a night at the museum
From a piece on the Online Newshour:
It’s just after closing on a Friday night at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington. In the darkened auditorium, a jazz quintet is building a rhythmic floor on a soft, steady percussion line and lilting piano chords. Composer-conductor Jacob Varmus steps in on trumpet, twirling a feverish melody above the beat — establishing a pattern between notes and time, then moving on to a variation of that idea.
Meanwhile, on a large projection screen above, a looped animation shows a double helix of DNA being ripped apart, the bonds between base pairs broken, copied and then aligned with their opposites, rapidly producing new double helices to be replicated. The pace is frenzied but constant, while the calming voice of Dr. Harold Varmus notes how important it is that errors occur.
“Mutation is essential to species diversity just as stylistic variation is essential to the arts,” he declares as the music slows to a background drip. “Without genetic error, there would be no evolution. Without variety, there would be no development in art, literature or music. Variety is essential to progress.”
