Empire ladies, from squarepianotech.com's page, SP in Art. Click to make bigger

In many respects, being an artist, musician, or writer was seen as being “in trade,” the same as a shopclerk, shoemaker, or bricklayer. Ladies were expected to be proficient at their watercolors, their pianoforte, and their letters, but they did not perform for the public and certainly they did not earn money for their performance.

As a writer, I love these seemingly random distinctions. What would it be like to be a woman in Olivia’s position? What is the difference between giving a “private” performance to 200 people at a soiree and giving a “public” one to 150 subscribers at a concert hall? (And how did this opinion change over time so that nowadays we have the likes of “American Idol?”)

Starting with Wikipedia’s list of female composers, I sought out primary and secondary sources on the composers in roughly the right time. In my research, I found nothing like an exact match to model my lady on, but I did find some interesting details. For one, there were far more well-remembered (or published) female composers on the Continent than in Britain; this is also true for males. If I’d wanted to set my story in Austria, I’d have been in clover.

And there were some high-born lady composers, but they were very high-born, and they dabbled. One of the most famous: Queen Ann Boleyn in the 1500s. And in roughly regency times, the also much-maligned but unstoppable Duchess of Devonshire wrote at least one piece: “On March 17 [1784] Georgiana went to the opera to hear La Reine de Golconde, which include a little piece she had composed herself.” (Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire, p. 136).

There were some “middle class” matrons (never single ladies) who composed, but they had to teach to make money. And Ann Hunter, wife of a celebrated surgeon, was commissioned to write verse to add to the music of others, including that of Hayden, and she wrote music to accompany her own poem “Song of the Indian.” I got that detail from The Girl in Rose, which is mostly about Rebecca Schroeter, an Englishwoman whom many consider a great love of the maestro, but also gives a great impression of the musical and social life of her time. (Careful readers will notice that maestro Hayden has a tiny cameo in my story, as well).

I’m not the only writer to find lady composers fascinating: If you’re looking for a literary story about a lady musician, try Clara: A Novel of Clara Schumann, by Janice Galloway (2002). Born in Germany in 1819, she’s post-regency, but her story is resonant. From the Washington Post review: “A moving portrait of an artist struggling to balance her extraordinary talent with the demands of daughterhood and duty, motherhood and marriage, a juggling act still relevant to the lives of women today.”

Some sources:

Wikipedia’s list of female composers by birth year

Clara: A Novel. Janice Galloway, 2002, Simon & Schuster.

The Girl in Rose: Haydn’s Last Love. Peter Hobday, 2004, Phoenix (Orion Books).

Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire. Amanda Foreman, 1998, Random House.

Concert Life in Eighteenth Century Britain. Susan Wollenberg and Simon McVeigh, eds., 2004, Ashgate Publishing.

Women & Music: A History, 2nd ed. Karin Pendle, ed., 2001, Indiana University Press.

Women in Music: An anthology of source readings from the Middle Ages to the present, revised ed. Carol Neuls-Bates, ed., 1996, Northeastern University Press.

The Norton/Grove Dictionary of Women Composers. Julie Anne Sadie & Rhian Samuel, eds., 1995, The Macmillan Press.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI), the signature injury of the current U.S. wars, calls for the nation’s best “emergency medicine,” Kevin Kit Parker told a group of top scientists, medicine makers, and policy makers, this spring at the One Mind for Research conference in Boston.

“Certainly TBI, as it affects the force, is a national security issue, and it’s certainly an emergency issue.” Like the race to the moon and the Manhattan project, he said, TBI is an emergency science project with national security at stake and a need to move rapidly.

“You’ve got young NCOs [non-commissioned officers], young soldiers out there that have been blown up a dozen times, a dozen times they’ve suffered a traumatic brain injury, since 9/11. We have this growing cadre of our professional warriors that are out there, that are walking around, and the concern is, what does the future hold for them?”

The timelines of TBI damage range from nanoseconds to years. “The data now is pretty clear that TBI can potentiate a variety of neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease,” Parker said. “So the outlook for these young soldiers is kind of bleak right now.”

Parker, a professor at Harvard, has also served multiple tours in Afghanistan in the Army Reserve, tending the wounded immediately after impact and observing their recovery on base and back in the United States. The experiences led him to expand his research focus from the physics of the heart to the brain. “When people started trying to kill me with IED’s I thought I’d better get a piece of this,” he said.

His background also led to an unusual approach to the problem, or at least unusual for neuroscientists. “I’m an infantry officer in the reserve, and I’m not a physician, I’m a physicist, so I look at things in terms of scaling laws.” Interested in how mechanical energy (such as from blasts) affects neurons, he and the people in his lab decided to try to build physical models of blast injury from molecule to cell and from cell to tissue.

“We use tissue engineering as a tool, including blasting neurons,” he said. “What we found right away is that we can mimic some of the things that the neuropathologists are reporting that they’re seeing in patients.”

“Now that we’ve got all these models, we’re working on developing a systematic understanding of the mechanical forces required to injure these neurons, these vascular tissues, and understand the chemical cascades that are turned on by these mechanical forces.” If they understand these chemical cascades, they could start to identify which molecules along the cascade are the most vulnerable—and which might be easily reached by drugs and other therapies.

Part of emergency medicine is exploring many avenues simultaneously, Parker said. His theory is it’s diffused axonal injury that leads to damage from TBI, but researchers need to work on multiple hypotheses, to “flank the problem” with the outside-the-box ideas until someone finds some badly needed solutions.

One giant challenge: “We need to build a brain,” he said. “Everyone would benefit from having a brain in their [laboratory] dish to work on:” a 1 mm³ piece of brain that mimics the neural microenvironment, scalable so what people discover in the lab can be tested in drug-maker’s wide-assay studies. He’s working on it.

In addition, “we need to push the science as far forward [on the battlefield] as we possibly can,” he said. “It might be a diffusion tensor imager that we put downrange, it might be a biomarkers lab that we put downrange … so we can understand, as these soldiers come off the battlefield, what’s happening to them, rather than waiting 6 months, 12 months before they present at a VA emergency room.”

“The whole idea is that when these guys [medics] run up there to pull these broken kids out of this MRAP [armored vehicle], that there’s a whole team behind them supporting them,” he said. “If I run up there and this kid’s got a leg dangling off, I know how to apply a tourniquet to him. If I run up there and he’s got his bell rung, I got no way of treating this guy right now. And right now he’s at the genesis of these neurodegenerative diseases that might not appear for 20-30 years down the road.”

His remarks start just after minute 1 of this video. The slides he uses are especially useful in understanding the science.

The forum was held in Boston May 23–25 by the One Mind for Research campaign, whose goal is “to significantly reduce the U.S. burden of disability due to brain disorders.” The campaigners released a blueprint of research goals at the event: “A Ten-Year Plan for Neuroscience: From Molecules to Brain Health” (PDF). Videos of all the sessions are collected on the Science Network site.

The Science Network also did a wide-ranging interview with Parker, on work in the lab, his experience in Afghanistan, how he got started in science, and his passionate advocacy for his compatriots in the field. (22 min). It’s also well worth a listen.

–Nicky Penttila

These greeted me as I stepped outside each morning for a week. Vanished already in life, they greet me now only in pixelworld.