He will, he will rock you

Anonymous — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 13:11:59 +0000

He will, he will rock you Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 10/10/2024 - 07:11

Rachel Sauer

Pursuing a passion for music, CU Boulder economist Murat Iyigun transforms from recognized expert on economics of the family and economic history to regional rock star with a growing musical reputation

In a low-key pub and grill on a quiet street in Littleton, Colorado, it’s about 10 minutes to 8 on a Saturday night, and the renowned economist seems to be in six places at once.

He’s sound checking his guitar and finalizing plans with the light technician and joking with the singers and ticking through the set list with the drummer and donning a dusky green bomber jacket and wraparound shades.

The dance floor in front of the stage is empty for now, but it won’t be for long. At a little after 8, members of the steadily growing audience put down their forks and drinks to welcome—as they’d been invited, as the musicians had been introduced—the Custom Shop Band.

Murat Iyigun is a professor of economics focusing on the economics of the family and economic history.

A kaleidoscope of colored lights flashes from the rafters toward the stage as lead singers Amy Gray, Mckenna Lee and Abbey Kochevar begin an iconic refrain: stomp-stomp-clap, stomp-stomp-clap.

“Buddy you're a boy, make a big noise, playin' in the street, gonna be a big man someday,” Gray sings, achieving the stratospheric, Mercurian growl and grandeur of the original. “You got mud on your face, you big disgrace, kickin' your can all over the place. Singin'…”

The renowned economist leans toward his mic and joins the immortal chorus: “We will, we will rock you.”

It wasn’t so much a threat as a promise. For the next four hours, minus breaks between sets, the band founded by Murat Iyigun, a �鶹��Ƶ professor of economics and former economist with the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C., would rock everyone there.

And they would rock hard.

‘You should listen to Queen’

The question, then, is how does a scholar and economist widely known for his research on the economics of the family and economic history come to be on a pub-and-grill stage on a Saturday night, slaying licks originally conceived by Brian May?

“Life is funny, isn’t it?” Iyigun admits.

The story starts, as not many rock stories do, in Ankara, Turkey. The son of a Turkish father and a Turkish-American mother, Iyigun grew up during a tumultuous time in Turkey, when older kids might stop him on the street to ask whether he was a leftist or a rightist. Still, he says, he was lucky and maybe even a little sheltered, while some of his older sisters’ friends became victims of the left/right violence.

It was that violence, in fact, that caused his older sister’s university to be shut down for seven months. To continue her chemistry studies, she transferred to The Ohio State University, but not before leaving her LP collection to her younger brother.

“I was about 13, and I was counting the days to when she left in July because I was going to be getting all the LPs,” Iyigun recalls with a laugh. “‘Hotel California’ was huge that summer, and then there was Cat Stevens, ELO. I was totally captivated even though, compared to now, things were so closed for us. Going to the U.S. was like going to Mars. But in terms of music and Western culture, especially among urban secular Turks, we followed everything.

Murat Iyigun was inspired to learn to play the guitar after hearing Queen's album Live Killers. (Photos: The Custom Shop Band)

“Now you can get all the vinyls and they’re easy to come by, but at that time people basically made tapes that everyone shared around. There was all this bootleg stuff that would come from Europe, and someone in Istanbul would press some vinyls, but I was never sure if they had an agreement (with the record labels) or if those were counterfeit.”

At the tender age of 13, Iyigun was more into the mellow side of rock n’ roll. A few years deeper into his teens, however, and he discovered KISS. Visiting family in the United States during the summer of ’78—a time that might be considered the fever-pitch apex of the band’s makeup years—Iyigun acquired all things KISS: T-shirts, posters, tapes, you name it.

It might have been the following summer, he doesn’t remember exactly, that he went camping with friends and met one of the great platonic loves of his teenage years—an older girl who inadvertently changed his life.

“She said, ‘You should listen to Queen, they’re a great band,’” Iyigun recalls. “So, I asked someone to make me a tape of the Live Killers album, and that was it.”

It says something about what happened to him, listening to that album, that he currently has—in a glass case in his Boulder home—a replica of May’s immortal Red Special guitar, signed by May. Iyigun also bought Red Special replicas for both of his daughters.

He heard Live Killers and had to learn to play guitar, is the point. Then he and some of his friends, including an ambassador’s son whose presence allowed them to practice at the Swiss embassy in Ankara, formed a band. Iyigun absolutely loved it, but making it as a rock musician in a Muslim country in the 1980s started to strike him as increasingly impossible.

“I thought, ‘OK, I need to get my act together,’” Iyigun says, so he came to the United States to earn an MBA at Boston University and then a master’s and PhD in economics at Brown University.

His parents had given him a Les Paul guitar when he graduated high school and began studying business administration at Hacettepe University—“in Turkey back then you just didn’t have these instruments, so for my parents I know this was very costly,” he explains—and as a graduate student at Brown he bought an amp and noodled around at home.

The Custom Shop Band includes, left to right, lead guitarist Murat Iyigun; singers Amy Gray, Mckenna Lee and Abbey Kochevar; drummer Kevin Thomas; bassist Elliot Elder; and keyboardist Tone Show. Steve Johnson (not pictured) also is a member of the band. (Photo: The Custom Shop Band)

But then life happened. He was beginning his career, he had a wife and young children, he was working toward tenure, and he just didn’t have time to play, for more than a decade.

Then, about 15 or so years ago, at a time he was hardly ever playing guitar, his daughters and wife gave him the game Guitar Hero for Father’s Day. He played it a bit and realized the game console was an instrument in its own way, so with typical focus “I thought, ‘I need to learn to play it well,’” he says. “It’s nothing like guitar playing, but I thought I could learn to do this, and then I was thinking about how I used to play. And that’s when I brought out my guitar.”

Learning through blues jams

“Once I started to come back to it, I realized some of my fundamentals had gone,” Iyigun says. “So, I started by taking these baby steps. I immediately hooked up with a great music teacher, Jeff Sollohub, a Berklee (College of Music) graduate and super nice guy, and every two weeks I’d work with him on a new song, on composition and things like that.

“Within a year or two, I realized I’m only going to get so good if I don’t actually go out and play. By the time I came back to it, there were so many more resources online, YouTube and things like that, and I still got a lot of joy out of playing at home. But I quickly realized there’s a limit to how much I can improve unless I get out and play. That’s when I discovered blues jams, which are the easiest way to go play live even though blues is super difficult to play well.”

He went to multiple blues jams a month around metro Denver and endured the “painful, painful learning process.” A significant moment of clarity and focus came when he saw the parallels between being onstage playing and lecturing in front of a full classroom or at an economics conference.

“I had a lot of embarrassing days where the ride home would be miserable, and I did that for a couple of years, and I was discovering other jams and just kept playing,” he says. “The limitation of blues jams, though, is you pack all the gear, get in the car, drive 40 minutes, get on the list, then the person running the jam will put these bands together and you play for 20 minutes. So, I drove there an hour, waited an hour, spent this time to play 20 minutes—and 18 minutes of that was painful.

“But after doing that a couple years, this blues band of three guys needed a guitar player, and they’d seen me play, so they said, ‘Do you want to join a band?’ I joined for about a year, and there was this point where I’m like, ‘Yeah, this is what I want.’”

Inside, though, he was still the kid obsessed with KISS and Queen who knew all the guitar greats, not just the blues ones. He was treasurer for Mile High Blues Society, but he wanted to play rock.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GsmjeOjVPs]

Joining the band

The Custom Shop Band—the name is a reference to the custom guitars Iyigun plays—came together in a way that could be interpreted as either patchwork or destiny: friends of friends, acquaintances who know a guy, calls and emails that began with, “Hey, are you interested in being in a band?”

Elliot Elder, the Custom Shop Band bass player and a 2022 CU Boulder graduate in jazz bass performance, was recommended by a mutual friend. Amy Gray, the original in what is now a trio of lead singers, was recommended to Iyigun by another mutual friend:

“I was singing with another band and had recently left them when I got a message from Murat,” Gray says. “He saw me in a video from that band, and he said they were looking for someone to do backups and fill in when their lead at the time was not available.

“So, I looked them up, I went to a show to see what they sounded like and saw that they played some fun songs, that they as instrumentalists all sounded good, so I thought, ‘Why not, let’s give it a chance, they all seem very nice’ and I jumped in and went with it.”

Murat Iyigun joins in on harmony during the Custom Shop Band's set list of "hits, with a twist."

Gray recruited Kochevar, whom she knew from performing with her in theater, and Lee, who had recently moved to Colorado from California and whom she knew through mutual friends. And that’s how the Custom Shop Band has worked: Iyigun founded it and continues to act as band leader and manager, but in every other way it’s a democracy.

“Murat is an awesome band leader,” Elder says. “One of the reasons why a lot of bands don’t get past a certain point, in my opinion, is the band leader doesn’t have the flexibility and communication skills to manage situations where lineups change, things change on short notice, people have different ideas about how a song should be played. Murat’s emailing venues, scheduling gigs, managing lineups and all the while teaching at CU. He puts a lot of work into it. You meet a lot of people in the music scene who don’t communicate, who don’t get details to people on time, but Murat is definitely an exception.”

The band, which also includes Kevin Thomas on drums and either Tone Show or Steve Johnson on guitar and keyboards, practices in-person when adding a new song to the set list or a new musician, but otherwise its members practice at home with versions of the songs that Iyigun sends to everyone. In keeping with the band’s democratic ethos, every member brings song suggestions to the table.

At any given show, the Custom Shop Band may open with Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” and soon thereafter play “Flowers” by Miley Cyrus and “It’s Raining Men” by The Weather Girls, which might be followed by a mashup of Foreigner’s “Jukebox Hero” and Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.”

On a Saturday night in September, at a pub and grill on a quiet street in Littleton, “So What” by P!nk gets booties to the dance floor in a joyful melee. A dude to the left is lost in his own world of intricate air guitar and a lady on the right has divested herself of shoes. A little later, as the band plays Cheap Trick’s “I Want You to Want Me,” the air guitarist to the left reaches a fever pitch as the band’s lead guitarist, who also happens to be a renowned economist, absolutely wails on the solo.

And transitioning smoothly into Sweet’s “Ballroom Blitz,” the dancefloor still throbbing, the economist is grinning wide.

He will rock you.

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Uncovered Euripides fragments are ‘kind of a big deal’

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 06:00:00 +0000

Uncovered Euripides fragments are ‘kind of a big deal’ Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 08/01/2024 - 00:00

Clay Bonnyman Evans

CU Boulder Classics scholars identify previously unknown fragments of two lost tragedies by Greek tragedian Euripides

After months of intense scrutiny, two �鶹��Ƶ scholars have deciphered and interpreted what they believe to be the most significant new fragments of works by classical Greek tragedian Euripides in more than half a century.

In November 2022, Basem Gehad, an archaeologist with the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, sent a papyrus unearthed at the ancient site of Philadelphia in Egypt to Yvona Trnka-Amrhein, assistant professor of classics. The two scholars have also recently discovered the upper half of a colossal statue of the ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses II in their joint excavation project at Hermopolis Magna.

She began to pore over the high-resolution photo of the papyrus (Egyptian law prohibits physically removing any artifact from the country), scrutinizing its 98 lines.

CU Boulder classicists Yvona Trnka-Amrhein (left) and John Gibert (right) spent months studying a small square of papyrus and became confident it contains previously unknown material from two fragmentary Euripides plays, Polyidus and Ino.

“It was very clearly tragedy,” she says.

Using the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, a comprehensive, digitized database of ancient Greek texts maintained by the University of California, Irvine, Trnka-Amrhein confirmed she was looking at previously unknown excerpts from mostly lost Euripidean plays.

“After more digging, I realized I should call in an expert in Euripides fragments,” she says. “Luckily, my mentor in the department is just that!”

Working together, Trnka-Amrhein and renowned classics Professor John Gibert embarked on many months of grueling work, meticulously poring over a high-resolution photo of the 10.5-square-inch papyrus. They made out words and ensured that the words they thought they were seeing fit the norms of tragic style and meter.

Eventually, they became confident that they were working with new material from two fragmentary Euripides plays, Polyidus and Ino. Twenty-two of the lines were previously known in slightly varied versions, but “80 percent was brand-new stuff,” Gibert says.

“We don’t think there has been a find of this significance since the 1960s,” he says.

“This is a large and unusual papyrus for this day and age,” Trnka-Amrhein says. “It’s kind of a big deal in the field.”

Retelling a Cretan myth

Polyidus retells an ancient Cretan myth in which King Minos and Queen Pasiphaë demand that the eponymous seer resurrect their son Glaucus after he drowns in a vat of honey.

“Actually, it has a relatively happy ending. It’s not one of these tragedies where everyone winds up dead,” Trnka-Amrhein says: Polyidus is able to revive the boy using an herb he previously saw one snake use to revive another.

The papyrus contains part of a scene in which Minos and Polyidus debate the morality of resurrecting the dead, she says.

A marble statuette of Euripides, found in 1704 CE in the Esquiline Hill at Rome and dated to the 2nd century CE, lists several of the tragedian's works on the back panel. It is on display at the Louvre-Lens Museum in France. (Photo: Pierre André/Wikimedia Commons)

Ino came close to being one of Euripides’ best-known plays, Gibert says. Part of the text was inscribed on cliffs in Armenia that were destroyed in modern conflict. Fortunately, early 20th-century Russian scholars had preserved the images in drawings.

The eponymous character is an aunt of the Greek god Dionysus and part of the royal family of Thebes. In previously known fragments of a related play, Ino is an evil stepmother intent on killing her husband the Thessalian king’s children from a previous marriage. The new fragment introduces a new plot, Trnka-Amrhein says.

“Another woman is the evil stepmother, and Ino is the victim,” she says. “The third wife of the king is trying to eliminate Ino’s children. … Ino turns the tables on her, causing her to kill her own children and commit suicide. It’s a more traditional tragedy: death, mayhem, suicide.”

Of course, in matters of ancient Greek, there is always room for interpretation, and such bold claims will receive careful scrutiny from other experts. Gibert and Trnka-Amrhein decided not to pull any punches with their conclusions.

“We could play it safe,” Gibert says. “We are establishing a solid foundation, and on top of that we are sticking our necks out a little.”

They’ve already entered the gauntlet of scrutiny, making their case to 13 experts in Washington, D.C., in June and having their first edition of the fragment accepted for publication in August.

On Sept. 14, they will host the Ninth Fountain Symposium on the CU Boulder campus, supported by long-time Boulder resident and classics enthusiast Dr. Celia M. Fountain. The day-long event will feature three illustrious experts: Professor Paul Schubert, a Swiss specialist in papyrology; specialist in ancient Greek literature and drama Laura Swift of Oxford University; and Professor Sarah Iles Johnston, an expert in Greek religion, goddesses and magic from the Ohio State University. They will be joined by Trnka-Amrhein, Gibert and Associate Professor of Classics Laurialan Reitzammer.

“In a departure, instead of having the guests give hour-long papers, we’re going to present for 20 to 25 minutes each, in pairs, in dialogue, followed by Q-and-A,” Gibert says.

And as the academic year gets underway, Gibert says he and Trnka-Amrhein will “take the show on the road” to such places as Dartmouth and Harvard.

“John’s contacts and readers in the Euripides world have given us reassurance we’re not going to have too much pie on our faces,” Trnka-Amrhein says. “We feel extremely lucky to have worked on this material and look forward to the world’s reactions.”

Top image: A marble bas-relief show Euripides (seated), a standing woman holding out a theater mask to him (left) and the god Dionysus (right), dated to between the 1st century BCE and the 1st century CE, from the Misthos collection in the Istanbul (Turkey) Archaeological Museum. (Photo: John-Grégoire/Wikimedia Commons)

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CU Boulder Classics scholars identify previously unknown fragments of two lost tragedies by Greek tragedian Euripides.

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How to ID thieving hummingbirds? Look at their feet

Anonymous — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 18:53:01 +0000

How to ID thieving hummingbirds? Look at their feet Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 06/25/2024 - 12:53

Blake Puscher

CU Boulder researcher analyzes 50 years of data to show the relationship between certain birds’ unorthodox behavior and their traits

Hummingbirds are iconic, easily recognized by their plumage, needlelike beaks and unique way of flying. With several hundred species in the family, different species of hummingbirds are distinct from one another in ways that are sometimes less noticeable.

“It is the great diversity of forms in this family of birds which renders the study of them so very interesting,” John Gould, a 19th-century English ornithologist and collector of hummingbirds, wrote. “If these little objects were magnified to the size of eagles, their structural differences would stand out in very bold relief.”

This belief led Robert Colwell, museum curator adjoint of entomology and zoology for the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History—as well as co-researchers Gregor Yanega, Alejandro Rico-Guevara, Thiago Rangel, Karolina Fučíková and Diego Sustaita—to collect and evaluate a large amount of data on hummingbirds’ physical features for a research paper published in The American Naturalist.

Robert Colwell, museum curator adjoint of entomology and zoology for the CU Museum of Natural History, and his co-researchers found that large feet and short bills correlate in hummingbirds that use an unorthodox feeding behavior.

The researchers found that large feet—an uncommon trait for hummingbirds, whose feet are usually small to the point of seemingly disappearing when tucked away—correlated with short bills in hummingbirds that engage in a particular, unorthodox feeding behavior.

Legitimate and illegitimate feeding

Hummingbirds are pollinators, and the flowers they feed from deposit pollen onto different parts of their bodies so that their flight from flower to flower functions to fertilize the plants.

“The flowers they visit produce nectar for the sole purpose of attracting hummingbirds,” Colwell explains, adding that different species of plants deposit pollen on different species of hummingbirds or different parts of a single species’ body. This specificity is necessary because “if the bird delivers the wrong pollen, then it just clogs up the plant’s female organ, the stigma, without fertilizing the flower,” he says.

While some plants have adapted to get pollen onto different parts of hummingbirds, the focus of this research is on species-based pollen delimitation. The main way that plants attract only certain hummingbird species is to develop corollas (the whorl of petals that protects the flower’s reproductive organs) with lengths or curvatures that not all hummingbirds’ bills can fit into.

“The plants sort of partition the hummingbirds based on bill length, bill curvature and flowering season,” Colwell explains. “It gets more complicated the more species are involved. In a tropical lowland community, there could be 50 or 60 hummingbird-pollinated species of plants.”

This evolutionary strategy is successful only when hummingbirds feed “legitimately”—that is, through the mouth of the corolla. A hummingbird with a short beak cannot reach the nectar of a flower with a long corolla; however, such a bird may access that nectar “illegitimately” by inserting its beak through natural opening near the base of a flower, poking a hole in the base using its beak, or using a hole made by another hummingbird. This method is called illegitimate because, according to Colwell, it “does nothing to pollinate the plant and imposes an energetic cost on both the plant and legitimate visitors by depleting nectar.”

Why feed illegitimately?

Considering the consequences of feeding illegitimately for both the flowers that a nectar thief relies on and other birds, why does this behavior exist? There are a couple of reasons, Colwell says. For one thing, it gives short-billed hummingbirds access to nectar that they otherwise could not reach.

The other reason is that, while most plants force legitimately feeding hummingbirds to hover, according to Colwell, this is not necessary for illegitimate feeders, who can instead cling to a nearby surface while stealing the nectar. Birds that cling to plants to feed, instead of hovering (called clingers), are therefore able to conserve energy in a way that non-clingers cannot.

Hummingbirds are pollinators, and the flowers they feed from deposit pollen onto different parts of their bodies so that their flight from flower to flower functions to fertilize the plants.

Hovering is the most expensive means of vertebrate locomotion, Colwell says. Consequently, hummingbirds are “on a very tight schedule” in terms of energy, “and if the birds have no nectar and insufficient insects to capture for a couple of days, they could die.”

For these reasons, saving energy by perching to feed can be the difference between life and death for a hummingbird. This is especially true in the case of the coquettes, a high-elevation Andean group that developed perching behavior early in the evolution of hummingbirds, Colwell says. Their habitat makes it even more expensive to hover: the air is thinner, making it harder to fly and breathe, and it’s colder, making the maintenance of healthy body temperatures more difficult.

“So, there’s strong natural selection to avoid hovering, if possible,” he explains. “There are some species that actually walk on the ground and feed on flowers that are near the ground.”

Although clinging and stealing nectar saves energy, all species of hummingbird feed legitimately while hovering at least sometimes, Colwell says. This is because if illegitimate feeding was ubiquitous, “the flowers would go extinct because they wouldn’t be getting pollinated. So, it’s kind of a game theory thing, where there are cheaters, but you can’t have all cheaters because then the game won’t go on.”

Morphological manifestations of clinging

As Colwell recounts, the study began with an observation that he made about the morphological differences between clingers and non-clingers: “It was an accidental discovery I made 50 years ago in Costa Rica. I was studying a high-elevation site with four species. The ones that are important to this are a very long-billed hummingbird with a large body and a smaller bird with a shorter bill.”

The expedition was using mist nets to humanely capture birds for measurement, and he noticed that the smaller bird with the short bill had feet that were bigger than those of the larger bird. The little bird perched on and pierced flowers to steal nectar that the larger bird would consume legitimately.

“I got the idea,” Colwell says, “that maybe this is general; maybe there’s a negative correlation between bill size and foot size. That’s how it all started. Sometimes scientific discoveries are accidental in that way, or intuitive, and then you have to go on and look at it statistically.”

Specifically, Colwell and his research colleagues hypothesized that clingers would have relatively longer toes and claws, as well as shorter tarsi (the bones connecting to bird’s digits to their lower legs) to make it less energetically costly to cling while feeding.

“The claw is very important in grasping the flower, or the stem, or the leaf, or whatever it’s perching on,” Colwell explains. “Biomechanically, it’s a crucial part of the gripping force.”

To determine if this hypothesis were supported by statistics, the researchers collected measurements of hummingbird feet (including the tarsus, hallux or hind toe, hallux claw and middle toe claw) and bills over many years. Ultimately, they pooled three datasets consisting of 1,154 museum specimens and 404 field captures, with 220 of about 340 recognized species of hummingbird represented.

Within these data, they found that clingers showed a negative correlation between bill and hallux claw size when body weight was accounted for, with no other strong correlations detected. This confirmed part of the hypothesis: among clingers with small bills, the foot span is increased by a longer claw on the hallux. However, clingers did not have smaller tarsi.

Saving energy by perching to feed can be the difference between life and death for a hummingbird, says CU Boulder researcher Robert Colwell.

According to Colwell, a role for tarsi was anticipated based on its presence in biomechanical studies of clinging behavior in other birds, such as woodpeckers. “We expected that to happen, and it didn’t,” he says. “It just means that hummingbirds do it their own way.”

Losing big feet

In addition to determining the correlation between bill and hallux claw size in clingers, the researchers used phylogenetic inference, a method of finding the evolutionary “family tree” of related species, to estimate the number of independent origins of clinging behavior in hummingbirds. “We were surprised at how many different, independent times perching to feed with larger feet arose in the hummingbird phylogeny,” Colwell says, adding that it was over two dozen times.

Despite this, clinging to feed doesn’t seem to be a good long-term strategy, as it doesn’t lead to much speciation (i.e., further evolutionary development) except in the coquette clade, Colwell explains. This may be in part because the additional weight of larger feet would be strongly selected against in most cases, he says. Consequently, a branch of hummingbirds with large feet will tend to lose that trait once it is no longer useful.

For example, Colwell recounts, “there are some species that walk on the ground and feed on flowers that are near the ground, so they have big feet. Late in that branch of the evolutionary tree, some of that group diversified the tropical lowlands, where they lost their big feet and now have longer bills. It beautifully confirms the overall pattern.”

Colwell adds that what makes the study significant is its focus on an often-overlooked feature of hummingbirds.

“When you see hummingbirds, you don’t think about their feet, you think about their wings, their color, their dives, their voice, their behavior,” he says. “Their feet have been ignored for 150 years, since John Gould, who was a very good observer, marveled at them. Nobody paid any attention to it until we got interested in it 50 years ago.”

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CU Boulder researcher analyzes 50 years of data to show the relationship between certain birds’ unorthodox behavior and their traits.

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