Jennifer Martin

Programme Note

It is rare, in my experience, to find a scientist who can show that the scientific achievements of the 20th Century can not only enrich theological thinking and creative imagination, but who can also dispel the very prevalent image of conflict between scientific and religious thought. It was on discovering such a scientist, John Peirson, and through reading his book `Encounters in Science and Religion', that I became interested in evolution and in particular the idea of emergence, the process of how new species evolve from what is already there. There are immediate parallels in music which I was interested in exploring further, and by examining the six main thresholds which have been crossed in the evolutionary process, I found the structure for the Quartet. It falls into six movements:
I The Origin of Life.
II The First Cells.
III An Organism
IV Nerves
V From Water to Land
VI Man
The musical material then, evolves as the first cells may have evolved. Fragments emerge from nothing or from tentative, sonic environments. Cells are bombarded with new harmonies, new rhythms and new timbres, finally emerging as something transformed. Harmonies look inside themselves, to their physical properties, to their intrinsic components, while temporal structures are often defined by golden section ratio.
The process at work in the transformation of musical material in the Quartet has parallets in the changing patterns of a living, evolving system. There is a dynamic stability, where energy is continually passing through the system but there is always the possibility that the system might be disturbed to the extent that it heads towards either complete stasis or alternatively, chaos.
`Systems which will best be able to adapt to change, and thus to evolve, are those which are on the edge of chaos'. * This Quartet is `Moving Towards the Edge.'

8encounters in Scince an dReligion by John Peirson
University of Warwick - Open Studies.

Notes

For John Peirson.