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The Atomic Age, Stirrat - Zaret stuff from the 50s and 60s has been
breathed new life by Jef Poskanzer, who hosts "MP3ed" versions (thanks
to Ron Hipschman) of all 6 albums at http://www.acme.com/jef/science_songs/
They may seem camp to the tweens we normally serve, but they are
certainly appropriate and acceptable to the "Barney-Set." (or in my
case, the "Captain Kangaroo Crowd").
Eric Siegel wrote:
> ISEN-ASTC-L is a service of the Association of Science-Technology Centers
> Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related
> institutions.
> *****************************************************************************
>
>
> When You Wish Upon an Atom: The Songs of Science
>
> By MICHAEL ERARD
>
>
>
>
> It's been years since Timothy Sellers, then a budding naturalist, licked
> a slug. Now he writes pop songs about scientists who were less absurd
> about their empiricism. Thirteen of them appear on "26 Scientists:
> Volume 1, Anning to Malthus," a CD that Mr. Sellers and his
> Los-Angeles-based band, Artichoke, recently released.
>
> That's Mary Anning, the 18th-century Briton who assembled fossils to
> support her family and who first discovered the ichthyosaur. As in
> Artichoke's other songs, the one about Malthus mixes biographical detail
> ("Thomas Robert Malthus/the second son of eight kids/grew up with a
> stutter") with intellectual history ("with the revolution/came a lot of
> high hopes/Malthus took a good look/uh-oh uh-oh) and the primordial rock
> chords of G, D and C ("la la la la la/la la la la la/la la la la la").
>
> In the small but slowly accreting world of science-themed music, songs
> tend to focus on processes and objects, as in Tom Lehrer's "Elements."
> Mr. Sellers, a 37-year-old artist and set painter, wants to change that
> balance, focusing on scientists "because people like to listen to songs
> about people," he says.
>
> Though he's not a scientist, Mr. Sellers pursued a major in physics
> before switching to art at Williams College (where he and this reporter
> became acquainted). It seems natural to him that someone would want to
> dig up Mary Anning's past, Darwin's wandering attention span and
> Einstein's sleeping habits, or take on the challenge of putting
> "geocentric," "Copernican" and "phlogiston" into pop songs. The bigger
> challenge, Mr. Sellers says, was to "try to write every song so that
> people would dig it."
>
> He ends up with songs that draw scientists not as heroes or as mad
> geniuses, but as ordinary people who befriended a new idea or two and
> paid the costs of their passions. Most of the scientists he sings about
> have been treated well by history: Einstein, Kelvin, Galileo,
> Heisenberg, Darwin, Marie Curie and Joseph Lister. Others, like the
> Dutch chemist Jan Ingenhousz, who investigated light, air and plants,
> are more obscure.
>
> Rock music, even of the indie persuasion, tends to avoid science. The
> Pixies have a song about Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, builder of the Eiffel
> Tower, and the celebrated geekiness of They Might Be Giants produced
> "Particle Man" ("Particle man, particle man/doing the things a particle
> can") and "The Sun Is a Mass of Incandescent Gas," among other science-y
> songs. And the folk-pop duo Kate and Anna McGarrigle made chemistry a
> metaphor for romance in "NaCl" ("Just a little atom of chlorine, valence
> minus one/Swimming through the sea, digging the scene, just having
> fun"). Scientific themes probably show up more often in music videos, as
> in Thomas Dolby's 1980's hit, "Blinded by Science."
>
> In the late 1950's and early 1960's, Tom Lehrer, a
> mathematician-turned-entertainer , contributed classic science songs
> like "The Elements" ("antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium"), "Wernher
> von Braun" and "There's a Delta for Every Epsilon."
>
> Around the same time, William Stirrat, an electronics engineer,
> co-produced six albums of science songs for children ("Why Does the Sun
> Shine?" and "Vibration"). Mr. Stirrat, whose songwriting nom de plume
> was Hy Zaret, was better known as the person who wrote the lyrics to
> "Unchained Melody."
>
> Now, most science songs are written for middle school science students,
> says Lynda Jones, a former teacher and a co-founder of the Science
> Songwriters' Association in 1999. The association now has 40 members, a
> mix of professional musicians and science teachers. Dr. Greg Crowther,
> an acting lecturer of biology at the University of Washington and an
> association member, has archived 1,800 songs about science on his Web site.
>
> The association also helps amateurs record their music, encourages
> songwriters to fill out the song paradigm (marine biology lacks songs)
> and keeps the science up to date.
>
> Scientific accuracy is a big challenge, Ms. Jones says, interrupting a
> telephone interview to sing a problematic lyric she adamantly opposes:
> "Just one element is what an atom's made of."
>
> "No, no, no, that's wrong," she says. "No scientist talks that way."
> She often brushes up the science in her own songs. At the recent meeting
> of the American Chemical Society, she was reminded that electrons do not
> actually orbit the nucleus of the atom, but vibrate in a cloud around
> it. "And I thought, well, I have to change my song," she says.
>
> In his quest to enshrine scientists in rock 'n' roll, Mr. Sellers
> forced himself to choose just one for each letter of the alphabet. "D"
> was crowded, but Darwin ("grandson of a poet, also of a potter, was
> brought up by his sister") beat out da Vinci and Doppler.
>
> The list still provokes conversations about whom to include, but mixing
> the well-known with the obscure was deliberate. "If I picked all totally
> obscure scientists, people wouldn't go 'ah-hah' quite so fast or at
> all," Mr. Sellers says. "I also like scientists people know something
> about because they come with a context."
>
> Finding women was also a challenge. Volume 1 includes Marie Curie and
> Mary Anning; Volume 2 will have a song about the physicist Chien-Shiung
> Wu, whose quip makes up the chorus: "There's only one thing worse than
> coming home/from the lab to a sink that's full of dirty dishes foam/and
> that's not going out to the lab at all."
>
> Mr. Sellers also minds the accuracy of his songs. In some cases, he
> explains, the song's structure "selects for" a certain line. In the song
> about Dr. Wu, who died in 1997, he needed to add another syllable to her
> conclusion that "parity was not conserved." (In physics, "parity"
> hypothesizes that two symmetrical systems will develop symmetrically.
> Dr. Wu and her colleagues showed this wasn't the case.) The line, which
> now reads "parity was not quite conserved," scans better - though it
> softens Dr. Wu's claim.
>
> If Mr. Sellers is self-congratulatory about anything, it's the band's
> ability to rock. On a recent Sunday evening, Artichoke rehearsed in the
> living room of Mr. Sellers's Los Angeles home, thick sheets of foam hung
> over the windows to keep the Pixies-like guitar hooks and bass riffs
> away from the neighbors.
>
> This brand of garage psychedelia still finds room for an accordion as
> well as the de rigueur theremin, played by the band's only real
> scientist, Steve Collins, an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
> in Pasadena, Calif.
>
> Their sound has won some notice, including a 2002 review in The Los
> Angeles Times that praised the "inspired songwriting" and "infectious
> indie pop."
>
> Mr. Sellers grew up in upstate New York, the oldest son of
> back-to-the-land parents who took to the woods and built an A-frame
> house with no electricity or indoor plumbing. Mr. Sellers calls it his
> "Robinson Crusoe childhood." He and his younger brother created their
> own natural history society, where all the members were required to
> present their discoveries.
>
> Mr. Sellers's slug-licking episode occurred when he was 10 and was
> helping his mother tend their garden tomatoes. As he removed slugs from
> the plants, he recalled asking, "Why don't the birds eat them?" Because
> they don't taste good, she replied. Disbelieving, he picked up a slug
> and licked it, an act he quickly regretted: the slug indeed tasted bad,
> and its slime burned his tongue. But he used his data. He wrote about
> the experience to get into Williams, singing the praises of first-hand
> exploration.
>
> Eric Siegel
> Executive VP
> Programs and Planning
> New York Hall of Science
> 47-01 111th Street
> Queens, NY 11368
> esiegel at nyscience dot org
>
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--
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