An event held by Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute and the National Jazz Museum in Harlem developed an interesting dialogue between the biology behind generational trauma and the ways in which it is reflected in music.

Last Thursday, Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute held an event at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem as a part of an event series called Music on the Brain. The event, entitled “Ancestral Callings,” explored the ways in which trauma manifests itself biologically and how music is used as a medium to reflect that trauma. It showcased the work of Dr. Thiago Arzua, a neuroscientist at the Zuckerman Institute studying how traumatic experiences are encoded in the brain and passed down through generations. The research presentation was paired with musical performances by multi-instrumental jazz musician and educator T.K. Blue, accompanied by jazz pianist Yayoi Ikawa. 

Prior to Blue and Ikawa’s musical performance, Dr. Arzua first gave a brief introduction to his work and inspiration. He mentioned the current social climate that seems to be recognizing and asking more questions about the concept of inherited trauma and how it passes from generation to generation: “it seems to be something that everyone has been thinking about constantly.”

He went on to provide a few examples of prior studies on the impacts of trauma, such as studies done on the survivors of the Dutch Famine of 1945, which found that their offspring had a higher risk of diabetes, metabolic diseases, and even schizophrenia. Dr. Arzua attributed these changes to epigenetics, which he explained are “the notes on top of the cookbook of life” that can alter genes as a result of one’s experiences and environment. This is the field in which he hopes to discover the ways in which biology influences the development of generational trauma, and in doing so, help to develop treatments for related mental and physical health issues.

Following Dr. Arzua’s introduction to the scientific portion of the dialogue, T.K. Blue spoke about his thoughts on music as a storytelling medium and introduced the pieces he was about to play. Blue and Ikawa had prepared excerpts from a suite called “Follow the North Star,” one of Blue’s original works that he dedicated to the life of Solomon Northup, author of the memoir Twelve Years a Slave. Before beginning the performance, Blue asked the audience members to pay close attention to how the music made them feel and what kinds of images or stories it invoked.

Blue began the performance by playing a solo melody on the kalimba, establishing the main riff of the first movement of the suite. He was joined by Ikawa’s piano accompaniment, which added depth and texture to his solo. Finally, he switched out his kalimba for the instrument he would play for the majority of the suite, the alto saxophone. Carrying on the original melody with the full versatility and range of the instrument, Blue played elaborate riffs off of the theme, painting vivid images with his music.

The feeling he was trying to evoke in this movement, he would later elucidate, was the freedom and joy of Solomon Northup’s African ancestors. Northup himself was a free Black man living in New York and working as a violinist before he was kidnapped at a performance in Washington, D.C. The subsequent movements took the audience through the story of his twelve-year-long enslavement and his journey back to freedom.

Blue’s music morphed from the bright, upbeat melody of the first movement, called “Ancestral Callings,” to moodier, darker tones to convey Northup’s despair and trauma, and eventually reemerged in the final movement with an ecstatic joy and energy. When he asked the audience about their reflections on the music, there was a general recognition that the shifting tone of the melodies reflected the events in Northup’s story and that people have the ability to encode their trauma into music, just like genes do.

The second half of the event was centered around Dr. Arzua’s work in studying epigenetics and generational trauma. He explained one study he completed where rats were exposed to trauma and later examined to see its impact on genetics. The rats were paired into two groups, one that was exposed to the smell of almonds and immediately shocked, and the other that was exposed to the same smell but was not shocked until much later.

The rats in the group that experienced the trauma immediately after smell exposure learned to pair the smell of almonds with pain, while the other group did not learn to do so. The rats in the group that “paired” the smell with the shock were found to have a change in their genetic makeup; they actually had more olfactory (smell) cells that could detect almonds than the rats in the group that did not learn to associate trauma with the smell.

What was even more interesting was that this trait was carried onto new generations of rats and manifested itself even in rats that had never experienced the trauma of the previous generation themselves. To Dr. Arzua, this means that there is evidence of a biological component that influences the way in which trauma is passed down from generation to generation, which he hopes to continue researching.

T.K. Blue closed the event by performing two more excerpts from his suite. Both were upbeat, hopeful, and bright, creating an uplifting mood. Blue mentioned, briefly, after the end of his first performance that “musicians are reflections of society“. They convey the social climate and trauma of collective experience. He used the jazz music of the 60s as an example; the free jazz avant-garde movement that began to develop in that period directly reflected the trauma of the sociopolitical unrest the nation was experiencing.

He said, however, that by turning to music in times of trauma, people are able to find hope and courage to continue. That was how Solomon Northup, the inspiration behind Blue’s musical suite, found hope in his years of despair. In a way, Dr. Arzua’s research aims to do something similar: to discover the biological foundations of generational trauma and in doing so provide people hope about overcoming it.

This event is available to stream here T.K. Blue’s album, Follow the North Star is available to stream on Spotify and Apple Music.

Music On The Brain: Ancestral Callings via Zuckerman Institute