jwilzewske: Tokyo Quartet: Meta-Messengers, Physics of Flow in (Musical) Porous Media

M usic has values which are above the ‘ordinary’ realm—unchangeable and not subject to mortal instabilities. They are not ‘human-made’ as such, but are domiciled in more esoteric realms of our musical nature. We must turn to the immaterial, spiritual aspects of music in order to find them... The veiled secrets of Art dwell in a region of visionary irrationality... the composer [and, for that matter, the performers-] can never enter this region but can only be elected as its messenger(s).”
— Paul Hindemith, A Composer’s World: Horizons and Limitations, pp. 2, 221.

J uxtaposing the ‘familiar’ with the ‘unfamiliar’ is tremendously helpful as a ‘programming pattern’, and this program performed by Tokyo Quartet in the Friends of Chamber Music series was a case in point. Juxtapositions like this reveal new facets of the familiar works and provide context for apprehending the facets of the unfamiliar ones. Juxtapositions produce dynamic contrasts that boost our minds’ “signal-to-noise” ratio, and we are able grasp ideas and feelings that we otherwise might totally miss.

Haydn – Quartet in G Major, Op. 77, No. 1
Hindemith – Quartet in C Major, Op. 22, No. 4 (formerly No. 3)
Schumann – Quartet in A Major, Op. 41, No. 3

I ’d never heard the Hindemith before. The whole program was a treat, but the Hindemith was especially cool. The Tokyos’ lyricism is a fine match for this Hinde-mythic cosmic, rapt vision. The slow Sehr Langsam and Ruhige Viertel movements have a persistent impulse keeping them going… an impulsion that is (‘stets fließend’!) almost feminine in its other-regarding flow.

T he fast passages of the Schnell Achtell, Massig schnelle Viertel, and Rondo movements are robust and motoric, as they should be. Seasoned and mature, without any compulsion to use any work as a technical warhorse. (The whole piece is extremely challenging; the viola and cello parts of Op. 22 present monumental, virtuosic demands, say, but the Tokyo Quartet’s playing never feels self-referential. It is about going to the ‘heart’ of the music... communicating its true message(s)... which is precisely as things should be!) Phenomenal to hear the deep, ‘heart-felt-but-deliberated’ results of musicians’ living for 40+ years with all of these pieces!

I listen... listen to Op. 22 and try to place it, understand it, fit it with other things I think I understand... Yet, it defies fitting. This can’t be ‘counterpoint’—Can it?—if the parts/voices are not dependably running ‘counter’. It is like Hindemith had invented a kind of parallelization/fluidization not unlike what happens in cloud computing these days—with multiple, parallel Hadoop 'map-reduce' jobs.

M utants of a theme ‘melt’ and percolate as subordinate voices, which in turn are witnessed by the other voices, moving in different pores or channels. The ‘stets fließend’ mutants accompany the theme itself, and we get a complex texture or ‘network’ of intertwining thematic lines.

T he network of relations among the various motives in this Hindemith quartet make me look at Fiore’s and Satyendra’s 2005 article (link below). The more direct the relations, the more intuitive they are, and the more of our attention they command. The more direct, intuitive ones then seem to “take precedence” over the more indirect or prosaic ones. Their flow seems to accelerate; each seems to streamline in its channel or crevice as they pass other slower-moving expressions that other members of the quartet are playing at that moment. In that regard, Dembske’s 1995 article mentions Rahn’s work exploring musical “hydraulics” and ‘paths of least resistance’… After the Tokyo Quartet performance, I guess I need to look at Rahn now, too…

A stretch with recurrent, penetrating C-sharps played by the viola (‘mit dämpfer’) in the Ruhige Viertel movement of Op. 22: acknowledging no relationship to the other ‘parts’/‘molecules’/‘reducers’ they have just passed or displaced in the flow… Fragments rejoining each other after each has percolated through different crevices and tubules and pores before converging again… And at passages with fermatas and subsequent resumptions of flow, the dynamics of the musical parts “feel like” moving-boundary integro-differential equations—equations characterizing the flow of a mixture of long-chain macromolecules, a suspension of ‘beads’ undergoing melting as it flows: phase-change equations (Stefan Problem) for flow through a 3-D (or even higher-dimensional) porous-media network. To me, it feels like there is even ‘porosity’ and inter-movement ‘trans-phase mass transport’ between the first and second movements, and between the fourth and fifth. Control-volumes of stets fließend musical ‘beads’ percolate between these movements. It is hard to imagine Hindemith writing such elegant complexity as this at the tender age of 26 years...

P hysics and computational methods for modeling flows in porous media would, I believe, be highly relevant and productive, for better understanding this wonderful music—this graphic Hindemith Vision—quantitatively (please see links below). It remains only for some enterprising young, conservatory-based music theory student to do it! Some of the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software packages that would be relevant to such a project are in the links below. Also several links for CFD papers that have been delivered at IRCAM conferences in recent years, for your interest. [It’s regrettable that the science and finite-element and Galerkin and other applied mathematics to do this were only developed after Hindemith’s lifetime, because I am confident that he would have enjoyed what they may reveal about the sonic imagery he created—this string quartet and other of his works.]

A ll in all, a tremendously exciting performance, vivid, thrilling!

jwilzewske

Friday, October 21, 2011

Tokyo Quartet: Meta-Messengers, Physics of Flow in (Musical) Porous Media

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