Viola

(Viola Tuning)

It's from a genus called Pachysoma.

You group similar species into a genus.

From that moment on, I was a viola player.

(Music) (Music ends) Only the viola can make this sound.

The earliest members of our lineage, the genus Homo, were darkly pigmented.

These are two shots of a red tide coming on shore here and a bacteria in the genus vibrio, which includes the genus that has cholera in it.

This is a different species in the same genus but exactly the same foraging behavior.

Maybe I can group species into other categories. And that's where we get the genus from.

As instruments go, you might say, the viola drew an unlucky number in the musical lottery.

Just as in the case of star formation here in galaxy formation, genus length or genus mass are key concept to determine the scale of fluctuations that can actually grow or fragment in the smaller one.

Musicians like to make jokes about it, they say things like, Oh, the viola, where bad violinist goes to die .

There are 13 species in the genus, and they have a particular behavior that I think you will find interesting.

And then he went even beyond that, because even the idea of grouping things into a genus dated back to the ancient Greeks.

I sat in my class and a group of professional musicians came explain the instruments of the orchestra, one by one, and when it came time for the viola player he played this.

I think it's telling that many composers wrote for the viola at the end of their lives, when the time for flash and brawn had past, they chose the imperfect instrument to tell their secrets.

In the late nineteen twenties the composer, called Paul Hindemith, wrote a very short piece for viola, in a time when German banks were printing money faster than they possibly could, where armories were building weapons, when the country was in chaos.