jwilzewske: beethoven

Showing posts with label beethoven. Show all posts

Thursday, May 10, 2012

Andreas Haefliger: Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 2, Op. 19, in Sydney

W ithout doubt, there is something you are doing profoundly right in your interpretation as a soloist when a yellow Labrador retriever in Row 1 listens attentively, head raised and up on her/his elbows, throughout your Beethoven concerto performance. (I do not know whether the same holds true of cats, except possibly Siamese—a point about which Christopher O’Riley and other cat-owning pianists may be able to comment.) Labradors are kindly, good-natured, and take a lot of things in stride. As a breed, the Labrador is notable for being steady-tempered but does display impatience with human pretension in all its manifestations. If she finds your expressions burdensome, the Labrador will sigh or adjust her posture, clunking her bony forearms on the wood floor loudly. But Andreas Haefliger’s account of Beethoven’s second piano concerto was true enough, and the Labrador looked thoroughly pleased as Andreas took his bows. We were well pleased too. (The probity of the cellos was periodically a matter of some doubt, though.)

T his concerto offers many dramatic moments—some Mozartian figures; some prodigious cadenzas that Beethoven only wrote down when the piano part was published in 1809, because up until that time he used the piece as a promotional vehicle for his own career as a concert pianist and did not wish other pianists to co-opt the work or eclipse him. And in that regard the interaction in this concerto between the soloist and the ensemble has been the subject of considerable scholarly writing—some authors opining that Beethoven had not by the early date of this concerto’s birth yet mastered the composerly skills of constructing the arcs that define soloist-orchestra narrative.

B ut Haefliger takes this material and masterfully does with it what can only be viewed as authentic completion of Beethoven’s meaning and intent. He knows how to take the measure of the concertmaster and first violins behind him, and gaze at the oboes as they speak, and then deliver his own lines in a manner that the others accept as truthful—an honest account to which they must respond in-kind. The brass, characters not known for tender sensibilities, wait for the completion of Haefliger’s pianissimo figure, a deep contemplation evident in the piano’s right hand, and are made visibly more humane and introspective by it. Haefliger finishes a burst of activity, leans backward, left hand falling to his side, right hand rising in a flourish, and looks earnestly to his left at the orchestra to see what their answer will be. He imparts a magisterial, conductorly relish to the meaning; to use a cinematic or theatrical phrase, he ‘pulls focus’ beautifully onto and off of himself in a way that makes the ‘character’ of the solo part believable and engaging and which enhances the overall flow of the story, including the part of it that belongs to the ensemble to tell.

T he cadenza was full of bravado; the recitative passages, aptly confessional. When the tempo is slow enough, the shorter notes were played softer, without loss of clarity... which, as I understand, is a ‘bebung’ clavichord technique that Beethoven sometimes used in his piano writing for dramatic expressive purposes. In fact, the whole performance yesterday embodied the best qualities of excellent drama and interplay between soloist and orchestra. Bravo!

I was consumed with sheer terror. How, how, how? How does this start? The silence lengthened, ominously. When you’re on-stage, a few seconds of silence feels like an eternity. This was considerably more than a few seconds, and I felt it pressing down on my shoulders. Finally, in panic, I had an idea: maybe if I just put my fingers up on the keyboard, they’d know what to do. I lifted my hands slowly to the keyboard. The audience was surely, by this point, deeply impressed. And, by a miracle, it worked. By themselves, on their own, my fingers found the right configuration of black and white keys, and I let them go. Before I knew it, they had jumped into the opening theme [of the third movement of Op. 19], and the orchestra soon came galloping up behind them.”
— Leon Fleisher, p. 24.

Monday, May 7, 2012

Evgeny Sorkin & Gerard Willems: Beethoven Sonatas for Piano & Violin (& Cocktails)

A re we as performers always bound to execute Beethoven’s ornamentation as he consciously intended when we believe that there is a more convincing possibility? This is a subject to which a whole conference could be devoted, as it involves aesthetic, philosophical and even moral dilemmas. My own short answer is ‘Yes!’ There are certain works where it is obvious that a convincing manner of execution took decades to discover. It is reasonable to think that we are still today discovering it.”
— Daniel Herscovitch, Professor of Piano, Univ Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

T he faculty recital given last night by Sydney Conservatorium faculty members Evgeny Sorkin and Gerard Willems was exciting. The program featured the ‘Spring’ Sonata (Op. 24) and the ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata (Op. 47). The conservatory’s ‘Cocktail’ programs—starting at 19:30, with 65- to 80-min of performance and a snap 5-min intermission—are very popular. It is clearly a very effective marketing/programming concept… the recital hall was nearly completely filled up on this cool Fall Monday evening. Attendees seemed mainly to be 30s to 60s business people who work in Sydney’s central business district, who attend these concerts before taking the train home to the suburbs.

Abundant sturm und drang… lots of passion and gravity-defying force… yet tremendous intimacy, with both performers probing emotionally far beyond the notes. Such joy in this ‘Spring’! Really beautiful to see two artists enjoy performing together this much. Thrilling performance, plus 60 seconds of amusing historical/explanatory remarks from Gerard and Evgeny prior to beginning each piece. No ‘museum’, this!

Friday, April 13, 2012

Jonathan Biss: Proairetic & Hermeneutic Codes In Action, Realtime Beethoven-Janáček Message-Passing Protocol

I ’ve done all-Mozart, all-Beethoven, all-Schubert programs, but there is always the danger of a stylistic sameness, or rather a lack of confrontation between the pieces. Concerts of works of two composers are great because they still offer enough music of each to create a sense of immersion in the composers’ sonic worlds, and yet the concert becomes a dialogue between the two, which often moves in surprising directions. The question of which composers work well together (and which don’t) is particularly alchemical, and I think it is one of both similarity and difference. The success of Beethoven and Janáček as a pairing relies in part on the terrific intensity that characterizes both... The intensity may be similar, but the language is utterly different... Beethoven’s sonatas are incredibly tightly argued... Janáček, by contrast, is perhaps the greatest master of the musical non-sequitur... Beethoven and Janáček could not be more different, which makes the similarities in temperament between the two all the more fascinating.”
— Jonathan Biss, 2012 essay.

N ot ‘non-sequiturs’ exactly. More like the worldview of peoples who have for centuries lived along a foggy seacoast and whose language now innately reflects their inability to see or predict what will loom into view in front of them from one moment to the next.

F orgetting, the renunciation of cause-and-effect and the obverse of forgiving. Beethoven afflicted with abject loss and despair (as in the Adagio of Op. 27 No. 2); Janáček surprised by optimism, welling up from where?

I just returned from Jonathan Biss’s Beethoven-Janáček recital at Kansas City’s Folly Theater (Sonata No. 5, Op. 10, No. 1; Sonata No. 14, Op. 27, No. 2; Sonata No. 26, Op. 81a; V mlhách, JW 8/22; Sonata 1.X.1905, Z Ulice, JW 8/19).

T he ‘affective’ content and contrasts of these intense works—both the composers’ affect or psychological state and intentions, and the performer’s affect—are what makes the program spellbinding—emotionally compelling to experience (confirming what Biss has written in his essays; see blockquote above)!

T here may be elements that denote a similar state of mind or parallels in terms of Beethoven’s temperament and Janáček’s temperament, as Biss says. But the orderliness and certitude of Beethoven—contrasted with the randomness and the existential acceptance of doubt and uncertainy, even the recklessness of Janáček—these features make us think about our differences, not just the differences between these composers or their respective eras.

T hese antithetical qualities—and how such personalities or such ‘stances’ that we adopt influence what happens to us in life—are constitutional, innate, inherited styles. Well, they are partly inherited and partly learned/habitual.

E very mixture, every conciliation, every passage through the barrier of our inherited and habitual style is a transgression with self-discovery.

N ot every transgression is transcendent or momentous. Some of them are ironic, trivial, or tame—much like when a belovèd pet cat trips and experiences embarrassment at its clumsiness, so out-of-character and façade-dropping. Sometimes events bring out the best in us. We appear virtuous and do and express commendable things. At other times, our undesirable qualities come out.

A nd some transgressions are outrageous or transformative. Putting these two composers next to each other makes for an intense two-way street—stylistically and emotionally. This program forces/enables the two to ‘mediate’ each other’s views and to rhetorically critique the other.

I t is as though Biss has learned from literary theorist Roland Barthes and reveals the “hermeneutic code” that governs the semantics of each of the two composers’ worldviews, the “semiotic code” of the musical motives of each, the “proairetic code” that governs the formal structure (or, for Janacek, the renunciation of cause-and-effect structure), and the “referential code”—musical abstractions and metaphors and borrowings.

T he ‘next-to-ness’ Biss creates in formulating this program conjures the main forces that drive the narrative—and that drive our own desires to listen attentively.

T he “hermeneutic code” (see links below) refers to those plot elements that raise questions on the part of the reader of a text or the viewer of a film or the listener to a program of music. For example, in the Beethoven Op. 10, we get tragedy—the anxiety becoming mourning, weeping, descending (Movement 1, Theme 1, Phrase 1) leading to violence (Movement 3, Theme 1)—which leads us to wonder about the reasons for these traumatic events. Then, in the Janáček, we get a fatalistic indifference to a world in which cause-and-effect processes break down, or in which some events can’t be prevented or explained. We need the ‘loose ends’ of the narrative ‘tied up’ in order to feel satisfied, like a good detective story—and that is what Biss does for us by the end of the concert. The entire narrative of a story like this operates via hermeneutic encoding. We witness a murder, and we enthusiastically spend the rest of the concert learning answers to the questions that were raised by the initial Beethoven scenes of violence. That is one half of how this concert program works.

P roairetic code”, on the other hand, refers to ordinary actions—those musical phrases or plot events that simply lead to yet other phrases/consequences/actions. Suspense is driven by action rather than by a reader’s or a listener’s desire to have unsolved mysteries solved. This “proairetic code” is the other half of how or why this particular concert program works—event or ‘message-passing’ between the works, in a fashion resembling what happens with remote procedure calls (RPC) and protocol buffers in software systems.

B iss’s idea of programming this seemingly-disparate-but-narratively-confrontational repertoire is really an excellent one—attractive, interest-holding, suspenseful—provoking us to reach a deeper understanding of the human condition, as well as deeper understanding of the mental states of two specific composers and of the nature of the works made to confront each other in this way. One could hardly wish for a higher form of “fun” than this. Bravo!

C an a piano work convey a bustling ‘severalness’, or the sense of many people congregated in a social gathering, as convincingly as a chamber work? I think so — parts of Schumann’s ‘Carneval’, Mussorgsky’s ‘Marketplace at Limoges’, and Ravel’s ‘La Valse’ spring to mind as trivial examples. One tempting view is that the composer is aiming to depict the entirety of the human condition: everything is in here and, just as in the real world, the profound and the banal are constantly rubbing shoulders. I don’t think this is wrong, but the truth may go further... By presenting a unified work in which the high and the low aspects of humankind are contained together, the composer invites the listener to find these worlds contained inside each other, not merely nearby. The piano sonatas may have a touch of this ‘adjacent’ humor—the riotous trio in the second movement of opus 110, or the manic dotted-rhythm variation in opus 111.”
— Jonathan Biss, 2012 essay.

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, November 7, 2010

Nash Ensemble: Beethoven and the Russians

C hamber music was considered by more narrowly nationalistic musicians to be too ‘academic’, too ‘Germanic’, to deserve a place in Russian [musical canon] at all. When Borodin started work on the first of his quartets in 1875, he wrote to a friend, referring to the nationalist critic of the time as well as to the leading nationalist composer, that ‘to Stassov’s and Mussorgsky’s horror, I have sketched a string quartet’.”
— Anthony Burton, Nash Ensemble program notes, 2010.

M embers of the Nash Ensemble gave a thoroughly compelling performance last night at Wigmore Hall. Stephanie Gonley (vn) was superb, as were David Adams (vn), Lawrence Power (vla), Philip Dukes (vla), Paul Watkins (vc), Alice Neary (vc), mezzo Christine Rice, and pianist Susanna Stranders.

W hat striking sonorities the 2 cellos achieve in the Arensky String Quartet in A minor, Op. 35! I’d never heard this work before (unique for its 1 vn, 1 vla, 2 vc orchestration), but, after hearing Nash members perform it, I can only say that, if you intend to create astounding Elegiosity, go for the 2 cellos!

A rensky composed this unusual piece in 1894 as a memorial to his teacher, Tchaikowsky. This was when Arensky was just 33, a short while after Tchaikowsky’s death. The first movement has all the strings with their mutes on—great to hear in an intimate hall like Wigmore, up-close. The A minor theme is taken from ancient Russian Orthodox sacred music—a setting of some psalm or other. The middle section is in A Major; then the psalm theme again, back to the minor, finishing the movement.

T he second movement is comprised of 7 variations on a children’s song by Tchaikovsky, ‘When Jesus Christ was still a child.’ The elaborateness of the 9 minutes of variations upon variations suggests feverish, obsessive grieving. Then the muted 3-minute coda at the end of this movement evokes ancient Russian chant or possibly other archaic atmospherics that would be primevally familiar to Russians. Poignant ‘leave-taking’ as the Nash’s program notes have it. The emotive material in here is amazingly effective even on the limbic systems of us non-Russians… traps like this do not require ‘bait’ to work.

K ravitsa rïbachka!
Prav k beregu ladyu
I vïd, I syad so mnoyu,
Day ruku mne svoyu.

Bolovku mne na serdtse
Bez strakha polozhi.
Morskim volnam bespechno
V veryayesha zhe tï.

A serdtse to zhe more:
To buri v nyoem, to tish,
I mnogo perlov chudnïkh
Sokrïto v glubi.

[Lovely bassin’ gal!
Steer your bass boat to this shore;
Come and sit with me;
Give me your hand.

Lay your head right here,
And don’t be afraid.
Trust me just as much as you trust yourself, heh,
Daily, to those waves there.

My heart is like the sea, you betcha:
It can be calm or choppy,
And lots o’ big pearls
Are hidden in them depths.]”
— D. Kropotkin, after Heinrich Heine.

T he third movement Andante sostenuto tugs on our heartstrings yet more and is followed by Allegro moderato finale, which has fugal structure and develops the nationalistic Russian hymn ‘Slava Bogu na nebe, Slava’ [Слава Богу, на небе! Слава!] (Glory to God in heaven! Glory!), which is found also in the Allegretto of Beethoven’s Quartet Op. 59 No. 2.

F rom a performer’s point of view, this Arensky Quartet is special in another respect: the ‘dialogical’ interactions between the parts have tremendous symmetry or parity in terms of technical and expressive challenges… All of the parts are exciting all of the time, and, despite this surfeit of interesting material, the pungency of so exceedingly much being said miraculously doesn’t tax the listener or undermine the credibility of the memorial. It’s emotionally ‘over-the-top’ in a quintessentially ‘Russian’ style but it never becomes pastiche. Fantastic!

Arensky – String Quartet No. 2 in A minor, Op. 35
Borodin – Songs with cello obbligato (Razliubila krasna-devitsa [‘Beautiful girl fell out of love’]; Slushaite, podruzhen'ki, pesenku moiu [‘Listen, my friends, to my song’]; Krasavitsa-rybachka [‘Beautiful fisher-girl’]
Tchaikovsky – Night, Op. 73 No.2
Rachmaninov –The Ring, Op. 26 No.7; To the Children, Op. 26 No.14
Tchaikovsky – Andante Cantabile from String Quartet No. 1 in D, Op. 11
Beethoven – String Quintet in C, Op. 29

T his program is one in a series that Nash Ensemble have prepared, illustrating the connections between Beethoven and Russian composers.

C hristine Rice’s account of the Borodin folk songs with Paul Watkins’s cello and Susanna Stranders’s piano was superb, drawing shouts and prolonged raucous applause from the normally-reserved Wigmore Hall audience. Her rich, expressive voice and spell-binding operatic gestures abundantly conveyed the passion and desolation—the authentic ethnic Russian sensibility of these lieder.

I t was a surprise to me to learn that the ‘Mighty Five’ or Balakirev group of 19th Century Russian composers took a dim view of ‘chamber music’—they severely criticized Borodin, for example, for engaging in such a diminutive and ‘academic’ genre [see Podlech, link below]. Well, last night—with the ample sound from the Nash members and the exceedingly wide dynamic range that they lent to their interpretation—we experienced a sonorous and strong ‘orchestral’ feel, even in the ‘smaller’ chamber pieces.

C annot help but think that the ‘Mighty Five’ would’ve amended their opinions about chamber idioms had they heard so mighty an ensemble as the Nash. Wow!

W hen Alexander was 9 years old, Borodin’s mother was seriously alarmed by his chemical experiments, fearing that her house would be set on fire. Not all his experiments were as harmless as his self-made watercolors, which he used for painting. The incendiary bombs he made in the basement were a particular worry for his parents.”
— Joachim Podlech.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Artemis Quartett: Dissonance, Forensic Evidence, and Knowing

L et’s make nonfiction that is more thrilling than fiction. Let’s use the best of what fiction has to offer and make it more exciting because what happened was real.”
— Ellen Windemuth, founder, Off_the_Fence Productions, Amsterdam.

A rtemis Quartet’s performance in Kansas City last Friday night received a warm reception here.

Natalia Prischepenko, violin
Gregor Sigl, violin
Friedemann Weigle, viola
Eckart Runge, cello

T he all-Beethoven program consisted of Op. 95 (F minor) “Serioso”, Op. 127 No. 12 (E-flat major), and Op. 59 No. 3 “Razumovsky” (C major): supple interpretations throughout, without excesses of any kind, either radical or conservative. In this way, what the Artemis are doing sounds perpetually spontaneous, as though each member is reconsidering the ‘evidence’ that is expressed in her/his part—considering it anew each time they play.

I n fact, one of the qualities that impressed me especially was Artemis Quartett’s emphasis on the dramatic tensions between the parts—discourse between the instruments, yes, but as though the instruments (and the scores) have long-lasting disagreements, and express points of view that are founded on different evidence, profoundly different life-histories, irreconcilably different politics, and so on. Each player/part is not about to renounce what he/she ‘knows’.

[50-sec clip, Artemis Quartett, Beethoven, String Quartet in F minor, Op. 95 II, ‘Allegretto ma non troppo’, 1.6MB MP3]

T he exciting (and thought-provoking) result is a durable refractoriness to “nice” conclusions—a richness of trans-indivdual tension and dramatic complexity, even in works that are very familiar to us from repeated listening or performances.

T he encore, Astor Piazzolla’s ‘Suite del Ángel: Milonga del Ángel – Melancólico’, was another 6.7-min illustration of this.

T his Piazzolla suite is part of his series of “ángel” compositions from the 1950s and 1960s, usually performed with bandoneon or other instrumentation instead of this gorgeous arrangement for string quartet. Piazzolla had studied with Nadia Boulanger and famously alleged that his unusual counterpoint methods, for better or worse, could be blamed on her insidious pedagogy. In the “ángel” movement that the Artemis performed as an encore, we have lyrical elements that are passed among the quartet members, some of whose musical ‘testimony’ is corroborative of others’ testimony and some of whose testimony is discorroborative or contradictory. The scordatura-governed dissonance is earnest but not fierce; laconic, not agitated and verbose; and, as noted above, its rhetoric is serious, not whimsical or anecdotal.

T his peculiar Piazzolla suite is similar in narrative technique and orchestration methods to the 1949 ‘Sonata for Double Bass’ by Paul Hindemith. In that work, the bass player uses scordatura, tuning up a whole-step, which lends an unsettling, destabilizing effect to the sonata. In this Piazzolla movement, the cello’s C-string is tuned, I think, a whole-step down. In both works, the parts conjure a song in the form of a dialogue between the instruments. Hindemith: creator of ‘disharmonious counterpoint’ in which traditional combinatorial rules are subverted by a ‘decoupled system’ of tonality, or, maybe more accurately, a novel with an “unreliable narrator” point-of-view character. Piazzolla: creator of ‘testimonial dissonance’, with similar “unreliable” point-of-view characters.

T he same melody can be sung either alone or together with other players/characters, or entirely different melodies can be enunciated at the same time, or with variations that substantially alter the sense that the melody makes—the very embodiment of subjectivity and multiple, unstable points-of-view.

W hile we can recognize that the point of view of the “ángel” cello is constitutionally dour or sometimes irritable/unsympathetic, the subtlety and the disputes among the other parts’ responses prevent us from deciding that the cello-narrator, for all his vividness and probity, is more than just a figment of Piazzolla’s imagination. Our drive for certainty is flouted again and again, but we continue to listen, and there arrive more clues. We continue our listening with feelings of prolongèdly heightened suspense. Or ‘suspense-mingled-with-poignant-sense-of-loss-plus-optimism’.

T he result is that we get a riveting, realistic depiction of what may happen to human psyches when they are self-styled and unrelenting. They each know what they know; they each agree to disagree. Such complexity is emotionally engaging and believable, not confusing. In other words, read the quartet as you would read a good novel—as though it were real.

[50-sec clip, Artemis Quartett, Piazzolla, ‘Milonga del Ángel-Melancólico’, 1.6MB MP3]

T he Beethoven the Artemis offered was remarkably cogent and organic. The group dispatched the agitated, mercurial first movement of the Quartet in F minor (Op. 95) with a deft combination of rhapsodic vigor and cool control.”
— Anthony Tomassini, New York Times, 02-MAR-2010.

Sunday, February 22, 2009

The Composer Vanishes: Solving the Diffusion Equation Shows that Adès’s ‘Arcadiana’ is Really a Quintet with a Fifth Un-voiced ‘Phantom’ Part

DSM. Entropy-diffusion from composer Thos. Adès, in absentia, to and through string quartet artists performing ‘Arcadiana’, iii

B oth form and content in Adès’s music depend upon the multivalent conjunctions that may be derived from relatively elemental forms of continuity… Analyses of ‘Arcadiana’ illustrate the paradoxical nature of postmodern musical time, in which a narrative linear interpretation may emerge from the higher-level perception of locally-concurrent periodicities and trends… Rhythmic analysis entails identifying projections of duration and pitch, as well as processes of timbre and dynamics… In some cases, these interactions are mutually reinforcing; in others, they may embody reorientation or conflict, not to mention ironic deception.”
— John Roeder, Music Analysis 2006; 25:121-54.

A dès’s music merits special attention because of the consistency with which it employs elemental continuities, and because of the variety of temporalities that the composer derives from them... Continuity [is] defined as an association between two percepts, formed when the second realises a mental projection that was made as part of the first. Generally, continuity manifests itself in sequences of successive pitches, or in series of pitch percepts that are not literally successive... It may also subsist in more abstract projections and realisations of duration...”
— John Roeder, p. 122.

T he Jupiter String Quartet delivered a wonderful account of Thomas Adès’s String Quartet Op. 12, ‘Arcadiana’ (Venezia notturna; Das klinget so herrlich, das klinget so schön; Auf dem Wasser zu singen; Et... (tango mortale); L’embarquenment; O, Albion; Lethe) [1994] in Kansas City on Friday night in the Friends of Chamber Music 2008-2009 series—this in a program that also included Mendelssohn’s String Quartet in A minor, Op. 13, and Beethoven’s String Quartet in E minor, Op. 59, No. 2.

Nelson Lee and Meg Freivogel, violins
Liz Freivogel, viola
Daniel McDonough, cello

I n 2008, the Jupiter String Quartet received the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant, and in 2007 the Quartet won the Cleveland Quartet Award from Chamber Music America. This year is the final year in the Jupiters’ three-year residency with Lincoln Center’s ‘Chamber Music Society Two’. From 2004 to 2006, the Quartet was enrolled in the Professional String Quartet Training Program at New England Conservatory, earning Master of Music degrees in Chamber Music.

A dès wrote his first and, to date, only string quartet in 1994, under commission from Endellion Quartet in the U.K. The work is highly regarded by both performers and by theorists, and has been the subject of several important published analyses. The first several bars of the third movement (‘Auf dem Wasser zu singen’ [To be sung on the water]) are especially amenable to a kind of analysis that I think can shed light on the theme of the whole work—‘vanishing’ and mortality. That is what this post is about...

F ranz Schubert’s ‘Auf dem Wasser zu singen’ D. 774 (1823) is a setting of Friedrich Leopold Graf zu Stolberg-Stolberg’s poem, written in 1782—which Adès took as an inspiration/calibration for this third movement.

M itten im Schimmer der spiegelnden Wellen
Gleitet, wie Schwäne, der wankende Kahn:
Ach, auf der Freude sanftschimmernden Wellen
Gleitet die Seele dahin wie der Kahn;
Denn von dem Himmel herab auf die Wellen
Tanzet das Abendrot rund um den Kahn.

Über den Wipfeln des westlichen Haines
Winket uns freundlich der rötliche Schein;
Unter den Zweigen des östlichen Haines
Säuselt der Kalmus im rötlichen Schein;
Freude des Himmels und Ruhe des Haines
Atmet die Seel im errötenden Schein.

Ach, es entschwindet mit tauigem Flügel
Mir auf den wiegenden Wellen die Zeit;
Morgen entschwinde mit schimmerndem Flügel—
Wieder wie gestern und heute die Zeit—
Bis ich auf höherem strahlendem Flügel
Selber entschwinde der wechselnden Zeit.

[Amid the glimmer of sparkling waves,
The bobbing boat glides like a swan:
Ah, the soul glides onward like the boat,
On shimmering, gleaming waves of joy;
For the sunset glow, shining down from heaven
Upon the waves, dances all ‘round the boat.

The rosy light winks at us
From above the treetops of the western wood;
Beneath the branches of the eastern wood,
The reeds whisper in the light—
In the reddening glow, the soul breathes
The joy of heaven, the peace of the grove.

Ah, alas, Time itself vanishes on dewy wings and I with It,
Into the weighty cradle of the waves.
Tomorrow, Time will fly away on glistening wings—
As it did today and yesterday and the day before—
Until I myself fly away from Time’s inconstancy
On yet loftier, more radiant wings.] ”
— Friedrich Leopold Graf zu Stolberg-Stolberg, ‘Auf dem Wasser zu singen’ [To be sung on the Water], 1782.

H ow does this piece work? What makes ‘Arcadiana’ ‘tick’? I look first at my rhythm metrics... These are not Fibonacci series... Ah, this quartet feels like a diffusion problem! Analytical solutions to heat- and mass-transfer problems reduce to solving partial differential equations (PDEs)—in this case, the so-called ‘heat equation’, treating the medium as a homogeneous solid under appropriate initial and boundary conditions. Hypothetically, the IC and BC can include convective and radiative interactions with the environment, but in the present example of Adès’s ‘Arcadiana’ I ignore convection and radiation possibilities.

M any analytical solutions of the heat equation refer just to the simple one-dimensional situation, with a ‘heat capacity’ c, a ‘diffusion coefficient’ k, and a ‘loss term’, φ, to account for dissipation of energy as diffusion proceeds.

DSM. Diffusion equation with dissipation term φ

T he Endellion Quartet recording of ‘Arcadiana’ is the only one currently available. But, obviously, it is not possible to separate the four parts in the stereo channels. So I transcribed each part into Finale®, played each track individually, ripped myself MP3s from those, converted to WAV files, and began examining entropy as a function of time using FAWAV® and MATLAB®’s signal-processing toolbox.

DSM. Wavelet-transform entropy analysis of viola part, mm. 1-4, ‘Arcadiana’, iii

T he results surprise even me. Using Crank-Nicholson finite-difference math to solve the 1-dimensional diffusion equation for propagation of entropy S(t), I find that the entropy pulse in the viola part diffuses to the cello, which appears to be sitting a “virtual 1,600 msec” away. Then the same entropy pulse appears, diffusing to the vn2 part with a smaller peak amplitude and more spread-out, consistent with a non-zero ‘dissipation’ within the expressive ‘medium’ constituted by the music. The vn2 appears to be located, according to the Crank-Nicholson solution of the diffusion equation, at a distance of about 2,100 msec from the cello. Further downstream, vn1 experiences the diffusing entropy pulse, at a virtual distance 1,200 msec away from vn2.

Example 11a from John Roeder, ‘Co-operating continuities in the music of Thos. Adès’, Music Anal 2006; 25:121-54

A dès often combines such elemental durational and pitch continuities within a single stream so that their realised projections are made to reinforce one another ... a series of regularly increasing and descending pitch-intervals unfolds [in ‘Arcadiana’, iii] within a sequence of regularly decreasing durations.”
— John Roeder, p. 126.

T he effects of harmonic confluence may lead to a blurring of streams, and thus to a clear sense of temporal interaction, not merely co-operation. Example 11a renotates and simplifies the first eight bars of the third movement of ‘Arcadiana’ in order to foreground the two streams of activity which characterise this passage. In the pizzicato stream, the instruments alternate transpositions of the accelerating expanding-interval motive... The registral and transformational termination of the motive’s accelerating free-fall imparts a frustrated potential energy to its final interval that finds only tentative release in the contrasting tremolos of hexatonically stacked perfect fifths...”
— John Roeder, p. 141.

T hese results by themselves were fascinating to me. But then I got to thinking. Who is the ‘source’? The patterns account for the palpable, organically-sensible relative locations of four performers experiencing an entropy wave. But where is the entity who emitted this entropy wave? Can we use the PDE solution to impute where that ‘phantom’ source is ‘located’ with respect to the 1-D positions of the other players? (Click on the jpeg below to download the Excel spreadsheet with the C-N results in it.)

DSM, Crank-Nicholson solution for entropy-diffusion in mm.1-4 of Thos. Adès’s ‘Arcadiana’, iii

A nd the answer is, ‘Yes’! If we take the ‘source’ of the entropy wave to be the composer in-absentia, then the diffusion equation says that that invisible, inaudible phantom is located about 3,200 msec upstream of the viola (jpeg at top of this CMT post). This piece is a quasi-quintet where the fifth player is absent!

A ctually, encouraged by the preliminary findings above today I’ve begun to do more calculations from other sections of this movement. And it appears that not only do the four string parts move around with respect to each other, as evidenced by the diffusion of entropy pulses propagating between and amongst them, so too does the phantom of Adès move, hovering at times very nearby one part and at other times watching the quartet at what is apparently a great distance.

John Roeder, Mus Analysis 2006; 25:121-54, Example 1c, Arcadiana, iii, mm. 1-2

John Roeder, Mus Analysis 2006; 25:121-54, Table 1

J ohn Roeder’s wonderful 2006 article in the journal Music Analysis—on coordinated continuities in Adès—is a great contribution to our understanding, illuminating a number of the features and mechanics of what Adès is doing. But I think what we have here (in entropy-diffusion evidence) is far deeper and far more symbolic (of Adès’s theme of mortality and vanishing) than Roeder and others have thus far recognized. What Adès has constructed here is nothing less than a statistical physics ‘diffusion chamber’ in which the four living performers together create an acoustic entropy field that strongly implies the existence/presence of the music’s creator. We are each familiar with the diffusion of a solute like sugar as it dissolves in a cup of tea; we are each familiar with the diffusion of heat by conduction through the cup from the hot inside to the surface that we hold in our hand. And the diffusive/dissipative effects that Adès has crafted here also strike the performer/listener as intuitively, empirically, palpably familiar. The fact that we can quantitatively model them and analyze them with pretty fancy math tools does not in any way diminish the fact that the underlying cognitive physics that Adès is using is utterly elemental, utterly organic.

A rcadiana’ is very difficult to play, yes. But when played well, the quartet evokes a physical reality that belies the technical difficulty. The very memory and spirit of the person who is absent are reanimated by the performers. We sense Adès’s presence through the implied [silent] fifth voice that is the source of the entropy waves that percolate throughout the other four parts. I find this deeply beautiful, as I hope you do as well. Thank you, Thomas! Thank you, Jupiters!

W e are particularly fond of the ‘Arcadiana’ quartet. We wish Thomas would get busy and write more quartets.”
— Daniel McDonough, Jupiter String Quartet, 20-FEB-2009, remark over supper.