jwilzewske: aesthetics

Showing posts with label aesthetics. Show all posts

Saturday, February 11, 2012

Konstantin Lifschitz: Ich bin’s; ich sollte zu träumen (I’m the one; it is I who should dream on this)

Konstantin Lifschitz, image ©Felix Broede

M usical ideas are such combinations of tones, rhythms, and harmonies as to demand/inspire a thoughtful treatment like the main theses of a philosophical tract. [Any non-trivial musical idea inevitably] raises a question—sets up a problem that, in the course of the piece, has to be answered, resolved, ‘carried through’. It has to be carried through however many contradictory situations are plausible; it must be developed by deducing however many inferences there may be from what it postulates; it has to be checked—has to be proved to be true, like a mathematical theorem. And all this, if you are successful, will lead to a conclusion—a ‘pronunciamento’, a fresh new certainty—a beautiful new discovery [that speaks].”
— Arnold Schoenberg, ‘Beauty and Logic in Music,’ unpublished manuscript.

T he quote above was one we saw in the Arnold Schönberg Center archives, when we visited Vienna a couple of months ago. I was reminded of this insight of Schoenberg’s during Bach’s complete two- and three-part Inventions (Sinfonias), performed by Konstantin Lifschitz last night. Interleaved Invention-Sinfonia-Invention-Sinfonia as they were, in ascending chromatic sequence (as opposed to chronologically; as opposed to rank-order by pedagogic difficulty in Wilhelm Friedemann’s Klavierbuchlein), the pieces led us in the audience to some new insights.

S ome inventions, performed by many at faster tempi, became intense meditations on color and timbre. Other ones, often performed with wider rubato variation, became motoric illustrations of individual conviction and duty. Consider the editorial suggestions of the Alfred or others’ modern editions; consider the ur-texts of Bach himself; but make up your own mind—find your own true story. Which is what Konstantin Lifschitz did for us so wonderfully and spontaneously last night.

T hese inventions began as [mere] ideas, that Bach conceived [in an improvisational, impromptu manner] and wrote as teaching tools. The complexities of the three-voice Sinfonias make the two-part Inventions seem [simple] when you play them side-by-side.”
— Cynthia Siebert, founder, Friends of Chamber Music.

I t’s a joy to hear the unfiltered account of a friend’s or lover’s dream. We feel touched and, not just ‘connected’, but also more ‘human’ for the shared experience... ‘included’, ‘alive’. We are included in the ‘action’, and we feel the curiosity and the moral duty to engage with the friend who is relating this dream to us. We sense the truth that arises from the honest synapses firing without the interpolation of an ego in the process. The purity of (absence of—) motives and the transparency count for a lot.

I st das möglich? Denkt ihr, man kann sich wirklich mit einer musikalischen Idee durch einen Traum verlieben, bzw. kann man tatsächlich träumen, verliebt sich in die musikalische Idee zu sein? Habt ihr sowas schon mal geträumt?

[Is this possible? Do you think you can really fall in love with a musical idea in a dream, or dream you can actually love to be in the musical idea? Have you dreamed something like this before?]”
— Milton Babbitt.

Thursday, June 16, 2011

David Hyun-Su Kim: Schumann’s ‘Davidsbündlertanze’, Op. 6

A lready as a young student he [Schumann] had evolved a philosophy of history, a systematic framework for the evaluation of temporally discrete cultural phenomena. This historical outlook pervades Schumann’s writing at every turn... [a Schlegel-like, Heine-like] faith in a future informed by the spirit of progress....”
— John Daverio, p. 118.

D avid Hyung-Su Kim’s performance of Schumann’s ‘Davidsbündlertanze’, Op. 6, in one of the ‘fringe’ events in the Boston Early Music Festival yesterday was idiomatically perfect—beautifully embodying the spirit and musical intentions of this Romantic classic. Stylistically, one can sense in his dramatic playing some of the influences of Robert Levin and other of David’s piano teachers. David is currently a DMA doctoral candidate at New England Conservatory of Music.

G ood interpretations of the Davidsbündlertänze reveal the essentials of Romantic Period aesthetics and philosophy: Insight derived from personal experience of fragments of life, Witz (humor/wit; provisional exploration; ad hoc reconsideration; fantasy/conjecture), and impulsive movement/arabesque. There is a Romantic ‘assuredness’ that the views you hold of what is true in the world are really true, absolutely true and immutable. Not ‘omniscient’, just ‘certain’, that’s all. Kim’s sensitive, emotionally expansive pianistic expressions achieve this very thing.

T he ‘Ungeduldig’ was as it should be: ‘impatient’, with the instrument’s hammer felts voiced not too hard, not too bright. The ‘Einfachs’ are just that: simple and earnest. We got a very cool, nocturne-like ‘Nicht schnell’, brooding, as though pondering the night sky. Kim’s ‘Zart und singend’ sang with great tenderness. ‘Mit gutem Humor’ did, in fact, amuse, and ‘Aus der Ferne’ was delivered with the right amount of detachment, remoteness… a sort of distance that evokes reminiscence with a touch of regret. David has a fabulous technique, plus fine insight into the composition and its inner motivations. Highlight of my day!

T he instrument itself, a 6.5-octave Viennese design made by R.J. Regier, was also a highlight—its rich, round tone perfect for this literature and for this intimate recital setting. (What is that little brass bell, though, over on the left side? I have not seen one of those before.)

N ote: This recital was performed in one of the small, carpeted first-floor rooms of the Goethe Institut in the Bay Bay area of Boston. The rectangular shape of the room and the tall ceiling height add to the acoustic challenges. In this instance, the fortepiano was positioned a few centimeters from one wall, in a stretch of the room where the wall has an irregular contour with a 25-centimeter-deep indentation/recess. Hardwood parquet flooring was the surface immediately below most of the instrument’s soundboard; only a little of the upper register was over carpet. The result was a surprisingly good sound, ample for the audience of about 100 people. If ever I were faced with a performance environment similar to the one at Goethe Institut, I would try to replicate that fortunate, highly-forgiving arrangement of the space!

Friday, January 21, 2011

Bell & Haywood: Balletics of Romantic Sonatas

Codified by 1840, the [sonata] form was now no longer a free development of stylistic principles, but an attempt to reach greatness by imitation of classical models. The results, at their best, aspire toward a classical ideal that had become unpopular by the mid-nineteenth century.”
— Charles Rosen, p. 394.

S onata norms remained in place as ‘regulative’ ideas throughout the 19th Century, even as the who sonata genre, with its various options, was continuously updated, altered, and further personalized with unforeseen accretions, startling innovations, and radical deformations... The ‘de-energizing transition’ and suppression of the medial caesura in, say, Schubert or Brahms, surely emerged from the precedents of the ‘blocked medial caesura’ coupled with ‘expanded caesura-fill’ in Haydn and Mozart.”
— James Hepokoski & Warren Darcy.

S aturday’s performance in the Harriman-Jewell Series will be given by Joshua Bell (Violin) and Sam Haywood (Piano).

Brahms: Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2 in A major, Op. 100
Schubert: Fantasy for Violin and Piano in C major, D 934, Op. 159
Grieg: Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2 in G major, Op. 13

T hese works are ones of tremendous lyricism, and showcase the narrativity of song and dance for creative structure. In fact, the pieces are unusual as sonatas go—unusual for the egalitarian ways that the violin part and the piano part interact with each other. It is not a one-sided virtuoso violinistic ego trip. For example, in the second movement of Grieg’s violin sonata Op.13 we have the secondary theme introduced by the piano without the violin! There is an innovative parity between the parts’ roles that's unusual—dance-like, ballade-like, Nordic.

T here is a manneristic thread that runs through the Op. 13 sonata, maybe deriving from Grieg’s Norwegian nationalism?

B ut in each of these three pieces we have structures of contrast, varied repetition, and symmetry-making and symmetry-breaking—specific patterns can be found in the arrangement of the lines. Between the piano and the violin we have “melodico-textural” networks of iterated phrases that embody the unfolding of stories.

F or Grieg ... the variation form may have been tied to the idea of strophic repetitions in a folk song. But in Grieg’s Ballade the variations make such a dramatic progression that one wonders whether to understand the work as a new venture ... in suggesting both the form of the song and the progression of the story.”
— James Parakilas, p. 159.

T rends in sonata procedure in the Romantic period are either (1) elaboration of sonata form beyond the 17th Century norms, or (2) exploration of tonal designs, both within sections and across entire movements. As noted by Carissa Reddick (link below), both of these Romantic trends result in “fusion” of forms, which occurs when a single section of music simultaneously fulfills more than one formal function. The breach of norms gives those sections innovative functions and powers, and often thwarts listeners’ expectations. The innovative tonal designs transgress the boundaries between the sonata’s formal divisions or thematic rotations (exposition, development, recapitulation, and coda), creating rotational overlaps.

I n Grieg’s Sonata, Op. 13, there are fusions of Transition and Re-transition within the Primary theme, fusion of Recapitulation and Development functions within the Transition [i, mm. 256-271; iii, mm. 86-98], fusion of the Development within the Secondary theme [i, mm. 169-183] and a variety of other novel maneuvers. In addition there are what Reddick terms ‘Multiply-Rotational Development Divisions’ and ‘Half-Rotational and Non-Rotational Development Divisions’ [iii, mm. 105-124; iii, mm. 273-305].

S o, composers active in the Romantic era took sonata form as a point of departure only, co-opted it as a vehicle for Romantic politics, and plied it with Romantic harmonies. The result is a progressive ‘dialogic form,’ in which a sonata was no longer the conservative, status-quo-reinforcing thing it used to be but instead became a ‘process’ in an open-ended dialogue [Hepokoski & Darcy, p. 10], among performers who may, as in this case, regard each other as equals.

R eddick’s taxonomy of rotations (half-rotations, double-rotations, triple-half-rotations, episodic reversals and flips) evokes something of the imagery of balletic movements (échappé sauté or jeté entrelacé) or diving figures (612B / armstand forward somersault pike).

P erfect, it seems to me, for the physicality of Bell and Haywood, whose refined kinesthetic sense can reach artistic heights visually as well as musically. Looking forward to Saturday night’s performance.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

The Importance of [a modest number of—] ‘Wrong’ Notes

Authenticity is not the only quality for which a performance might be valued. Where a relatively inauthentic performance is highly valued, it is valued in spite of its ‘inauthenticity.’ For example, Schnabel’s recorded performances of the Beethoven sonatas are well regarded despite the wrong notes that they contain.”
— Stephen Davies, p. 47.

Beethoven marks ‘fugue in 3 voices with some license’, which is a serious understatement [Sonata No. 29 in B-flat Major, Op. 106, “Hammerklavier”] and which I read as something of a joke: the joy of the joke being the extent to which Beethoven will simply flaunt the very idea of a fugue. Though the fugue subject begins with a series of consonant, descending thirds (taking up an obsessive theme of the piece as a whole), pretty soon its running sixteenth notes have a willful tendency to encounter all sorts of dissonant neighbors, and these ‘wrong notes’ become a subject for the composer’s perverse and inventive discourse. Beethoven’s ‘play’: causing all kinds of collisions of one dissonant neighbor with another and then miraculously making sense of them: this is the playful creation and resolution of chaos.”
— Jeremy Denk.

I was recently checking to see how my friend, pianist Victor Goldberg, is doing with his Asian tour. As part of my online “checking up,” I looked at his Twitter feed, which I had not done in awhile. There was not much in the way of updates about his performances in Hong Kong or Taiwan or Thailand in there, but there was this little tweet from last June, which I’d not previously seen.

Are wrong notes that important?”
— Victor Goldberg, Twitter, 23-JUN-2010.

N umber one, Victor plays exceedingly well, with wonderful expression and technique. He does not produce wrong notes—at least not many of them, and especially not many of them in the context of the difficult, finger-challenging repertoire he performs. His tone remains consistently focused, clear, and centered throughout the range. The pulse remains secure, and his rhythms are accurate for the style. Dynamic levels are consistent, emotionally coherent, and an accurate interpretation of the style. Phrasing remains always consistent and sensitive to the style. Expressiveness manifests creative nuance and style, remaining responsive not only to the score but to other performers and the audience. Articulation has secure attacks, and all markings (staccato, legato, slur, accents, etc.) are executed accurately. In short, anyone who has heard Victor play would be astonished by his Tweet from last June.

N umber two, Victor’s recoveries from any notes he misses are invariably graceful and, if anything, the few misses lend in an admirable way to the overall humanity of his performances. We do not attend to hear damned automatons or computers perform. We come to hear a real human, and to vicariously experience our own humanity more fully through what that dear human does.

N umber three, we know both the quotidian and the sometimes noble, poignant origins of “mistakes” in elite performers; we understand how they happen, at least those of us who have ever studied music do. And we actually want to witness them. We love virtuosic spectacle, yes, but, more than that, we glimpse first-hand in the virtuosos’ limits and accomodations and recoveries from occurrences around those boundaries some important dimensions that we have and that all people, past, present, and future have.

N umber four: authenticity is not conditioned upon enslavement to the urtext. In any good performance, we witness improvisatory but at the same time fully consequential music. We see the person’s full absorption as it unfolds in front of us. And, given the finiteness of human attention and other capacities, the “full absorption” is not evenly spread across all of the myriad elements to be attended to. As a result, we witness the highly personal irregularities of the elements that receive extra attention, while other less-attended elements recede toward the boundaries where the so-called “mistakes” happen. A lot of what we call “depth” in performance arises via these core-vs-boundary processes. Again, it is part of the beauty.

N umber five: the composer created these risks in the score. In some cases the risks were put there deliberately, in full recognition of what awkwardnesses under the hand (or for the voice, etc.) would do to the performer—some of Rzewksi’s writing is diabolical in this way—and in other cases it was happenstantial/incidental. But the aesthetic whole—the unity of the score’s architecture, replete with its hazards and insurmountable challenges—is what we seek.

N umber six: We can measure the “mistakes” and statistically model the ‘reconstruction error’ or fidelity to the score. In principle, we could study the situations in which the reconstruction error density is high and yet our emotional and aesthetic reception of the performance is also [paradoxically] high.

F irst, we record the occurrences of deviations from the score and transform them from the time-domain to the event-frequency-domain. Then y_t is the power spectrum of those deviations. And we calculate the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence (see Lee and Seung 1999)… the 50-cent equation up at the top of this blogpost.

F or those who are especially interested in these issues, have a look at the paper by Maria Ruiz, Hans-Christian Jabusch, and Eckart Altenmueller at Hanover and Dresden (link below).

N umber seven: some of what we hear as “wrong” is not wrong after all, even if the performer herself/himself obsesses over it.

W e first have to diagnose the right notes as ‘right’ before we can say that any of them are wrongly played—‘diagnose,’ rather than merely find: no longer does the fact that a composer puts down a C on paper [or in Finale or Sibelius, etc.] necessarily mean that s/he cares two hoots if a C sharp is played instead, or a C-semi-sharp for that matter. And even if s/he thinks s/he cares, one takes leave to doubt the profundity of his/her worries when, in rehearsal, one notices that s/he does not perceive the difference between the alleged right note and the wrong note s/he gets instead.”
— Hans Keller.

E vents remaining in Victor Goldberg's Asian tour include:

Masterclass, City Hall, Hong Kong - 20-JAN
Masterclass, Hong Kong University - 21-JAN
Concert, Discovery College, Hong Kong - 23-JAN

B est wishes, Victor. See you back in the U.S. at the end of the month.

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Renée Fleming Sings Brad Mehldau’s ‘Rilke: Book of Hours’

R enée Fleming’s performance last night in Kansas City was excellent.

[50-sec clip, Renée Fleming, Brad Mehldau, ‘Rilke: Stundenbuch’, ‘Ich liebe dich, du sanftestes Gesetz’, 2006, 1.8MB MP3]

T he singing was gorgeous. The piano accompaniment by Bradley Moore was superb.

I had not previously heard the Brad Mehldau composition, “Songs from Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘Book of Hours’.” The ‘Love Sublime’ CD on which these were recorded was released in 2006. A disturbing thing for those familiar with Rilke’s poetry is the Anita Barrows-Joanna Macy Rilke translation used by Mehldau for these texts. Barrows and Macy convey mainly adulation and bended-knee piety, and strike out Rilke’s struggling with the problem of theodicy and anger towards a God who allows/causes suffering.

I n the first song (Mönchischen Leben #18, ‘Ich liebe dich, du sanftestes Gesetz’), Rilke’s God as ‘the [maleficent] forest from which we never escape’ is transmuted by Barrow and Macy into a uterine ‘forest that always surrounded us’.

T hroughout Barrow’s and Macy’s “translation” there is wholesale, highly-politicized editing going on. They delete major portions of some stanzas (?where they find that Rilke’s original text does not jibe with their own church’s teachings or their own personal religious views), as in the second song (from Pilgerschaft #3, ‘Ich bin nur einer deiner Ganzgeringen’). Likewise in the third song sung by Fleming last night (Pilgerschaft #31, ‘Und seine Sorgfalt ist uns wie ein Alb’). The fourth song (Pilgerschaft #32, ‘Lösch mir die Augen aus: ich kann dich sehn’) completely renovates Rilke’s sense of God as an insurmountable, lethal burden... into a maniacal, martyrous masochist-terrorist’s self-immolation ritual, suicide-bomber-style. Yikes!

Rilke, Stundenbuch, Mönchischer Leben, #18

L ike all good art songs, Mehldau’s writing affords the vocalist wide latitudes for rhythmic phrasing and melodic interpretation, and Fleming does not disappoint. Her ear ‘colonized’ by the buggy Barrows-Macy translation, she is compelled to become a ‘medium,’ clairvoyantly assaying what Rilke meant. She takes the words she is given, and turns them musically into something far closer to authentic Rilke. To hear her sing this is like hearing an alchemist at work, changing base metals into gold.

O f course, there can be no ‘last word’ in translation or poetical hermeneutics, and, equally well, there can hardly be a ‘first word’ either. Hermeneutics is a process, an ongoing reaction to questions about the subjectivity and finiteness of understanding. Mehldau’s composition, then, amounts to an elaborate invitation—to the singer, to the pianist, and to the audience—to (re-)examine the text and decide for themselves what it means, or whether this account of what Rilke wrote is authentic or not.

M any years ago, Gadamer came up with the term ‘philosophical hermeneutics’; here, Mehldau leaves it to Fleming and to us to resolve. Faced with an English translation so very far from what Rilke actually wrote, Fleming concentrates on the question of what happens to us when we ‘understand’. Suffice to say, very few singers are up to a challenge of this sort...

W hat I mean by all this is: hearing Rilke ‘in his own voice’ is important. An honest and genuinely gifted translator can achieve this, even with poetry. It is an altruistic act, this setting aside of one’s own prejudices and temptations in devotion to a poet’s own unique (and sometimes disagreeable—) expressions.

A translator should never be an ‘editor’ in the way that Barrows and Macy allowed themselves to be, co-opting a text and bollocks with the truth. It’s about ‘transparency’.

W hat else? Mehldau offers an imaginative, dramatic, and widely-varied use of sound and silence, which Fleming takes full advantage of. Some links below, on sound art and acoustic ‘territories’ as compositional devices, may interest you in this regard.