Classical Music and Geology

Okay, I’m going out on a limb here to create an analogy. But we need a little fun once in a while.

My favorite classical composer has, for many decades, been Antonín Dvořák. Every one of his pieces, whether symphonies or smaller works, consists of beautiful melodies, some of the best ever written. However—and I hesitate to criticize this master of music—that’s pretty much all it is. Melodies, strung together, occasionally showing up again in modified form, but not quite fitting together when they do so. The New World Symphony is a good example.

Some of  Dvořák’s pieces, however, do have structure. His tone poems (such as Wodník, or the Watersprite; The Wild Dove; The Noon Witch; and The Golden Spinning Wheel) were deliberately written around old Czech legends. And for other Dvořák pieces, such as Symphony 8 in D major, I have imagined stories. But even in these cases, the structure is episodic rather than woven together as a fabric.

My second favorite classical composer has, for many decades, been Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He wrote good melodies too, but within a much more limited range than Dvořák. Most of Mozart’s melodies were various forms of scales. For example, the final movement of his last symphony is pretty much just descending major scales, with some occasional ascending scales. They are incomparably beautiful, though, incomparable to anyone except Dvořák. But Mozart’s melodies fit together. In Dvořák’s music, you could never really guess what was coming next, but in Mozart’s music, everything seems to follow from what came before. You feel astonishment and surprise, only to realize that you should have seen it coming. I have listened a lot to his Gran Partita while following the study score. The twelve instruments fit together to form beautiful vertical chords, yet each instrument has a beautiful melody that interweaves with the others horizontally. A perfect fabric.

Mozart’s music reminds me of smooth layers of limestone, in which every layer is in place. Surprises frequently come in Mozart, as in limestone: unpredictable discolorations caused by various forms of iron, as in the photo.

Dvořák’s music, however, reminds me of conglomerate, which consists of a jumble of rocks (frequently limestone in Oklahoma) cemented together by calcium carbonate cement that has leached from the rocks. Each rock is a beautiful surprise, but the overall structure is a jumble.

Both limestone and conglomerate are beautiful, but in different ways. I will conclude by noting that some early-twentieth-century academic music (mostly listened to by music professors) reminds me of the alluvium in the bed of the Arkansas River. The rocks have been broken apart into such small pieces that they no longer have any recognizable individual beauty, and they are mixed in with bits of trash in various states of weathering. I know I am not the only person who feels this way about atonal music.

My Fun Evolution Trip Part Three: The Great Unconformity of the Black Hills

One of the greatest new insights into the history of the Earth was when James Hutton realized that the Earth had to be very old and that geological deposits were recycled over and over again—an idea called uniformitarianism. Hutton was not the first person to think of this but he was the first to pursue the idea in an organized fashion. His complex thoughts were later summarized by John Playfair and extended by Charles Lyell. As the modern paleontologist Michael Benton has explained, uniformitarianism can mean lots of things, some of which (such as uniformity of process) is still accepted by modern scientists, but others of which (such as uniformity of rate) are not. The former means that you can understand the past by studying the processes of the present, rather than invoking random miracles. The latter means that those processes have operated as slowly in the past as they are at present, which is clearly not the case.

Hutton, loving near Edinburgh, Scotland, in the late eighteenth century, looked at the local geological deposits and thought about them. At Siccar Point is an unconformity with nearly vertical Silurian sedimentary layers on the bottom and gently sloping Devonian and Carboniferous sedimentary layers on top, with millions of years of missing history in between. He realized that such sedimentary deposits could not have formed all at once during a global flood. And here’s why.

When the older, lower sedimentary layers formed, they had to be horizontal, due to the law of gravity. But these layers had been turned on their sides. If they were still mud when turned sideways, they would have gone PHHHHHHT! and squished into a big pile. The fact that they retained their layers meant that they had become rock before being turned on their sides. Then other sedimentary layers formed on top of them. This simply could not have happened during a single global Flood of Noah. Of course, creationists then as now could simply invoke miracles. They could say that God squished the lower layers into rock and turned them on their sides in the middle of the Flood. Does the Bible say this? No, they just make it up.

You can go to Scotland and see it for yourself. Sounds to me like a great excuse to go to Scotland. But there are other formations called The Great Unconformity, including the one John Wesley Powell discovered in the Grand Canyon. An unconformity is a geological formation in which a large chunk of time is missing. But there is a really good one (which didn’t make it into the Wikipedia entry) in the Black Hills of South Dakota, which has Precambrian sediments raised at a 70 degree angle on the bottom, and horizontal Cambrian strata on top, with almost two billion years of missing strata.

It is difficult to get directions to find it. So remember this. Find Nemo Road west of Rapid City. There are several ways to get there. Just as soon as this road, as you go west, crosses over the line from Pennington County into Meade County, you will see a bridge over Boxelder Creek. Immediately to your left is the Great Unconformity.

This is what it looks like from Nemo Road:

Even though it is in Black Hills National Forest, there are private landholdings all around, so you need to stay away from people’s yards. You will probably find, as I did, a path worn through the grass by generations of geology students from the South Dakota School of Mines and Wheaton College Science Station. There are other places to see the unconformity, but this is the only place where you can walk right up to it and put your finger on almost two billion years of missing history.

How could this unconformity have formed all at once during a flood? But maybe creationists have another explanation. Maybe the lower Precambrian layers were pre-Flood, which would have given ample time (almost two thousand years) to form the sediments into rock and then push them to their current 70 degree angle, and then the upper sediments were of Flood origin. This approach is not much help, however, because two thousand years is not enough time to have turned all the Precambrian sediments into rock and pushed them over, unless God did a miracle which the Bible conveniently does not mention.

So when you are in the Black Hills, forget about Deadwood and even Mt. Rushmore. The only really interesting thing, to me, about Mt. Rushmore, is the remnant populations of the rare fern Asplenium septentrionale that someone showed me in 1993 but which have apparently died. Go see the Great Unconformity, a hidden treasure—there is not even a road sign to mark the Nemo Road location.

Evolution in Oklahoma, a Road Trip: A Dramatic Geological Past, part two.

I continue now to describe some of the geological things that we will see on the Evolution Road Trip May 30 to June 2, 2013. See here for more information.

Back in Pennsylvanian days, about 300 million years ago, sediments had been building up and turning into rock in what is now Oklahoma for over a hundred million years. Then something dramatic happened. Part of the land rose, part of it fell. Cambrian and Ordovician rocks now looked down into deep valleys. Big rocks eroded down into those valleys. Soon the valleys were filled with what was to become conglomerate rock. And such conglomerate! See the photo. The component rocks are big, and sharp-angled, both of which facts mean that the rocks did not get carried very far before being mashed together. At the scenic overlook north of Exit 47 on Interstate 35, you can see contorted layers of Ordovician limestone right next to Pennsylvanian conglomerate. Two hundred million years ago, this is where the cliff was.

Today, young couples spray-paint proclamations of love on the exposed strata. But do they have any idea what “4ever” means against the backdrop of 500 million years of geological history sometimes hidden, and sometimes exposed, in central Oklahoma?

Even in the gentlest rolling hillsides of south central Oklahoma, there are surprises. There is a very thin layer of limestone crammed with fossils (see photo). This layer is a little harder than the others and creates a shelf that I have driven past many times and never noticed. Thanks, Gordon, for pointing this and all of the preceding things out to me.

I have learned so much since my old creationist days. And I continue to learn. Most of these geological sites are near Sulphur, Oklahoma, which has a whole bunch of youth Bible camps. I am sure that one of these camps was where the Church of Christ cult of which I was a member had its summer youth meetings at which young men and women could meet and marry within the cult. (We were the branch of the C of C that rejected not only instrumental music and Sunday school but even insisted on using a single cup rather than individual cups during communion.) I never went to one. But here I am, perhaps driving right past them, in search of evidence about the evolutionary past that my erstwhile cult so vigorously denied.