30 November 2010

Genevieve Steele

Nationality: British


Eight-year-old Genevieve Steele was a little girl who knew what she wanted. And what she wanted was to play the harp. As soon as she first spotted one – while clog dancing at Sidmouth Folk Festival on England's south coast – she pretty much didn't let it out of her sight.

“Whenever I wasn't on stage, I basically followed this poor harpist around!” she laughs. “He noticed me and gave me a go in the end, which was very nice of him.” Captivated by the beautiful resonating sound, Gen, who already played piano and violin by that point, set about convincing her parents to let her take lessons. “They were hesitant about such an unwieldy instrument, and tried to persuade me that I might prefer the flute,” she remembers.

They were fighting a losing battle though, and Gen was adamant about her choice. In what may have been a crafty move to keep the peace, her parents relented and agreed that if they could find her a teacher near their home – a little old mining village outside of Durham, northeast England – then she could have lessons.

“I think they thought that it was an unusual enough an instrument for them to be truthfully able to say that no teacher could be found,” she considers. But they didn't account for their daughter's determination. When the Yellow Pages failed her, Gen set about asking all the music teachers she knew through school and friends. Eventually she found a teacher in the next town, with a handy harp hire service. “I told my Mum about that, and she gave in,” she grins.

Learning didn't present much of a problem for Gen, who had been playing piano since age five: “It was kind of the same, but twisted on its side.” And unlike a lot of children, she loved to practice. “I was one of those people – I think I still am – that I have to do lots to be able to do anything,” she considers. “If I do nothing, it spreads out to fill all my time. I realised that very early on, so I'd always be doing something, so that I'd get lots done.”

A couple of years down the line, Gen had her very own 34-string Celtic harp (clarsach in Gaelic). “There was a brand that I really liked that also did a kit – they give you the chunks of wood that make the harp and the strings. My Dad's quite good at that sort of thing – his Dad was a carpenter – so he made it for me.”

Before university, her studies were focussed on maths, physics and music. Science won out as a career choice though, although she did play as a soloist at weddings and events during her undergraduate degree, as a means of earning some money.

It was the investigative nature of physics that hooked her. “And being able to explain things in a nice formula and see how it all interacts.” She studied for her four-year Physics Masters at Durham University and continued living at home with her parents. But she got her first taste of CERN in 2007 as a third year summer student, checking and installing muon chambers with the Munich group.

Now she's back at CERN full time, and is in the third year of her PhD with the University of Glasgow. She spends her time studying hadronic Tau decays and babysitting Tier 0 on distributed computing shifts, watching data coming off the detector and starting to be reconstructed. She lives in Thoiry, a “prettier version” of her home village, with her French LHC physicist boyfriend. When asked if they discuss physics over dinner, she delivers a resolute “no”.

Being at CERN isn't her only experience of living away from home though. There was the year she spent as a half-elf, living and working at a children's adventure camp in the English midlands. Although the days were long, she loved working with ten-year-olds. “They're brave enough to be away from their Mum and Dad without crying, but still young enough so that you can lie to them!” she says with a little mischief. She had fun telling wide-eyed children that she was genetically half elf, and was easily able to substantiate that claim, in their eyes, by firing off perfect bullseyes in their archery lessons.

Of all the outdoor activities she enjoyed there, it was kayaking that really stuck with Gen. She's not had much chance to explore the white waters around Geneva yet, but she brought her kayak over with her, along with her faithful harp which was strapped into her car with a seatbelt. She was just moving out here when the ATLAS CD was being recorded and, in the spirit of throwing herself into her new life, she jumped on board with that. That's more than can be said for the harp itself, which was misbehaving and slipping out of tune frequently in the recording studio.

“It's quite a temperamental instrument,” she explains. “It doesn't like being moved, it doesn't like changes of temperature.” And it really didn't like the humid Geneva summer: “It threw a hissy fit and snapped all of its strings. In the end I just couldn't play it, I had to slacken off all the strings and leave it alone.”

Thankfully, she had other musical pursuits to fill the void. She sings in a choir and is a member of an amateur operatic group, whose pantomime (“It's quite good fun. It's very silly”) she'll perform in at the start of December. Unlike some musically inclined physicists, the realms of music and maths are separate for Gen, except for when she starts to muse on harmonics and other technicalities.

“That's why the harp sounds so nice,” she smiles, still as entranced by it as her eight-year-old self. “It's very hard to make it sound bad when everything just resonates.”

 

 

 

Ceri Perkins

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