Monkisms

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1) start with a recording, not of a Monk tune, but rather a tune shamelessly inspired (in a good way…) by Monk, say “Monk’s Rec Room” by Jane Ira Bloom

2) What makes it Monk?  Do we know what those things are? What are those things it shares with the high priest of bop?  (Do we know who he is?)

3) Make a map…

PJE_Monk_Map_MAML&Mspring2014

PJE_Monk_Map_MAML&Mspring2014

4) Is this Monk?  That’s obviously the wrong question…  Are these the multiple things that constitute (some of what) we call Monkisms?

5) PLAY SOME ACTUAL MONK.

6) Findings confirmed?

7) How far Monk?

8) Extrapolations Confirmed?

© 2014 Peter J. Evans, theorist

Protagonist Musicians in SF, pt.2—Erich Zann

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TITLE: Music of Erich Zann (available here)
AUTHOR: H.P. Lovecraft
YEAR: 1922

PJE SYNOPSIS
A perpetually poor student in Paris finds an affordable residence in a part of the city that doesn’t actually exist, but seemed to for a short while. While living on the fifth floor, he hears music, eerie music, disconcerting music, coming from the sixth floor and wants to find out more.  He meets Erich Zann who plays viol(!).  By day/evening Zann plays for theater orchestras, but by night/early morning plays music for an audience beyond……..  When our poor student meets EZ, says he wants to meet/listen, EZ humors him at first with some typical classics. Student is curious about the other music, EZ sends him away, mortified to know that student has been eavesdropping. EZ later relents, allowing student to witness him playing the “music” for something not of this world/time/space/cosmic psychology.  Student flees in horror, tries to return, but can never find the neighborhood ever again.

REALLY A MUSICIAN?
Yes!
1) EZ plays viol for crying out loud!  Though HPL did not know much about music, we are given the impression that he is technically proficient, musically knowledgeable, etc.
2) Despite constant playing and practicing, EZ can still only afford to live in the cheapest parts of town
3) EZ hates to know that other people are listening to him when he is not performing.

WHY A MUSICIAN?
Music is the most ephemeral of the arts, and HPL takes that to a further extreme—ephemeral to the point of supernatural.

CONCLUSIONS?
As with most HPL, the narrator is a unwitting-observer, so the reader is not sure what it is exactly that EZ is doing, or where he’s getting his music from.  One wonders if he is attempting to communicate with the beyond through music, or if he’s taking dictation for new ideas, though his reticence does not lend itself towards the latter.  One could read this short story as a play on the adage “Music soothes the savage beast”.

RECOMMENDED?
Yes.  HPL called this one of his favorites, and it does have a certain flavor and pacing that stands out from the rest of his oeuvre. Short and crisp, psychologically compelling enough to be a gateway to the rest of HPL’s work.

© 2014 Peter J. Evans, theorist

Protagonist Musicians in SF, pt. 1

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TITLE: We Who Are About To…
AUTHOR: Joanna Russ
YEAR: 1975

PJE SYNOPSIS
The protagonist is a musicologist who just happens to be female.  Due to an accident to the faster-than-light-speed drive, a ship is forced to land on an uninhabited planet millions of light years from anywhere. Protagonist suggests that doom is inevitable, while other passengers suggest attempting ‘colonization’. Protagonist is on the side of pragmatism: though things seem OK for now, air, water, plants could be partially poisonous—-days are too long, weather too dry for cultivation, etc. Among the other passengers are a family with a teenage daughter (Lori), a jock, a ‘professor of ideas’, and two younger women, one of whom is en route to military training.  Add to that, the protagonist hordes pharmaceuticals and micro-weaponry, and goes to great lengths to conceal these, so that even when she is found out and thoroughly searched some of her stash remains undiscovered. This, along with some ‘code-speak’ she attempts with the trainee, suggests that she might be an undercover agent of some sort. Without  totally giving it away, let’s just say her viewpoint prevails in the end (for those who have read this book, please note the irony…)

REALLY A MUSICIAN?
YES! Protagonist claims to be a scholar of John Dowland in particular and Late Renaissance/Early Baroque in general. In the early parts of the book she sings songs (including some by Dowland) around the camp-fire, to help calm the child etc.

WHY A MUSICIAN?
Protagonist spends much time in a dark and secluded cave, so obviously a musician would be be able to handle that duty… Protagonist is also equipped with a voice-activated recorder, enabling her to archive the plight. Additionally she often speaks derogatorily to the professor of ideas, contrasting her own practical approach with his idealistic approach, which is actually a quite remarkable statement regarding the study of music (which itself is often considered a-practical).  Additionally, she is also well-rounded, often quoting poetry and history, making her an ideal archivist for the group.  Also typically for a trained musician, she shows the requisite amount of disdain. Oddly enough when Lori says she wants to be a composer, the protagonist does not jump at this opportunity to teach or encourage, probably because of her pragmatism regarding the living situation.  The protagonist’s relationship with Lori is one of the few quasi-connective relationships she has with any of the group.

CONCLUSIONS?
All in all, the Protagonist is a musician inasmuch as she is the archetypal Storyteller, sharing songs and shaping histories about the current group and others long gone. She is also the one person in the group able to read celestial/solar activity in terms of day lengths and seasonal transitions.

RECOMMENDED?
YES—Good read, lots to chew on… and on…

© 2014 Peter J. Evans, theorist

Cloud Atlas: Text & Language

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David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is a daunting book—well to be technical, it’s actually six books in one—well to be even more accurate, it’s dauntingly six different types of texts:

1) Journal of Adam Ewing
2) Letters from Robert Frobisher
3) Luisa Rey, which in the next segment we learn that is a yet-to-be-published novel
4) Timothy Cavendish, which then appears as a movie in the next segment
5) Sonmi 451, which is a record of an interrogation
6) Sloosha’s Crossin’, which Zachry presents as part of an oral history

You notice in this list that I hedge my text a bit—all of these narratives are written for us, yet to the characters they appear as discrete bits of different “texts”.  Luisa Rey’s story is presented to Cavendish as a unpublished novel, and in Sonmi’s world we see that Cavendish’s story is portrayed in film.

Among these six strands, we see the following trend:

       past —————–> present ————> future
hard copies ————> fictions——–> oral traditions

This in itself is fascinating as a commentary; as we ‘progress’ hard copies will disappear and we will again have to rely upon ‘traditional’ methods despite (or maybe because of) advanced technology.

Within each of the six narratives, the characters deal with textual interpretations of their own worlds, Frobisher’s reading of Ewing’s journal, the handling of the safety report in Luisa’s world, the inspiration that Sonmi takes from Cavendish’s plight, Zachry religious reaction to seeing a video of Sonmi…  This is perhaps most interesting in that narrative of Robert Forbisher, who finds and reads Ewing’s diaries, and reports on them to Sixsmith.  At the same time Frobisher is entrusted to the papers, notes and compositions of Vyvyan Ayrs, finishing, transcribing and adding to his works.  This then becomes a textual battle of sorts, as the two argue over the true authorship of the Cloud Atlas sextet, which of course is ironic when taken in context with the rest of the novel; six different narratives each of differing, sometimes dubious, authorships.

The previous paragraphs describe a more noticeable aspect of the novel, a progression through the narratives and some of the links between them.  An even larger scope and somewhat less obvious design is created by the use of language throughout the entire novel.

1) 1850s English
2) Refined English, early 20th-Century educated prose
3) 1970s Thriller novel
4) ‘current’ Comedic Screenplay
5) Science Fiction, about 100 years distant?
6) Post-Earth slang, about 200 years distant?

The trend here is that the middle parts of the novel are, linguistically speaking, the parts that Mitchell’s audience (us) most readily identify with and can read with ease.  The first and last parts are symmetrically removed from that middle, both in terms of time and language.  The casual reader would perhaps get the gist of both (eventually) but would invariably struggle with the details.

Ewing’s journal is full of erudite, Classical references with a vocabulary that was normal for it’s day, as Ewing wittingly-constructs words from Greek and Latin roots. Taking place on a Pacific Island, of course, makes it that much more foreign, adding a layer of location-specific vocabulary (names of tribes, landmarks, etc.) to an already dense lexicon.

Zachry’s narrative is just as dense and foreign, only now the reader feels it is the narrator’s lack of formal education that creates the linguistic difficulty.  Contrary to Ewing’s style, Zachry seems to be lopping the ends off of some words, running others together, eliminating vowels (cf. the spelling of his name).

                          150 years                       NOW                  200? years
when:                     past —————-> present ————> future
effort to read:      much——————> none ————–> much

With such a design, perhaps Mitchell is meditating on the time spans of lasting-education and language, and in a way projecting the equation forward as a type of hypothesis—the language from 165 years ago is difficult for a current-day reader, so the language 200 years from now will be just as difficult?  Is that correct?  Does language have a 400-year lifespan? Adam and Zachry would not understand each other, but from our current vantage point we can appreciate both….

© 2014 Peter J. Evans, theorist

 

-tree- of —cod–es

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Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes is a purposely incomplete book, as it’s an erasive re-reading of Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles.

  1. many of the words have been removed,
  2. some of the remaining words have fewer letters than originally

this hits me around p.88 when the title of the book appears in the main text as

” tree  of     cod   es”

that is, whittled from Schulz’s title story in the the following manner

street of crocodiles
street of crocodiles

Intriguingly, from my view point, it  turns out that the ‘tree of codes’ is actually a map…
“My father kept in his desk a beautiful map of our city, an enormous panorama. the city rose toward the center of the map, honeycomb streets, half a street, a gap between houses. that tree of codes shone with the empty unexplored, only a few streets were marked.” (87-88)    the map is incomplete, however….     “The cartographer spared our city” (88)    ….by inexact mapping the city can continue?   …or that the map becomes the city?  “we find ourselves part of the tree of codes.  Reality as thin as paper” (92) 

This brings to mind an interesting metaphorical relationship that is perhaps at the heart of JSF’s methods for creating the Tree of Codes….

 map : city : : Tree of Codes : Street of Crocodiles

This re-writing brings to mind the issues explored in “On Exactitude in Science” by Jorge Luis Borges, where initially the map of the territory is the same size as the territory, but as generations pass, the descendants lose interest in cartography and the old map only exists as such in desolate areas especially for the ‘Animals and Beggars’… as Schulz describes them…

In both cases, we are reminded of, or perhaps inspired by, malleable maps that allow the material/territory to be tactile and creatively flexible, not over-embalmed with detail…

___________________________

for those interested in structural ephemera;
the book starts with page 7
the phrase ‘tree of codes’ first appears on p.88 of 134 pages
81/127 = .63, ~Golden Mean

—————

© 2013 Peter J. Evans, theorist

Actual Possibilities

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Music Theory: Actualities vs. Possibilities

“What is musical reality? What is a musical actuality?” I’ve come to ask myself these questions in light of student concerns, interests and presentations specifically stemming from this year’s Pedagogy of Theory class.

Theory itself is too abstract, non-relevant—the primary concern is that which will achieve immediate results in classroom and lesson settings, with Performance ultimately the main locus focus of attention.  Indeed, we, as the members of the Theory Department, say in our collective syllabi…

“Coursework should be thought of as not only classroom activity, but also as small-scale, highly-focused versions of musical reality.”  

In all honesty, this is meant to encourage students to prepare solfege and part-writing homework with the utmost attention to detail and musicality.  Thoughts of similar ilk seem to be an over-riding concern among those who teach theory these days: not Theory itself, but rather its practical application.   If preparing homework is akin to preparing for a lesson or a performance, is that an end in its own right?

This is a minor third, and you play/sing/hear it this way.  This is an eighth-note, and you feel it this way.  These types of approaches are undoubtedly well-intentioned but ultimately self-defeating, opening several different cans-of-worms. Will performances and hearings of these things be the same in all contexts and styles on all instruments and voices?

This train of thought is actually contrary to historical evidence (which mostly suggests the reverse…) and perhaps may ultimately harm music by stunting creativity from within the field… (has it already?)

I suggest that folks are too performance-biased, unwilling slaves to the literature—RE-creationists!  Is that actually a useful result?  There are useful aspects of that kind of thinking, but performance cannot be THE result, instead is has to be the beginning!  The equation needs to be revisited, or re-calibrated so that Performance rather marks the entry point of the Theory cycle…

…ultimately raising and addressing the following questions:

What was that?  Did that work?  How did it work?  Why did it work?  Is it duplicable?    Is it comparable?  Is there a model?  Has is developed from some previous form?  Can I make it work in the same way?  Can I improve upon that?  Can I further develop that?  WHAT’S NEXT?!?!

Theory is not solely preparation for musical actualities, but also it is there to introduce and explore musical possibilities!  Not just re-creation, because then the art form is dead, but rather….

Distillation/Reduction:

  • Guido d’Arezzo     —   compose with only one pitch per vowel
  • J.J. Fux           —         think/hear/teach in whole-note species
  • J.S. Bach Chorales — quarter-note reductions of harmonic-phrase units
  • Heinrich Scheker   —  think/hear/teach with unending variations and prolongations of cadential templates
  • Nicholas Slonimsky — propose over 1,000 new kinds of scales

Note that thes above list includes methods and techniques that are often SEVERAL SCALES OF MAGNIFICATION REMOVED FROM MUSICAL ACTUALITIES MANY OF WHICH HAVE BEEN RIGOROUSLY TESTED VIA
Experimentation—Assumptions that get tested, Questions that get asked:

  • How far can you stretch a minor third?  On a piano, clarinet, or natural horn?  In the blues?  As the combination of two sine tones?
  • How far can you push and pull an eighth-note? In the style of Bach or Wagner?  In Dixieland, Sing, Bop or Funk? In different tempos? As a discrete unit of time?  As a pulsation of Acoustic Beats?

COMPOSITIONS that push forward instead of regurgitating.
PERFORMANCES that address issues or ask questions.
IMPROVISATIONS that allow real-time explorations.
ANALYSES that  inspire better listening/hearing/imagining.
TEACHING that explains actualities, yet opens the door for further possibilities…

Evidence suggests that teaching is one of the most important things that separates humans from apes, the ability to deliberately (not just imitatively) pass on a skill.  Beyond that basic definition, “part of teaching is being able to coordinate your attention with another person’s attention” and that, I think, is also a pretty fair definition of music.  The highest aim of any art is to express & share a viewpoint, that is… to teach!

All in all, the point of Theory is to not to restrict one goal’s along a unidirectional path, but rather to provide students the means to traverse the self-aware feedback loop that is MUSIC.

© 2013 Peter J. Evans, theorist

ZAPPA’S LUMPIEST

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FIRST: What is gravy? Generally, it’s a sauce for meat made from it’s own juices with flavors and thickeners added to taste…  
Lumpy Gravy is the result of mis-mixture, or perhaps the abundance of flour, or the addition of cool water instead of warm water—
Typically, Lumpy Gravy is not a desired result, though some do crave it for nostalgia “Just like Mom’s!” or for the heterogeneous ‘pearls of flavor’…

SECOND: Zappa was initially commissioned to compose/conduct a work for Capitol Records, and as such Lumpy Gravy was actually recorded, printed, and briefly released ready early in 1967…

Shortly after MGM/Verve, the label for the Mothers of Invention, filled suit prohibiting its release on Capitol.  Zappa then re-edited the material for its subsequent official release in May 1968…

Though one can here many orchestral similarities, the original material has been re-cut and reordered, and there is now a vocal element, that is spoken bits of dialogue. Though basically random snippets of friends, family and hangers-on talking into a well-reverberating piano, the listener grows used to such voices and types of dialogue, perhaps creating a narrative where none was intended…
(BTW: Lumpy Gravy there is actually a third version, this one is also pre-1968, similar, yet different, with much more improvisation and generally jazziness:
)

THIRD: ANALYSIS, part 1: James Borders in his article “Form and the Concept Album: Aspects of Modernism in Frank Zappa’s Early Releases (Perspectives of New Music Vol.39nO.1 (Winter, 2011), pp. 118-160) analyzes the first side of Lumpy Gravy as a Rondo form, largely due to the recurrences of “Oh, No” throughout the album…

According to Borders this tune returns twice, though it has been sped up, retrograde, etc. (Ex.3, pp. 130-133).  Intermixed with this tune are tidbits of what Borders calls ‘Varesiana,’ ‘Weberniana’ and ‘Stravinksiana’ in hommage to Zappa’s three favorite classical composers, Edgard Varese, Anton Webern and Igor Stravinsky. There are also found samples of non-Zappa pre-recorded music and eletronic treaments of various sorts

FOURTH: ANALYSIS, part 1: Borders’s rondo-form analysis is tantalizing, especially given similar structures found in Charles Ives’ “General William Booth Enters unto Heaven.”  A drawback to this might make us think Zappa was using classical forms as such, but I  instead encouraging folks to think collage or montage, more like film or a plastic art OR remind folks the Rondo form was initially a popular vocal form before it was a serious classical form…

As a MAM—dude 4eva, I hear many influences beyond, the three mentioned above—Varese of course being the most important, as he was the premier sonic collage collagist par excellence…. For (some of) those influences, see the ‘map’ below, and no more need be said…
…except of course to note that however ‘serious’ we perceive Zappa to be, he was always at least equal measure ‘silly’…
…and Lumpy Gravy is perhaps the best example of… that…

 

© 2013 Peter J. Evans, theorist

Hong Kong, city of Rhizomes?

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Summer in Hong Kong, walking down the tropical streets sweating and burning, heading for the Cultural Center from Mody Road.  I have a pretty good sense of memory-for-direction, and I know where we’re going, but there’s not a lot of information to be had…   and there are surprsingly few people about…

i can see it from here! by the way, where is everybody?

Then there’s a sign that says “subway” and my tourist experience clicks into a thought—that term doesn’t have to mean trains or sandwiches (like in the U.S.), but can also refer to a path beneath the street… and this changes everything.

Steps down and we find…  People!  Directions!  A.C.!  Moving Walkways!  So this is where everybody’s been hiding!  Ample signs point us towards our surface destination, yet the tunnels also lead us past shops, vendors, malls, businesses, hotels, residences, etc., as well as past multiple stations for the underground train (MTR) or walking paths, boats, ferries, surface trains, elevators, escalators and cable cars!   Overwhelmed at first, it takes me the rest of the visit to realize what I’ve encountered… Rhizomes—with a vengeance!  In other words, these pathways are not simply underground connections to trains (like in London) but rather offshoots of/to/from/within a subterrene culture that is distinct from that aboveground.

In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari posit the rhizome as a non-hierarchical means of collecting and processing data, as well as fostering creative thought.   My experience in Hong Kong ties in with the principles laid out in Introduction from that book…

1) Connection – Yes, paths between places—indeed, that’s the function
2) Heterogeneity – Yes, a diversity in character and in content
3) Multiplicity – Yes, through this can be tough to grasp, as the individual is not an addition to the multiple, but rather a subtraction from it—the individual is lesser than the multiple…  So my experience on the surface before finding the subway proves this point all too well…
4) Asignifying Rupture – Yes, and this was something that I realized only progressively.  Over the course of our trip, and without any intention whatsoever of doing so, we went from Tsim Sha Tsui to the Cultural Center in three completely different ways, i.e., several paths exist between the same starting and ending points—and I’m confident there are at least a couple more that we didn’t get to try.  This is important; imagine if one tunnel was under repair, it would still be possible to find multiple ways to get to and from the same places!

been there, rode that

5) Cartography – Well, here it gets sticky.  Yes, there are maps of the MTR, and some of the linking tunnels between stations.  Yes, the malls have store guides, etc.  But there is no one map of all the possible paths, all of the connections, all of the lines of flight (well, there probably has to be one somewhere, in the city planning office, or in the emergency response center, right?).  I think, for the average person, that such a map would be unreadable, or unpresentable—perhaps as a series of transparent overlays.  I asked my uncle-in-law if he’d ever heard of such a thing, and the look on his face suggested that by even asking such a question was to peer over the sheer brink of lunacy itself.  However, I think that the average HK citizen knows a bunch of these subconsciously or can find them quasi-instinctively.  My wife’s cousin was to meet us for some coffee, and approached our meeting spot in a way we hadn’t even considered, and then when we returned to the same point later, it was by yet another path, but he never seemed lost or confused, only certain we’d arrive at or destination…

6) Decalcomania – Without a map this is _______, but generally as a model such an approach can be applied to conditions in other locations.  Indeed, think of the Mole People in NYC.  The current-use subway system for that city is pretty extensive, but mainly these are well-mapped in regards to the set routes of the train and folks who need to swtich lines, but within these parameters there is no need for deviation or fluctuating options for walking traffic, though there is a navigation contest of sorts.  In Boston, the Downtown Crossing//Park Street tangle is a smaller-scale rhizome, which can be confusing for those who do not commute there daily. Or consider the speculation on indigenous use of caverns in the US to keep cool and provide connection, though we’re not currently certain of the extent of use and inter-cavern travel.

Part of the reason for these rhizomes is the climate—a hustle-and-bustle society situated in the tropical zone needs cool routes to keep people comfortable, and to connect them to shops and business.  I might add on a personal note that connecting travelers to tourist locations quickly and comfortably was a plus, though the conspiracy theorist in me wonders if such multiplicity of connection is meant to lead inexperienced consumers by as many different shops as possible.  In fact, I tried to go the above mentioned route to the Cultural Center the same way each time, but I was unsuccessful.  Would such a rhizomatic construction work in the US?  Are modern-day Americans to used to the supremacy of the Interstate Highway?  Is it another facet of the rift in the urban/rural divide?  Are we just easily confused or unaccustomed?  Does such an approach reflect a distinct approach to culture, where in HK the individual is lesser than the multiple but in the US we believe the reverse?  Nah…

subtract this from the multiple, jackass!

With places of work and living all inter-connected, I  wonder if the full-time residents ever really need to peak about up top.  Regardless, I’m pretty sure one could visit HK without ever visiting the surface—in fact that’s the goal for my next visit!  

Modern Nostalgia?

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Charles Ives is quite the twentieth-century composer…

  • Dissonance in all realms; rhythm, texture, language, color.
  • Carefully treading that fine line between the composer and improviser; see the controversy with Elliott Carter, or listen to Ives Plays Ives.
  • Fragmentary quotation—never the full tune, but rather snippets here and there, raggy fragments; hymns next to folk next to rags next to classical next to patriotic next to parlor next to…

And yet… his titles, subtitles and settings seem to look back—nostalgia…

  • Piano Sonata #2 (Concord, MA 1840-1860),
  • Putnam’s Camp
  • Symphony #3: The Camp Meeting,
  • Lincoln the Great Commoner…. etc.

Consider, however, the following anti-nostalgia quotation… “It isn’t necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.”—Frank Zappa.  As I get older the ‘nostaliga’ part of this makes more and more sense to me—so many people romanticize the past and never get beyond it, never appreciate where they are.  So many people (is it the same people?) map this into the creative area of other people, never allowing artists to move on, to change, to try something new…  Still, it’s a daunting idea, that the world would end this way, everything stuck in place, artists glued in time.

Is it possible for Ives to be both a modernist AND a nostalgist?  I recently stumbled upon a quote by George Steiner from his After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, p. 490, which sheds some light on this argument:

“The apparent iconoclasts have turned out to be more or less anguished custodians racing through the museum of civilization, seeking order and sanctuary for its treasures before closing time.  In modernism collage has been the representative device.  The new, even at its most scandalous, has been set against an informing background and framework of tradition.”

This definitely applies to Ives, as a musical collagist par excellence.  See General William Booth Enters Into Heaven as an example of successive collage, and Mvmt.2 from the Fourth Symphony as an example of simultaneous collage.  Steiner lists Picasso, Eliot, Joyce and others as well, and I’ve heard people link Ives to Joyce previously, which perhaps makes more sense now…  So our most forward looking artists are the ones most desperately clinging to the past?

Steiner’s quote is taken from the chapter entitled Topologies of Culture, and on p.448, he explains this title, and addresses our issues with these modern nostalgists….  “These manifold transformations and reorderings of relation between an initial verbal event and subsequent reappearances of this event with other non-verbal forms might be best seen as topological.  […]  Topology is the branch of mathematics that deals with those relations between points and those fundamental properties of a figure which remain invariant when that figure is bent out of shape.  The study of these invariants and of the geometric and algebraic relations which survive transformation proved decisive in modern mathematics.  It has shown underlying unities and assemblages in a vast plurality or apparently diverse functions and spatial configurations.  Similarly, there are invariants and constant underlying the manifold shapes of expression of culture.” (see interesting interpretation here!)

Ah!  So not just the stuff from the past, read ‘invariants,’ but that stuff twisted, distorted, stretched as far as possible across the framework.  That is, not rupture, but distortion…!

Thoughts?  Good night, Mr. Ives

 

© 2012 Peter J. Evans, theorist