Hopped Off a Plane at LAX...

You may have heard of Mike A. Einziger; he’s best known as the guitarist of the band Incubus, but he’s also a student at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and his most recent project combines these two worlds. On November 21 at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, musicians Rachel E. Lee ’10, Lucy M. Caplan ’12, and Xin “Cindy” Wang ’10 from Harvard will be among the performers for a piece written by Einziger for 12 strings and 12 guitars. The concert is the opening of a series celebrating West Coast music, to which Einziger has been asked to contribute.

He says he got the idea for the piece in Science A-41: “The Einstein Revolution,” which covered topics relating to quantum mechanics. “It kept me awake at night, thinking really hard and hoping that I might be able to figure these things out,” he said of the theories discussed in the class. The piece, which he is still in the process of writing, is the musical articulation of wave-like shapes that Einziger drew inspired by diagrams of the relationships between space and time.

Lee, a professional violin soloist and a member of the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, has been assisting Mike with the technical aspects of the violin part. “It’s been a unique perspective seeing the piece come together because usually I will play pieces that have been written already,” she said.

Caplan says she is looking forward to the unorthodox combination of instruments, especially in a venue of this size. “It’s going to be a really cool effect because you have 24 musicians on stage and everyone is doing something...very different,” she said.

Now it’s up to Einziger to find time to finish the composition and still take all of his midterms before November 21.