Ruth Hertzman-Miller

NCFO Science Festival Chorus Songs by Ruth Hertzman-Miller

Ruth Hertzman-Miller is a Boston-area physician and musician who has studied composition with John Stewart at Harvard, John Morrison at Longy, and Stephen Savage at New England Conservatory. She performs regularly with NCFO and was last seen as an a cappella singing droid in the 2019 production of Space Opera.

• The Ballad of Michelson and Morley (lyrics by Meg Muckenhoupt*, world premiere, 2015: A Little Light Music and 2016: Giants of Science) – American physicists Albert Michelson and Edwin Morley set out to detect the substance through which light flows, but their elegant experiments found no evidence of "aether" at all. Negative results can be earthshaking as well, and in 1907 Michelson became the first American scientist to win a Nobel Prize.
  [2016 performance audio / 2016 performance video / demo]
  [2015 Broad performance audio / 2015 Peabody performance audio / 2015 performance video]
• Hurricane (lyrics by Meg Muckenhoupt*, world premiere, 2017: Singin' of the Rain) – Meteorologists have excellent models to predict the strength and movement of hurricanes, but the data necessary to run the models can only be obtained by aircraft flying into the hurricane itself.
  [performance audio / performance with slide show / demo]
• Peanut Man (lyrics by Joanna Brown**, world premiere, 2016: Giants of Science) - A bluegrass-folk fusion song paying tribute to American botanist and inventor George Washington Carver (c1861-1943), who researched and promoted alternative crops to cotton, such as peanuts and sweet potatoes, helping poor farmers provide their own food and other products to improve their quality of life.
  [performance audio / performance video / demo]
• Space Time-Out (lyrics by Meg Muckenhoupt*, world premiere, 2019: One Whole Step) – If a spacecraft were to make a round-trip voyage at very nearly the speed of light, significantly less time will have elapsed on the ship than back home on Earth. Space Time-Out includes quotations by Albert Einstein and Brian Greene and a musical quotation by Mozart.
  [performance audio / performance with slide show / demo]
• Topsy Turvy Vision (lyrics by Meg Muckenhoupt*, 2020: Vision) –
  [virtual performance audio / virtual performance video with lyrics / demo]

*Meg Muckenhoupt works for OpenBiome in Cambridge. She is widely published, but she feels her finest work was “Horton Sees a Pluto,” which appeared in the Annals of Improbable Research. Remember, a planet’s a planet no matter how small. She is delighted to hear her lyrics debut in this year’s Cambridge Science Festival.

**Joanna Brown is a physician and writer living in Providence, Rhode Island. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in the chapbook 2 Horatio, Topography Magazine and Bird’s Thumb. While peanut allergic herself, she’s delighted to be a part of a science festival that celebrates the “Peanut Man” and other great scientists.