Lunar Module with Caleb Palka - Part 2

For Good Measure, by Ensemble for These Times (E4TT)
Episode 147: Lunar Module with Caleb Palka - Part 2

Looking for a way to listen to diverse creators and to support equity in the arts? Tune in weekly to For Good Measure!

In this week's episode, we continue our Lunar Module, a mini-series with the E4TT/ Luna Composition Lab Call for Scores winners and commissioned composers. Today we are joined by Caleb Palka, who we spoke to in June 2024. If you enjoyed today’s conversation and want to know more, check out his music here: https://lunacompositionlab.org/people/caleb-palka/.

This podcast is made possible in part by a grant from the California Arts Council and generous donors, like you. Want to support For Good Measure and E4TT? Make a tax-deductible donation or sign up for our newsletter, and subscribe to the podcast!

Intro music: “Trifolium” by Gabriela Ortiz, performed by E4TT (Ilana Blumberg, violin; Abigail Monroe, cello; Margaret Halbig, piano),  in SF, CA on January 29, 2022
Outro music: “Lake Turkana” by Marcus Norris, performed by E4TT (Margaret Halbig, piano), in SF, CA on October 15, 2021

Transcription courtesy of Otter.ai.
Buzzsprout: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1903729/episodes/16799489

Producer, Host, and E4TT co-founder: Nanette McGuinness
Co-producer and Audio Engineer: Stephanie M. Neumann
Podcast Cover Art: Brennan Stokes
Interns: Renata Volchinskaya, Sam Mason, Addy Geenen, Yoyo Hung-Yu Lin

Don't miss Ensemble for These Times' upcoming concert 'Mujeres Ahora' on May 9 at the Community Music Center, presented as part of the San Francisco International Arts Festival. For more information, go to www.E4TT.org.

Chapters

• 0:38 In this week's Lunar Module episode, we continue talking to E4TT Luna Composition Lab Call for Scores winner, Caleb Palka who we spoke to in June 2024.
• 0:49 Do you want to talk about the piece you're writing for us, thoughts about that?
• 3:28 Were other people working in this field? Or was she (Eunice Newton Foote) pretty much a lone voice?
• 8:07 And the text that you're working with, are you going to excerpt? Are you going to go in... do you know yet how you're going to work with it?

Transcript

Nanette McGuinness  00:00

[INTRO MUSIC] Welcome to For Good Measure, an interview series celebrating diverse composers and other creative artists, sponsored by a grant from the California Arts Council. I'm Nanette McGuinness, Artistic Executive Director of Ensemble for These Times. In this week's Lunar Module episode, we continue talking to E4TT Luna Composition Lab Call for Scores winner, Caleb Palka [INTRO MUSIC ENDS] who we spoke to in June 2024.

Nanette McGuinness  00:32

Do you want to talk about the piece you're writing for us, thoughts about that?

 Caleb Palka  00:38

Sure. Yeah. So I'm looking at setting text from a paper written by Eunice Newton Foote. She was a scientist, inventor, and women's rights advocate on, she lived between, I think I want to say 1819 to 1888, if I remember the dates correctly, and she published this paper in 1856 about her findings of experiments she'd done and one of the notable results was she like was the first person to discover the link between carbon dioxide and temperature and kind of the principle behind the greenhouse gas effect that, like, you know, is behind global warming. And it's kind of incredible that she discovered this way before, like so much of like, what we think about with, like climate science. This was such an early discovery, and at the time, like I was looking at this, like, you know, data of like, what is the carbon dioxide, like, concentration in the atmosphere at the time that she was, like, making this, doing this paper, and everything. And like, you know, during her lifetime, it was somewhere between like 281 and 294 parts per million, the 400 and some, you know, concentration now, and just thinking about, like, you know, if more people paid attention to her paper at the time, you know, what kind of path might we be on today, perhaps, you know. And I guess it also was very her observations were very profound to me because there's still the issue of some people not really believing in climate science, as if it's like something that there's like not enough proof of, or there's a lot of doubt around, or something like that, when it's like, this science has been around for a while. It's not particularly a new kind of thing.

Nanette McGuinness  02:58

Yeah, yeah. The second half of the 19th century was a very fertile scientific era. A lot of stuff was being discovered or refined in very early ways. Were other people working in this field? Or was she pretty much a lone voice?

Caleb Palka  03:18

There were some other people working in the field. I know that, like John Tyndall, is most often credited for her discovery, yeah, but his discovery was made several years later. There's seems to be disagreement, from what I've read on, like whether he was copying her work, or whether it was an independent discovery, because I think he was in Ireland, or something I want to say. But depending on who you read about it, some people are like, he definitely was copying her work, and some people are like, no, it's like, there wouldn't have been good communication in the time across the ocean and like, I don't know, but regardless of whether he did or didn't copy her work, he's often credited for her discovery today, which is not the way it should be.

Nanette McGuinness  04:12

No I agree, that is often typical, that kind of Zeitgeist evolution and Darwin had this similar thing happen, there were other similar discoveries around the same time, but it is fairly typical that if a woman discovers it first, it's the guy who comes out with it later, whose name we remember.

Caleb Palka  04:33

Yeah, yeah. Reminds me of like Rosalind Franklin with DNA discoveries.

Nanette McGuinness  04:39

And yeah, and also the... the woman who did the mathematics for the space travel and so forth.

Caleb Palka  04:46

mmhmm

Nanette McGuinness  04:46

Yeah. Unusual that she was able to get the kind of scientific training that as a woman at that time. Do you know anything more about her background, how she managed to do that?

Caleb Palka  04:58

Um, I know that she went to, like, the, I want to say it's like the Troy Seminary, or something like, that I think had some degree of, like, science...

Nanette McGuinness  04:58

mmhmm

Caleb Palka  04:58

...or it was the Troy Female Seminary and the Rensselaer, like...

Nanette McGuinness  05:18

Rensselaer.

Caleb Palka  05:20

Yeah, I'm like, I don't know how to pronounce that school. It's not quite clear to me, like, what things she might have learned where, and what things were just like her independently, like self taught kinds of...

Nanette McGuinness  05:37

mmhmm

Caleb Palka  05:37

...stuff. I was kind of hoping to maybe reach out to some of those places where you can see if I could visit, since I'm in upstate New York...

Nanette McGuinness  05:44

Right.

Caleb Palka  05:44

...see if they have any records on her that are like in person that I could look at that's like more than what I could find online, yeah.

Nanette McGuinness  05:54

Fascinating.

Caleb Palka  05:55

Yeah

Nanette McGuinness  05:55

Yeah, we'd certainly be interested in that...

Caleb Palka  05:58

yeah

Nanette McGuinness  05:57

...for the commission as, as well.

Caleb Palka  06:00

Yeah, the interesting thing I did find out was that, like, one of her daughters became a naturalist and wrote a book on, like, marine life.

Nanette McGuinness  06:03

mmhmm

Caleb Palka  06:07

And it is interesting to me because Rachel Carson mentions having, like, encountered this, her daughter's book on marine life. And so it's kind of interesting to me, this kind of like chain of influence...

Nanette McGuinness  06:28

mmhmm

Caleb Palka  06:28

...of science there. And it makes me wonder what it was like for her, her daughter to grow up with, you know, her mother doing all this science, and this kind of weight might have inspired her. And then her daughter's writings reached Rachel Carson, and that's just kind of like incredible to me.

Nanette McGuinness  06:50

Right, the six degrees of separation...

Caleb Palka  06:54

mmhmm

Nanette McGuinness  06:54

...theory of how people are connected, except this is only three, I guess, degrees. 

Caleb Palka  06:58

Yeah [laughs]

Nanette McGuinness  06:59

Yeah. Did she teach as well?

Caleb Palka  07:03

I'm not aware of her teaching, but...

Nanette McGuinness  07:08

Such an interesting person.

Caleb Palka  07:10

Yeah, it's been frustrating trying to look at more about her, because a lot of the sources are these, like, short, written paragraph biographies. 

Nanette McGuinness  07:18

Right.

Caleb Palka  07:19

And it's like, okay, I would like more information.

Nanette McGuinness  07:24

This definitely sounds like a time for some archival research, and...

Caleb Palka  07:28

yeah

Nanette McGuinness  07:28

...you are well placed to do it. That's smart.

Caleb Palka  07:30

Yes, yes, I think I'll have maybe a little better luck now that I'm here in person...

Nanette McGuinness  07:35

[laughs]

Caleb Palka  07:36

...rather than trying to research from Los Angeles. [laughs]

Nanette McGuinness  07:38

Yeah. So for the piece, tell us what's the instrumentation you're going to be working with.

Caleb Palka  07:44

I'm going to be working with voice and cello and piano. Yeah.

Nanette McGuinness  07:50

That's great. And the text that you're working with, are you going to excerpt? Are you going to go in... do you know yet how you're going to work with it?

Caleb Palka  08:00

I'm planning to use like excerpts from her paper where she made the discovery...

Nanette McGuinness  08:06

mmhmm

Caleb Palka  08:06

...and figure out like, maybe not necessarily in the order exactly that they were in the paper, because I want to figure out what's the best way to make the like main takeaways of the paper make sense even there's a lot fewer words...

Nanette McGuinness  08:23

Right.

Caleb Palka  08:24

...that are being used because I don't want to, like, flatten her experiments, but I also wanted to make it like understandable and like clear enough without having the audience having read like the whole paper, you know.

Nanette McGuinness  08:37

Right, right, you want to create a narrative thread.

Caleb Palka  08:40

Yeah.

Nanette McGuinness  08:41

Yeah, no... I think that's very wise, if you just kind of go, chung-chung-chung, in order. And besides, when one sings, it's a very different experience in time for the audience, as opposed to reading... that one absorbs the words differently, and some words take time differently. So, yeah.

Caleb Palka  09:03

Yeah.

Nanette McGuinness  09:04

It's like, going from a book to a movie, you... you can't cover the same amount of verbal territory.

Caleb Palka  09:09

Yeah, yeah, no, I found that in the past that often I have like, cut in half or cut and only used a quarter of like, the words I originally planned on in some pieces, because I was, like, felt like the words were rushing the music, and it's like, that doesn't work, okay, I gotta pare down the words further and further, you know?

Nanette McGuinness  09:32

Yeah.

Caleb Palka  09:32

 Figure out what works best musically.

Nanette McGuinness  09:34

Yeah, so I'm glad you're thinking about that, and it does lead to kind of an interesting side note about how time in music works as opposed to time in daily life. It's different, isn't it?

Caleb Palka  09:47

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Nanette McGuinness  09:51

Our perception shifts because of how the music is flowing or something.

Caleb Palka  09:55

Mmhmm

Nanette McGuinness  09:57

Yeah.

Nanette McGuinness  09:57

[OUTRO MUSIC] Thank you for listening to For Good Measure and a special thank you to our guest, Caleb Palka, for joining us today. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to our podcast by clicking on the subscribe button and support us by sharing it with your friends, posting about it on social media, and leaving us a rating and a review. To learn more about E4TT, our concert season online and in the Bay Area, or to make a tax-deductible donation, please visit us at e4tt.org. This podcast is made possible in part by a grant from the California Arts Council, and generous donors like you. For Good Measure is produced by Nanette McGuinness and Ensemble for These Times, and design by Brennan Stokes, with special thanks to co-producer and audio engineer Stephanie M. Neumann. Remember to keep supporting equity in the arts, and tune in next week "for good measure" [OUTRO MUSIC ENDS].