Aural DNA?

The location of my mtDNA as of about 47,000 years ago. The light gray lines show earlier routes (c. 60,000 years ago) taken by others who share my mtDNA; the white lines show paths others with my mtDNA took while my maternal ancestors remained near Iran.

For my birthday this past year, I had National Geographic sequence my DNA. [If you're interested, view my "Genographic" summary here!] I've long considered myself to be historically-minded -- after all, I think daily in units of 300 or 400 years, whenever I touch my violin. Even so, a decade of work in early music left me unprepared for what I felt upon receiving my DNA results. Here was my ancestors' migration pattern out of Africa, a temporal distance of 180,000 years broken down into 10,000-year increments. Here was a 142,155-line Excel file showing the As, Cs, Gs and Ts of my sequenced genome. This was both unimaginably larger and inconceivably smaller than anything I had encountered before.

This got me thinking about other kinds of lineages. I went to a cello recital yesterday during which the performer, in his remarks from the stage, said that he traces his musical ancestry to Pablo Casals. (He added that this is something he likes to emphasize in performance: he went so far as to "warn" us that he would not just be playing Bach, but playing Casals playing Bach.) Of course, many musicians have voiced such thoughts. When I was young, one of my piano teachers claimed to have traced his musical lineage to Beethoven; interestingly, popular legend holds that a different teacher in a different decade said the same thing to a young Richard Taruskin. (I resist the temptation to ask whether Taruskin and I are, therefore, musical relatives...)

My own musical genome is complicated. As a conductor, I have two main ancestral lines: on the "American" side, I can trace a line of teachers back to Koussevitzky. On the other side (my RAM teacher), I descend from Toscanini. As a violinist, I can claim to share small amounts of aural DNA with Arcangelo Corelli.

But, to keep this post from becoming a list of dropped names, here's the rub: whereas I do look like my grandmother (my actual grandmother, that is), I'm quite sure that I play nothing like my teacher's teacher's teacher. This becomes even more true with each generation as I count backwards. By the time I reach Corelli, the claim of kinship is quite meaningless. My conducting lineage shows the absurdity even more clearly: I'm removed from Koussevitzky by only two "generations", but one wouldn't know it to watch me conduct.

Still, the game is amusing.

Other fun facts about my real, genetic, non-aural genome: 1) My paternal line remained in Africa until surprisingly recently; 2) my maternal line lingered in the Middle East (Iran, it seems) for about 20,000 years longer than most others with the same migration route; 3) trace amounts of Native American DNA were introduced into my genome either when my paternal line arrived in America or when my maternal line and the pre-Native Americans were still in Russia [I secretly hope it's the latter, but, either way, I will only find out if one of my parents takes the test]; and 4) although I have no Bulgarian blood, my particular proportion of geographic markers very closely resembles that of the average modern-day Bulgarian.

That's d'amore!

I ended my last post, almost half a month ago, with some questions I had hoped to explore "in the next week." Predictably, a number of distractions have prevented me from writing anything that would be worth your time to read. In lieu (for now) of any well-developed philosophical musings, however, here's a bit of documentation from the most recent "Bach Explored" concert.

One doesn't get to hear (or play!) a viola d'amore every day. Since it was a very important instrument to Bach and his colleagues -- particularly to Pisendel -- I felt that it would be wrong not to feature it at least once during the series. I'm fortunate to own a very beautiful original 18th-century viola d'amore, and I'm always thrilled when I get the chance to perform on it. (After all, under "normal" circumstances, it comes out of the case only a few times per year, invariably for the St. John Passion.)

I don't have any closeup photos of my d'amore, but you can see it in this picture -- twelve pegs and all!

Last week, I performed an anonymous 18th-century dance suite on it. Here's a recording of the gorgeous Aria.

And the viola d'amore doesn't just do slow and beautiful. Here's a fast movement from the same work:

The viola d'amore's harmonic vocabulary is somewhat limited, since the open strings are tuned in a two-octave arpeggio, and you can take full advantage of its resonance only in that home key. (Notice, for example, in the second half of the fast movement, that the chords disappear as soon as we move to E-flat major.) Nonetheless, the sacrifice in modulatory freedom is amply compensated by resonance and chordal possibilities. One can imagine the inspiration that Bach, Pisendel, and the other great, early polyphonists derived from this instrument.