Codified by 1840, the [sonata] form was now no longer a free development of stylistic principles, but an attempt to reach greatness by imitation of classical models. The results, at their best, aspire toward a classical ideal that had become unpopular by the mid-nineteenth century.” — Charles Rosen, p. 394.
S onata norms remained in place as ‘regulative’ ideas throughout the 19th Century, even as the who sonata genre, with its various options, was continuously updated, altered, and further personalized with unforeseen accretions, startling innovations, and radical deformations... The ‘de-energizing transition’ and suppression of the medial caesura in, say, Schubert or Brahms, surely emerged from the precedents of the ‘blocked medial caesura’ coupled with ‘expanded caesura-fill’ in Haydn and Mozart.” — James Hepokoski & Warren Darcy.
S aturday’s performance in the Harriman-Jewell Series will be given by Joshua Bell (Violin) and Sam Haywood (Piano).
Brahms: Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2 in A major, Op. 100
Schubert: Fantasy for Violin and Piano in C major, D 934, Op. 159
Grieg: Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2 in G major, Op. 13
T hese works are ones of tremendous lyricism, and showcase the narrativity of song and dance for creative structure. In fact, the pieces are unusual as sonatas go—unusual for the egalitarian ways that the violin part and the piano part interact with each other. It is not a one-sided virtuoso violinistic ego trip. For example, in the second movement of Grieg’s violin sonata Op.13 we have the secondary theme introduced by the piano without the violin! There is an innovative parity between the parts’ roles that's unusual—dance-like, ballade-like, Nordic.
T here is a manneristic thread that runs through the Op. 13 sonata, maybe deriving from Grieg’s Norwegian nationalism?
B ut in each of these three pieces we have structures of contrast, varied repetition, and symmetry-making and symmetry-breaking—specific patterns can be found in the arrangement of the lines. Between the piano and the violin we have “melodico-textural” networks of iterated phrases that embody the unfolding of stories.
F or Grieg ... the variation form may have been tied to the idea of strophic repetitions in a folk song. But in Grieg’s Ballade the variations make such a dramatic progression that one wonders whether to understand the work as a new venture ... in suggesting both the form of the song and the progression of the story.” — James Parakilas, p. 159.
T rends in sonata procedure in the Romantic period are either (1) elaboration of sonata form beyond the 17th Century norms, or (2) exploration of tonal designs, both within sections and across entire movements. As noted by Carissa Reddick (link below), both of these Romantic trends result in “fusion” of forms, which occurs when a single section of music simultaneously fulfills more than one formal function. The breach of norms gives those sections innovative functions and powers, and often thwarts listeners’ expectations. The innovative tonal designs transgress the boundaries between the sonata’s formal divisions or thematic rotations (exposition, development, recapitulation, and coda), creating rotational overlaps.
I n Grieg’s Sonata, Op. 13, there are fusions of Transition and Re-transition within the Primary theme, fusion of Recapitulation and Development functions within the Transition [i, mm. 256-271; iii, mm. 86-98], fusion of the Development within the Secondary theme [i, mm. 169-183] and a variety of other novel maneuvers. In addition there are what Reddick terms ‘Multiply-Rotational Development Divisions’ and ‘Half-Rotational and Non-Rotational Development Divisions’ [iii, mm. 105-124; iii, mm. 273-305].
S o, composers active in the Romantic era took sonata form as a point of departure only, co-opted it as a vehicle for Romantic politics, and plied it with Romantic harmonies. The result is a progressive ‘dialogic form,’ in which a sonata was no longer the conservative, status-quo-reinforcing thing it used to be but instead became a ‘process’ in an open-ended dialogue [Hepokoski & Darcy, p. 10], among performers who may, as in this case, regard each other as equals.
P erfect, it seems to me, for the physicality of Bell and Haywood, whose refined kinesthetic sense can reach artistic heights visually as well as musically. Looking forward to Saturday night’s performance.
Bach - Concerto for Violin, Flute & Harpsichord in A minor BWV 1044
T he ensemble for the BWV 1044 last night was 3 violins, 2 violas, 1 cello, 1 double bass, and harpsichord. David Gordon’s renderings of the cadenzas for harpsichord in the Alla breve were amazingly organ-like, and the reverberous acoustics of the chancel of St. Martin-in-the-Fields added constructively to this impression.
T he improvisational ‘chorale’-like material in BWV 1044 is not so much reverential as fantastical. The orchestral, organ-like quality to the cadenzas and ritornelli is simply devastating to hear. It has been long-established that sections in this piece are borrowed from Bach’s BWV 894 and also some ‘borrowings’ from Telemann or others. In that regard, it is almost as though Bach—and here David Gordon and collaborators—were ritually invoking the Divine and not at all concerned with ‘originality’.
T he window by Iranian-born artist Shirazeh Houshiary was commissioned in 2008 as part of a renewal project at St. Martin-in-the-Fields. The stainless steel ‘cames’ are shot-peened natural raw finish and configured in a Cross shape, and the central ellipse resembles an astronomical ‘globular cluster’ of stars with the grid of cames indicating a gravitational ‘warping’ of time and space in the neighborhood of the cluster, calling into question the nature of ‘creation’ and human experience. The window is symbolically a well-suited backdrop, I think, for the expansive atmospherics provided by London Concertante Chamber Ensemble.
S o… unbridled improvisations within Baroque pieces, profuse improvisations in Piazzolla honoring a different, humanistic god: illuminating to hear these side-by-side in the same program. A wonderful evening!
Adam Summerhayes, Fenella Humphreys, Roger Huckle (violin)
Matthew Quenby, Nick Howson, Robert Smissen (viola)
Dark brightness’... the music of a contemporary Romanian gypsy girl... Born in Romania in 1977, Adina Spire is a classical composer of sacred music for Catholic and Orthodox liturgies. An attempt to put any interpretation on her music has to make references to the mysterious Romanian old culture and the context of recent history... The context of Adina Spire’s compositions is the 1989 the revolution of Romania against the totalitarian government and the suffering of the people during the subsequent civil war—including the Adina’s own suffering as a little girl, suddenly orphaned and displaced to the orphanage associated with a monastery near Arad. Her music dwells on a complex of interrelated themes: grief, fear, solitude, vigil, memory, nostalgia, innocence, sensuality, intolerance, protest, violence—each piece approaching this view from a different angle, insistent upon perfecting a coded way of talking about something either unmentionable or impossible to express... This is ‘rebel’ music—the protest of the soul against soullessness, of the poor and defenseless against unfeeling poverty and aggression and intolerance.” — Institutul Cultural Român, 2009.
A dina Spire’s music is brilliant—evocative, lyrical, and incisive. Intensely political. It is also ‘doctrinal’—expressing doctrines of the once-and-future displaced, disenfranchised, and disabused... each note now aspiring to live.
M any of Adina’s compositions are calibrated by Romanian tradition and informed by Orthodox liturgy or explore notions of religious practice and the Divine. But her vision is delocalized from her native Romania and draws upon materials that are pan-European and span a period from Medieval times up to the present.
T he very old ‘borrowed’ elements and the instantaneous ‘ambient’ elements mingle and give rise to a fantastical sort of ‘bricolage’ that calls into question the very concepts of time and civilization. In a manner similar to Jorge Luis Borges stories, Adina’s compositions can make you wonder whether human history—any of it—is to be trusted. This disorienting effect can be both beautiful and moving.
A dina Spire is a teacher at the conservatory in Arad, Arader Musik Conservatorium. She is also an accomplished conductor and cellist.
T he example MP3 clip above is representative of her modus operandi—generating new expressions from materials that are simultaneously familiar and exotic, archaic and radically new: her compositions are, like Kontakion, invariably novel and surprising. The execution is passionate, with deeply-felt flourishes. Adina’s music suggests Renaissance or Baroque performance practices of elaborating from the written music, and it is hard to know where Adina’s score leaves off and the performers’ ‘improvvisaziones’ begin.
A dina Spire’s ... harmonic and dynamic designs reflect a paradoxical vision of intense feeling behind a frozen and fearful facade. Thus, tempos are mostly so slow as to give the impression of motionlessness, an effect sustained, even when short note-values are in play, by the use of small and very simple progressions, tense pedal-points, and agonized suspensions.... In parallel to orthodox modulation, the composer cuts abruptly between keys or slowly dissolves one chord into another by accumulating their pitches into blurred clusters. Since the tonic at any given point in Adina Spire’s score is a disputed issue (often brusquely dictated by the orchestra, often completely absent), these arpeggio-clusters—which have their precedents in the cinematographic soundtrack genre of terror movies—also amount to significant polytonal ambiguities in themselves... At the level of general design, Adina Spire works repeatedly with extreme contrasts between moments of tonal delicacy and cataclysmic avalanches of atonal sound... Spire’s three-dimensional orchestration scores and interpretations are intrinsic to these gradual transitions, tone-colour in what amounts to a quasi-cinematographic conception of timbre as light and sound positioning as ‘viewpoint’.” — Institutul Cultural Român, 2009.
I n the case of this example, ‘Kontakion’ (Greek: κοντάκιον) is a kind of hymn that has for many centuries been performed in the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Greek word is ‘kontax’ (κόνταξ), a ‘pole’—specifically the pole around which a sacred scroll text is coiled. The term describes the way in which the words on a scroll unfurl as the scroll is read in worship. The word ‘kontakion’ originally referred to a Byzantine poetic form, whose origins date back as far as the 6th century CE or probably earlier. Based in Syriac hymnographical traditions that underwent mutations in Greek-speaking Byzantium, it’s really a “sermon in verse accompanied by music”. The meter and music accentuate the rhetorical beauty of the speaker’s meditation.
A Kontakion is fundamentally a ‘funerary’ form—usually comprised of 18 to 24 metrically identical stanzas called oikoi (“houses”), each preceded by a short prelude (in a different meter), called a koukoulion (“cowl”). If the ‘cowl’ is, say, in a duple meter, then the ‘house’ may be in triple meter. The first letters of each of the stanzas form an acrostic, which frequently includes the name of the poet... not unlike, say, J.S. Bach and his fascination with numerology and acrostics (e.g., incipits that spell out B-A-C-H). The last line of a Kontakion prelude introduces a refrain, which is repeated at the end of all the stanzas. The stanzas are not unlike Baroque chaconne or passacaglia or ‘folia’ forms, with their dozens of variations that obsess upon a theme until the point of ecstasy or emotional transcendence.
T his Kontakion by Adina Spire has reverential yet aggressive aspects to it. It is contemplative, brooding—as is fitting for a ‘Hymn for the Dead’ or requiem. But it’s also punctuated with explosive electroacoustic effects. Listen carefully. Are some of these recorded segments played backwards, reversed tracks? Maybe so. What we have is a delirious mix of ambient-aleatoric material with Baroque variations. (I pull my copy of Robin Stowell’s book from the shelf, look at p. 140.)
I n the midst of the ambient-aleatoric edifice that’s going up, we hear... the cello playing a version of ... ‘La Folia’? The ‘La Folia’ meter is either in 1 [4+2] or 3, depending on what era you're speaking of and depending on whether the ‘La Folia’ performance was a vernacular music of common people or was instead a co-opted, stately dance of the aristocracy. Its chord progression is the ubiquitous/eternal i-V-i-VII / III-VII-[i or VI]-V / i-V-i-VII / III-VII-[i or VI7]-IV[4-3sus]-i.
R encontre entre la tradition de la basse obstinée du 17e siècle et le jazz, sur fond d’improvisation et de plaisir pur?
F olia’ is pronounced “foh-LEE-ah,” conventionally thought to mean ‘crazy’ or ‘empty-headed’ or ‘revelrous’. But is this correct? Well, no, not really. It seems to have been uncritically repeated in the musicology literature, by non-Iberians who neither know Portuguese nor have any deep understanding of the politics of 16th-Century Iberians who likely were the originators of ‘La Folia’.
I t’s a sort of hemipedalian waltz that carries the feeling of lament with a slow, percussion-marked processional feeling—not a jolly dance, really; more like a reckless PTSD dance of refugees and casualties from a war—like Adina. Yes, the ‘folia’ was a musical framework used during the Baroque period for songs, dances and sets of variations. But the early versions embody, I think, a valedictory spirit ... of the Portuguese who were busy fighting and eventually defeating the Moors? It is an aesthetic that acknowledges the real possibility of premature, sudden death—the unpredictability of troubled times. It is ‘mannerist’ and ‘historical materialist’ in outlook.
I n other words, ‘La Folia’ bears the same aesthetic ‘marks’ as the epic and autumnal ‘Tarantella’—furious, ecstatic dancing in defiance of fate and death. Its rollicking is not orgiastic but reckless in its psychological regressiveness. I could die tomorrow, as could you... as did he.
I n 1611, Sebastiàn de Covarrubias (Tesoro de la lengua castellana) described the folia as a Portuguese dance, very noisy, performed with tambourines and other instruments by disguised street-porters carrying young men dressed in women’s clothing on their shoulder. He said nothing about moroseness... it is a defiantly celebratory requiem dance. Have a look at the books by Hauser and Maniates.
T he musical design of a 16th or an early 17th-century folia consists of an upper melodic framework (although the precise melody varies) and a lower staff that yields a simple continuo accompaniment. The opening two beats of anacrusis are sometimes omitted, but in any case the first accent always falls on the V chord. The stroke pattern continually emphasizes 3/4 meter, but both the melody and the harmonic changes often oscillate between 3/2 and 6/4—as seems to be the case in Adina Spire’s ‘Kontakion’.
T hen in the 1670s the ‘folia’ was co-opted by the aristocracy and was mutated into a slow and stately dance, akin to a sarabande. All second beats still were dotted... the prominent secondary ‘folia’-type accent.
W hat is so special about this tune? Why has it been borrowed so extensively, by many western composers over the past 500 years?
Does its appeal derive from its satisfying human beings’ love of rhythmic ‘balance’ and harmonic ‘parity’ among multiple parts? The fact that ‘folia’ form has a high degree of symmetry and equitable harmonic layering suggests that this might be so.
Does ‘folia’ embody some hard-wired pattern that our brains have evolved to prefer? It even sounds familiar when you have never heard the piece before.
Is its perennial popularity a consequence of a peculiarly wide latitude that the ‘folia’ chord progression affords for textural adaptation and variations? La Folia form provides lots of freedom because there are no fixed numbers of variations to complete nor has there to be any structure between the variations. Vamp away!
Is ‘folia’ popularity driven by politics? Consider the social phenomenon that the ‘folia’ had its roots in popular ‘rebel’ culture and developed into a stately court dance but, more than this, a vehicle for courtly flirtation. Consider, too, that in some cultures it was a funerary piece or requiem but in other cultures was primarily a fertility dance for the people. The ambiguities enable all sorts of interpretations, all sorts of transgressions.
Is ‘folia’ popularity a Richard Dawkins-like ‘selfish gene’, popularity that begets more popularity and repetition/borrowing? A tune that we grow up with, and that each composer grows up with—strongly associated with culture and personal memories—and this is what invites yet more borrowing?
T he performer needs to be aware of the transformations of the basic four-note subject. Not only does the subject repeat almost relentlessly, but it’s restated and transformed in successive variations, in sixteenth and eighth notes. These segments divide the music into discrete sentences/statements. This approach generates ‘micro-pieces’ played one after the other. Kaleidoscopic!
L ike a chaconne or passacaglia or romanesca, the ‘folia’ form involves a short subject (usually four measures) that’s relentlessly repeated and varied... Symmetric thematic transformations of transposition, inversion, retrograde, and retrograde inversion. These are normally supplemented with diminution, augmentation, interpolation, fragmentation, octave displacements, and elision operations. The relentlessness of it is, I think, what lends the funereal aspect to what is otherwise (or can be) a pretty vigorous dance.
W hat we have here amounts to a kind of ‘multiple-encryption’. From the elements of a supposedly Orthodox liturgy, Adina Spire’s incorporation of symbolic components of secular origin enables her to protest recent political events and cultural trends. Conversely, from the notation of a supposedly ‘secular’ music Bach and other Renaissance and Baroque composers who ‘borrowed’ ‘La Folia’ encrypted texts of the Latin liturgy, we get [Bach's] customary incorporation of symbolically numbers of biblical origin that were significant in [Lutheran] doctrine (for example, Bach's multiform signatures, B-A-C-H, etc.). Hidden chorale citations embedded in the developing variations.
B ach used antithesis, conceit and paradox to ‘instruct and familiarize the reader with basic concepts of faith in highly condensed form’. Also called paradoxa, a typical epigram included juxtapositions of passages such as ‘God wills that all men should be saved’ with ‘Few are chosen’ (1 Timothy 2:4 and Matthew 22:14)... With enigmatical notations such as ‘mi contra fa, concordia discors’, ‘cross/crown’, and ‘beginning/ending’, Bach associates his canons with a peculiarly Lutheran dialectic in which antithesis (what Augustine called ‘antinomy’) is a symbol for the cross of Christ.” — Eric Chafe, Symbolum, p. 14.
D id ‘La Folia’ arise out of the valedictory spirit in Portugal, during and after the conflicts with the Moors in 1500s? Is this music a product of the same milieu that prompted Camões to write the epic ‘Os Lusíadas’? I find tidbits of evidence, for and against. I am unsatisfied with the facile accounts given and repeated uncritically in the musicology literature [which trivialize the history of ‘La Folia’ as ‘mad revelry’... as either a peasant dance or courtly dance], but I have not found (yet) anything definitive to support my conjecture of more serious origins of the tune--involving, say, political/aesthetic correspondences between ‘Os Lusíadas’ and ‘La Folia’.
T his beautiful ambient, aleatoric ‘Kontakion’ is wholly compatible with the epic, ecstatic, improvisatory, protestful, funerary idiom of ‘La Folia’. Adina’s decision to incorporate it here is, I think, brilliant.
T he compass of Adina Spire’s music cannot be adequately grasped in one reading. I have ‘read’ it and admire it and am excited about it to want to write about it here. I recognize that I have only so far scratched its surface, but I hope the ideas above may excite you to explore her work. Adina’s music is playful. It manages to be intensely political without being angry. Expect to read it with an attitude that questions the status quo—or even, say, the notion of ‘reverence.’ Discover ‘sacred’ music that respects reverential postures but asks you to critically reevaluate your reverential stance and the moral implication that reverence has for us as individuals and as societies. Very cool.
T o prepare for [a friend’s funeral] service, I had been practicing the Chaconne every day — fussing over individual phrases, searching for better ways to string them together, and wondering about the very nature of the piece, at its core an old dance form that had been around for centuries. After the many times I had heard and played the Chaconne, I had hoped it would fall relatively easily into place by now, but it appeared to be taunting me. The more I worked, the more I saw; the more I saw, the further away it drifted from my grasp. Perhaps that is in the nature of every masterpiece. But more than that, the Chaconne seemed to exude shadows over its grandeur and artful design. Exactly what was hidden there I could not say, but I would lose myself for long stretches of time exploring the work’s repeating four-bar phrases, which rose and fell and marched solemnly forward in ever-changing patterns.” — Arnold Steinhardt, Violin Dreams.
[50-sec clip, Don Freund, Sonapartita, Adagio, Daniel Rubenstein & Muhiddin Dürrüoglu-Demiriz, 1.3MB MP3]
[50-sec clip, Don Freund, Sonapartita, Passepied, Daniel Rubenstein & Muhiddin Dürrüoglu-Demiriz, 1.3MB MP3]
[46-sec clip, Don Freund, Sonapartita, Presto, Daniel Rubenstein & Muhiddin Dürrüoglu-Demiriz, 1.1MB MP3]
[50-sec clip, Don Freund, Sonapartita, Siciliano, Daniel Rubenstein & Muhiddin Dürrüoglu-Demiriz, 1.3MB MP3]
This exciting and beautiful piece contains extensive musical references to Bach, and other modern composers like Lukas Foss and Stravinsky. The title alludes to ‘Nach Bach’, a harpsichord piece by Georges Rochberg. The ‘Noch Nach’ is ‘Yet Another, After Bach’. For example, the third movement (Presto) replicates the violin part of the final movement of J.S. Bach’s G minor Sonata but has Freund’s imaginative piano part interacting in curious ‘noch nach’ ways with the violin.
Besides Rubenstein’s and Demiriz’s superb and sympathetic performance of it, the Freund work is interesting on multiple levels as relates to compositional methods and musical analysis.
The structures of the Bach sonatas and partitas that this ‘sonapartita’ mimics can be cast in computational form—using humdrum, for example. And, although I do not know whether Freund used a computer software to help generate this composition algorithmically, it’s possible to see from his finished result how a series of Java constructors and ‘refactoring’ transformations could be written to do so. Freund’s german title for this piece ‘Noch Nach Bach’ reminds me, in fact, of the old Stephen Johnson AT&T Bell Labs compiler generator utility, YACC (Yet Another Compiler Compiler), part of the original UNIX operating system.
An early decision in writing a compiler is whether the language will be treated in terms of patterns of characters (individual notes) or as patterns of tokens (horizontal motifs and vertical clusters). How do you create a compiler to generate the result you want/expect? We use refactorings such as safe rename and move refactorings, plus advanced refactorings like ‘ExtractMethod’ or ‘ExtractSuperclass’—or in a music composition application, we would use more complicated refactorings to be performed across large spans of each movement such as ‘ApplyMotifSupertype’ or ‘InferTypeArguments’ or ‘GeneratePartitaCounterpoint’.
The refactoring performed on the method A#partita() above first searches for all method invocations to partita. The only occurrence can be found in the constructor of class B. The Freund refactoring inserts the new indirection method indirection(A), which delegates to the original bach partita method. The partita-generating method invocation to partita in constructor B() is redirected to call the new indirection method. This object-oriented refactoring program amounts to a transformational network compiler—in this case, one that automatically composes partitas mimicking the patterns represented in Bach.
David Lewin’s wonderful book covers ‘transformational network’ theory from the point of view of post-composition analysis, not from the point of view of algorithmic composition. Of course, Klumpenhouwer, Lambert, Stoecker, Headlam, Rahn, and Mazzola and many other musicologists have productively applied transformational nets in analyzing music and for music information retrieval (MIR).
To date, though, software composition tools and ‘compiler compilers’ to create composition tools that can generate music that faithfully emulates design and orchestration patterns in established idioms (like Bach’s) have lagged behind. But Eclipse and other platforms for creating compilers and ‘compiler compilers’ have gotten significantly better and easier to use over the past 5 years or so. It is now far more feasible to create decent software-based composition tools than it was just a few years ago.
That side-steps the question of whether using such a tool—even as an ‘assistant’—violates aesthetic principles you hold dear. For my part, I would use such tools, provided their musicality was acceptable. After all, I use ProEngineer™ CAD/CAE software for the engineering that I do in my day-job. I use AdobeIllustrator™ and other computer-assisted art software for graphic art that I create. Those are not ‘crutches’ that in any way replace or undermine the integrity of my role as a designer. Why wouldn’t I happily use a good software composition tool? But the ‘compose’ widget in Finale and the GenJam applet for jazz improvisation aren’t that helpful. And the computational challenges are so daunting that I won’t hold my breath. Twenty years ago, William Schottstaedt worked on software-based counterpoint voice-leading and, since then, most people have used Markov-chain or other stochastic algorithms. These all focus on ‘small-scale’ decisions—Markov is, after all, a nearest-neighbor algorithm for generating a set of choices from which to choose. Schottstaedt used a best-first search algorithm to select a preferred candidate at each step. More recently, genetic-algorithm and simulated-annealing techniques are being used. But none of them is yet, so far as I know, very satisfactory. And none of them has an effective ‘scope’ that extends beyond about a 10-note or 12-note phrase. If there are 10 notes and, say, just 16 ways of moving from one note to the next in a given part or voice, then a phrase of a mere 10 notes begets 1610 possibilities—a combinatoric explosion, even for just one part and just one 10-note phrase. So, if a partita compiler compiler is going to succeed within the memory constraints on currently-available systems (even with 64-bit machines and terabytes of main memory and pagefile store), it will clearly have to go back to Fux’s ‘Gradus ad Parnassum’ or other rule-based processes to generate choices and to supervise polyphonic orchestration. Algorithms to predict the weather or earthquakes have better odds!
I wonder whether Freund was thinking about YACC when he chose his title. I wonder whether he used any computational tools in creating this nice composition.
T here is a manneristic thread that runs through the Op. 13 sonata, maybe deriving from Grieg’s Norwegian nationalism? 
