Feature Stories
“Music and poesy use to quicken you;
The mathematics and the metaphysics,
Fall to them as you find your stomach
serves you”Taming of the Shrew, Act I, Scene I
SCIENTIST AND SINGER OF SONNETS
By Andrew Vowles
Prof. Diane Nalini de Kerckhove is torn. As a physicist studying the atom-sized nature of things at the University of Guelph, she understands the compulsion to use science in attempts to tease out the secrets of a painting said to portray no less a character than William Shakespeare. But there’s another side, the one that the singer-songwriter, sometime artist and self-confessed Shakespeare fan has also used to explore what might be revealed of the celebrated writer through his songs and sonnets.
Glancing at a sheet of paper on which she’s listed the numerous analytical techniques used during the past 14 years to examine the Sanders portrait, she says: “On the one hand, it’s fascinating. But as a creative artist myself, I feel bad for the painter, who may not have wanted the world to know his technical secrets. The artist in me says: When do we leave the mystery alone?”
In the case of the Sanders portrait, the mystery had been left mostly alone for much of the painting’s existence. It was only in 1993 that Ottawa engineer Lloyd Sullivan began the arduous task of authenticating his family heirloom. De Kerckhove hasn’t examined the Sanders portrait as a physicist, but she’s had plenty of opportunities to see how science can be used for testing the provenance of other cultural and historical artifacts. Following her B.Sc. in physics at McGill University, the Montreal native received a Rhodes Scholarship to pursue a doctorate in materials science at the University of Oxford. During her PhD studies — completed in 1999 — and post-docs at Oxford from 1999 to 2002, she saw how an instrument called a proton microprobe could be used to measure trace elements such as arsenic in Napoleon Bonaparte’s hair. She herself analyzed hair samples from the Neolithic/Copper Age “Iceman” uncovered in 1991 in a glacier of the Ötztal Alps. (Visit her U of G website for images from that project and for an informative layperson’s guide to the nuclear microprobe at www.physics.uoguelph.ca/~diane.) Other tools and methods used at Oxford and in the research labs of the Louvre in Paris allowed scientists to analyze paintings, sculpture, writings and other artifacts.
That marriage of science and culture proved irresistible to a student who had pursued both tracks for as long as she could remember. At home in Canada, she had studied ballet, jazz and modern dance and had sung in school choirs for years. She had dreamt of a career in dance, but found herself drawn to physics by her mid-teens, figuring that “it’s easier to study science and dance for pleasure than it is to become a dancer and try to do science on the side.”
De Kerckhove had arrived in England intending to study astrophysics until she got a look at the possibilities through the microprobe. “It awakened some deep passion,” she says. “Much as I love astronomy, I was lured toward the proton microprobe because I liked the fact that it was being used to study art.”
That physics-art crossover in her Oxford supervisor’s lab involved an analytical technique called PIXE, one that would turn out to have connections to Guelph. PIXE, or proton-induced X-ray emission, is used worldwide for analyzing a vast range of materials. To read and interpret the characteristic X-ray spectra generated when a sample is bombarded with nuclear particles called protons, scientists need fancy software. One software package called GUPIX was developed here at Guelph by physics professor Iain Campbell and local software consultant John Maxwell.
Normally scientists use GUPIX to analyze such things as trace elements in rocks or soil. But the same techniques also work on microprobes used in museums and art galleries to study everything from paint recipes used by Paleolithic cave artists to metal-point drawings of Renaissance artists like Dürer. (Campbell himself saw those kinds of applications for the first time during a 2005 visit to offer GUPIX training sessions to clients in Paris and Florence, Italy. Sessions held at the Louvre were attended by museum staff members interested in using his software with their own proton accelerator housed in the Centre for Research and Restoration of the Museums of France in the Louvre basement.)
De Kerckhove joined U of G’s physics faculty in 2005 and now works with Campbell, who runs the Guelph Scanning Proton Microprobe. It’s the only facility in Canada that operates both PIXE and micro-PIXE beam lines. She has received a total of almost $300,000 from the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council to build the country’s first one-micron nuclear microprobe to study semiconductors and microscopic light-emitting devices. The instrument will use protons and ions to study samples, providing a more detailed look than permitted by more wayward electrons used in electron microscopes.
Those samples might include anything from semiconductors and rocks to forensic samples to, well, cultural items. Not the Sanders portrait: de Kerckhove allows that she’d have to build an external microprobe to examine a painting with this device. None of the earlier analysis of the portrait involved a proton microprobe. She says such equipment might allow users to get a closer look at certain trace metals such as lead or cadmium in the painting’s pigments, using a much smaller sample than needed in a conventional test. But that’s not likely, says the physicist, whose own first look at the portrait will come during Guelph’s “Shakespeare — Made in Canada” festival. “I would want to analyze the portrait only if I could add something new to the debate.”
What she has added to the picture comes from a rather different side than her scientist persona. De Kerckhove pursues a second professional career as a singer-songwriter. Her latest recording — Songs of Sweet Fire, released in spring 2006 under her Earthglow Records label — is a collection of Shakespeare’s songs and sonnets set to her own jazz, blues and funk melodies. It’s her third album since she started recording in 2001. You can hear excerpts at www.dianenalini.com. (For her recording and performing life, she drops her surname and goes by Diane Nalini. “I didn’t want to be that singer with the unpronounceable name,” she laughs.)
Nalini has been singing jazz professionally since age 17. Her first gig was in a coffeehouse at Montreal’s Dawson College while she was a student there. She has performed for former U.S. president Bill Clinton and Sir Paul McCartney, has appeared in jazz festivals in London and Malta, and has been interviewed extensively in print and on radio, notably on CBC and Radio-Canada. Even here, science and art have danced together. While studying at McGill, she spent her summers working under a federally funded scholarship with the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope Group at the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics. In 1994, she performed for the first time at the Montreal Jazz Festival — she would appear again in 2001 and 2002 — and travelled to Hawaii the next month to view the collision of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter.
Nalini began writing Shakespeare songs in 2001. Her second album, Tales . . . My Mama Told Me, which was released in 2002, included a version of Shakespeare’s Come Away composed with British jazz pianist Martin Pickett. In words reminiscent of the science-art crossover she’d encountered in her Oxford lab, she says she found the idea of bringing a modern twist to the Bard’s centuries-old lines “fascinating.”
Riding a bus around London that might have been taking her to a scientific meeting or to her latest performance at a London club, she would thumb through her Dover Thrift Edition of Shakespeare’s songs and sonnets, looking for inspiration. “It’s an interesting challenge,” she says.
Nalini recalls seeing performances of Shakespeare’s plays in Montreal and Stratford as a student — and as the daughter of a Shakespeare enthusiast. Preparing for a visit to the theatre, she and her mother would often read passages aloud to each other. Years later on that London bus, “I found myself rediscovering the plays. I became enthralled with Shakespeare, I couldn’t believe how modern his lyrics sounded.”
That turned out to be the key for her latest album, which had its debut in May 2006 at her launch concert to promote the “Shakespeare — Made in Canada” festival. Recorded in Montreal, the CD contains two sonnets and 13 songs from various plays, all pieces that met her litmus test of singable and timeless lyrics. (The disc’s liner notes contain her own watercolour illustrations; she studied Chinese watercolour painting and calligraphy for 10 years.)
Nalini is thrilled when listeners are surprised to learn that she’s singing lyrics composed in Elizabethan England, from Mistress Mine (Twelfth Night) and Be Merry (Henry IV, Part 2) to The Lover and His Lass (As You Like It). That timelessness doesn’t surprise the singer-songwriter herself. Ticking off the recurrent topics of young love, springtime joy and the inconstancy-eternal love dichotomy threaded through the Bard’s works, she says: “These are all universal themes. To me, that’s the genius of Shakespeare. I can enjoy it on so many levels — his political wit, his sarcasm, his humour, his passion, his insight into human nature — all coupled with beautiful language that has stood the test of time so elegantly and beautifully.”
Away from the microscopes and spectrometers, what has her CD project revealed to her about Shakespeare? “I think he was a good lyricist — he understood song form,” she says, referring to the playwright’s use of repetition, metre and simplified phrasing in songs such as Under the Blossom from The Tempest (“Where the bee sucks, there suck I”). Not all poetry lends itself readily to music, she says, but Shakespeare’s words made composing almost effortless for her.
“He knew that what was required for a song was different than what was required for dramatic language. Setting his songs to music made me more enamoured than ever. I feel much closer to his words now. I feel as though my life has been graced in some way. My collaborator is Shakespeare.”
She believes her collaborator had uncommon insight into human nature, coupled with an egalitarian spirit. Witness how both men and women receive equal skewering under his pen — and equal enthusiasm in Nalini’s renditions — in songs from Henry IV (“For women are shrews, both short and tall”) and Much Ado About Nothing (“Men were deceivers ever”). At the same time, she’s reluctant to read too much into his words. Recalling a course she took on Chaucer’s work at Dawson College, she underlines the futility of trying to pin down an author amid the myriad voices speaking through characters, storytellers, travellers and spectators. Perhaps that sensibility explains her somewhat surprising take on the provenance of a portrait that has engrossed scholars, scientists and artists around the world for much of the past five years.
“I find the portrait absolutely charming. It’s almost beside the point whether it’s real or not. The fact that it has been a focal point and is eliciting so much interest, inspiring people — to me, that’s much more important.”