Laurence Picken

Laurence Ernest Rowland Picken, biologist and musicologist: born Nottingham 16 July 1909; Fellow, Jesus College, Cambridge 1944-76 (Emeritus); Assistant Director of Research (Zoology), Cambridge University 1946-66, Assistant Director of Research (Oriental Music) 1966-76; FBA 1973; Editor, Musica Asiatica 1977-84; Editor, Music from the Tang Court 1981-2007; died Cambridge 16 March 2007.

Scientist, Sinologist, polymath, musician - Laurence Picken came up to Cambridge in 1928 from Waverley Road Secondary School, Birmingham, with a scholarship to Trinity College, obtained a Double First in Natural Sciences and remained at Cambridge for the rest of his life. He became a great man: great, though retiring; determined but with a child-like lucidity - a calm man with gentle kindness and an astonishing and humbling range of talents. He was a man to whom one always said "yes" - even when it was a matter of proofreading his magnificent book Folk Musical Instruments of Turkey.

Picken was elected a Fellow of Jesus College in 1944, but had given a clavichord recital to the Jesus Music Society in the previous year. On his return from China in 1946 he transformed the society and its ambitions with lecture recitals on topics such as "Music of the Far East" and "18th-Century Harpsichord Music", and devised a symposium on "Restoration Music and Literature".

As president of the society, Picken worked tirelessly with the undergraduates and other musicians in the college on productions such as Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. He was also involved in productions of cycles of miracle and Nativity plays, again combining the college's musical and dramatic talents. Roger Scruton, as an undergraduate, played Mozart piano concerti with Picken, one as soloist and the other as orchestra, and described the experience:

He said very little but played with a kind of vulnerability that suggested depths of feeling, depths of suffering too, that he could admit to in no other way. Once I put in some Mozartian ornaments, and he spoke out approvingly across the room. Seldom has praise been so precious to me.

Picken's hospitality, civilisation and exquisite cooking must have educated and delighted many generations of students.

Picken was a biologist until 1966, when through the generosity of his Head of Department, Carl Pantin, he was able to transfer from the Cambridge Department of Zoology to the Faculty of Oriental Studies, there to pursue his other main interest, which was Oriental music. As a young biologist, he published seminal papers on invertebrate physiology and the ecology of protozoa before finding his major field, which was to be the organisation of cells.

After two years in Kurt Meyer's laboratory in Geneva studying the biophysics of long-chain polymers, he moved on to research the role of such molecules in determining cell shape and movement. He was before his time here and it is only in recent years that it has proved possible to achieve the insights he aimed at.

Picken's major book in biology, The Organisation of Cells and Other Organisms (1960), aimed to be a comprehensive review of cell structure and function, as then understood. In its original form it was deemed by the publishers to be too long and he was asked to cut it by one-third, though every word was considered and polished. This disastrous request meant that, by the time this was done, some of Picken's original and far-sighted predictions had become accepted knowledge.

He, a man of the highest standards of scholarship, would always say, "One must never be a perfectionist", yet, rather than cut the book in two, he instead rewrote it as a complete, shorter, but still large book. His generosity, in originally proposing to publish his accurate predictions before they were established, was ill rewarded by the inherent delays involved that turned his insights into mere reiteration of accepted fact.

Picken's forecast, made in his final-year Zoology lectures, that beneficent and useful viruses would exist (for we only look for and know about those that harm us) is even now proving to be true with the discovery that viral-related transposons ("jumping genes") are uniquely entrusted with creating the diversity and range of our immune systems, and that mice deprived of genes of viral origin are not viable.

The huge range of Picken's interests, even in biology alone - from the fine structure of muscles, to birdsong and the stings of sea anemones - was formidable. These were not dilettante enquiries, but hard and difficult science. What aspects of a quail-lure mimicked the quail song? How does an intracellular sting explosively eject itself to extend by many cell diameters? On birdsong, Picken wrote,

It confers the first real opportunity to enter into the profound complexity of natural sounds of all kinds, but particularly in relation to communication, and its applications extend far beyond the voices of song-birds.

Picken's warm and gentle character ensured that he always had many research students who wanted him to supervise their work. On one aspect, he was, quite rightly, ruthless. He would not hand out topics on which it would be rewarding to work, or on which he wanted to find out the answer for his own career. Indeed one of Picken's most distinguished research students was a whole year choosing a topic; a year in which Picken sent him to a variety of overseas laboratories. The person in question has worked on the topic he chose ever after.

The Fellowship that Picken held at Jesus College allowed him the scope to pursue his many interests, musical, scientific and culinary and indeed, most unusually, to move his university position. The turning point was that Picken had recognised and, to his amazement, had been able to purchase in Japan part books that, with the help of a dedicated group of musicologists that he assembled, proved to be what the Japanese visitors to the Tang Court in China remembered of the music that they had heard at that respected court.

With the rhythmatisation of the notes to the Chinese words, the results proved to be lively tunes that were progressively slowed by the Japanese, out of respect; requiring the addition of decoration. The first volume of Music from the Tang Court was published by the Music Department of Oxford University Press in 1991: further volumes are still emerging.

Laurence Picken was sustained in his last years, when blind, by great affection and the best-quality Swiss chocolates.

Richard Skaer

Laurence Picken's breadth and depth of musical knowledge was prodigious, writes Robert Walker. Whilst still in his teens and encouraged by his local organist, he became a skilled keyboard player and composer. Even in his sixties he gave an annual performance of the Liszt Piano Sonata "just to prove I still can". Though never large-scale, nor great in output, his own piano music and songs reflected his deep understanding of the scientific roots from which music sprang: the harmonic series, the cycle of fifths and the human requirement for rhythm and pulse.

He was a good cook and, whilst he thoughtfully dropped single Brussels sprouts into a pan of boiling water, his conversation might wander from symbolism in Bach cantatas to Korean classical modes, by way of Balinese gamelan tuning methods and Schumann's sex life. On his musical contemporaries he was often gently caustic ("Michael? Oh! Such a rag-bag of a mind!") and was faintly dismissive of attempts by music faculties everywhere to hive off ethnomusicology as a separate speciality. "The musics of Asia and Europe constitute a single, historical continuum," he once averred, in a preface to Musica Asiatica which he edited from 1977 to 1984.

Although he was already deeply involved in Chinese culture, his love of Asian music was ignited by his wartime trip to China with Joseph Needham (in 1944) - where Zha Fuxi, erstwhile Vice-Chairman of the Chinese Musicians Association, but then disgraced under Mao, taught him to play an 18th- century seven-stringed zither (qin). Snatching moments away from his scientific duties, he sought out many traditional Chinese instruments - pottery flutes, one-stringed fiddles, mouth organs - and learned to play them all with varying degrees of proficiency. So began a 60-year odyssey.

On his return to Cambridge and a Fellowship at Jesus, he realised the new political map of Asia made returning to China improbable. While he was still heavily involved in researching and teaching zoology, a chance invitation to visit a friend resident in Turkey took him down a new path to investigate the migration of musical instruments from the west to China. In Trebizond he heard a Black Sea fiddler, which led him to Turkish folk music and, nearly 20 years later, with the aid of a clockwork tape recorder, he produced his seminal, monumental work Folk Musical Instruments of Turkey (1985).

In 1966 he left the Zoology Department for Oriental Studies, where he became Assistant Director in Research (Oriental Music). He acquired a collection of Togaku manuscripts and pursued relentlessly his conviction that this classical Japanese repertoire was directly descended from the court music of the Tang dynasty of China. Collaborating with dedicated students, he embarked on a massive 27-volume Music of the Tang Court. He would occasionally hold little concerts of his latest discoveries, charmingly enticing students and Fellows into blowing Hohner melodicas or banging tabors to recreate the sound world of an eighth-century Chinese court. His seventh volume appeared when he was 91, before the progress of his degenerative disease called a halt.

From the Fifties to the Seventies, Jesus College was heartily dismissive of anything not involving an oar or a ball. Picken, surrounded in his college rooms by 700 instruments - clavichord, chamber organ, Turkish tambourines, Chinese mouth-organs, dozens of flutes, ocarinas and a monstrously carved grand piano - cut a strange, incongruous, almost fey figure. His solitary and ascetic life style - lunch was a boiled egg and soldiers with his transistor radio whispering The Archers - was magnetic to undergraduates throughout the university who favoured the cerebral over the physical.

He was enormously supportive of every succeeding generation of music students; and whatever their enthusiasms - the great bass Crumhorn, the symphonies of Parry, Messiaen's piano music or Gibbons's Viol Fantasias - Laurence Picken had something pertinent to offer. He wore his enormous erudition lightly; always slightly self-effacing and never allowing his listener to feel inadequate. Of his own compositions he was characteristically diffident, and when in 2000 the University of Arkansas Fine Arts Center arranged performances of two of his song cycles (For Mary and 5 Songs of Walt Whitman) and recorded them, he was boyish in his pleasure.

Picken wrote papers on many musical matters, and on Far Eastern topics contributed to The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and The New Oxford History of Music. He was awarded numerous honorary fellowships, gaining most pleasure from his Fellowship of the British Academy (1973) and the Curt Sachs Award (1995).