Featured Artist: Mark Ackerley
Mark Ackerley is an unusual composer. He attends City Church and has a Masters degree in music composition. Mark has written new music for the Berkeley Symphony, and recently founded Transcendent Pathways, an organization dedicated to bringing music to people in places otherwise often forgotten: hospitals, nursing homes, and institutions for the mentally ill.
As if his work weren't remarkable enough already, Ackerley doesn't write what you would call traditional music. He can, of course, but lately he's been interested in something a bit more complex:
Your DNA.
His latest project, DNA Melody, combines genetic material and the art of music composition. Ackerley has received hundreds of thousands of submissions to the DNA Melody project, and the resultant music is haunting and every bit as complicated and singular as you would imagine, given its source. There is infinite creativity in the human genome, and it is a beautiful take on a topic that is as close to us as our own skin.
The duty of an artist is to illuminate unknown places.
—Mark Ackerley
So, how exactly does one make music using a person's genes? Our DNA comprises four chemical bases, known in shorthand by the first letter of their names--A (Adenine), T (Thymine), C (Cytosine), and G (Guanine). These four chemical bases, arranged in certain sequences, also serve as the basis for Ackerley's compositions. He translates them into four musical parameters (rhythm, pitch, timbre, and key signature), and the arrangement begins to take form.
Ackerly's vision of music is positively Kuyperian. (The Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper famously wrote, "There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ...does not cry, Mine!") "As an artist," Ackerley says, "all of life is your domain." Drawing inspiration from the very building blocks of life is not so unusual, then, if all the world is open to you.
It is this same vision that drove Ackerley to found Transcendent Pathways. Acklerley's interest in the extremes of the human condition drove him to challenge the isolation and loneliness that often accompany illness (especially mental illness) through music. Transcendent Pathways, whose debut is this Monday, October 7th, at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, will serve as the channel through which musicians are connected with patients in need of care.
This concert will serve as a fundraiser to drive Transcendent Pathways' mission. Magik*Magik Orchestra and Nonsemble 6 will accompany husband-and-wife duo of pianist Jeff LaDeur and violinist Liana Bérubé for an evening of new music and renewed spirits.
The Transcendent Pathways inaugural concert will take place Monday, October 7th, at 8 PM at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Concert Hall. Admission is free, but reservations are required. Call the SFCM at 415-503-6275. More info >
If you'd like to support the work of Transcendental Pathways, visit Ackerley's Indiegogo site.