jwilzewske: biss

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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.

Thursday, November 16, 2006

Biss: Little Pieces in Cosmic Context

“Schoenberg … leads us into a realm where musical experience is a matter not of the ear but of the soul alone—and from this point of view begins the music of the future.”
— Wassily Kandinsky (1911)

CMT: Biss’ playing ( Kansas City and New York ) is phenomenal. Spacious. Expansive in his ideas and references to other works and other ideas. His pre-concert remarks were also very good (Biss Interview with Cynthia Siebert. 15-NOV-2006. )—indicative of the way his mind works; how he reacts to musical and social stimuli across space and time. So what? Where does Biss lead me? Working from Heidegger’s and Adorno’s and Wittgenstein’s “Philosophy of Language” concepts, I would say that a piece of music is only meaningful by way of that work’s relations to other works within a larger group, by way of the person’s relations to other persons, and in relation to the “game” that’s unfolding in the society that the composer, performer, and listener are members of.

DSM: When I experience a piece of music, I experience it in the context of this community of other related works and events and motifs—which include other cultural and political motifs, not just musical ones. Even if you consider only the characteristic features of a single work, the exceptional features of the specific piece inevitably arise in proximity vs. remoteness to other pieces that are somehow related to it. Even if the composer and the players scrupulously avoid listening to or studying or performing other works, they inevitably manifest aspects of their native culture. They can’t escape that—even if their work doesn’t overtly aim to express it; even if their work deliberately strives to hold itself at a distance from the prevailing culture or avant garde-ishly, consciously avoids reference to it.

CMT: This is, I think, basically right. We never experience a piece of music as self-contained in isolation. Nor is it possible to create one in total isolation. Each piece is like a star within a constellation of other pieces in our gaze. Musical understanding happens when we situate a particular piece within such a musical galaxy. Thought of like this, a work isn’t so much an isolated point as much as it is a location of gathering together. A condensation of matter and energy.

DSM: Well, yes. And the sustained appeal of Schenker’s theory and method of musical analysis is due to their ability to situate tonal pieces in the galactic realm of the proverbial masterwork, a musical equivalent of a Grand Theory of Everything in physics, the desire for a universal Gesamtkunstwerk.

CMT: So if we privilege the concept of historical backward-and-forward continuity—if we make that the “card” that “trumps” all others—then atonality just serves to extend and continue the tonal tradition. Seen in this way, atonality isn’t “really” atonal, but is instead just a more complicated kind of tonality. The disruptive effect of “atonality” is an optical-acoustical-cognitive illusion.

DSM: An example from Schoenberg’s Six Little Pieces, Op. 19 (1911), shows what I mean. The second little piece contains this G-B dyad that’s repeated throughout the nine measures. In m. 7-9, a progression of major thirds descends against the ostinato dyad—producing a sequence that goes F-A, E-flat-G, D-flat-F, C-E. A tonal analysis of this might take these thirds as a stepwise descent from G to C interpreted under a rubric of the key of C. But it’s ambiguous. It could be interpreted in the key of G, or no key at all.

CMT: Mitsuko Uchida’s account of Schoenberg’s Klavierstücke covers emotional light-years in the few bars that comprise each piece. Different from Jonathan Biss’ treatment but also deep and beautiful. Lots of dark matter in the interstellar space she spins out. The pieces in Op. 19 are so short that it’s impossible to say that there are clear expository sections—they’re a study in compactness. They’re a gauntlet to test your expressive artistry—they are not a crucible for virtuosic stellar playing.

DSM: Yes, they’re so compact conceptually as to be unexpectedly daunting to the performer. You can easily turn in an uninspiring incarnation of these Sechs Kleine Klavierstücke—but it's surprisingly difficult to materialize an inspiring one. Maybe this is a consequence of how compact the process of composing them was. Nos. 1 through 5 of Op. 19 were, you know, composed in a single day, 19-FEB-1911. And No. 6 was composed on 17-JUN-1911 in one go.

CMT: The longest, No. 1, encompasses just 18 bars, while the shortest ones, Nos. 2 and 3, only nine bars each. Some melodic repetition and manipulation occurs in No. 3, Sehr langsam Viertel, but it too is really compact, like astronomy’s M39, a globular cluster. Because of its tempo, Rasch, aber leicht (No. 4) is the shortest of the Klavierstücke.

DSM: In No. 2, the repeated third (G-B dyad), played ostinato, contrasts with the legato melody at a higher dynamic level. The pauses create galactic cadences—sparse structure, spacious. The most dramatic of the pauses occurs just after the vertical build-up of the thirds.

CMT: And a pitch-class set analysis of this might explain the various collections that result from combining other pitch classes with the central G-B dyad. The piece seems to center on the important trichords (0 1 4) and (0 4 8) and culminate with the statement of the (0 1 4 5 8 9) hexachord at the end. At least that’s where my own telescope focuses!

DSM: So what are we doing here on this blog? I notice, by the way, that sometimes you bring out your microscope instead of your telescope! And your mirrors! Always your mirrors! Like Beethoven’s “Diabelli Variations”—looking backward and forward at the same time.

CMT: Well, to quote Jonathan Biss from his interview with Cynthia Siebert: [The responsible person] “… must nurture discourse. He/she must make music part of the public conversation.” Because we lack voices in other spheres of life—and also because you and I live 2800 kilometers apart [ 91 picoparsecs or 1.6 megasmoots ], in Boston and Kansas City—we meet here in this bloggy part of the galaxy. We add more music conversation to the public commons. We’re discharging what Biss says is a social moral duty. Cogito ergo obtineo! Velicamus ergo crearāmus! DiggIt ergo sum!