Science
sion, and that’s fine, but for me it’s really personal what happens in the world. I wanted to find a way to push the students to take on bigger subjects.”
And the students responded with a diverse array of works, including a ballet inspired by the complex molecular structure of viruses and another piece that aims to demystify some scary-sounding research into using salmonella bacteria as a weapon against cancer cells.
The two composers also came up with disparate approaches to the project. Bush wrote a piece about the scientific process itself, trying to capture the rhythm of starts and stops, of dead ends and breakthroughs. But he also worked in a few inside jokes, of a sort, composing in E major in honor of the e4 alele (i.e. gene variant) implicated in Alzheimer’s.
Mitton, on the other hand, tried to capture the arc of the progress of the disease itself, from uncertainty and anger to acceptance.
“This was a unique composition for me because I was telling somebody else’s story rather than telling my story, and having so much to work off of from this research was really captivating for me,” Mitton said. “It actually made it easier to write the piece than if I was just pulling it out of my head. So I do think that composers and artists in general can learn something from the sciences, and I think the reverse is true as well.”
That, of course, is the proposition underlying the entire project.
“This is the beta. This is an experiment,” said Diane Price, director of communications for the Biodesign Institute and one of the main organizers of “Science Exposed.”
“This is the start of something that we hope to continue in many different forms of art.”
The project is also intended to explore new ways of communicating with the public about the work that research scientists do.
“In some ways scientists and artists have the same issues these days,” Lerman said, “which is trying to get the public to care about what we’re doing.”