Sunday, February 25, 2007

Glagolitic Ekphrasis and Melisma in Tondal

Dialogos, Vision of Tondal
DSM: Dialogos uses such—What would we say?—onomatopoetical sounds. If Tondal’s spirit is leaving his body, then what better way to represent that movement than by the splitting of vocal lines—the divergence from unison to close harmonies and dissonances, diminished seconds, and so on—and the re-convergence of those lines back into unison! The whole thing is melismatic (that is, many notes per syllable of text)! The extended, braided melismas distort our sense of time! A fantastic effect!

CMT: Yes. In Tondal, all six of the Dialogos members’ voices execute extensive melismas—sometimes in the upper range to express aspiration or anxiety or other emotions; sometimes low in their vocal range to express a pensive rumble. I think that long melismas are such a vivid musical rendering of the self, of the spirit. Incidentally, Bach often does this on the word ‘geistlich,’ and he even works in some irony in his choral settings—for example, when the alto sings the chorale while the soprano and tenor parts accompany—in his Cantatas and in his smaller works (Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied; Komm, Jesu, komm; Lobet den Herrn; Jesu, meine Freude; and Fürchte dich nicht). The singers bid farewell to life’s vices and passions to gain eternal life, and you would expect Bach to emphasize the joy and eagerness of those expecting salvation. But instead the musical figure of the soprano voices—the way in which they reluctantly release their held notes down a half step—clearly represents regret and doubt. You hear a predominating sorrow—an aporia. Much of Dialogos’ account of Tondal’s Vision is like this—these aporietic melismas!

DSM: Buelow notes Bach’s use of melismatic gestures, which he says are “contradictory to all Baroque theory of recitative.” But maybe Bach was harking back to an early tradition. Not only poets may respond to a work of visual art with a creative act in their own medium, transposing the style and structure, the message and metaphors from the visual to the verbal. Composers routinely engage in interartistic transfers like this. Although the musical medium is reputedly abstract, composers, just like poets, can respond in many different ways to a visual representation. They transpose structure and content. They interpret or play with some of the suggestive elements of the original image. This is basically the musical equivalent of what literary theorists call ‘ekphrasis’. Central questions concern the definition of musical ekphrasis in relation to music’s ability to represent extramusical realities or narratives—to relate to reality by way of musical mimesis or symbolic reference.

CMT: You know, listeners don’t have unbounded capacity to track multiple concurrent lines of sound. David Huron found that as the number of concurrent voices in a polyphonic texture increases, expert listeners are both slower to recognize the addition of new voices, and more prone to underestimate the number of voices present. Here is Huron’s plot of experimental data from five expert musicians. This shows voice-tracking errors while listening to polyphonic music. The data show that when listening to polyphonic textures employing relatively homogeneous timbres, tracking confusions are common when more than three voices are present.

David Huron
DSM: The solid columns show mean estimation errors for polyphonic textures of varying textural densities; the shaded columns indicate mean error rates for single-voice entries. For polyphonic textures employing relatively homogeneous timbres, the accuracy of identifying the number of concurrent voices drops markedly at the point where a three-voice texture is augmented to four voices. Beyond three voices, tracking confusions are commonplace. In a study of isolated chords, Parncutt (1993) found similar results. When asked to count the number of tones in chords constructed using tones with octave-spaced partials (Shepard tones), Parncutt found that listeners make significant errors (underestimation) once the number of chromas exceeds three.

CMT: Limitations in the perception of auditory numerosity may be symptomatic of a broader perceptual limitation, since the results of these studies parallel the results of similar studies in vision. Using a dishabituation paradigm, Strauss and Curtis showed that performance degrades when discriminating three from four items, and reaches chance performance when discriminating four from five items. The work of Strauss and Curtis is especially significant since pre-verbal infants can be expected to possess no explicit knowledge of counting. This implies that the perceptual confusion arising for visual and auditory fields containing more than three items is a low-level constraint that is not mediated by cognitive skills in counting.

DSM: These results are consistent with reports of musical experience offered by musicians themselves including composer Paul Hindemith. It strikes me that this is much like the close harmonies and complex dissonances of barbershop quartet singing. Your mind naturally follows and anticipates the divergences and convergences. In fact, that is a major source of the power and charm of such music—the textural complexities.

CMT: Dialogos compounds this further when they circle themselves on the stage. The choral effect is as though the dissonances are massed—one single aggregate collective spirit, despite the continued multi-vocality of it. Then the antiphonal qualities are restored when they disperse from the circle and distribute themselves across the stage—the individualistic contrast is especially apparent when they are performing in a large cathedral, with all of the reverberations that are characteristic of a church.

David Huron
DSM: Temperley addresses a fundamental question about music cognition: how do we extract basic kinds of musical information, such as meter, phrase structure, counterpoint, pitch spelling, harmony, and key from music as we hear it? Taking a computational approach, Temperley develops models for generating these aspects of musical structure. The models he proposes are based on preference rules, which are criteria for evaluating a possible structural analysis of a piece of music. A preference rule system evaluates many possible interpretations and chooses the one that best satisfies the rules.

CMT: Temperley has addressed some of this in his book, as has Taruskin in his. There is the ontology of musical structure: meter, phrase structure, contrapuntal structure, harmony, and key, as well as pitch spelling (the labeling of pitch events with spellings such as A-flat or G-sharp). Musical structures are inferred, but there is also musical ambiguity, “look-back” retrospective revision of our concepts as we continue listening, and sweet anticipation—‘expectation’ in Huron’s sense. Dialogos is masterful in interweaving all of these to make their performances powerfully evocative!




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