Laurence Picken was one of the great Cambridge scholars of the 20th century.
He was accomplished to such a degree that few even in the university could
appreciate the range of his achievements in fields that were united in him
as in no one else.
One of his undergraduate pupils, Roger Scruton, described him as “a bachelor
don of the old school, an established scholar in the fields of biochemistry,
cytology, musicology, Chinese, Slavonic studies and ethnomusicology, world
expert on Turkish musical instruments, Bach cantatas, ancient Chinese
science and reproduction of cells”. He added: “You could pick up from him an
amount of knowledge on any number of subjects — from Baroque keyboard
ornamentation to the vinification of burgundy, from the wave structures of
the benzene ring to the translation of the Confucian Odes, from Frazer’s
theory of magic to the chronology of Cavalcanti — and the very irrelevance
to the surrounding world of everything he knew made the learning of it all
the more rewarding.”
Laurence Ernest Rowland Picken was born in Nottingham. From Waverley Road
Secondary School, Birmingham, he won a scholarship in 1928 to Trinity
College, Cambridge, the first from his school to do so.
His musical talents had been fostered by a local organist, and in his teens,
already a fine keyboard player, he had composed songs. In his first year at
Cambridge he embarked on the study of Chinese. With a double first in
natural sciences, he began research on the mechanism of urine production in
invertebrates, taking his PhD in 1935.
He held a Rockefeller Studentship in the Geneva School of Chemistry for two
years, working on the X-ray crystallography and thermoelastic properties of
living muscle and of long-chain polymers. Here he became fluent in French
and German, and translated a monograph on high polymers, as well as
publishing papers of his own on his return to Cambridge.
He spent his summer holidays travelling, notably to Lake Ohrid in Yugoslavia,
where he studied freshwater ciliates. Meanwhile, in the mid 1930s, he
composed a song-cycle and some piano music.
The outbreak of hostilities in 1939 found him laid low with flu in Yugoslavia.
He returned to the UK in the last sealed train from Geneva to Calais. In the
early war years he was officer-in-charge of the eastern region blood
transfusion lab, developing better methods for the filtration and drying of
blood plasma.
His techniques were considered so valuable that he was trained by the British
Council in Chinese, so he could join Joseph Needham’s scientific mission to
China, flying to Chungking from India in 1944. His contacts in China were
not merely scientific, though: he learnt to play the seven-stringed zither (
qin) to such effect that he was the first European to be made a
member of the Chungking qin society.
Back in Cambridge in 1945, he took up a fellowship at Jesus College, and in
1946 he became assistant director of research in the zoology faculty (until
a magnanimous gesture by the retiring professor transferred his post to
oriental studies in 1966).
He had also begun to publish musical papers, the earliest on Bach, identifying
an unknown fugue. By the 1950s he was contributing articles on Chinese and
Japanese music to Grove’s Dictionar y and The New Oxford
History of Music. He also edited the journal of the International Folk
Music Council briefly in the 1960s. With the closure of Communist China, his
fieldwork shifted to Turkey and his collection of instruments grew to fill a
further set of rooms in college.
Picken’s last work for zoology was his essential contribution to the new
courses on the biology of cells (1965). He devised equipment and techniques
to train freshmen as skilled microscopists within four weeks, and in 1960 he
received the Trail Medal of the Linnean Society for his work on microscopy.
His book, The Organization of Cells and other Organisms (1960), was
reviewed by some as outdated, but came to be seen as a landmark in the study
of the relationship between fine structure and function in living matter.
Its final page quotes from the Guanzi of the 4th century BC:
“Reality is the embodiment of structure; structures are the embodiment of
properties; properties are the embodiment of harmony; harmony is the
embodiment of congruity.” This fundamental notion of structure was the hinge
on which Picken’s academic life turned, from zoology to musicology.
Fifteen years later he published Folk Musical Instruments of Turkey,
a monumental work. In it he synthesised detail of the biological fine
structure of the materials of which the instruments are made with
constructional details, acoustic data and performance techniques, as well as
giving musical transcriptions, linguistic notes on instrument names, and
contextual material of a historical, ethnographic, economic and domestic
nature.
In the foreword to a series of papers by his pupils and himself which he
edited under the title Musica Asiatica (1977-84), Picken wrote that
he believed “that the musics of Asia and Europe constitute a single,
historical continuum” — a swipe at the burgeoning discipline of
ethnomusicology. He was increasingly frustrated by the move towards
sociology, gender studies and popular music, which left him in later years
somewhat academically isolated. But for a man who did not have a telephone
until his late eighties such isolation was relative only.
From the late 1960s he had been blessed with a succession of brilliant pupils.
His exacting teaching did not make for easy relationships, but the resulting
doctoral dissertations were often outstanding. With these pupils, and
Professor Noel Nickson of Queensland University, with whom he had been
collaborating since 1970, Picken embarked in 1981 on what he saw as the most
important work of his life: Music from the Tang Court,a projected
25-volume reconstruction and transcription (by brilliant detective work) of
the entire corpus of Chinese Tang dynasty entertainment music of the 7th to
9th centuries, as preserved in the Japanese Togaku tradition.
For many years, especially on a sabbatical tour in 1972, he had been
collecting original and photocopied manuscripts of this repertory in Japan.
But by 2000 only seven volumes had appeared, and although there had been
some spectacular achievements, such as a performing version of the complete
three-movement suite The Emperor Destroys the Formations,the
project had attracted some criticism, most notably in Japan itself, where
scholars found it hard to accept that Togaku had slowed the lively drinking
and dancing songs of the cosmopolitan Tang Court to one sixteenth of their
original tempo.
In 1977 Picken swapped his rooms in Jesus College for a small terraced house.
Some 700 instruments went to the University Museum of Anthropology, and a
large number of musical books and manuscripts became the nucleus of “Class
Picken” in the University Library.
Like many academics he never retired: by the turn of the century his research
work had spanned 70 years. The honours flowed in: emeritus and honorary
fellowships at Jesus, Trinity, SOAS, and Paris; particularly gratifying were
his fellowship of the British Academy from 1973, and his receipt of the Curt
Sachs Award in 1995. Exceptionally, he was offered the Walker-Ames
Professorship at Washington University twice within 20 years, the first time
for zoology (1959), the second time for music (1979); but due to a perceived
slight by a US Embassy official in London over his visa application, the
trip was cancelled.
A visit to Shanghai in 1990, however, culminated in a performance at the Music
Conservatory under Nickson’s direction and Picken’s supervision of
transcriptions of Tang and Song dynasty pieces.
The death of his sister — his only close relation — in 2000 and the sale of
the family home in Birmingham hit him hard. Yet even at this time he took
pleasure in the first performances and recordings of his youthful
compositions, and in the rekindling of academic fires through his
involvement with the Ancient Asian Music Project at the Library of Congress.
Generations of undergraduates and colleagues remember Picken’s stimulating and
conscientious work as tutor, his generous parties and his fine cooking.
Laurence Picken, scientist, musicologist and polymath, was born on July 16,
1909. He died on March 16, 2007, aged 97
