RECENT NEWS

This year marked the 200th anniversary of what may be the most important science book ever written: Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

Darwin was British, and throughout 2009, the English have been particularly proud, issuing a Darwin coin, official stamps and a variety of celebratory exhibitions.

But none of the Darwin-mania was lost on this side of the pond, even in musical circles. David Balakrishnan, violinist and founder of the Grammy-winning Turtle Island Quartet, composed a piece titled Tree of Life, inspired in part by Darwin's groundbreaking book. It's a large-scale multimedia composition (commissioned by the Lied Center at the University of Kansas), mixing theatre, dance, video, spoken word, a wind ensemble and the Turtle Island Quartet itself.

Balakrishnan and the rest of the Turtle Island Quartet stopped by the Performance Today studio to play a version of the piece for string quartet.

"The subject matter is Darwin's theory of evolution," Balakrishnan says. "I tried to avoid getting into the conflict of it, but instead talk about the cultural values of wanting to know where you came from and what that means artistically."

Turtle Island's Cross-Cultural World

The piece is in four movements: "Aswatha" (the Indian Tree of Life), "Lucy" (named for the second oldest human found), "Monkey Business," and "Coelacanth" (named after the world's oldest fish).

As Tree of Life flows by, styles and eras of music seem to evolve, swimming seamlessly into each other. I tried jotting down a few as the piece went by, and came up with at least 16, including Indian classical music, bluegrass, swing, bebop, Afro-Cuban, the songs "Strangers in the Night" and "All of Me," Eastern European folk music, blues and hints of rock and funk. You might hear more. But what really struck me is that it didn't feel like a pastiche; all of these styles live organically in the Turtle Island world.

The Quartet has always had a love for the multi-stylistic and multicultural. And, as Balakrishnan told me, each member of the group comes by it naturally. It's particularly obvious in the story of his own musical evolution.

"My father is from India, so I grew up hearing that music as a kid," Balakrishnan says. "Then I fell in love with Jimi Hendrix and wanted to play Hendrix on the violin. That was great for a while. I got into fusion, got into classical 12-tone study. Then I discovered bebop, then the David Grisman Quintet. All these things, they are all accidents, right? But they are following your heart. In the end, Turtle Island was the way that I found to connect the dots."

Balakrishnan says he has tremendous respect for Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, but his musical world encompasses much more. I don't know if I've ever heard a piece of music with such a wide range of cultural references that doesn't sound like a collage. Tree of Life sounds wholly integrated — a single musical ecosystem, made from many species.

Listen to the studio interview and performance:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121778672