jwilzewske: athleticism

Showing posts with label athleticism. Show all posts

Sunday, November 27, 2011

Schools above the Ground: Music of the Spanische Hofreitschule Wien

A n impressive performance this morning by Lippizaner horses and their riders at the Spanische Hofreitschule Wien. Such grace and rhythmic artistry by all!

Favory Trompeta / Zimmermann
Pluto Favorita / Oberhauser
Pluto Medea / Burg
Conversano Bellamira / Zimmermann
Maestoso Beja I / Zeithofer
Favory Gidrane / Egger
Pluto Bellornata / Eder
Neapolitano Gaetana / Rothleitner
Conversano Undine I / Burg
Maestoso Basowizza / Zimmermann
Maestoso Calzedona / Eder
Pluto Riga / Rothleitner-Schreiner
Conversano Bonavoja / Zimmermann
Favory Dagmar II / Oberhauser
Maestoso Biondella / Burg
Favory Duba / Zimmermann
Favory Dagmar / Zimmermann
Siglavy Recolta / Rothleitner
Pluto Blanketta / Schreiner
Conversano Darinka / Zimmermann
Pluto Theodorosta / Oberhauser
Favory Wanda / Burg
Siglavy Dubovina II / Zimmermann

I nteresting to note that each rider generally trains and stays with each horse throughout the horse’s life after the horse comes to the SRS at age 4 to 6 years. Interesting, too, to note that the SRS riders are promoted from ‘Eleve/Elevin’ (apprentice/student) to ‘assistant rider’ level after not less than about 4 years.

P resenter Georgina Whittle gave animated and informative introductions to each of the 5 15-minute program segments, ending with the Schulequadrille.

Schubert – Militärmarsch No. 1 in D major
Schantl – Schmiedeck Fanfare
Strauss (sohn) – Wiener Blut
Boccherini – Menuett
Schantl – Andrassy Fanfare
Walch – Pariser Einzugsmarsch
Ziehrer – Schönfeldsmarsch
Fucik – Regimentskinder
Bizet – Aus der Arlésienne Suite No. 2
Chopin – Polonaise No. 1 in A major
Haydn – Aus der Symphonie No. 101
Traditional – Österreichischer Grenadiermarsch
Strauss (vater) – Radetzky Marsch

T he horses’ executions of the patterns in the dressage ring were astonishingly precise in the synchronization to the music. The tempi of the chamber orchestras who performed on the recordings for these exhibitions are chosen to be compatible with the natural/comfortably-feasible velocities and cadences of the horses. Animals that have served in domesticated roles for centuries clearly love to have meaningful, artistically beautiful roles to play—honest jobs. Their expressions show genuine satisfaction—they clearly enjoy their own achievements. In other words, they do it not just for the sugar-lumps, and not just to be compliant with human ‘masters’. It was wonderful, just wonderful to watch this. Pirouettes! Piaffes! Levades! Caprioles! Bravo!

Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Bronfman and Everest: Balakirev’s and Ravel’s Virtuosic Fantasies

In the U.S. the new season of DiscoveryChannel’s documentary, ‘Everest: Beyond the Limit’, is currently being broadcast as an ongoing series of television programs. Each episode shows climbers—young and old ones, highly-skilled ones and relative novices—risking their lives trying to reach the summit of Everest. Not surprisingly, the drama revolves around the steepest, riskiest, most hostile parts of the climb. We viewers feel a [morbid?] fascination with the ever-present possibility of catastrophe—a fascination equal to the admiration we feel for the climbers’ endurance and achievements and successes. The spectacle of the natural beauty that’s connected with the pursuit captivates us, too, as does the diversity of humankind when (self-) driven to these extremes——when (self-) driven to accept such suffering and risk, in pursuit of an extreme, world-class goal.

‘Summits’ of a different kind—musical comparables to Everest—are in store when pianist Yefim Bronfman performs on Friday evening in the Kansas City Friends of Chamber Music Master Pianists Series. The program includes Balakirev’s ‘Islamey’ and Ravel’s ‘Gaspard de la nuit’, among other works. The program requires a capacity to play these technically demanding works—prodigious athleticism—but never decoupled from the capacity to play with interpretive skill. In other words (and to paraphrase Stephen Pettitt, music critic of The Times in London), true virtuosity requires as much poetry as athleticism—or so Bronfman implies, in devising a program like this.

A virtuoso is a musician who can play with panache a score of seemingly impossible technical difficulty... The north face of the Eiger has been conquered. The musician has, once again, triumphed over impossible adversity... A significant part of the musician’s craft has to do with the acquisition—through many hours, many years, of arduous, repetitive practice—of a very particular athleticism, one that enables the accurate playing of a large number of notes within a small amount of time while still making a pleasing sound. Virtuoso playing is a high-wire act, and the sensation it delivers to the audience similar. Surely he’s going to fall off at that speed, we think. When he gets to the other side intact we still think it a miracle. … Surely some dark magical force must be at work to enable such superhuman miracles of execution. … Indeed, is what seems like virtuoso playing necessarily that? Don’t misunderstand me. Even if its purpose is simply to thrill its audience, much as a particularly adroit footballer thrills with a piece of consummate skill, there’s nothing wrong with this showy variety of virtuosity. It’s fun to hear — and see — a violinist skate across a Paganini Caprice now and again. Yet it’s hardly a test of the most insightful musicianship. The player isn’t required to see between the notes, because between the notes there lies precisely nothing. There’s no insight into the human condition. No miracle of contrapuntal logic. Just a musician showing off his or her amazing skills. But maybe we should recognise more generously than we do the exercise of the inconspicuous brand of virtuosity... Virtuosity need not be a matter of playing lots of notes brilliantly at all. The truth is that all serious music worth the playing and singing, no matter how physically simple it might seem, requires a certain virtuosity of the mind. … Although the notes in Mozart might come relatively easily, the contextualising of them, the weighing of them, the nuancing of them, does not. Mozart demands such precision of touch, colour and phrase that an interpretation can fail on the slightest contextual faux pas. Moreover, it’s the performer who must find a personal context, since playing Mozart is no more a matter of choosing one correct way than is playing anything else. Control and freedom need to co-exist in perfect balance, so that the mysterious eloquence of the music is allowed to emerge, the player opening a window on to the soul of a miraculously gifted person. That is true virtuosity.”
— Stephen Pettitt.

In 1928, Ravel wrote, “ ‘Gaspard de la nuit’, piano pieces after Aloysius Bertrand, are three romantic poems of transcendental virtuosity.” Well, Mozart can be technically demanding, too—the two-part cadenza of the opening allegro of K 466, for example. But we usually think of the virtuosity required for Mozart as predominantly interpretive virtuosity. Similarly tough: revealing the emotion in Chopin without falling into cliché, or articulating the voices within Bach without being stilted and suppressing the emotion or creating a fugue-pastiche. Ravel’s ‘Gaspard de la nuit’ imposes demands that are simultaneously interpretive and technical/athletic——hideously, dauntingly so. Aloysius Bertrand’s prose-poems, ‘Gaspard de la nuit: Fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot’, were published posthumously in 1842 and re-issued in 1895, when Ravel’s friend Ricardo Viñes discovered them and introduced them to Ravel. Later Ravel returned to the poems and was captivated by their grotesque, hallucinatory imagery as an evocative subject for a piano composition.

And what about ‘Islamey’—composed in 1869 by Mily Balakirev, then 32 years old? The first theme is a folk dance from the Caucasus. The prevalent augmented seconds lend a south Asian ‘islamic’ aspect. The central section is lyrical and derives from an Armenian folk song. The slow, exotic middle section contrasts with the energetic outer parts. In the third section, Balakirev reprises the thematic material of the opening, culminating in a pyrotechnical coda. ‘Islamey’ is comprised of variations with increasingly, insanely, demonically complex elaborations. (Maybe we should note that Balakirev had a nervous breakdown in 1872, three years after composing this piece?) So our definition of ‘virtuosity’ gets worse: virtuosity is defiant and risky; it tempts fate; it scoffs at danger. It wouldn’t be virtuosic if catastrophe were impossible. You have to work without a safety net! (Balakirev punched out—became a railway clerk for awhile; worked as a school inspector until 1883; then returned to music as Director of the Imperial Chapel and conductor of the Imperial Musical Society, where he remained until retiring in 1895.)

I n music, no less than in athletics, audiences thrill at witnessing exceptional feats of physiological accomplishment, and they fête and reward those who
afford them such thrills.”
— Jane O’Dea, p. 40.

H e did not appeal to the emotions, except those of wonder—for his playing was statuesque, cold, beautiful, and so masterly that it was said of him, with reason, that he would play with the same care and finish if roused out of the deepest sleep in the middle of the night.”
— Sir Charles Halle, review of Thalberg, quoted in O’Dea, p.39.

In ‘Performance as an Extreme Occasion’, Edward Said writes that the contemporary concert is an extraordinary event, highly specialized and totally alienated from ordinary life. Before the mid-20th century performers were often also composers, and listeners were also often amateur musicians. Today the audience is marginalized. The specialized artist so ‘owns’ the work today! The recital has come to be an occasion for the display of extreme ability—on a level that’s totally alien to the listeners, most of whom are neither familiar with the scores nor play any instrument or sing. Their ‘regression of hearing’ (Adorno’s phrase) is manifested in “the listener’s poignant speechlessness as he/she faces an onslaught of such refinement, articulation and technique as almost to constitute a sado-masochistic experience.”

The audience has become more passive and concurrently we get this spectatorly cult of virtuosity. But why has social power recently captivated the imagination of popular culture—and academic anthropologists as well? Surely it’s not just a consequence of fewer practicing amateurs! Is it instead a society-wide reaction to our diminishing power as individuals? Is it a reaction to the decimation of social cohesiveness by the recent emergence of long-tailed, fragmented, web-based culture? Is it a backhanded way to oppose the ‘colonization’ of our selves—that is, an endorsement of and vicarious participation in demonstrations that individual victory over mass culture is still possible—more than gazing at an athlete/artist’s literal victory over physical difficulty?

Stanley Barrett asserts that the answer can be found in the effect of the past 100 years’ warfare throughout the world; the end of old colonialism and emergence of new forms of colonialism under the guise of multinational corporate globalization; the information and technology revolution, mass culture and cultural fragmentation. “The notion of a homogeneous, cohesive, geographically-bounded local culture consisting of people who share a putative common ancestry is obsolete,” he says. The diversity of distinctive cultures and identities “has become constricted, and ‘culture’ has become the new equivalent of ‘race’: difference-as-inferiority; new structures of exploitation and domination; new relations of power saturated with new possibility of inequality and disparities.”

I hope that hearing Bronfman perform on Friday may shed additional light on these issues. Me, I’ll be listening from a moderate elevation, at ‘Base Camp #3’!

T he question of the relationship of the individual person or subject to domination carries ‘resistance’ to the level of consciousness, subjectivity, intentionality, and identity.”
— Sherry Ortner, Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject.

Everest: Cairns (memorials to those who have died on the mountain)

[Mr. Bronfman was born in Tashkent, in the Soviet Union, on April 10, 1958. Bronfman immigrated to Israel with his family in 1973, and made his international debut two years later with Zubin Mehta and the Montreal Symphony. In Israel, he studied with pianist Arie Vardi, at the Samuel Rubin Academy of Music at Tel Aviv University. In the United States he studied at Juilliard and the Curtis Institute—with Rudolf Firkusny, Leon Fleisher, and Rudolf Serkin. He made his New York Philharmonic debut in May l978 and his New York recital debut in January 1982 at the 92nd Street Y. Bronfman became a U.S. citizen in 1989. In 2006, Bronfman partnered with Emanuel Ax in Mozart's ‘Concerto for Two Pianos’ conducted by Lorin Maazel. Early in 2007 he premiered Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Piano Concerto, written for him and commissioned by the New York Philharmonic. In addition to solo recital appearances, he recently served as the Pianist in Residence with the Berlin Philharmonic and completed recordings of all the Beethoven piano concerti and the Triple Concerto with violinist Gil Shaham and cellist Truls Mork with the Tönhalle Orchestra Zürich under David Zinman for the Arte Nova/BMG label. Bronfman is a “Perspectives” artist at Carnegie Hall during this 2007-08 season.]

Friday, December 15, 2006

Undeutlicheit: Acoustic Surprise in Extemporaneous Performance

DSM: Pomerium performed in The Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Kansas City last night. That cathedral sanctuary is beautiful but cavernous—a rectangular shape about 40 meters long, by 20 meters wide, by 20 meters high, with a horizontal-half-cylinder plaster ceiling. It’s a cruciform building plan with a nave crossed by a stubby transept, and the stone altar is in the center of the large nave, raised several steps up from the main floor. The members of Pomerium assembled themselves on those steps in front of the altar. The audience in their winter-time clothing filled the pews in the long part of the nave, so there was an acoustically absorptive-dissipative effect over there. And the upper part of the nave, beyond the transept, was empty pews all the way to the apse—a highly echoic effect in that direction.

CMT: Yes, I was there. Several times during the performance it seemed to me that Alexander Blachly, the director, was re-gauging the reverberation in the cathedral—making adjustments in his direction for attacks, releases, dynamics, and so on, based on his evolving impressions of the acoustics and how the acoustics of the sanctuary was affecting the sound of the various parts and registers. Despite Pomerium having performed in venues like this since the group’s founding in 1972, he and the singers seemed last night to be genuinely and continuously ‘surprised’ by the characteristics of this particular cathedral. I could only imagine that he was wishing he’d had a chance to more extensively check the acoustic properties of the church in advance of the performance!

DSM: Well, there’s checking and then there’s checking. Only a standing ensemble who routinely performs in a familiar, consistent venue really has a chance to truly know and adapt to the strengths and limitations of that venue. What could you do, besides a rehearse in the room? A well-known and basic method for characterizing the acoustical characteristics of a room is to measure the response at a particular microphone position to a brief source of energy, such as a “blank” pistol shot (not usually done in churches) or a hand clap. The use of a deterministic signal (e.g., long-length sequence, sine-wave sweep) is also possible. From the perspective of room acoustic quality, the result usually involves visual inspection of a graphic display of the “room impulse response”, that is, the root-mean-square pressure of the real part of the analyzed signal, measured in decibels as a function of time. A similar sort of graphic can be obtained from a modeling program that uses ray tracing or other techniques for predicting, rather than measuring, the room impulse response. This information can be used for both analyzing the acoustics of a real room or for simulation of the acoustics of a virtual room. You wouldn’t find regular musicians doing that sort of thing—especially not on the budgets that typify chamber music and early music. But, if you had your ‘druthers’, that’s the sort of thing that you’d like to do…

CMT: And then post-analysis of the reflection amplitudes relative to the level of the direct sound would determine their significance in terms of audibility and clarity. Early reflections are well-known to be potentially detrimental to timbre reproduction, speech intelligibility, and the formation of spatial images in a sound field.

DSM: You remember in Bang&Olufsen’s old ‘Archimedes’ project, the hypothesis to be tested in the project was that the interaction between the sound source and the room has an influence on the perceived sound quality (timbre)? The hypothesis was verified in a Round Robin Test (RRT) in different listening rooms, which included as variables the room, the directivity of the source, and position of the sound source in the room. The results showed that the room has a significant influence on 1) the reproduction of timbre in all positions for all sources, 2) timbre differences between different sources in the same position, and 3) timbre differences between the same source in different positions.

CMT: Yes, in the B&O RRT, the purpose of the project was to examine the influence of individual reflections on the timbre or localization of sound reproduced by a single source in a listening room. The setup simulated the physics—mathematically speaking, the ‘transfer function’—of individual reflections in addition to the attenuation due to distance. The simulated transfer functions included the frequency response of the off-axis angle of the reflection path from the original loudspeaker and the frequency dependent attenuation of the reflection from the simulated room surfaces. The first-order floor reflection contributes on an individual basis to the timbre of the sound source for a sound field that has many harmonics—a noise signal, say; or an ensemble with lots of polyphony, many players and parts. An increase in the level of the first-order reflections either from the floor, the left-hand wall or the wall behind the listener will influence the timbre of later-arriving reflections and noise.

DSM: The threshold of detection for timbre and a noise signal seemed in that study to be determined by the spectral changes in the frequency range 500 Hz —2 kHz The threshold of detection for localization of the later reflections and noise seems to be determined by the spectral changes in a frequency region above 2 kHz.

CMT: I was thinking about that last night. Despite the fact that I sat in Row #2 not 10 meters from the center of Pomerium members, the soprano and alto and countertenor voices and their reflections were far more clearly audible than the bass. And as the singers changed positions with almost every piece, we had an unusual—Unintended!—opportunity to observe the effects on the different parts and registers. The baritones seemed to be immune to positional effects. The tenors were, at various points, the hapless victims.

DSM: You, pitying tenors? Hah! Although it’s common to characterize hall acoustics in terms of a single number—reverberation time—there’s much more detail that affects how listeners perceive the music, and how the performers and the director interact with each other. In a large room, listeners hear the direct sound of the performers, followed by many variably-delayed reflections of the sound—bouncing off many different surfaces that are at different distances from the performers and different distances from the listener. Early-arriving reflections within about 50 msec after the direct sound are especially important—our brain tends to associate them with the direct sound, and we perceive it as louder rather than being diverted by a “different” sound. (This was published by Haas in 1951, but it was something others had known about for almost 100 years before that.) Later-arriving reflected sounds are not processed by the brain in this way, and cause one sound (note) to mask or interfere with the next. I think this is partly what was going on among the members of Pomerium last night.

CMT: Lochner and Burger developed the concept of “useful-to-detrimental” sound ratios, where ‘useful’ is the sum of the intensities of direct and early-reflected sounds and ‘detrimental’ is the sum of the late-arriving sounds plus background noise. Obviously, the judgments ‘useful’ and ‘detrimental’ are too simple for music—the ratios were developed initially for studying intelligibility of speech, not music. But other not-so-simple but more appropriate measures have been proposed—ones that take into account some of the values in musical aesthetics. Gade’s ST1 metric, for example. That one is basically a metric that quantifies a musician’s ability to hear himself/herself and maintain a graceful balance of his/her own instrument or voice with that of the others.

DSM: You could see in the singers’ eyes the fact that they were exploring that cave, that sanctuary—discovering as they sang their way through it just what acoustical support the chamber was giving (or not giving) to their performance. The subjective impression you could read in their eyes was “…I need to have some sensation that my voice has filled this chamber … I am trying to find out when my voice has reached the last row of seats … I want to feel that my voice has slapped back to the altar here.”

CMT: Yes, really, what impressed me last night—apart from the beauty that Pomerium achieved in their singing—was their esprit de corps in adapting to the idiosyncratic acoustic properties of the cathedral. The uncertainty of the acoustics—in a chamber where the performers didn’t have the luxury of being able to rehearse and calibrate themselves to the reverb or other effects in advance, and therefore have to discover and adjust their performance on-the-fly—this didn’t daunt them. In fact, it’s a type of “inadvertent improvisation” that’s typical of early-music performances in cathedrals or other historical venues. Some performers are annoyed by it, I know. But, facing the challenges head-on, Pomerium seemed to find the “discovery” aspects of extemporizing their performance in that cavernous chamber illuminating. Sort of like camaraderie in rock-climbing or other “extreme sports”. When successful, this does tend to bring the aesthetic-athletic feeling of “winning”. Maybe early music in period-appropriate settings is inherently ‘extreme’ chamber music!

DSM: So is it the shape of the chamber that matters most? Is it the sheer volume or size of it that matters? Is it the position of the sound source and the position of the listener that dominate these things? Are some particular registers of the instruments or voices affected more than others, based on the geometry of the room and some resonances or harmonics that the room supports? Is it the “people density”—the room’s volume in cubic-meters-per-person?

CMT: All of those things, in various complicated ways. You might want to have a look at one or more of these recent books on acoustical physics and architectural acoustics.