jwilzewske: Spiccato Perfection: Formosa Quartet, Shih-Hui Chen’s Quartet No. 5

S hih-Hui Chen’s String Quartet No. 5 (‘Mei-Hua’, ‘plum blossom’) [commissioned by Formosa Quartet in 2007] was performed last night by Formosa Quartet at University of Missouri Kansas City’s White Recital Hall.

[Jasmine Lin (violin), Ayano Ninomiya (violin), Che-Yen Chen (viola), and Jacob Braun (cello) formed the quartet in 2003. Formosa Quartet members trained at Juilliard, the New England Conservatory, the Cleveland Institute, Curtis, Harvard, and Yale. They have held title positions in the San Diego and Cincinnati Symphonies and have been on the chamber music faculty at Interlochen, University of California San Diego, Taos School of Music, and Northwestern University and have appeared regularly at the Marlboro, Caramoor, and Ravinia festivals, and at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. They have taken first place in the Primrose, Paganini, and Naumburg competitions as well as first Prize and the Amadeus Prize at the Tenth London International String Quartet Competition in 2006. Besides the Shih-Hui Chen work on last night’s program, Formosa Quartet also performs other new music, including pieces by Bright Sheng and Richard Wilson.]

B orn in Taipei, Shih-Hui Chen emigrated to the U.S. in 1982 and received her doctoral degree from Boston University. Her works have been performed by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, among others. Also frequently appearing in programs abroad, her music has been featured in China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Germany, Italy, and Amsterdam. A recipient of several fellowships including the Guggenheim, Ms. Chen has received grants from the Fromm Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Meet the Composer Foundation, the Tanglewood Music Center, the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute of Harvard University, the Koussevitzky Music Foundation Commission, and the Bellagio Rockefeller Foundation.

H ard to be unaddressed,
Empty to reflection—
Take the road east—
Be where it is.”
— Robert Creeley, ‘There’, from ‘Gnomic Verses’, 1991.

S hih-Hui Chen frequently collaborates on inter-disciplinary and multi-media projects. She composed a film score for the documentary ‘Once Removed’ by film maker Julie Mallozzi, premiered several years ago at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She also composed ‘There’, a song cycle composed with poet Robert Creeley prior to his dying in 2005. Shih-Hui Chen is currently an Assistant Professor of Music Composition at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University and has served as Composer in Residence at the Tanglewood Institute and at the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP). She is a music advisor for Formosa Chamber Music Society, an active member of Musiqa (a composers’ collective based in Houston), and the Asian Composers’ League.

Some Chamber Music Compositions by Shih-Hui Chen

Six Songs (‘Sweet Rice Pie’) for voice and mixed ensemble
Shui (‘Water’) for cello and piano
Fu I for solo pipa
Fu II for pipa and 5 western instruments
Four Little Pieces of Wood for piano
66 Times (‘Voice of Pines & Cedars’) for soprano and chamber ensemble

S hih-Hui Chen’s Quartet No. 5 is comprised of three movements: Fantasia; Scherzo; and the eponymous Mei-Hua (Plum Blossoms). It is edgy, energetic throughout—athletic, even, in the demands it makes of the artists. Part of its edginess derives from the extensive use of spiccato gestures in each of the instruments’ parts. The bows rarely stop dancing and bouncing.

T he bowing styles called spiccato (sautillé) and ricochét, in which the bow bounces off the string between notes, have a predominant mode between 13 and 15 bounces/sec for a bow tensioned at 50 to 60 Newtons force. The kinematics of the bouncing involves a ‘ripple’ that is dominated by bending moments in the distal part of the bow, out toward the tip.

T he percussive ricochet bouncing—with the dissipation of energy over the series of successive bow impacts with the string—can evoke a variety of suspenseful musical effects. It conveys an emphatic, forward-looking ‘consequentialism’, for example—like a reminder that gravity is inescapable, like death and taxes: a Creeley-esque ‘be where it is’ inevitability. The kinesthetics of the bouncing is trampolinesque, fascinating as our minds anticipate the diminishing intervals of milliseconds between the successive bounces.

I calculate that, with a constant bow force, the inter-bounce time intervals approximately follow a hyperbolic Fibonacci series. I do not see that Askenfelt or anybody else has published on this. But, to me, it is a beautiful little mathematical result—writing spiccato as a compositional gesture amounts to invoking Nature and Mathematics and situating human society and its concerns in the large context of the universe and history. Spiccato kinesthetically alludes to the intersection of music and cosmology.

1/1, 1/1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/5, 1/8, 1/13, 1/21, 1/34, 1/55, 1/89, ...

B ut you need exceedingly skilled artists to pull the gesture off in performance! You need a light bow-hold, yet a bow-hold that stays under control despite the vigorous bouncing. The bow more or less pivots around an axis through the ‘U’ in the frog with the thumb and middle/index finger (depending on your bow-hold technic) daintily opposing each other. You want the force of the bow on the string to stay essentially constant during the successive bounces in order to avoid ‘multiple-slipping’.

A squarish, Gibraltar-shaped force curve with a sharp rise and sharp drop, slipping during contact, has been shown to be optimal for a crisp spiccato. This was the result of physics experiments performed about 15 years ago by Anders Askenfelt and his colleagues at KTH in Stockholm. They found that the ‘ripple’ bending mode in the bow serves to reduce the build-up time for the force between the bowhair and the string with each successive bounce, enabling the sharp, box-shaped force as a function of time—and the crisp attack and release. However, more is not necessarily better, with regard to the sharpness imparted by the ripple. The risk of multiple-slipping is increased if the ripple mode is too great. Askenfelt found that spiccato playing properties of different bows varied widely and that the reproducibility of spiccato effects within-player and between-players also varied widely.

O ne of the [many] remarkable qualities that characterized the Formosa Quartet performance last night was the astonishing cohesiveness and elegance of their spiccato bowing. A cohesiveness of style and technic—all four of them—not just Ayano’s violin ricochet cohering with Jasmine’s violin ricochet. In fact, the extensive spiccato in each of the parts in the Shih-Hui Chen quartet provided ample empirical opportunity to confirm Askenfelt’s experiments: the ‘ripple’ in the bow dominates the effects, and the predominant 13 to 15 Hz mode is the same in violin, viola, cello, double bass. The effects are quite insensitive to the size and register of the ‘anvil’ (instrument) and have mostly to do with the physics of the bouncing ‘hammer’ (bow). The fact that this is so lends itself toward a ‘sectional’ unity that the composer can take advantage of. That spiccato physics plays no ‘favorites’ imparts a sense of the pervasiveness of ‘cause-and-effect’ natural law, of (eventual) justice and karma catching up with each and every one, of our embeddedness—every last mortal one of us—in Time.

T here are so many wonderful things in the Formosa Quartet performance and in this Shih-Hui Chen composition that I really must apologize for my ‘over the top’ delight in this one bowing-style/technical feature | compositional device. But, after all, this is a blog, not a ‘review’.

T he Formosa Quartet was joined by guest violist Scott Lee, Assistant Professor of viola at UMKC for Dvorǎk’s Op. 97, String Quintet in E-flat Major (1893). Scott won First Prize in both violin and viola in the Taiwan National Instrumental Competition, and was a top prize winner in the Lionel Tertis International Viola Competition and the William Primrose Viola Competition. He has performed at the the Newport Chamber Music Festival, La Jolla Chamber Music Festival, The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Music from Marlboro, and, in addition to collaboration with the Formosa Quartet, has been a guest artist with the Miro, Guarneri, Juilliard, Orion, and Miami String Quartets, and with the Beaux Arts and Mannes Piano Trios. Scott Lee has been a featured soloist at the International Hindemith Viola Festival and at the 22nd and 24th International Viola Congresses. Born in Taipei, Taiwan, 29 year-old Scott trained beginning at age 14 in the U.S. with violist Donald McInnes and violinist Todor Pelev and later with Michael Tree at Curtis Institute of Music and Paul Neubauer at Juilliard.

B edřich Smetana’s String Quartet No. 1 in E Minor (1876) was also performed. Both the Dvorǎk and the Smetana were superb—highly narrative, dramatic expressions that cohered with the Shih-Hui Chen piece, in terms of their grounding in the composers’ respective (auto-)biographical, nationalistic and folk-music traditions. Without question, last night’s performance was an adventure and a high-point of my concert-going thus far in the 2008-2009 season. Bravo!

O ne of my reservations about trendy new music that is heavily based on folk music—some pieces by Osvaldo Golijov and Tan Dun, everything by Mark O’Connor—is that it is too transparently a recycling of those sounds. With [Shih-Hui] Chen’s work, by contrast, the Taiwanese melody is heard only furtively, as if it were lurking around the corner or hovering spectrally above the music. Indeed, an imagined pentatonic melody rattled through my head at intermission, even though it was never really quoted fully in ‘Mei Hua’. The folk original was evoked in fragments, with microtonal bends and other effects, obscured by dissonance in the first movement and treated with viscerally exciting rhythms and a repeated-note pulse in the second movement. The instruments were called on to make sounds more specific to Chinese music in the third movement, reminiscent of the pipa and erhu mostly.”
— Jens Laurson, IonArts, 17-DEC-2007.

[Happy Groundhog Day!]

jwilzewske

Sunday, February 1, 2009

Spiccato Perfection: Formosa Quartet, Shih-Hui Chen’s Quartet No. 5

No comments:

Post a Comment