jwilzewske: It Was When the Nagging Became Music (1:41) that Love Became Clear to Me 腾讯QQ

I long with all my heart to return to my quiet home where I was born and have spent happy days in nature. Nature! Where can I find it here? Everything is so artificial...”
— Robert Schumann, letter from Leipzig to his mother in Zwickau, 24-OCT-1828 [Jugendbriefe, 2e., 2 vols., Clara Schumann, ed.].

M any composers have treated the subject of ‘Heimweh’ (German for homesickness)... Carl Gottlieb Reissiger (Op. 50, No. 1); Robert Schumann; Edvard Grieg; Arnold Schoenberg; Franz Schubert, Hugo Wolf, Johann Kalliwoda, Fanny Mendelssohn, Johannes Brahms, Franz Liszt, Max Reger, Mischa Spoliansky, Heinrich Proch, many others. Here in this Tencent QQ video we have it in an industrial marketing film. (Unfortunately, I am not yet able to find out who the performers of the soundtrack music in this video are, and I am not certain of the composition either.)

T he video is, I think, a fine example of how indispensable chamber music is for effective, impactful films, especially ones that address matters of family. Meaning is constituted not simply by its semantic content but also by its sonic content. Thirty years ago we had Roland Barthes’s concept of ‘the grain of the voice’. The effect of women’s voices, mothers in particular, was examined by Leslie Dunn and Nancy Jones in their book (link below). ‘Purely sonic’ features of the female voice in "the construction of its non-verbal meanings" involve roles played by (1) the person or people producing the sound, (2) the person or people hearing the produced sound and (3) the acoustical and social contexts in which production and hearing occur. The meaning of sound is co-constituted by performative as well as semantic and textual features.

I n the Tencent QQ video, the mother-son intersubjective acoustic space must be—and is—recovered. That is why this video and its supporting sound track work.

I n the aftermath of the notorious Amy Chua book, this is something of an anti-Tiger Mom video, complete with healing chamber music sound track. Reed-in-the-wind mother is mistreated by ambitious, impatient son who departs for U.S., makes good, feels remorse, gets a clue, starts treating mom better, from 20,000 kilometers away. There is not enough time to show whether son’s earlier irritability and maladjustment to parental implacability are in any way justified, nor whether there are any mitigating conditions, such as autism spectrum disorders. There is not enough time to show whether mom’s despair and hovering are related to ongoing chronic depression or other mitigating conditions.

A ll we see of son is the stage of exasperation and fuming resentment, followed by the stage of loneliness and isolation and regret. All we see of mom is stage of despair, sorrow, followed by stage of ecstasy at learning to use instant messaging and restoration of the relationship. Montemayor and Hanson (1985) reported a parent-adolescent child conflict event rate of 2 conflicts per 3 days, an average of 20 events per month, so maybe the video shows what is entirely within the bounds of ‘normal’. Warm, candid, poignant, gently humorous, it’s a story that has plenty of the cozy intimacy of chamber music in industrial ‘promo’ settings/jingles.

T his music amounts to a shamanic ceremony during which the shaman-surrogate commercial sponsor 腾讯 QQ produces this music and images to appease the spirits both within the family depicted in the story and within the broader community—by extension including you and me.

T he first violin makes three rhapsodic statements, each ending with a pause while the inner strings catch up with their parallel entries. The remainder of the track is comprised of pianissimo phrases on three voices, while the fourth voice carries a confessional folk melody (first and second violins, in turn). Cool, how this works...

12年相伴弹指间心无间.”
— 腾讯 QQ.

jwilzewske

Monday, February 7, 2011

It Was When the Nagging Became Music (1:41) that Love Became Clear to Me 腾讯QQ

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