The Music at the Center Of a Dan Brown Novel
BOSTON — The composer Gregory Brown describes himself as an introverted academic who prefers playing piano or walking his dog to standing in a spotlight. But you’ve probably heard of his older brother: Dan Brown, the author of blockbuster page- turners including, of course, “The Da Vinci Code.”
Gregory won’t be able to hide for long, though. His brother’s factheavy novels often send readers racing to Google, and the latest book, “Origin,” devotes an entire chapter to one of Gregory’s pieces: “Missa Charles Darwin.”
In the acknowledgments, Dan goes so far as to write that Gregory’s “inventive fusion of ancient and modern in ‘Missa Charles Darwin’ helped spark the earliest notions for this novel.”
That “fusion” refers to the form
A writer is inspired by his brother’s scientific ‘mass.’
of “Missa Charles Darwin,” which follows the tradition of five-movement Latin Masses but substitutes much of the sacred text with excerpts from “On the Origin of Species” and other Darwin writings. The juxtapositions can be bracing, like “Kyrie eleison” (“Lord have mercy”) followed by the brutal line “Let the strongest live and the weakest die.”
The piece may sound like Renaissance polyphony, but its score also nods to modern science, transcribing the DNA of Darwin’s finches for the opening melody, for example, and adapting into musical variations genetic concepts like insertion, mutation and deletion.
“There’s this exploration of the edges of things,” Gregory Brown said. “Whether that edge is science and music, or religious and scientific, or sacred and secular.”
Dan Brown said that he’s “al- ways looking for big themes” and that when he heard the mass performed in 2011 at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, “it got me thinking about creationism and this sort of battle between science and religion.”
He followed the idea until it became “Origin,” a thriller — starring his signature protagonist, the Harvard “symbologist” Robert Langdon — about a scientist whose discovery about the source of life on Earth and the future of humanity threatens to upend the world’s religious order.
Spirituality and science often did overlap as the Brown brothers grew up. Their father, a math teacher, was an Escher obsessive who told them folk stories about clever mathematicians, and they turned pages for their mother, a church organist who provided Gregory’s first exposure to sacred music. He, in turn, began college as an aspiring scientist, and traveled to the Galápagos Islands, where he was awe-struck by a vermilion flycatcher and Lonesome George, the last known tortoise of his species. “You get the sense that it hasn’t changed much since Darwin was there,” he said.
Studying geology also gave him a sense of the planet’s long, slow timeline. He ended up with “this feeling about time and our place on Earth that I’d never had before,” he said, which works its way into the “Credo” movement of “Missa Charles Darwin.” Halfway through college, he had a change of heart and pursued music.
Dan Brown didn’t tell his brother that the mass had made its way into “Origin” until he finished writing the chapter. He said that when he asked Gregory to give it a read — they are often sounding boards for each other — “he came back sort of wide- eyed.”
Any money his brother makes from New York Polyphony’s recently reissued recording of “Missa Charles Darwin” will be donated to music education programs.
“Origin” was released this month, and Gregory Brown said he is bracing for whatever happens.
“When you’re a composer, you write a piece and hope it gets one performance,” he said. “When it gets two, you’re lucky. But who knows what will come of this?”