Science and Music Are in Harmony at Caltech

Flushed and nervous, Robert Navin stepped onto a low podium, perched his guitar on his knee and began to pluck out the notes of Gaspar Sanz’s “Pavanas and Canarios.”

Tentatively at first, then with increasing confidence, Navin’s fingers danced over the frets of the instrument, bringing the difficult piece to life.

The recent afternoon recital was a dry run for Navin’s performance exams at the Royal Academy of Music in London. It was one of several informal classical music recitals played on the campus of this well-known institution every semester.

The Juilliard School? USC? Guess again.

How about the California Institute of Technology?

The Pasadena school, known for its brainy science students who do more fiddling with computers than, say, violins, actually has a thriving music program.

It just may be the best-kept secret on campus--more so, perhaps, than even the undercover planning sessions for the notorious senior pranks.

“When we tell people that I conduct Caltech’s wind ensemble and two jazz bands, and that (wife) Delores oversees the chamber music program’s 20 ensembles, the response is frequently: ‘I didn’t know Caltech had a music program!’ ” said Bill Bing, one of Caltech’s five music instructors, whose wife also works at the school.

There is no music department or music major offered at the preeminent science and engineering institute. In fact, the music rooms are literally underground, in the windowless basement of the student activities center.

But in a typical year, Bing said, 90 of the school’s 1,600 undergraduate and graduate students, along with 30 staff members, faculty, alumni and employees at the Caltech-affiliated Jet Propulsion Laboratory, participate in one of the Caltech-sponsored ensembles.

The result has been a devoted following. “We have a loyal community that comes to all our concerts,” said Allen Gross, director of the Caltech symphony.

Navin, who at 25 is working on his doctorate in particle physics at Caltech, believes that science and music are not incompatible. He has played the guitar since he was 13 and has been a physics devotee nearly as long.

“I’m not a Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde,” Navin said after his recital. “Science is a very human endeavor. You operate on hunches. With music your approach has to be very precise, and you try to be expressive without being numerical.”

Alex Santoso, a 22-year-old clarinetist and mechanical engineering major, takes the comparison between music and science one step further. When he gets stuck on a particularly difficult engineering problem, he sometimes puts down his work and picks up his clarinet.

“This music thing kind of hones my skills in approaching a problem on an intuitive level,” Santoso said. “Sometimes in engineering there just isn’t a logical solution. That’s where music comes in because you can find new ways of solving problems.”

Arts teachers who find themselves in a science world sometimes solve their problems with a duet of logic and machinery.

Delores Bing said she uses electronic gadgets, such as tuning machines and metronomes, that employ the quantified measures scientists are most comfortable with.

“It can also be difficult to teach highly cerebral people to become physically involved with music,” she said. “We find that using a video camera enables students to see that a lack of physical movement can, in fact, be as distracting to the audience as excessive gyrations.”

The rewards of working with Caltech students are great, the music instructors said.

“They are disciplined, they know how to apply themselves, they’re highly motivated. What they can produce in a short time is extraordinary,” said guitar teacher Darryl Denning.

Many times, it is the students who teach the instructors.

Bill Bing said he never knew before coming to Caltech that a “phase shift” might occur when one musician in a quartet gets a beat ahead of others. Nor was he aware, until a student pointed it out one day, that because of its small bell the piccolo trumpet is an inefficient transmitter of sound.

Aside from its appeal to scientists, music is an important form of expression for Caltech students, Gross said. “It gives the students a way they can express a part of themselves that they don’t get a chance to do otherwise,” he said.

It is also an important way to escape the incredible pressure that all Caltech students--who are in the top 1% academically nationwide, according to school officials--face in the classroom.

One Ph.D. candidate dedicated his dissertation to Denning. “He said that without guitar class, he would have gone mad,” Denning recalled.

Socially, music is especially important for Caltech students.

While their studies are highly specialized and often isolating, students can make music together in a non-competitive situation that often puts a freshman, graduate student and a professor in the same ensemble, even though they would never collaborate as equals in the laboratory, Delores Bing said.

“Many of these kids were freaks in their home schools because of their intelligence,” Gross said. “Here, they may relate best to other people within a musical situation.”