February 15, 2007
Researcher fuses twin passions — science and music
Eric Rynes is a research scientist in the Department of Genome Sciences. He works on statistical population genetics with Mary Kuhner, research associate professor, in the lab of Joe Felsenstein, professor of genome sciences and of biology. Rynes is also a classically trained violinist who records and performs contemporary classical music in the United States and Europe. In January, he became the concertmaster of the Northwest Symphony Orchestra in Seattle. On Feb. 24, he will perform with the ensemble Affinity at 7:30 p.m. in Brechemin Auditorium in the UW Music Building. Here he talks about his two passions — music and science — and how they complement each other.
Q: You started playing the violin 30 years ago?
A: Yes, I was around 8 years old. Some people start at an earlier age — around 3 or 4. So I was a bit more mature than some starting out.
Q: Do you come from a musical family?
A: I have a younger brother who is a violinist. He was the one who first had the interest in taking violin lessons. I was actually more interested in rock music, and wanted to play something like guitar or saxophone, and then my brother wanted to play violin. I had a competitive streak in me and I didn’t want him to get famous before I did! So, something in my head said, “This is a good idea.”
Q: When did you really immerse yourself in playing the violin?
A: The major turning point was pretty late. I was in my mid- to late twenties. It was when I got my first full-time software job in Champaign, Ill., working for a company that did billing systems. Suddenly I had this 9 to 5 structure. They actually made us wear ties! This was in 1995-96. I was suddenly making decent money, and the work was relatively easy. But, I became intellectually and emotionally restless.
I’d go to my job, sit in my ergonomic chair in a climate-controlled room and do this relatively easy stuff, and when I would come home, I would have physical energy left over and intellectual energy left over. I just started practicing more. The growth that was missing from my job began to happen as I became more goal-oriented in my musical practice.
Q: What did you study in college?
A: I got a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Chicago in 1991. Then I stayed on for a year working in a physics laboratory at the university. I did that during the day and then I would take the bus to Orchestra Hall in downtown Chicago to play with the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, which is the training orchestra of the Chicago Symphony, in the early evenings. After that year, I went to the University of Illinois in Champaign for grad school in physics.
At the time, physics was really saturated. This was 1993-94, and very few people were retiring, and a lot of people were coming into the field. You also had the fall of the Berlin Wall, so you had these mid-career Soviet scientists who were basically washing test tubes and had two doctorates apiece — or so we were told — and were applying for all the jobs over here. So, it was a real soul-searching time for me. I wound up leaving with a master’s in physics from the University of Illinois. Eventually, I came to Seattle to work as a software programmer. I kept playing my violin more and more on the side, and experienced the growth that did not seem to come naturally to me in those corporate jobs.
When I was 30, I was finally able to save up enough money to enter the graduate program in violin at the UW. Finishing the master’s degree in music has been really helpful to me. I had a good teacher (Ronald Patterson, professor of music) who was able to really help me work on consistency, and get rid of the bad habits in my playing. The program really helped improve the quality of my sound, and sort of “legitimized” me as a musician, because most professional classical musicians end their studies with a master’s in performance.
Q: What kind of music do you play?
A: Classical, mostly contemporary classical music. Some of it is quite avant garde — in the sense of development, experimentation, and exploration. I’ve always gravitated toward working with contemporary composers.
Q: What is your area of research?
A: We develop a software product called LAMARC [Likelihood Analysis using the Metropolis Algorithm with Random Coalescences]. It’s a product that’s used by field biologists who are studying one or more populations of organisms — everything from viruses to whales and humans. Our program takes in genetic data that’s sampled from the organisms in the populations by the field biologists, and then we use sophisticated statistical techniques to take the sequence data that’s gathered in the present day and try to infer the evolutionary history of that DNA. We try to determine how the sequences are related to each other, what the ancestral sequences may have been like, and in what order the genetic sequences emerged. Ultimately, we infer the most likely size for each population, whether it’s growing or shrinking, whether there’s migration between populations — things that help the biologist understand the population as a whole. Conservation biology has been sort of a marquee application for us. Now we’re expanding our models to help medical researchers see what can be learned by interpreting HIV infections in different tissues of a body as distinct populations.
Q: You seem to be very passionate about both the violin and science. Do your science and music complement each other?
A: For me they complement each other and in many ways feed each other, too. One thing that I really love is having this balance when working on problems that are very well defined for which there is an exact correct answer. The concreteness of science is very appealing to me. As a balance to that, the abstraction of art is also very appealing. And there are some concrete facets of playing the violin or any other instrument. There’s some algorithmic thinking that goes along with playing music. There are these elements of it that make me think very analytically, for example choosing which finger to place on which string when several combinations are possible. But when I work on a piece of music, I like the fact that I can’t put it into words. I like being able to talk with music, communicate something, and to have it open-ended and open to interpretation. I really like having that balance between concrete problem solving and abstraction.
There is a lot of science and math in contemporary composition. There has been a certain amount of math in music for a long time in various ways, but it’s coming more and more to the forefront. And, that’s made me even more receptive to it. If you’re not aware of the math in certain phrases built using math, they might sound like gobbledy gook on first hearing. If a composer starts talking about algorithmic and mathematical principles to get to certain notes, another violinist may think the conversation is antithetical to art, but I know otherwise. I’m able to understand and appreciate the use of science in art quickly because of my scientific training.
Q: How is science integrated into the contemporary music you play?
A: I’ve performed a work by Richard Karpen, who’s a professor in the UW’s Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media. Many notes in the composition are derived from the digits of pi. It’s really hard to play, but it’s also deeply satisfying, just knowing the idea came from there and having the appreciation for the complexity in life and knowing that numbers like pi are natural phenomena. Knowing you can listen to pi, give it a voice. A beautiful and arresting voice! It makes me appreciate that this is a living, breathing thing, and it makes me understand that music’s not always about the notes, it’s about texture, trajectory, coloration, intensity. Understanding the scientific nature of some music helps me to form larger ideas and not get bogged down in the individual notes because I understand it’s not about the individual notes, it’s about the overall collection of notes.
Iannis Xenakis, a composer who died a couple of years ago, developed something called stochastic music. He would look at various sophisticated statistical models and equations and then derive music out of those equations. So, there’s music of his that I play that’s inspired by the motion of gas particles — a collection of gas particles (makes sounds). But, it’s not just taking these equations and putting it down on music paper, you have to think of it as a piece of art also. Xenakis’s music brings his artistic sensibility to it by bringing some drama into the piece by changing the range of it from low growls to super-high shrieks, by changing the volume of it – by making very quick cuts between soft and loud. He puts a lot of emotion in the piece. Richard does in his, too.
Q: Would you say you’re leading a charmed life being able to pursue two passions – science and music?
A: It’s rare to be performing as internationally as I am and to be able to do science as well. It’s terrific to be in such an amazing powerhouse department with such great people, with just endless possibilities for personal growth. I’ve worked very, very hard to get to where I am. Every day I wake up happy, and every day I go to bed happy, I’m very, very lucky. I hope I never take it for granted.
