A Strange Alchemy

Bill Bell
for Illinois Physics

Find Professor Philip Phillips seated in the auditorium at Smith Hall on a Sunday night. Professor Casey Robards is at the piano, accompanying renowned baritone Kenneth Overton. They are premiering an excerpt from a song cycle by Anthony Patterson called “Lyrics of Love and Laughter.”

The four are friends. Robards and Patterson are, in fact, married. In their various ways, they’ve bonded over a passion for this music: art song. Poetry set to a nuanced style of opera. Intimate rather than bombastic. Performed with a piano rather than an orchestra.

Phillips is intent as Overton sings the words of Paul Laurence Dunbar. He’s set aside his pre-show snack and folded in on himself. Arms and legs crossed, one hand supports his chin. He doesn’t move—no toe tap or head bob.

Intermission comes. Phillips is up. He greets Patterson in the aisle and offers a hug. “Tony! Bring it in! Extraordinary! Absolutely great.”

Phillips is so much bigger when he speaks. Booming.

After some questions about Patterson’s process for selecting the poems used in “Lyrics of Love and Laughter,” Phillips returns to his seat. Overton and Robards continue with selections from other composers and close with Duke Ellington’s standard, “Come Sunday.” Overton ends with a beautifully controlled decrescendo from a high note. As the crowd begins to applaud, Phillips whispers an obviously impressed “Whoa!”

He appreciates how technically challenging the moment is. In addition to being a globally recognized condensed matter physicist, he’s a singer himself.

Find Professor Philip Phillips on stage in the summer of 2022. The past six weeks have been a flurry of rehearsals, recitals, and classes. He is now performing Colline in a production of Puccini’s La bohème. The character is “a philosopher type,” he later explains, who famously sings a farewell aria (“Vecchia Zimarra Senti”) to a coat that he must pawn. It’s Phillips’ first time in a role at the Bay View Music Festival in Michigan. Bay View is the longest continuously operating chamber music festival in the United States. Overton, Patterson, and Robards are all faculty artists there.

“Your work ethic has to be incredible” for a Bay View-caliber performance, according to Phillips. As in any opera production, “You have to be ready to deliver a line regardless of what you hear or don’t hear, which requires intense focus. There’s a similar thing when you derive an equation. But this is much more immediate and tactile. If you lose focus, it’s curtains. You can’t come back to the moment.”

The equations he derives off-stage often involve unorthodox approaches to the Mott problem. (The Mott problem, very basically, represents the failure of the standard theory of metals to explain electron motion in transition metal oxides, such as the copper-oxide high-temperature superconductors. Read more about Phillips’ research on Mott physics in Nature Communications and Nature Physics.) His breakthroughs in applying the random dimer model—the exception to Anderson’s localization theorem—to explain conducting polymers, meanwhile, are what led Illinois Physics to recruit him from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“I wanted to know what happens to an electron when it has a random potential in low dimensions,” Phillips says in a recent interview. “I knew the standard result, that disorder would preclude conduction in one dimension. But I also knew that there were conducting polymers and that diffusion poles were hard to kill regardless of dimension. So I knew there had to be an exception. That’s the random dimer model.

“Exceptions to dogma. That’s the sort of thing I do.”

“My work is sometimes viewed as nontraditional, but I feel I understand profoundly what others have done. I understand what’s in the box before I step outside of it.”

Phillips came from MIT 30 years ago, but his love of opera goes back even further. It played in his family home growing up in Tobago, Boston, and Washington state. It was practically all he listened to in college. During his postdoc at Berkeley, he was fortunate enough to see Leontyne Price’s final performance as Aida at the San Francisco Opera. “Wow. What a production,” he recalls.

The desire to sing was “always under the surface,” says Phillips. He had performed with the University of Illinois’ Lyric Theatre, playing Commendatore in Don Giovanni and Alcindoro in La bohème, for example. But the summer gig doing La bohème in Michigan was intimidating, nonetheless.

“I ended up at Bay View sort of accidentally,” he says. “In my first coaching session with Casey in February 2022, she asked me if I would send in audition tapes for a role at Bay View. The rest is history: I was cast as Colline.”

“I was by far the oldest performer at Bay View. It’s mostly college and grad students. But it’s all about singing there. It’s irrelevant that you’re a physicist. You put your ego somewhere else. You have to be completely open and imbibe everything they have to say.”

Pictured above: Illinois Physics Professor Philip Phillips plays Alcindoro in the Cafe Momus scene in Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème. Photo courtesy of the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts

Find Professor Philip Phillips entering Professor Casey Robards’ office in the Music Building with Kenneth Overton. A beat-up baby grand piano takes up half the room. Scores of scores line metal bookshelves and pile on the desk that fills the other end of Robards’ office.

In addition to being let’s-grab-dinner friends, Robards and Overton double as vocal coach and voice teacher, respectively, for Phillips. He sees Robards often in person, and Overton, who performs around the world, is catch-as-catch-can both in person and via Zoom.

Phillips, a bass, performed a recital with pieces by Verdi, Rossini, Mozart, and others in January. Today, the group is refining one of the recital pieces. It’s Schubert’s Erlkönig, or The Elf King. He starts their session with a run-through of the song. In it, a father ignores his son’s warnings that they are being chased by a demon.

Phillips voices narrator, son, and child alike, pleading: “Mein Vater, mein Vater, und siehst du nicht dort Erlkönigs Töchter am düstern Ort?” (“Father, father, can you not see Erlkönig’s daughters there in the darkness?”) As Phillips finishes, the father cradles his dead son in his arms, and Overton begins sharing his thoughts quickly and candidly.

They explore ways to embody the different characters in the song. They practice diction and musical phrasing. Overton touches Phillips’ face—at various moments, his cheek, his temple, the back of his head—to remind him where he should be feeling the sound. At one point, they pull against opposite ends of a scarf to encourage Phillips to sustain a given note.

“Make that as legato as molasses,” Overton prompts. “The narrator is matter of fact, mysterious.

“Air is free. Audiences will forgive you for taking a breath if you make the rest of the phrase beautiful.” Robards consistently lays in a bit of piano at just the right moment to illustrate a point or to help Phillips stay on track.

There’s a debate about what key Phillips should be singing Erlkönig in. Robards has been encouraging him to move it up. Overton agrees, strongly. Phillips acquiesces and runs it in the higher key.

“It’s a strange alchemy, this training for operatic singing,” Robards explains.

Find Professor Philip Phillips in his own office at the Anthony J. Leggett Institute for Condensed Matter Theory. A poster of The Clash’s London Calling hangs on the wall; Schubert and Handel aren’t the only things spinning on his turntable.

He’s just back from teaching his Philosophy of Physics course. One of the topics covered was 19th-century debate on the aether as the medium for transporting electromagnetic waves. All of the problems this posed weren’t properly resolved until general relativity emerged. For decades, some of the world’s brightest minds ground away to upturn orthodoxies. Surely, the work was driven by a combination of intuition and technical skill, intense personal focus and powerful collaboration, obstinate beliefs and complete openness, moments of quibbling and moments of ego put aside.

Another kind of strange alchemy, perhaps.

“The problem I’ve chosen as my life’s work is the Mott problem,” he says with a laugh. “And, really, most people would walk. For years, it was too controversial. People’s opinions were set. But new doors opened as we gained new insights. You have to be open to changing your view. If it’s smooth sailing, you’re not working hard enough.”

Whether picking a key or picking apart a long-standing puzzle in physics, “some people naturally want to do things their own way. It may seem that’s what I’m doing, but it’s not,” he says. “My work is sometimes viewed as nontraditional, but I feel I understand profoundly what others have done. I understand what’s in the box before I step outside of it.”