Sunday, April 1, 2007

Goode: Whitman-esque Voyager-Prophet of the Universal ‘Want’

Richard Goode, Voyager
I  considered how best to describe to you Richard Goode’s unique accomplishment; how best to characterize that quality which makes his a distinctly American voice. And it occurred to me that he is, in many ways, the musical equivalent of Walt Whitman. Richard Goode is, among pianists, the epitome of a Whitman-like ‘voyager ego’—someone who is able to take the specifics of one individual’s feeling and experience and, through his playing, make them universal. In doing so, he transforms us . . . ”

  —  Cynthia Siebert

CMT: The human brain, according to Nussbaum, is a living record of its evolutionary history. Relatively recent cognitive developments derive from older representational functions, about which the science is all less than forty years old and of which we are hardly aware. But consideration of music performance can shed light on ancient cognitive functions that underlie modern human cognition. The biology, psychology, and philosophy of musical representation have much to tell us about what we are, and what, as a species, we have been.

DSM: It isn’t just music that offers us revelations like this. ‘Poets Thinking’, one of Helen Vendler’s books, argues that poetry is a mode of thinking that reveals not just our aesthetic values but also our psychology. Vendler is a wonderful elucidator of individual poems. Nobody writes more insightfully about a poem’s stylistic structure, and the emotional and intellectual purposes that the structure serves. And by examining the distinctive strategies of thinking in the work of such radically different poets as Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, and Yeats, Vendler makes visible aspects of style and language that other critics simply haven’t seen.

CMT: This is what Cynthia Siebert was hinting at in her introduction of Richard Goode. Music, like poetry, has often been considered an irrational genre, more expressive than logical, more meditative than given to coherent argument. And yet, in each of the four very different composers Richard Goode performed last night, he reveals a style of thinking in operation. Although they may prefer different means, he argues, all composers of any value are thinkers. He convincingly traces a trajectory from Bach’s Partitas, through late Mozart, through Brahms, to Debussy. Admittedly, Goode’s Bach is a more romantic account than is usual. But it’s a very plausible interpretation.

DSM: Whitman was writing as a poet of repetitive insistence—someone for whom thinking must be followed by rethinking. Goode shows us Brahms thinking in images, using montage in lieu of argument. He shows us Debussy as a satiric miniaturizer, remaking in verse the form of the essay. He shows us Mozart experimenting with plot to characterize life’s unfolding. The repetitions that Goode localizes in each of these composers’ works become, in his mind and hands, coherent arguments—ones that are set forth, defended, critically turned over, reiterated after deliberation and reflection. This is part of what makes Goode so ‘new’.

C   ome, said my soul, such verses
for my Body let us write, (for we are one,)
That should I after return,
Or, long, long hence, in other spheres,
There to some group of mates the chants resuming,
(Tallying Earth’s soil, trees, winds, tumultuous waves,)
Ever with pleas’d smile I may keep on,
Ever and ever yet the verses owning
 —as, first, I here and now
Signing for Soul and Body, set to them my name . . .
The untold want by life and land ne’er granted,
Now, voyager, sail thou forth to seek and find.”

  —  Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

CMT: It’s also, I think, what makes his playing so universal, so meaningful to each person, and fresh for each person upon repeated listenings. With his characteristic lucidity and spirit, Goode traces through these composers’ expressions to find evidence of thought in lyric; the silent stylistic measures representing changes of mind; the condensed power of poetic thinking. His work argues against the reduction of performance to well-worn and long-since elucidated themes and demonstrates, instead, that there is, ideally, in music a serious process of thinking, a deliberated style—however ancient the theme may be—and one that is powerful and original, fresh and new.

DSM: Whitman seeks the redemption of America through the reconstruction of individual subjects in conversion. Would Cynthia Siebert say that Goode seeks to redeem us by inducing ecstatic, regenerating experiences in his audiences?

CMT: Yes. That is the consequence of her opening remarks—consummate presenter that she is. She gives us not merely an introduction, but a capsulized lesson. There are the de rigeur honorifics, of course. But then she invariably gives the audience a ‘pearl,’ some unique bit of insight, a provocation, even. She cautions us that Goode is about to spin an emotional tale. You know a well-known “rule system” has been developed at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm (Sundberg et al., 1983), for characterizing emotional content in music performances. The KTH model consists of a set of performance rules that predict or prescribe aspects of timing, dynamics, and articulation, based on local musical context. The rules refer to a limited class of musical situations and theoretical concepts (simple duration ratios between successive notes, ascending lines, melodic leaps, melodic and harmonic charge, phrase structure, etc.). Most of the rules operate at a low level and look only at very local contexts and affecting individual notes. But there are also rules that refer to entire phrases, much apropos of Richard Goode’s expressive playing. The rules are parameterized with a varying number of parameters. Originally, the KTH model was developed using the so-called “analysis-by-synthesis approach” that involves a professional musician directly evaluating each tentative rule brought forward by the researcher. Musician and researcher engage in constant feedback to iteratively find the best formulation and parameter settings for each rule. This method has the advantage of modeling a kind of performer–listener interaction, but it falls short by placing high demands on the evaluating expert musicians and by not permitting reliable evaluations due to the small number of judgments.

DSM: Thinking of the performance that Richard Goode just gave last night, consider just one particular rule: DURATION CONTRAST. This rule modifies the ratio between successive note durations in order to enhance and make more easily perceivable the differences in duration. Most commonly it changes the durations of a long and a short one so that the longer becomes a bit longer, and the shorter becomes shorter. As for every rule, there is a quantity control parameter (k) to be set by the analyst. This parameter is designed so as to give a fairly good result when its value is around 1. With a k value of 0, a particular rule is effectively switched off; when k is set to a negative value, the rules are inverted (in DURATION CONTRAST, it would blur the rhythmic contrasts)—which, by the way, can produce unmusical results. I can show you on my DAW synthesizer-sequencer if you like. An important aspect of the model is that it’s additive. For instance, there are several rules that influence the duration of a note, and the effects of the individual rules are added cumulatively to give the final duration. Sundberg and colleagues examined how well the KTH model can be fitted to a particular performance of a slow Mozart sonata movement (K.332, first 20 bars of the Adagio) manually, by trial and error. They focused exclusively on expressive timing of the melody (in terms of deviations from the score) and determined similarity between the performance and the model with the correlation coefficient. The PHRASE ARCH rule (shaping phrases on different structural levels) seemed to dominate the performance, although they could not find one single k parameter for these initial bars. Therefore, they tested k values for each phrase individually. Here it was mostly the PHRASE ARCH rule that got the highest correlations, as well as HARMONIC CHARGE and negative DURATION CONTRAST. The KTH model has also been used to model certain emotional colourings that might not be immediately inherent in the music structure. For example, the DURATION CONTRAST rule was found to especially distinguish between a sad and a happy performance. Some specifically selected subsets of rules and k parameter settings (“emotional rule palettes”, see Bresin & Friberg, 2000) were derived from measured performances in order to model emotional coloring of performances.

CMT: This extension to emotionality has led recently to more comprehensive computational models of expressive performances. These models include, besides the generative KTH model and the emotional models, also random variability within certain bounds, and analogies to physical motion. Recently, it was proposed to extend it with a factor of “stylistic unexpectedness” (see Juslin). To date, there is plenty of evidence that the KTH rule model is a viable representation language for describing expressive performance. To what extent it can account for the observed variations in large collections of performances of truly complex music is still an open issue. These other more recent quantitative models with more complexity and more degrees of freedom may ultimately capture more of the expressive range . . .

DSM: One of those recent models based mainly on mathematical considerations is the “Mazzola model”. The Swiss mathematician and Jazz pianist Guerino Mazzola developed his mathematical music theory and performance model beginning in the 1980s. His most recent book (Mazzola, 2002) extends over more than 1,300 pages and gives a comprehensive survey of the theoretical background as well as its computational implementation.

CMT: The Mazzola model builds on Mazzola’s mathematical music theory that includes various aspects of music theory and analysis and involves philosophical, semiotic, and aesthetic considerations as well. Every step is explained in specifically mathematical terms. He invents special terminology that is greatly different from what is commonly used in performance research, so musicologists do seem to hold it somewhat in abeyance. Engineers and mathematicians, like Bill Sethares at Wisconsin, seem to have greater receptiveness to Mazzola’s ideas . . .

DSM: The Mazzola model basically consists of an analysis part and a performance part. The analysis part involves computer-aided analysis tools for various aspects of the music structure as, e.g., meter, melody, or harmony. Each of these is implemented in particular plugins, the so-called “rubettes”, that assign particular “weights” to each note in a symbolic score. The performance part that transforms structural features into a synthesized performance is theoretically anchored in the so-called “Stemma Theory” and “Operator Theory” (a sort of additive rule-based structure-to-performance mapping). It iteratively modifies the “performance vector fields”, each of which controls a single expressive parameter of a synthesized performance. I’ve been playing around with that over the past couple of weeks on my old Ensoniq equipment . . .

CMT: What about quantification of individual style? Predictive models like the KTH or the Mazzola models generally focus on fundamental, common performance principles—that is, on those aspects that most performances have in common. Of course, there have also been attempts at measuring, quantifying, and describing stylistic performance differences. Statistical analysis can reveal a number of characteristic and distinctive phrasing behaviors, some of which could be associated (in a statistical sense) with a particular pianist. Can we do that with Goode?

DSM: Well, yes. After the concert last night, I extracted some tracks off Goode CDs that we own. We can examine visualization performance trajectories from those mp3s. Basically, the detailed performance data – beat-level tempo and dynamics curves – can be represented in an integrated way as trajectories in a two-dimensional “tempo–loudness” space that show the joint development of tempo and dynamics over time (see Langner & Goebl, 2003). This plot shows a trajectory from Richard Goode’s recording of a performance of the Mozart Rondo in A minor (K. 511) that we heard last night at the Folly Theater in Kansas City.

Goode, Mozart Rondo in A minor, Loudness-Tempo Trajectories
CMT: The line is produced by interpolating between the measured tempo and dynamics points that you captured off the CD, and smoothing the result with a moving-window Gaussian to make the trends visible. The degree of smoothing controls the amount of local variation in the plot. This is similar to Dixon’s “Performance Worm” (Dixon, 2002) that computes and visualizes performance trajectories. But the trajectory representation here also provides the basis for more detailed quantitative analysis, with data analysis (data mining) methods. So for Goode’s ‘voyager ego,’ as Cynthia Siebert called it, we should be able to map his (or other artists’ – ) expressive voyages after the fact, catalogue them, compare them.

x

Cynthia Siebert, founder of Friends of Chamber Music, explains a musical point


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