s madness, in Vivaldi’s homonymous opera. In the Renaissance, it was quite common to use popular, even bawdy, songs or motives as a theme for a polyphonic ‘‘parody mass’’ (e.g. L’Homme´ arme´ by Josquin des Pre`s or Palestrina), or to use pre-existing complete passages of music from other compositions, usually profane plainsongs or madrigals for sacred compositions, as in the case of Rolande de Lassus’ eight-voiced Missa Bell’ Amfirit’altera. Here, the composer borrowed passages of music from an unknown, and probably simpler, anonymous Venetian madrigal to build up a complex polyphonic form. This kind of metamorphosis is particularly frequent in the works composed after the Great Divide, when the accent and the aesthetic value was placed in the general organization or form of the individual form rather than on specific themes or motives. The change or succession of function is generally applied to the figures or motives (the second level of the hierarchical structure of a musical composition). These changes of function become the tools for the construction and development of the whole form, as in Beethoven’s symphonies. In Schubert’s string quartet No. 14 in D minor, known as The Death and the Maiden, the melody and harmonic structure of just a fragment of the homonymous Lied becomes the tool for an extraordinary syntactically and emotionally complex development. For Liszt ‘‘paraphrases’’ of themes or motives from famous operas became the pretext for a virtuoso exploitation of the piano’s technical and expressive means.
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A figure originally presented as a main theme of a composition can change its function and become a figure which accompanies another theme, as in the Rosamunde Quartet by Schubert (1824) or in the second movement of Claude Debussy’s String Quartet (1893). Likewise, a Wagnerian leitmotiv (literally ‘‘leading motive’’), a short melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic figure, clearly identified so as to retain its identity if modified on subsequent appearances, is associated with a particular person, place, or idea and assumes different meanings or functions in the dramatic and musical development, because of its modification in terms of rhythm, harmony, orchestration or dramatic situation (Warrack 1980). The technique of the metamorphosis can be used also as a particular form of expression, when a well-known figure of the musical tradition is included in a different work and used for parody or caricature, a sort of biological transplantation, in which the implant assumes the characters of the region in which it is placed and change completely its function, formal and expressive. One of the most extreme and delightful examples of this technique is the suite The Carnival of the Animals by Camille Saint-Sae¨ns (1886), in which the Galop infernal (commonly called the Cancan) from Offenbach’s operetta Orpheus in the Underworld, which rapidly became very popular in Parisian cabarets, is played by the strings at their lower register and a very slow tempo, producing a grotesque and caricatural movement, as opposed to the original lively and moving tempo, rhythm and articulation. In the twentieth century, Dmitri Shostakovich often used metamorphoses of the motives and themes from other composers, sometimes with humour, more often for expressing deep emotions and thoughts. In his last symphony, he includes an outburst of Rossini’s William Tell Overture as well as themes from Mikhail Glinka and Gustav Mahler (Wilson 2011).
5 Conclusion The examples can be multiplied ad libitum, as the principle of metamorphosis or succession of function is the primary mean for the construction of form and for modifying the expressive meaning of a composition, at least in Western music after the Great Divide. In biology as well as in music, the construction of the form through development involves a great deal of remodelling and transformation of the initial simple organism, a cell in the case of a biological organism and the initial theme or themes in a symphonic sonata form. The form, the dynamic structure, the grammar and the figures, the mode of development of a musical work and the forms and functions in a living organism resemble each other in such a way that music has been thought, especially in the Romantic era, as a symbol and representation of life. The close likeness between the features of the two kinds of forms and movements is the basis for the univocal application in both domains of the same vocabulary that stands for these characteristics. Biology and music are both at the same time an epistemic and an aesthetic experience and both produce epistemic and aesthetic emotions.
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Music and biology at the Naples Zoological Station Bernardino Fantini
Received: 30 August 2014 / Accepted: 9 September 2014 Springer International Publishing AG 2014
Abstract Anton Dohrn projected the Stazione Zoologica as composed of two complementary halves: nature and culture. This attitude was not only expression of the general cultural background of the nineteenth century cultural elite, for Dohrn both formed a coherent and organized whole. In my essay I will analyse the different levels of the relationship between music and biology. In particular, I will demonstrate that both share similar ‘‘styles of thought’’. In the last part I will show that Dohrn’s most important scientific contribution, the concept or ‘‘principle’’ of Functionswechsel, provides evidence for the link he had established between music and biology Keywords
Anton Dohrn Music Metamorphosis Functionswechsel
1 Music and science at the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn’s ‘dream’, as Christiane called it (Groeben 1985, 2001), was twofold: science on one side and music on the other. The architectural project of the Stazione reflected this double-faced dream, because Dohrn knew exactly what he wanted, and how he wanted it done, and elaborated the plans for the buildings himself. On the first floor Dohrn projected two large rooms, one dedicated to biology, with laboratory space for many scientists, and one, facing the sea, dedicated to lectures, art and music. The latter, the Fresco room, with its statues and allegories, was symmetrical and complementary to the laboratory, with its organisms, aquariums,
B. Fantini (&) Centre Collaborateur OMS pour la Recherche Historique en Sante´ Publique, Universite´ de Gene`ve, Case Postale, 1211 Gene`ve 4, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected]
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microtomes and microscopes. His architectural choices can be explained at three quite distinct though not separated levels. First of all, making and listening to music could be considered as Dohrn’s personal interest and leisure. Music in fact remained very close to his heart throughout his life. He loved in particular Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Brahms, and became an intimate friend of the violinist Joseph Joachim, a close collaborator of Brahms and the leader of the Joachim String Quartet.1 The second level assumes a superficial connection between music and biological research, as distinct parts of the same cultural background and social life. Art and music were essential parts of the life of the cultural elite in the nineteenth century, two complementary aspects of intellectual and social status, and Dohrn, like a Renaissance prince, wanted to have his ‘‘musical laboratory.’’ Therefore, the scientific entrepreneur promoted pleasant and cultivated activities, supporting music and the arts, sharing values and emotions, developing a sense of community and a ‘‘creative atmosphere’’ beneficial for scientific research. Finally, instead of being simply juxtaposed, biology and music could be seen as integrated components of the same cultural, scientific and philosophical endeavour, two different expressions of the same quest, at the same time scientific and aesthetic. Anton Dohrn grew up in a familial and social context in which music played an important role. His father Carl August had wide-ranging contacts with eminent scientists, like Alexander von Humboldt, and musicians, notably the composer Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, who became Anton’s god-father. Throughout his life, Anton tried to cope with his father’s expectations, hoping to win his respect and affection. In 1897, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Naples Zoological Station, he recognized his debt to his father, defined as his ‘‘intellectual protoplasm’’ and he noted that in their family circle it was considered more important to know quotations from Goethe or to recognize Beethoven’s music than to excel in Greek or mathematics (Dohrn 1897; Groeben 1985). In his early childhood, Anton developed his taste for classical literature and music but also learned that art and science must coexist and interact, as they had in the work of Goethe, a poet and a scientist who envisioned a complete integration of both sensibilities. Quite often, Dohrn in his letters to his wife mentioned a passage from the prologue to Goethe’s Faust: ‘‘In the beginning was the deed.’’2 During his formative years, Dohrn was profoundly impressed by Friedrich Albert Lange, a philosopher, pedagogue, political activist, and journalist, who was one of the originators of neo-Kantianism. Dohrn adopted therefore the neo-Kantian attitude, centred on the concepts of form and teleology, in science as well as in art. The model for his scientific and institutional work was Goethe’s ideal of harmonic humanity (harmonische Menschlichkeit), that is, the unity and harmony between 1
In a letter of June 4, 1896 from Naples to his nephew Harold, Joachim mentioned his trips in the Bay and his discussions with Anton Dohrn, ‘‘a most charming fellow’’ (Bickley 1914).
2
Anton Dohrn to Marie Dohrn, Aug. 22, 1888, Hoekendorf, Bd. 543, quoted in Groeben 1985. It is of interest to note that ‘‘deed’’ means ‘‘act’’, and it is used to replace logos (the verb) in John’s Evangel. The logos means also to give form, in the platonic sense, as the essence of things, and it is the form which ‘‘acts’’ in the world.
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what one can do and what one wants to do (Groeben 1985, p. 16). As Dohrn put it in a letter to his wife in 1886: I have told you several times that I made a work of art out of life itself […]. I found chaos before me and have created out of that both a practical organism, the Station, and a theoretical one, the ‘‘protohistory of vertebrates [Urgeschichte der Wirbelthiere].’’ Each step on the path of these two things I have envisioned beforehand, as an artist first sees the complete work of art and then starts to create its parts.3 The active search for form and beauty thus provided a common background for both science and the arts. As Dohrn wrote to Edmund B. Wilson, himself an outstanding scientist and excellent musician, in 1900: Phylogeny is a subtle thing, it wants not only the analytic powers of the ‘‘Forscher’’, of the researcher, but also the constructive imagination of the ‘‘Ku¨nstler,’’ of the artist—and both must balance each other, which they rarely do—otherwise the thing does not succeed (quoted from Fantini 2000, p. 525). According to his correspondence, Dohrn’s motto was ‘‘to create, to organize, to develop—this is my need, even passion.’’4 Still, ‘‘to create, to organize, to develop’’ can be considered also as the main attribute of the living world, according to the Darwinian morphological evolutionary theory. Furthermore, ‘‘to create, to organize, to develop’’ is also the need and the passion of a musical genius in his or her creative activity. This is the core of the epistemic conjunction between music and science, a point I want to explore further in the following.
2 The epistemic conjunction of biology and music The relationships between music and science can be traced at three different levels. The first level concerns the direct use of scientific knowledge in musical theory, for instance the numerical Pythagorean formulations of harmony and consonance, the application of geometrical propositions in the musical treatises of the Renaissance, the physical explanations of consonance and dissonance by the nineteenth-century physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz (Kursell 2008), or the use of computers and of chaos theory in contemporary musical composition. A second level of analysis is found in the scientific study of music’s influence on body and mind and in attempts to explain the reasons for the emotional power of music, based on physiological and psycho-neurobiological models. This subject was already treated in Greco-Roman culture and received great attention from many famous doctors of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, notably in discussions on the effect of music on people suffering from tarantula bites (Baglivi 1700; Budd 1985; Fantini 1999). The search for the reasons behind music and, more generally, sound’s psychological and physiological effects on man and his comportment found its apogee in 3
Anton Dohrn to Marie Dohrn, Aug. 1, 1886, Naples. Bd. 372, quoted in Groeben 1985.
4
Anton Dohrn to Marie Dohrn, Aug. 1883, Stettin Bd. 246.
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Helmholtz’s work (von Helmholtz 1870, 1873), and recently, psychological and neurobiological researches have produced an enormous amount of experimental results and theories (Patel 2008; Juslin and Sloboda 2010; Cochrane et al. 2013). The third, and perhaps more fundamental level of interaction between music and biology is epistemic and concerns the role of similar ‘‘styles of thought’’, the use of analogue interpretive models, metaphors and images (Fantini 2013). The idea of style is wide-spread in musical and musicological treatises, and includes elements of communication, writing and method (forms of notation, social practices, interactions with instruments and with the physiology of performers, to name a few). In music as well as in science, a style is needed that encompasses constructive methods, forms of communication, criteria for the evaluation of results, which are, by definition, necessarily public and collective activities (even at the level of social organization), but allow a great, central space to individual creativity. Metaphors, in this context, are not only rhetorical artifices, but have a heuristic role since they suggest a general interpretative model that can be contradicted by theories or observations (Ricoeur 1975; Ortony 1979; Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Ko¨vecses 2005). According to this point of view, it is useful to break with the historical schema, which tends exclusively to stress discontinuity, discoveries and revolutions, and, on the contrary, to seek the continuity that underlies these changes (Canguilhem 1988). Knowledge consists not only of facts and empirical evidence but also of problems, hypotheses, paradoxes, innovations and surprises. Changes in paradigms and styles during revolutionary moments in the development of science, as in that of art, are also moments of re-evaluation, of re-proposition of old aporias. From the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, medical and biological thought has been dominated, successively, by three different models of the body and its structures and functions. The first model was proposed by humoral medicine, based on the correspondence between four physical elements (fire, air, water, and earth), four bodily humours (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile), and four psychological temperaments (sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, and melancholic). The individual behaviour and the susceptibility to diseases was determined by the particular combination of the four humours in each individual. After the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, the humoral model was gradually replaced by a model of the body as composed of elementary, permanently oscillating fibres (Grmek 1989). This model, built on anatomical and microscopic observations, identified the ‘‘elementary fibre’’ as the ultimate element in the organization of the body and as the centre of all physiological function, including motility and sensibility. Finally, starting from the second half of the eighteenth century, the idea of ‘‘organism’’ became central and represented the theoretical starting point for the creation of biology as an autonomous science. This model explained the essential properties of living organisms on the basis of a complex, harmonious and balanced organization, which constructs itself from a seed. Each medical and biological model played a major role in all three above mentioned levels, in musical theory, in the philosophical discourses about the emotional power of music, and in the practical construction and elaboration of compositional techniques and musical styles. In late Middle-Ages and Renaissance, analogous to the medical humoral theory, a musical composition was a ‘‘body’’
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composed of the four humours and characterized by a good temperamentum (Ficino 1989[1489], p. 10; Boccadoro 2004). In the seventeenth century, the effects of music were explained with reference to objects and exterior movement, like the movement of air provoked by the vibration of strings, imprint vibrations on the elementary fibres that form the nerves and the whole of the body. If during the Renaissance and for Monteverdi love kindled, and the heart burnt and consumed itself, in the seventeenth century humans vibrated with all their cords and quivered with fury. The dynamic between warmth and coldness, typical of humoral medicine and of Renaissance music, was replaced by the dynamic ‘‘tension-release,’’ typical of mechanical interpretations of life and form, and of Baroque music. From the second half of the eighteenth century the new science ‘‘biology’’ emerged, based on new notions of form and function and on the idea of organisms as organic, harmonious wholes which come into being as the result of an essential tension, contained in embryonic form in the seed. Exactly in the same period, a ‘‘Great Divide’’ also took place in music: a new cultural and social role of music was created, linked to the origins of ‘‘absolute music’’ as an autonomous structural and syntactic language (Kivy 1990) and tied to the composers Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Biology and music came to share the same epistemic object, that is, ‘‘form’’ and its construction for the purpose of building up a coherent and individual organism, a living system and a musical work, respectively. The principle formula of the music of this period was the sonata form. The sonata is not built through apposition, as in sinuous Baroques sequences, but ‘‘from inside’’, starting with a ‘‘seed’’ or germ, which represents the ‘‘idea’’ of the final form of the individual composition in its totality (Rosen 1971). The objects (the sounds) themselves are not intrinsically musical. A single tone or a series of tones are musically meaningless as physical elements. Exactly like biology was now understood not as a science of particular physical and chemical objects, but of the relationships between these objects, in space and time, music is made of objects (sounds) but its logic and meaning depends on the relationships between these objects. As a consequence, an element acquires its musical meaning in modern music when it is connected with other different elements, and its function is revealed by this connection. The meaning of music lies in the perception and understanding of the musical relationships within a complex organization. The higher levels of physical organization cannot be fully explained by the sum or mechanical combination of ‘‘atomic’’ or ‘‘molecular’’ elements included in them, in the same way that the behaviour of a living system cannot be fully explained only by the structure and functions of macromolecules. On the other hand, the meaning of the composing structures is not completely determined by the whole form, because a cell in a living system and a sound in a piece of music have their autonomy, and the global meaning and aesthetic value is the result of the interrelation and integration of the different levels of organization, each with its specific autonomy (Meyer 1984). This brief analysis of the concept of form and organization in biology and music up to the time of Anton Dohrn can explain the profound reasons for the building of the two complementary rooms at the Naples Station. Indeed, as I will show in the
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following section, the most important scientific contribution Dohrn gave to biology, the concept or ‘‘principle’’ of Functionswechsel, provides evidence for the link he had established between music and biology.
3 Anton Dohrn and the Functionswechsel As pointed out by Michael Ghiselin in his introduction to Dohrn, there is no straight-forward English equivalent for Functionswechsel, and one is tempted to leave it untranslated (Dohrn and Ghiselin 1994). ‘‘Change of function,’’ indirectly suggested by Dohrn himself in a letter to Charles Darwin, seems appropriate.5 ‘‘Succession of function’’ is adequate, too, since it recalls Stoffwechsel (metabolism), used in the German scientific literature of the nineteenth century for the concept of the ordered succession of chemical processes within a living cell or organism. The idea behind Dohrn’s principle is that each organ can realize different functions in the organism in response to changes in the environment and life conditions. The eventual weakening of the original function and the strengthening of a different one can produce the transformation of the organ (Dohrn 1875, p. 60).6 Dohrn was profoundly convinced that morphology and physiology ought not to be completely separated. Function represented the main attribute of a living system. A form is not an abstract entity, but always linked to a specific function. Morphology must therefore be ‘‘functional’’ and it is the change of function which produces the modification of the form (Maienschein 1994). For Dohrn, morphology was the study of the form of living organisms in their construction (embryology), in their functioning (physiology), and in their environment (ecology, as suggested by his mentor Ernst Haeckel). The continuity of living systems along evolution, a fundamental principle of biology, is not only morphological, but must also be functional. This principle states that organs and functions cannot arise de novo, and Dohrn consistently rejected hypotheses that invoked ‘‘new formations’’ as a way of eliminating explanatory difficulties. The principle of continuity in evolution implies also that there had to be a plausible series of intermediate stages in which an organ with a given function was transformed into an organ performing a different function. Dohrn’s evolutionary thinking integrated traditional morphological and embryological data with an emphasis on functional changes. In such a way the traditional dichotomy form/ function acquired a new and not exclusive meaning: both aspects and their relationships are fundamental conditions for life. The principle of the succession of function was envisaged as a mechanism for explaining innovation and the emergence of novelty in evolving biological and ecological contexts, but it could also be applied, as I argue, to link the various kinds 5
A. Dohrn to Ch. Darwin, Jena, 30. Nov. 1867, in: Darwin and Dohrn 1982, p. 21: ‘‘Isn’t that most striking? Such a change of function?’’.
6
This passage is translated and discussed in chapter 14 of Russell 1916, p. 276. See also Dohrn and Ghiselin 1994.
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of progress and creativity into a more general conception, one that includes science and art, notably music. Physiological morphology assumed the synthesis between form and action (function) and music could be equally defined as the synthesis between form and action (movement). The expression ‘‘succession of function’’ can be used to describe the manner in which composers may change the tempo, rhythm, and notes of a theme to preserve its essential and recognizable characteristics but at the same time to change their function according to the new context these elements or figures are included. Like a living system, a musical work is ‘‘a form in movement’’ and there is no form without function and without development. Romantic science was dominated by the idea of metamorphoses, that is, major changes in the form and the function of a living organism accompanied by a striking alteration in appearance, character, or circumstances. But the idea of metamorphosis has been central in the history of music, too. The principle of variation of a melody or any other musical figure or form is the most powerful aesthetic and architectonic aspect of music. Franz Schubert used the technique of metamorphosis to bind together the four movements of his Wanderer Fantasy. Franz Liszt and Hector Berlioz made an extensive use of ‘‘thematic metamorphosis’’ (or thematic transformation): a theme is repeated throughout a musical work, but it undergoes constant transformations (transposition, inversion, augmentation, diminution or fragmentation) and appears in several contrasting roles or functions. The transformations of the theme will serve the purpose of ‘‘unity within variety’’, the architectural principle of absolute music. In distinction from the classical sonata form, the thematic transformation can accommodate dramatically charged phrases, highly coloured melodies and richer harmonies, favoured by the Romantic composers. The term metamorphosis is often included in the title of important works: Paul Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes by Weber, Benjamin Britten’s 6 Metamorphoses after Ovid, Leopold Godowsky’s Symphonic Metamorphoses on Waltzes and Themes by Johann Strauss, Richard Strauss’ Metamorphosen (which referred directly to Goethe), just to name a few. It constitutes a valuable interpretative model even for contemporary music (Spampinato 2008).
4 Functionswechsel in modern music Music is therefore an outstanding example of Functionswechsel. The idea of ‘‘change of the function’’ is overtly expressed by Arnold Scho¨nberg in his book The Structural Functions of Harmony (1967). In a passage he indicates a change of the function of the 7th degree of B minor by introducing the substitute a#, 7, which acquires the function of a leading-tone (Dudeque 1997, p. 4). A chord can play different functions according to its place in the harmonic progression or in the whole structure of a musical work. The same chord can be considered in its diverse positions as the dominant in a given key and a fundamental chord (tonic) in another. For example, the two triads G–B–D and C–E–G have different harmonic functions in different general contexts: in the key of C major, these cords play the role of the V and I degrees of the harmony respectively, whereas in the key of G major they
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have the role of I and IV degree. The sequence of the two identical chords in the two different keys has different function and meaning. In the former case, the succession V–I is an authentic cadence, felt as a resolutive movement and a closure. In the second case, the same two cords, that have exactly the same physical nature, act as a I–IV progression and this produces a feeling of unfinished and rises an expectation for further developments. Numerous experimental results show that even untrained listeners can react quickly and accurately to the two distinct functions and meanings of the syntactical and formal differences (Bigand 1997; Bigand and Parncutt 1999). According to Scho¨nberg, a transformation of a chord through substitution does not change the root function expressed as a scalar degree of a chord and its relationship to a tonal centre. Thus, a chord can be transformed, for example, from a major triad to a minor, a diminished, or an augmented triad, always keeping its diatonic root but changing its function in the general harmonic progression. The same kind of metamorphosis can be applied to the melodic materials. A melody can have a different expressive force, depending on the harmonic context, the tempo, the instrumentation or the register, acquiring in such a way a different meaning. As a consequence, the same theme or melody can show a sort of ‘‘succession of function’’ according to the form and the environment (style) in which it is involved. The best example of this permanence with variations is the harmonic and melodic theme of the Folia, originated probably in the fourteenth century and used by hundreds of composers until the twentieth century in totally diverse musical and cultural contexts, and with different functions, as the basis for virtuosistic variations, the development of composing skills, the expression of different emotions or as a symbol for Orlando’s madness, in Vivaldi’s homonymous opera. In the Renaissance, it was quite common to use popular, even bawdy, songs or motives as a theme for a polyphonic ‘‘parody mass’’ (e.g. L’Homme´ arme´ by Josquin des Pre`s or Palestrina), or to use pre-existing complete passages of music from other compositions, usually profane plainsongs or madrigals for sacred compositions, as in the case of Rolande de Lassus’ eight-voiced Missa Bell’ Amfirit’altera. Here, the composer borrowed passages of music from an unknown, and probably simpler, anonymous Venetian madrigal to build up a complex polyphonic form. This kind of metamorphosis is particularly frequent in the works composed after the Great Divide, when the accent and the aesthetic value was placed in the general organization or form of the individual form rather than on specific themes or motives. The change or succession of function is generally applied to the figures or motives (the second level of the hierarchical structure of a musical composition). These changes of function become the tools for the construction and development of the whole form, as in Beethoven’s symphonies. In Schubert’s string quartet No. 14 in D minor, known as The Death and the Maiden, the melody and harmonic structure of just a fragment of the homonymous Lied becomes the tool for an extraordinary syntactically and emotionally complex development. For Liszt ‘‘paraphrases’’ of themes or motives from famous operas became the pretext for a virtuoso exploitation of the piano’s technical and expressive means.
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A figure originally presented as a main theme of a composition can change its function and become a figure which accompanies another theme, as in the Rosamunde Quartet by Schubert (1824) or in the second movement of Claude Debussy’s String Quartet (1893). Likewise, a Wagnerian leitmotiv (literally ‘‘leading motive’’), a short melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic figure, clearly identified so as to retain its identity if modified on subsequent appearances, is associated with a particular person, place, or idea and assumes different meanings or functions in the dramatic and musical development, because of its modification in terms of rhythm, harmony, orchestration or dramatic situation (Warrack 1980). The technique of the metamorphosis can be used also as a particular form of expression, when a well-known figure of the musical tradition is included in a different work and used for parody or caricature, a sort of biological transplantation, in which the implant assumes the characters of the region in which it is placed and change completely its function, formal and expressive. One of the most extreme and delightful examples of this technique is the suite The Carnival of the Animals by Camille Saint-Sae¨ns (1886), in which the Galop infernal (commonly called the Cancan) from Offenbach’s operetta Orpheus in the Underworld, which rapidly became very popular in Parisian cabarets, is played by the strings at their lower register and a very slow tempo, producing a grotesque and caricatural movement, as opposed to the original lively and moving tempo, rhythm and articulation. In the twentieth century, Dmitri Shostakovich often used metamorphoses of the motives and themes from other composers, sometimes with humour, more often for expressing deep emotions and thoughts. In his last symphony, he includes an outburst of Rossini’s William Tell Overture as well as themes from Mikhail Glinka and Gustav Mahler (Wilson 2011).
5 Conclusion The examples can be multiplied ad libitum, as the principle of metamorphosis or succession of function is the primary mean for the construction of form and for modifying the expressive meaning of a composition, at least in Western music after the Great Divide. In biology as well as in music, the construction of the form through development involves a great deal of remodelling and transformation of the initial simple organism, a cell in the case of a biological organism and the initial theme or themes in a symphonic sonata form. The form, the dynamic structure, the grammar and the figures, the mode of development of a musical work and the forms and functions in a living organism resemble each other in such a way that music has been thought, especially in the Romantic era, as a symbol and representation of life. The close likeness between the features of the two kinds of forms and movements is the basis for the univocal application in both domains of the same vocabulary that stands for these characteristics. Biology and music are both at the same time an epistemic and an aesthetic experience and both produce epistemic and aesthetic emotions.
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