Of Trilobites & Trumpets
Dr. Niles Eldredge should keep his day job as a museum curator; he'd never make it as a cornet player. However, his personal collection of the horns is yielding secrets about "a general theory of material cultural evolution," because Eldredge is studying them as he does his beloved trilobite fossils.

Eldredge, of the renowned American Museum of Natural History in New York, is famous for his "punctuated equilibrium" theory of evolution, developed with the late Dr. Stephen Jay Gould. According to a recent article in the New York Times (March 9 2004), he came to this view - in which evolution takes place in sudden lurches - by studying the ancient arthropods called trilobites.

Along the way, he developed tools to explains the patterns of physical features in terms of "the transmission of patterns of information." Now he is applying the same tools to the evolution of the cornet.

"In many ways, a cornet may be understood as a trumpet curled up," and Eldredge has collected "examples of every conceivable curlicued pattern that cornet makers have invented in the past 200 years." He owns over 500 instruments in total, with every shape and configuration of "metallic calligraphy."

The variations represent both innovation and "theft of idea," the two drivers of the industrial world. His paleontological tools have helped reconstruct the family tree of the cornet (although with more ease and reliability - trilobites don't come with serial numbers that can be cross-checked against written historical records).

The trilobite became extinct. What's ahead for the cornet? According to the Times, "in the late 19th century, the US had more than 10,000 town bands, providing a thriving market for musical instruments. But as radio brought an alternative source of music, most town bands disappeared." The rise of school bands in the 1920s kept the instrument makers afloat in general, but the cornet especially suffered when emerging star Louis Armstrong switched to the B-flat trumpet, which has dominated the lead horn role in jazz ever since.

A familiar pattern, says Eldredge: an obscure species emerges after a disruption of the equilibrium. The old guard dies off and new forms emerge.

The article also mentions work by Ilya Temkin. Temkin, another evolutionary biologist (pearl oysters are usually on his research plate) and music fan, has studied the family tree of the Baltic psaltery, a stringed instrument of northeastern Europe that resembles the zither.

Read the New York Times article [fee required], or free via partner Stilus.net

Visit Eldredge's home page at American Museum of Natural History and read his ideas on “The Sixth Extinction”

Learn more about the cornet at The Cornet Compendium

Learn more about the Russian version of the psaltery, the gusli, including a mention of Ilya Temkin