Folk singers of science

A few summers ago, I stood in the dark of a courtyard at Yale University with my travel guitar, part of a loose circle of scientists about to break tentatively into song. It was a hot, humid night. The dorms were not air conditioned and no one wanted to be indoors. There were little gaggles of students and conference delegates around, serepticiously sipping beer, engaged in quiet conversation. 

I had never played music with these people, didn't know their styles, and was a bit apprehensive. They came from all over the U.S. and Canada with instruments tucked into trunks or overhead bins to take part in a song circle with people they saw just once a year. Profs and students and post docs, the hierarchy was gone and replaced with a collaborative, sharing vibe. One or two were professional musicians, others were strummers like me, but the idea was to teach each other a simple song, figure out some vocal harmonies on the fly, and pass the chord progressions around the circle for those who wanted to improvise on top. What songs would we have in common? My assumptions of Bob Dylan and the Beatles and Neil Young turned out to be wrong. They played the blues, bluegrass tunes, what they called Old Time music. My contribution of U2's I still haven't found what I'm looking for fell flat. I was like an undergrad student, entering the lab for the first time.

There are lots of musicians in science and all kinds of analogies between music and research. The Principal Investigator as conductor, the lab as a band. I once spent an evening with a composer of modern music, more or less my age, and he insisted that composition and research were exactly the same thing. You have an idea, implement it piece by piece, experiment until you've got it right.

I once accompanied an elderly mentor to a chamber music recital in a church in Europe, and watched him read  the score of the string quartet, sliding and tapping his finger along the notes as they were played. A fellow grad student had a weekly show on community radio and spent one of his evening each week getting vocal lessons; he has now released two CDs. The leader of this Yale song circle had also released a CD or two. My apprehension was partly related to remembering that a few years before, at this same conference, the police (but not The Police) had been summoned to an outdoor jam session that involved an accordion and a Russian with an electric guitar. There might have been a bit of rock 'n' roll that night.

There is a tendency to promote prominent practitioners of anything as Rock Stars, and indeed, there is a group of professors who call themselves the Rock Stars of Science. People use that label for Neil deGrasse Tyson too, although I can't imagine him replacing Mick Jagger. Perhaps there really are rock star wannabes in science, who behave outrageously to draw attention for themselves. I've seen a few such performances. It's as if we need flamboyance to promote a cause, that celebrity is required to bring credibility to an idea. In biology anyway, there seem to be more folk singers than rockers, more researchers taking time to write a good lyric than those shouting it out with hysterical emotion.

A year later, I was back with some of these same guys on a hotel balcony in Austin, Texas. My only contribution that night was the Beatles' homage to Dylan, You've got to hide your love away and it matched the mood. I was feeling mellow, there was some nice harmony, a harmonica kicked in at the right moment. It was a successful experiment. I'll take that.