jwilzewske: arranging

Showing posts with label arranging. Show all posts

Sunday, November 25, 2012

Sväng’s Arrangements of Chopin for Harmonica Quartet

W e use a special bass harmonica microphone manufactured by Suzuki. This mic is attached directly to the body of bass harmonica, so it gets really close to the source of the sound. The mic module is as long the instrument, and there are several electric condenser mic capsules in it. The capsules are engineered to have different frequency responses depending on their location in the bass harmonica, according to register. The mic has an built-in preamp operating on battery power. Because the capsules are omni-directional condenser mics, the mic module is very prone to feedback on-stage. It feeds back really easily in the monitors and sometimes also on the main PA. To solve this problem, we use in-ear earbud monitoring and very careful equalization on the bass harp.”
— Sväng.

F or diatonic and chromatic harmonicas, we use handheld Audio Technica ATM350s. The mic is held between player’s left-hand fingers, but there are seldom problems with any handling-related noises. Microvox has its own belt clip preamp with volume control knob.”
— Sväng.

O nly recently I came across Sväng’s 2010 recording of their arrangements of Chopin piano etudes, mazurkas, and polonaises. Sväng—the award-winning harmonica quartet from Finland—was commissioned by the La Folle Journée de Nantes festival to create these arrangements. Eero Grundström and Jouko Kyhälä, two of the group’s members, responded to this challenge with dazzling facility, adapting and orchestrating Chopin in such a way that the ethnic texture and musical intent of the originals are honored and preserved and yet new and interesting possibilities are revealed.

I n much the same manner as Chopin wrote the bulk of his compositions while living on ‘foreign’ soil, so too this work by Sväng feels deeply ‘transnational’.

T he arrangements have the motorics of festival dancing and outlawry, and all the confessional intimacy of close friends. The tuba-like bass lines alternately convey polka-like or gypsy-like feel. We have klezmer/ladino clarinet figures in here, rendered by harmonica with awe-inspiring technique. Story-telling, pneumatic phrasing of free-reeds clasped to emphatic lips, the music hovers between conserving traditional values and surrendering to pressures for assimilation into an alien culture.

T here are sad songs of separation, improvised deployments of non-standard instrumentation in service of musical ideas that hail from another culture. The collection co-opts Chopin, infusing it with Baltic jazz sensibilities.

T he informality of the recordings makes you want to get up and dance and join in song. The arrangements of the mazurkas are all bright and uplifting.

[50-sec clip, Chopin - Mazurka Op. 68/2 arr. Eero Grundström ; (track 1), 2010, 2.4MB MP3]

M ore than anything, the effect is a ‘caravan’ soundscape—like a great kumpania—a nomadic band of families, traveling with horses and sleeping in the rough. The sonic ‘wagons’ in this caravan are elaborately carved and fantastically painted; the outlook of Sväng is heterogeneous, with a strong sense of the whimsical and the absurd.

T he music evokes nostalgia, but nostalgia for what? A return home? No. This is a musical pattern of chronic displacement; of families who have winter digs but are of uncertain origins; of clans who have no permanent place and few possessions. Or maybe you feel a resemblance to the saudades and fatalism of portuguese fado. Or you listen, as you might listen to a ribald uncle telling aphorisms. The fascination in which he holds you derives from his concision, which stuns... and also from his wit, which throws you down. The Disenfranchised and Appropriated become the Appropriators!

T he engineering and production values achieved at Studio Kyhättö do great credit to the arranging and performing on this disc. The sound has great warmth and intimacy, with just enough reverb/chorusing for liveliness. (For harp players who wish to learn about the miking equipment and techniques that Sväng utilizes to such advantage, have a look at their website.)

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Tallis Scholars’ sound, or why 176 KHz/192 KHz HD sampling for choral chamber music is important

I t is known that energy in the 5-20 KHz range can be perceived even when it is 50 dB or more below the main voice spectrum peak. Also, these upper frequencies are conventionally emphasized in the production of popular vocal music. Yet very few studies of the acoustic content of this range have been made. High fidelity recordings were made of singers sustaining vowels at varying levels of vocal effort. A general characterization of the two highest octaves 5-20 KHz was sought. The prevalence of high-frequency energy, the variation of harmonics signal-to-noise ratio as a function of frequency, and the covariation with overall SPL were all highly variable, but several landmark features were identified... [including] clusters of resonances in the regions 7-10 KHz and 13-16 KHz. Harmonic energy was observed to over 16 KHz in strong female voices.”
— Sten Ternström, KTH Stockholm, 2008.

T he Tallis Scholars’ performance in Kansas City tonight was gorgeous. The concert was performed in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, which has a central altar and a wide chancel such that there are myriad acoustic reflections that arrive at one’s ears from multiple directions. Unlike many performance venues where reflected sound for people seated in most locations is predominantly from one or two general directions, Immaculate Conception has quite high reflective efficiency from many of its interior surfaces.

I f you are seated close to the ensemble—not more than, say, 10 meters away from the sound source—the sound projects exaggerated cues of ‘spatiality’, accentuating the atmospheric qualities that are there in the music and the text. This was especially true tonight during the pieces by Arvo Pärt, which have considerable dissonance and frisson amongst the parts, with long sustained notes during which the spatial effects from the direct and indirect sounds arriving at our ears can be fully appreciated.

T aking into account the speed of sound, we can convert energy defocusing in the time domain to “smear” in distance estimation by the ears. Energy spread over ±500 ms is the same as a distance smear of ±15 cm. 96 KS/s keeps almost all the energy within about ±50 ms, or ±1.5 cm. One of the observations people make about 96 KS/s material is that the spatial localisation of everything is very much better than 44.1 KS/s. 192 KS/s is better than this, although very dependent on amp and speaker performance to demonstrate it.”
— Mike Story, 1997.

T he spectrum of frequencies and harmonics returning to your ears in this marble-and-plaster, highly-reflective cathedral has a surprising, pleasing amount of power in the range 4 KHz and up. In an age when noise and unpleasant/irrational/blurred stimuli bombard us every day, the Tallis Scholars’ sound in this sort of brightly reverberant performance space restores our belief in clarity—restores our belief in the fidelity of human communication across large distances in space and time. It is as though high signal-to-noise ratio becomes an aesthetic and cultural emblem of Civilization itself.

W hat I mean is, the sound (with its high S/N and high-end harmonics) not only embodies the enduring and transcendent meaning of the sacred music that Tallis performs and the human spirituality that caused this music to be written so long ago, but it asserts the very possibility of transcendence and persistence—of meaning that lasts beyond one’s own lifetime. After the concert, I go to Gimell Records’ website and download a couple of their 24-bit 176 KHz-sampled Studio Master high-def recordings, to get more of this. What I hear is truly thrilling—as good as the live performance.

C onventional wisdom doubts that humans can hear frequencies much higher than 20 KHz—frequencies higher than that are only perceptible to dogs and other animals. That is foolish—misinformation propagated uncritically since 50 years ago. In recent years, the misconception persists as a reflection of the fact that otolaryngologists’ and audiologists’ primary focus has been on “basic,” “practical” functions such as a person’s ability to hear and accurately understand speech. By contrast, research concerned with aesthetic and musical functioning has received much less attention or funding. [Measurement equipment for studying acoustics of bats in the 20 to 100 KHz part of the spectrum has existed for quite awhile—bat and bird and other animal communication is the subject of scholarly articles in acoustics society journals—but not many researchers studying humans have utilized it. Part of the reason why the freqency spectrum above 4 KHz for vocalizations has been under-studied is that high-speed video strobolaryngoscopy has been unable to detect the very small-amplitude (~0.1mm) vibrations in the larynx. Not surprisingly, if you can’t detect something, then you tend not to study what you can’t detect.]

T here is a common, mistaken notion that frequency response above 10 KHz is only relevant to sibilant “S” or fricative “F” type consonants in speech or singing. Well, that is most definitely not true, as evidenced by tonight’s Tallis Scholars performance! Recent research by Brian Monson, Andrew Lotto, and colleagues at the University of Arizona in Tucson (link below) shows that the frequency spectrum above 8 KHz figures prominently in singers’ sustained-vowel sound imaging—and figures also in listeners’ perception of open vowel sounds. The Pärt works in tonight’s program—and the effects of reverberation in these, in Immaculate’s chancel—especially emphasize intervallic and spatial relationships and transformations, and remind me of a workshop led by John Roeder at the 2003 Mannes Institute. That workshop examined expressive transformational representations for music by Pärt and others, and addressed how transformational representations relate to musical form, and to how musical forms are experienced. Varied repetition as in Pärt amounts to retracing similar transformational pathways among different sets of musical objects, and plumbing the extent and meaning of their similarities. Canon and contrapuntal cyclical spaces are frequent vehicles for enacting or showing transformations, of course, and—to the degree that each of these enactments is individually convincing—uncovering these unexpected connections becomes our primary mode of understanding and enjoying the music.

T onight’s performance and these HD Gimell/Tallis recordings reveal why it’s desirable to have a sampling frequency that is at least 4 times the desired system bandwidth, a process that is known as oversampling. If your goal is to maintain a “flat” response with 6 dB or less roll-off at the upper limit of the band, then a sampling frequency that is more than four times the desired bandwidth is needed—hence, the 176.4 KHz or 192 KHz sampling rates on these Gimell HD Studio Master files.

A problem (for me, at least) with off-the-shelf HD audio equipment is that the sound reproduction chain (player, preamps, EQ, power amps, speakers) can sometimes have too much high-frequency power. It can sound too sibilant—even for vowel sounds—somewhere between 12 KHz and 20 KHz. The spectrum EQ sliders on your playback equipment may not have center frequencies that correspond to wherever that objectionable tweeter “break-up frequency” peak is—so the adjustments you make to cope with it end up impairing the quality of the sound around that peak, essentially leaving you with a sound that's far less than HD. But Bowers & Wilkins speakers are one example of a product that doesn’t have this issue. They’re clear above 8 KHz, and give smooth mid-range and ample bass. Put two 800 Diamonds in front of you, two 802s behind you, plus a couple of DB1s somewhere in the room to cover the bottom bass frequencies. HD music recordings—such as those produced by Tallis and Gimell—have frequencies that exceed 20 KHz and we need speakers (and other components in the reproduction chain) that can accurately render these. The response of the 800Ds is essentially flat between 25 Hz and 33 KHz. Their tweeter “break-up” frequency is way, way out of harm’s way—at about 70 KHz.

R eproducing high frequencies has everything to do with recreating the sensation of sharpness and immediacy—the experience of being near the sound-source, in or near the front row (see Beranek, p. 511). There is not just the issue of rapid attenuation of high-frequency portions of the spectrum as a function of distance, but also the matter of inter-aural time-difference cues.

W e found that robust pitch perception can be elicited by harmonic complex tones with fundamental frequencies below 2 KHz, even when all of the individual harmonics are above 6 KHz—well above the currently-accepted ‘existence region’ of pitch and above the currently-accepted limits of neural phase-locking. The results suggest that perception of musical pitch at high frequencies is not constrained by temporal phase-locking in the auditory nerve but may instead stem from higher-level constraints shaped by [immediately] prior exposure to harmonic sounds.”
— Andrew Oxenham, Christophe Micheyl, Michael Keebler, Adam Loper & Sébastien Santurette, Dept of Psychology, Univ Minnesota, 2011.

I n other words, our ability to perceive (a) spatial relationships—relative locations of different singers or depth and breadth of other sound-sources—and (b) overtones/harmonics generated by the blending of all of the lower frequencies in ensemble (Fourier spectra of mixed signals) ... depends primarily on the high-frequency (short-wavelength) components and on phase-angle relationships between the frequencies as they mingle with each other in the performance space (or the playback environment, for a recording). If the sound-sources are moving (as in an opera; or even for singers who are shifting or rotating slightly on-stage), then the high-frequency components contribute most to our ability to perceive that motion. It’s part of how our brain sorts out “signal” from “noise” in noisy environments.

A nd we get special pleasure from successfully doing this. Clarity that facilitates the listener’s own brain’s processing—which is what the HD 176 KHz/192 KHz-sampled media does for us (see Vorländer, pp. 222ff).

Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck - Hodie Christus Natus Est
John Taverner - Magnificat (A5)
Robert White - Tota Pulchra Es
Arvo Pärt - Magnificat
Arvo Pärt - Nunc Dimittis
Hieronymous Praetorius - Magnificat IV
Robert White - Regina Caeli
Morales - Regina Caeli
Benjamin Britten: Hymn to the Virgin
Giovanni Pierluigi Da Palestrina - Magnificat for Double Choir
Giovanni Pierluigi Da Palestrina - Nunc Dimittis for Double Choir

I very much hope that Phillips and colleagues continue to add aggressively to their HD DVD-Audio recording downloads. There are many of us out here who crave the immersive psychoacoustic experience that only very high sample-rate HD can deliver. The Tallis Scholars’ recordings are [one of the types of—] music that powerfully motivates and intensely satisfies the “immersive HD” desire.

B efore you place an order, Gimell recommmends to try the Test Files they provide for free download, to insure compatibility with your system.

T allis and Gimell recommend using an audiophile-quality Network Music Player to listen to the HD download files. If you own a DVD-Audio player and your PC has a DVD burner, then you can create your own DVD-Audio discs by importing the HD download files into Cirlinca’s DVD-Audio Solo® or other similar software apps. The files are 15 to 18 times larger than the equivalent track with MP3 compression. The Gimell offerings also include multichannel Quadraphonic/Surround Sound formats. Cirlinca’s HD-Audio Solo Ultra® v4.1 software costs just USD$75 for a single-user license— HD-Audio Solo Ultra® is the product that I use. Cirlinca has relationships with record labels including Gimmel, Deutsche Grammophon, and Hyperion, plus orchestras and ensembles including Boston Symphony Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, and many others.

M arketing-wise, when HD recordings such as these from Tallis/Gimell are coupled with correspondingly good playback chain equipment it opens up a promising (and to-date under-developed) market segment for serious music: tech-avid audiences and software developers and gamers whose primary passion is virtual reality (VR) and who have a strong but decidedly secondary interest in music. Many in this segment or niche market may not be musicians per se, and they may not be people who regularly attend ‘conventional’ live concerts. But they crave excellent VR and immersive “worlds” that can capture the heart and mind—as good music can do so effectively. And such people spend quite a lot of money each year on personal “world-building”. Their sort of passionate “sonic-experience-first-music-second” amateurism is, I suppose, not unlike serious HiFi audiophiles of the 1960s or late 50s.

I n summary, Tallis Scholars and Gimell are creating the right kinds of HD content to grow a VR audio market. Maybe more and different marketing, including social media, will be needed to really drive its growth. For now, I’m delighted to have experienced these wonderful recordings that prove once and for all that very high sampling-rates of 176.4 KHz and 192 KHz are actually necessary, to accurately reproduce the nuances that we hear up-close in live performance. The freshness and lightness and clarity of the sound invite the listener “inside” the world that the music conjures—the Studio Master HD files enable listeners to inhabit that world via interactive replay evoking “live” sensations and realism, most vividly when the listener/file-downloader can freely explore and re-explore again and again ad lib. We avid listeners want to rehearse our neurons—not only to re-experience the shivers up our spines, but (through practice) to train our bodies to optimally respond to the aural cues that are in these beautiful HD recordings, and in the next live performance we’re able to attend. Bravo!

Saturday, November 26, 2011

Celebrating Advent & Christmas: Trumpet-Organ Duos

W hile rotary valve trumpets are not strictly speaking historical but rather contemporary brass instruments, trumpet players have in recent years increasingly been using these instruments for all of the Austro-German classical and romantic repertoire from Mozart and Haydn to Bruckner and Mahler... While the use of rotary valve instruments is certainly not historically accurate for the classical and early romantic natural trumpet orchestral literature, many conductors and players seem to feel that the tapered attack and warmer tone quality of these instruments is better suited to the modern performance of natural trumpet parts than the more brilliant and incisive piston valve instrument. There is no question, however, that the rotary valve trumpet is the stylistically appropriate and historically authentic instrument for the late 19th and early 20th century Germanic repertory.”
— David H. Green.

T he Advent program at Annakirche in Vienna last night was excellent.

S tefan Fleißner (trpt) and Reinhard Schobesberger (organ) performed a 1-hour program for a delighted audience that completely filled the pews. The trumpet-organ duo works included arrangements of a number of Marienlieder, plus a variety of contemporary Christmas carols, plus the following:

Clarke – Trumpet Fanfare, Prinz von Dänemark Marsch
Haydn – Andante, Trumpet Concerto in E-flat major
Marcello – Concerto in D minor
Schubert – Ave Maria
Telemann – Trumpet Concerto in D major
Bach – ‘Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring’, from Cantata ‘Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben’, BWV 147
Torelli – Sinfonia in D major

I ’ve been in Wien for 7 days, and have attended the Staatsoper, the Wien Philharmoniker, Wien Kammerorchester, Theater an der Wien opera, and various other music events—and I have yet to see a single piston-valved trumpet. Not one. The only thing that anybody uses over here are rotary-valve instruments. Their timbre is very round, full, and capable of a legato sound like nothing else—not as ‘dark’ as a flugelhorn, though, and not as breathy.

T he rotary-valve keys have a shorter ‘throw’ (about 1 cm) than piston-valved instruments, so fingering of rapid passages may, in general, be a bit faster on these instruments, compared to on a conventional piston-valved trumpet. Other biomechanics advantages are mentioned by trumpet players who prefer these rotary-valve designs, including better symmetry between left-hand/arm and right-hand/arm musculature, in terms of holding the instrument… no brass crook for the right-hand “pinky,” and therefore no big forces on that little finger to get transmitted into the lumbricals of the other fingers of that hand; no tension in the left-hand; etc.

T he legato playing of Fleißner was superb throughout. Gorgeous, both in the sacred music and in the secular pieces.

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Maybe You Would Like Some (bwa-ha-ha!) Halloween Chamber Music

T h E minor sonata... impressive for its impassioned and profoundly grave character. Its very first notes create room for dialog between rising arpeggiated octaves and sighing downward figures. This interplay combines a plebian ‘cantabile’ quality with dramatic outbursts and fermatas of great intensity... eerily piercing melody above nervously racing bass lines is an incomparably tender and profoundly human portrait hovering somewhere between hope, apprehension, and a scarcely definable longing.”
— Anselm Hartinger, liner notes for Viviane Chassot CD.

T he pale F minor Adagio [of the F major sonata, Hob. XVI:23] sounds like an eccentric siciliano, with idiosyncratic bass phrasing and complicated rhythms undermining the movement’s simple, rocking motion... an unimposing but brilliant exploit. The abrupt toccata-like entry... is remarkable for its passionate quality, giving the lie to any good-natured, fatherly image one might have of Haydn.”
— Anselm Hartinger, liner notes for Viviane Chassot CD.

E very year somebody I know asks me to suggest some scary music for them to play, for a Halloween party or other gathering of friends around this time. “Something exotic. Not Bach ‘Toccata and Fugue in D minor’ predictable.” Okay, so how about haunted accordion!

[30-sec clip, Viviane Chassot, Joseph Haydn, Sonata in e minor, Hob. XVI:34, Presto; (track 11), 2009, 1.1MB MP3]

A h, the wistful, waning days of autumn, hours of daylight quickly shortening, your major-key moments vanquished by spooky darkness. How about a swooping, nimble waltz brought up crippled with rubatic, sesquipedalian and perhaps lethal injuries? Rapid sextuplets of flitting bats! Long fermata rests in the spooky wood; then continue on the dank path...

[30-sec clip, Viviane Chassot, Joseph Haydn, Sonata in F major, Hob. XVI:23, Adagio; (track 5), 2009, 1.1MB MP3]

Y our languid puppy innocence cannot protect you from the danger here; it only signals your vulnerability and the juiciness of your jugular. These stretches of tranquil major are like a cinematic tight-shot, hiding the danger that’s nearby. Your lonely ambling treble can take no comfort from the lurker bass-voice. He does not escort you. Instead, he narrates your doom. Bwa-ha-ha!

T hese sonata movements become ‘character pieces’ by way of, shall we say, a “possessed” timbre and texture of which accordion is capable! E minor, the key of flight from reality and spiritual drunkenness. F minor, the key of self-torment; qualms of conscience; introversion; pensiveness; endless worry; self-reproach; wishing you’d never come. The e minor and f minor are perfect keys for Halloween, don’t you think? Far more subtle and sneaking than ... the undead d minor; the ominous g-sharp minor; the sepulchral c-sharp minor; the tragic c minor; the frenzied g minor, so obvious (see links below, esp. Steblin and Schubart).

B orn in Zürich, Chassot studied at the Hochschule der Künste in Bern with Teodoro Anzellotti. She is winner of the Kranichstein Music Prize in 2004 in Darmstadt. She is an energetic champion of new music, working with ensembles such as Contrechamps Geneva, Collegium Novum Zurich, Klangforum Wien und Ensemble modern Frankfurt. She also has in the past 10 years engaged in interdisciplinary projects with writers and dancers—for example, her 2007 collaboration with choreographer Luca Veggetti and the Cincinnati Ballet, with presentations at the Guggenheim Museum, New York. Ms. Chassot presently lives as a freelance musician in Leipzig. She has collaborated with composers such as with Beat Furrer, Michael Pelzel, Toshio Hosokawa, Roland Moser, Henri Dutilleux, Jörg Widmann, Friedrich Cerha, Arman Gushchyan, and Bernhard Lang, and she has transcribed many Baroque and early music works for the accordion. Her interpretations combine historical musical performance practice with the unusual properties of free-reed, which inevitably makes the music appear in a new [and sometimes eerie] light!

Sunday, October 16, 2011

The Darwin Project: Does a Multimedia Biography Need to Have a ‘Center’?

A loose-jointed affair that never really found an aesthetic center.”
— Robert Trussell, Kansas City Star, 15-OCT-2011.

W hen I read Robert Trussell’s review, I thought about how different mindsets and expectations can produce profoundly different experiences for different attendees at a performance. Trussell came to the Friends of Chamber Music premiere of The Darwin Project event with one set of expectations, geared to his commitment to write a review to be published in a daily newspaper on deadline. I came to the event with a different set of expectations--with only a genuine interest, really; that is, with no specific objective or purpose. (I attend lots of events; I only write about some of them, mostly ones that are strictly chamber music per se. This event was theatrical and multimedia, and I only decided to write this blogpost after seeing what Trussell wrote. I feel that Trussell’s words do not reflect what I and others who attended experienced, and that is what prompted me to post about it.)

T hree actors (Gary Neal Johnson, Darwin and others; Kathleen Warfel, Emma Wedgwood (Darwin’s wife) and others; Cinnamon Schultz, narrator) portrayed Charles Darwin’s life story (script by Jeremy M. Lillig and Nancy Cervetti), accompanied by classical music performed by the Daedalus String Quartet, solo pianist Alon Goldstein, and Kansas City Collegium Vocale chamber choir, under the direction of Ryan Board. Above the performers on-stage, historical images and dramatic original nature photography were projected on a large, suspended screen—animations, montages, and stills.

T he musical performances were impeccable throughout. Direction by Kyle Hatley was insightful and dynamic. The actors—especially Gary Neal Johnson—fully inhabited their characters. The imagery was well-chosen to complement and synchronize with the dramatic arc and cadences of the music. The sound reinforcement (which Trussell complained about) was just fine for those of us who were down in the Orchestra section. (Not sure where Trussell was seated Friday night, but it should be recognized that it has only been a few weeks since the Kauffman Center opened, and the people manning the mixing console up in the studio loft are surely still just discovering as they go what the optimal level settings are for various ensemble types, genres, miking configs, and audience sizes.) The staging and deployment of the musicians and actors were thoughtful. The lighting direction was done in a manner that appropriately emphasized the shifts in action and mood. The antiques/props, complete with rare blooming orchids and fossils, lent just the right amount of atmosphere.

T he one issue about which Trussell and I agree is the bit about the small percentage of the audience clapping after each ‘number’. It is vital that—for productions that are comprised of multiple short segments or ‘scenes’, and where piddling, confused applause will disrupt the atmosphere and continuity of the performance—the presenter should instruct the audience before the program begins: ‘Please do not applaud until the end.’ Simple.

B ut, gee, look at what this thing is! And look, too, at the fact that this was its premiere performance! The writing of lives is inherently difficult and complex, and The Darwin Project should, I think, be considered on its merits as biography. The aims of accuracy and commemoration can undoubtedly be helped by multimedia content, to convey what is hard to capture in words. Well-chosen music and images can clarify and intensify the characterization of the multiple milieux that affected the person the biography is about, over a long (73-year) and illustrious lifetime. The agnostic and Unitarian and Anglican excursions in Darwin’s changing (‘evolving’?) religious/spiritual thought, were elegantly and empathetically suggested by the diversity of the music selected for The Darwin Project:

Anonymous - Antiphon for the Feast Day of St. Albert, Patron Saint of Science
Mendelssohn - String Quartet No. 2, Op. 13, adagio, allegro vivace
Debussy - Preludes, Book 2, ‘Canope’
Schumann - Fantasiestücke, Op.12, ‘Des Abends’
Schumann - Fantasiestücke, Op.12, ‘Aufschwung’
Byrd - Mass for 5 voices, ‘Gloria’
Ravel - Miroirs ‘Une Barque sur l’oceane’
Haydn - String Quartet in C major, Op. 33, No. 3, allegro moderato
Chopin - Prelude in B-flat major, Op. 28, No. 21
Debussy - Preludes, Book 2, ‘Les tierces alternées’
Des Prez - Inviolata
Chopin - Prelude in A major, Op. 28, No. 7
Janácek - 1.X.1905 Sonata ‘Smrt’
Mendelssohn - String Quartet No. 6 in F minor, Op. 80, allegro vivace assai
Vaughan Williams – ‘See the Chariot at Hand’ (cantata from ‘In Windsor Forest’)

N o. Despite the fame of ‘Origin of Species’ and the reductionistic way in which modern popular society regards who he was and what he did, Darwin did not have just one lifelong aesthetic or ideological ‘center’, and it would be wrong for a biography of him to portray him as if he did. Lillig’s and Cervetti’s quotations and adaptations of Darwin’s writings amount to a kind of verbal portraiture—well-paced; at times humorous; a fine antidote to the monolithic ‘evolutionist-naturist’ caricature that exists of him in popular society. The music likewise opposes one-dimensional caricatures of the man. The production informs the viewers-listeners and invites the audience to think and reflect and imagine and feel and understand and apply, as any good biography should do.

I n fact, the matter of opposing claims and methods of science versus the imagination are a recurring issue in modern discussions of biographical methods. Serious biographers usually agree that their conclusions, while grounded in facts and a scholarly, scientific process of sifting and evaluating evidence, are at bottom ‘intuitive’ in much the way that medical diagnosis is ‘intuitive’: the biographer perceives meaning and reaches conclusions in a high-dimensionality, time-varying set of data; the biographer reliably finds patterns and takes decisions in the face of extreme complexity and contradictions and counter-factuals.

T he facts of his life become the most interesting—and perhaps the most ‘true’—just at the edge of mystery.”
— Jay Martin, commenting about the process of writing the biography of Henry Miller.

R eading all the the extant materials, being open to all points of view on the subject of the biography—these are just prologue to the biographer’s purpose, which is to intuit accurately what it all means and express that in a convincing and authentic way to others, even if the story is irreducibly complex and the intuitions do not reveal just one ‘center’. The Darwin Project succeeds beautifully as multimedia biography of a very remarkable, complex person.

P .S.—You may especially like the Hamilton and Rollyson books (links below).

P .P.S.—Lee Hartman's arrangement (for SATB and string quartet) of Vaughan Williams’s ‘See the Chariot at Hand’ was superb... warm, very moving with end-of-life atmospherics, beautiful orchestration, and a balanced and emotionally-fitting concluding work for this production. Bravo!

Friday, April 8, 2011

Musorgsky’s Dream Worlds: I Musici and Natasha Turovsky’s Animations

W hen Victor Hartmann, an artist, designer and sculptor, died of a heart attack in 1873, his close friend Modest Mussorgsky was devastated and slipped into a depression aggravated by his alcohol problem. Vladimir Stasov, a music critic and friend of both Mussorgsky and Hartmann, arranged an exhibit of about 400 works of the deceased artist, hoping that this tribute might relieve Mussorgsky's depression. Thanks to Stassov, Mussorgsky was inspired to create a suite of ten musical portraits for piano, but it did not achieve popularity in any form until Maurice Ravel orchestrated it in 1923. ... Two years ago, Yuli Turovsky made his own arrangement for string orchestra. Each musical portrait of the original work is based on one of Hartmann’s paintings, though the visual element has been reinterpreted in surrealistic terms by Turovsky’s daughter Natasha.”
— Robert Markow, program notes.

K nowing that most of the paintings by Victor Hartmann which inspired his friend Mussorgsky were lost, I asked Natasha to paint new pictures, pictures inspired by the music, just as the music had been inspired by the pictures. After this was done, the next idea was to make these pictures and their personages ‘dance’ with the music. In this ‘symbiotic’ form, the audience will listen as well as ‘see’ the music.”
— Yuli Turovsky.

P ossibly the best, most compelling imagery to accompany music ever, these animated paintings [mainly watercolors] by the talented artist/violinist Natasha Turovsky, daughter of I Musici’s founder, Yuli Turovsky that were projected during their performance in Kansas City tonight.

I was reminded of Guerino Mazzola’s and Stefan Müller’s work on music information retrieval (MIR), semantic matching, and visualizations of music vector-fields with his Corebounce and EspressoRUBETTE® software (2003, pp. 920ff)... a set of notes comprising a score S, a corresponding performance P, and the associated set of field vectors F.... The animations reminded me of Mazzola’s so-called ‘Inverse Performance’... how expressive shapes can be extracted from performance and can then be re-represented in other media.

M odest Musorgsky began with a combination of title and then music... It is natural that anyone listening to music probably will have images going in his or her mind. Painting these pictures simply captured some of them for me, our version of images, in a concert. I would listen thousand times to the same piece... some are inspired more by ideas, some more by actual music color... At that point, when I was doing these paintings, there was no question about [the possibility of] doing something more with a painting [an extended opportunity to amend and enhance it]. But when I was asked now to do animation, then I thought, okay, now it [conventional painting] is not enough. If I would have known in advance the details of the performance or animation production that [Yuli] had intended, probably I would have done the paintings differently; I would have made different pictures. It is okay. In animation, I thought, how to make this stand out, since this character is very small? I did maybe ten drawings of a rooster... which became all 10 into one animated rooster that moves around on the screen. It is like a ballet: this movement, you try to see how the image, how this particular part of the image corresponds to [signification in—] the music... It’s not just animation; it’s not just music: they became ‘one’.”
— Natasha Turovsky, NPR interview with Laura Spencer, 06-APR-2011.

S ocial pressures shape anybody’s personal expression, composers maybe more so than others. But while both internal and external issues imbue the composition with its material and color, meaning does not imply pathology. Handel’s ‘O, Sleep, why dost thou leave me’ doesn’t necessarily mean that Handel was an insomniac or obsessing over his sleep patterns. Writing ‘Kindertotenlieder’ wouldn’t necessarily mean that Mahler was morbidly depressed, even though this was composed to memorialize the death of a friend’s child.

S o the message sent does not necessarily define the sender. And yet, “poiesis is concerned with the individual condition of the work’s creator as a consequence of the history [of the work’s] development as well as with the role of the broader frame of the work... neither the frequency of the vibration nor the envelope of its amplitude is uniquely determined... In fact, Fourier’s Theorem only states uniqueness of the coefficients if the fundamental period is given; but the latter is not automatically inscribed: such parameters are part of poiesis... the way of making the sound, not a ‘neutral’ sound-object.” [Mazzola, p. 12]. Here we have in Yuli Turovsky’s chamber orchestral arrangements of Musorgsky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ Natasha Turovsky’s ‘inscribing’ us, just as she was herself ‘inscribed’ by this music. Truly beautiful.

B y 1871 [age 32] he was already becoming irrelevant, and he sensed this. His intensifying depression made him fair game for anyone who might seem to have an answer, and he fell under the influence of a soothsayer who turned him from a freethinker into a fervent believer... For four years he withdrew completely from Russian musical life...”
— David Brown, p. 204.

T he sync’ing of the animated montages to the orchestra’s playing was flawless, crisp, elegant. The moods of the Natasha Turovsky’s paintings (and Gäel Hollard’s choreography and digital renderings and animations of the paintings by Hollard and Marie-Josee Auclair and Jean-Philippe Traore) embody the best of atmospheric aesthetics in animated film production. The imagery powerfully evokes the fantastical hallucinations, the playfulness, the vivid dreams and nightmares, the bipolar depression, the impressionability of Musorgsky near the end of his short life—evokes his inertness leading to dependence on others to get him to act, alternating with extreme agitation. The paintings are edgy and have wonderful visual 'depth'... they are at times sweet but not sentimental. Turovsky’s brush and pen and charcoal techniques are varied, capturing and keeping the audience’s attention and lending dramatic emphasis to the sonic gestures and arc of the music—exciting yet coherent throughout the work, despite the considerable variety in technique and visual composition.

W hen many struggle to integrate light and imagery with serious music, Ms. Turovsky and Mr. Hollard, Ms. Auclair, and Mr. Traore succeed. If you wish to have an iconic example of an approach that works, combining imagery and music, this is it. Bravo!

T abaimo’s installations clearly propose a notion and position of implicated ‘spect-actorship’ for viewers, where ‘implicated’ designates simultaneous participation and immersion—physical, political, theoretical, poetic... ‘Spect-actorship’ captures our strangely split positionality of being a part of this installation—we act like, and even become, additional characters in the animated film... the work's mechanical reproduction of a double reflexivity: the reflexivity inherent in the artist’s implicit conception of the virtual image and creative evolution as animation; and the reflexivity of the animated film as an art that is endlessly fascinated by its own elastic capacity for world-making.”
— Steven Brown, p. 209.

F rom the back room the sound of plates crashing and uncorking of bottles was to be heard. Each time Musorgsky emerged, he was becoming ever more ‘tight’. After supper the concert began, where Musorgsky would appear already completely ‘plastered’, as accompanist and solo performer. He played his own compostions with amazing perfection, making a stunning impression... At this time he was suffering from frightening hallucinations so often observed in alcoholics. Leonova reported on this in her recollections.”
— Sergey Rozhdestvensky, Univ. St. Petersburg Dept. of History, passage from Keldish & Yakovlev, 1932, ‘Musorgsky k pyatidesyatoletiyu so dnya smerti’, quoted in Brown, p. 352.