When love kills

Grieving over AIDS with song and sculpture

By Larry Keough
FSU Communications Group

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but add music and it speaks volumes.

FSU graduate student Bryan Shuler added his song about AIDS to a photographer's images, and the result is a national touring exhibit called "Rapture -- The Interface between Love and Disease."

Shuler, who is working on a doctorate in humanities and a master's of music in ethnomusicology at FSU, added his music to David Teplica's photographs of ghostly white figures wrapped in surgical fabric from head to toe.

Teplica is a reconstructive surgeon whose photography has captured, among other things, the pain and suffering of burn victims and the common characteristics of twins. He called Shuler after hearing about the song on National Public Radio.

Shuler composed his song by translating the DNA "scientific fingerprinting" of the AIDS virus against the DNA sequence of the human T4 immune cells. All were assigned musical notes through numerology.

Shuler then fed the information into a computer, which played it back through a digital sampler synthesizer.

"Though Renaissance composer Vasquin des Prez assigned musical notes to extramusical resources, Shuler's song is the first I know of to assign musical notes to DNA," said Jane Clendinning, an FSU professor of musical theory.

Shuler's five-minute composition, "Song of the Helix," begins with slow, repetitive phrases of the "alien" HIV helix invading the human body. The tension builds as the T cells, in the form of quick sixteenth notes, struggle to keep the immune system fighting what Shuler calls the "hideous intruder."

Inevitably, the melodic T cells are drowned out by the jarring sounds of the HIV virus as AIDS takes another life.

Shuler makes no apologies for the morose tone of his composition.

"I believe music about AIDS in the 1990s should reflect the seriousness of a plague that threatens our very existence," said Shuler, who has lost four friends to AIDS. "My composition is intended to evoke a disturbing and unsettling feeling that none of us, regardless of our sexual, ethnic and religious orientation, are immune from this insidious virus."

By next spring, thousands of people, especially college students, will have had an opportunity to listen to and view the exhibition. Its national tour began at the University of Virginia's Fayerweather Gallery last fall.