jwilzewske: china

Showing posts with label china. Show all posts

Sunday, February 12, 2012

John Bischoff: Audio Combine, Modal/Bispectral Discoveries, Post-Human Futures

L ocal color’ features synthetic bell-like tones, sustained tonal clusters, and computer-triggered acoustic bells struck in complementary patterns that are sometimes random, sometimes human-triggered, and combinations of both... It is enough to reference the idea of a tactus, but not enough to be [understood as] an organizing [meaning-generating/insuring] element.”
— Audio Combine, liner notes, Ed Osborn, Brown Univ, 2011.

T he music comprising John Bischoff’s new CD ‘Audio Combine’, just released on New World Records, is beautiful, fascinating, thoroughly enjoyable. Philip Perkins’s engineering and production values are superb.

T he five tracks on the disc are diverse, representing Bischoff compositions from 2004 to mid-2011. The third track ‘Local Color’ evokes traditional chinese zhong bells, but also especially calls into question the ‘who’ of music performance [in asmuch as some of the bells are computer-triggered, randomly and deterministically, while others are played by Bischoff from his score] and other limits of performance identity [insofar as the bell modes and timbres evolve after the bell is struck—on the rim; on the bosses/nipples; on the wall; etc.—in aleatoric/random ways that the musician-computer can neither predict nor control]. Of course, all music emerges in less-than-predictable/controllable ways—just less obviously so than bells.

[50-sec clip, John Bischoff, ‘Local Color’; (track 3), 2012, 1.4MB MP3]

T he pieces were all recorded in live performance with minimal editing and no over-dubs. Philip Perkins recorded direct from Bischoff’s setup and also from three pairs of microphones placed at various points in the concert hall. The mix heard here switches between these four perspectives as the pieces are played. The distance and pace incorporated into the recordings from various mic positions give a clear sense of the space of the performance, and of the object-ness of the sounds. That space and our place within it become the final part of the ‘material’: when the listener has no fixed point of perspective, then the position from which the listening/understanding is done becomes one of the elements of counterpoint.”
— Audio Combine, liner notes, Ed Osborn, Brown Univ, 2011.

T here are a few excellent books that empirically measure the modal vibrations of bells... He & Fu, for example. And some books on bispectral analysis—mainly used today in aerospace engineering and vibration-management engineering of turbines and other structures. Useful to explore if you are a composer/performer wanting to know more about how to more reliably utilize distinctive bell harmonics in your work. Links to some of these at the bottom of this post.

[Modal Analysis, Fu & He, 2001, p. 276]

[50-sec clip, Wang Yuanping & Hubei Chime Bells Orchestra, ‘竹枝词 (Zhu-zhi-ci) Bamboo-pole Love Poem’; (track 1), 1989, 1.5MB MP3]

T he substantial rhythmic independence of the parts in the ‘Local Color’ bell quartet is part of its distinctive Asian beauty. Because each bell projects its sound clearly, each individual bell can easily be heard over the rest of the bell ensemble, and yet the ensemble—the ‘community’ of bells—remains the primary subject. This is dissimilar from other voiced percussion like a timpani choir, performing a ‘programmatic’ role, where the effect of four or more timpani playing together is treated more as an ‘effect’ than as harmony. It is instead quartet ‘orchestration with Chinese characteristics’!

W ith computer-triggered sticking, the timing of the ring-down and the pitch-bend are the same, but the kinematic nuances of human left-hand/right-hand mallet or sticking patterns are gone. But the electromechanical linear actuators for the computer-controlled bells have their own kinematic constraints, in terms of speed of resetting for the next stroke, and so on. They have their own unique, finite kind of ‘embodiment’ just as we humans have ours, and we can hear this in these wonderful Bischoff compositions and this excellent recording of them being performed ‘live’.

A nd so the most amazing thing that we get from Bischoff’s mechatronic compositions like ‘Local Color’ is a vivid glimpse of robotic humanity and machine consciousness, revealed by the beater mechanics and linear actuators... something like an inversion of the ‘human-becoming-machine’ perspective of Ambrazevičius and Balsienė (link below): ‘machine-becoming-human’... a brilliant future of new expressive possibilities, including bionic accomodations for musicians with disabilities. Musical prosthetics? Sonnez les matines! / Din, dan, don!

J ohn Bischoff (b. 1949) is an early pioneer of live computer music. He is known for his solo constructions in real-time synthesis as well as his seminal work in computer network ensembles. Bischoff studied composition with Robert Moran, James Tenney, and Robert Ashley. He has been active in the experimental music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 25 year as a composer, performer, teacher, and grassroots activist. His performances around the US include NEW MUSIC AMERICA festivals in 1981 (SF) and 1989 (NYC), Experimental Intermedia (NYC), Roulette Intermedium (NYC), and the Beyond Music Festival (LA). He has performed in Europe at the Festival d'Automne in Paris, Akademie der Künst in Berlin, Fylkingen in Stockholm, and TUBE in Munich. He was a founding member of the League of Automatic Music Composers (1978), considered to be the world's first Computer Network Band, and he co-authored an article on the League's music that appears in "Foundations of Computer Music" (MIT Press 1985). He was also a founding member of the network band The Hub with whom he performed and recorded from 1985 to 1996.

Saturday, June 18, 2011

¡Sacabuche! Matteo Ricci: His Map and Music

J ust as western countries have never heard the teaching of the sages of China, so we Chinese have never heard of the books of their ancient sages. Both now enlighten each other; both benefit one another.”
— Feng Yingjing, acquaintance of Fr. Matteo Ricci, 16th-Century China.

S acabuche! is an ensemble of Chinese and western instruments and voices directed by Linda Pearse. Sacabuche! performed a series of concerts and workshops in Beijing, China, in December, 2010, and yesterday at BEMF in Boston offered a multimedia performance of their work about the Italian Jesuit priest (and mathematician, scientist, cartographer, and all-around polymath), Matteo Ricci, whose decades spent in China in the late 16th century resulted in the first map in Chinese. Ricci’s detailed map, completed and presented to the Wanli Emperor in 1602, showed the entire world—eastern and western hemispheres—surprising and edifying both the Chinese and the Italians.

I U Jacobs School of Music faculty members Stanley Ritchie and Wendy Gillespie contributed to the collaboration, as did University of Minnesota professor of History, Ann Waltner. The performance combined historical readings with early music from both sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe and China, along with new compositions by Oberlin/Juilliard-trained now-New-York-based composer Huang Ruo, commissioned for the Sacabuche! project.

T he multimedia performance reanimates the seminal political and cultural exchange between Italian Jesuits and Chinese literati in 16th/17th-century China and unifies (1) Italian music of Ricci’s Italy performed on period instruments, (2) Chinese music of Ricci’s China performed on traditional Chinese instruments, (3) Huang Ruo’s new music, (4) dramatic readings, and (5) historical imagery, including a projected digitized version of Ricci’s map (an old original, James Ford Bell Library, U of M) Chinese paintings and calligraphy and other artworks.

Linda Pearse, artistic director & sackbut
Ann Waltner, co-director, speaker, author of program notes/script
Qin Fang, speaker
Yang Yi, guzheng
Carrie Tsujui Chin, sheng
Eunji Lee, piano and organ
Sarah Barbash-Riley, Ray Horton & François Godère, sackbut
Martie Perry & Janelle Davis, Baroque violin
Wendy Gillespie, viola da gamba
Elise Figa, soprano
Andrew Rader, countertenor
Benjamin Geier, tenor
Huang Ruo, composer
Cathy Barbash, producer

T he thoughtful selection of 16th-Century Chinese imagery alternating with Italian Baroque Catholic Church imagery was accompanied by short descriptive and poetical Chinese and English texts read by Qin Fang and by Ann Waltner, respectively, interleaved with the Chinese and Italian Baroque music. The pace and the variety of sonic textures were really exciting—informing those of us who do not know very much about Chinese or Jesuit history; capturing and holding our interest throughout; and inspiring our expanding wonder about what the decades-long contact that Fr. Ricci and his Chinese hosts had with each other really entailed.

H uang Ruo’s “Fisherman’s Sonnet” is patterned after kun opera but includes a number of exotic orchestrations of Chinese and western instruments that have probably never been heard playing together before (sackbuts! viola da gamba! Baroque organ! with sheng and guzheng!).

C arrie Tsujui Chin’s sheng playing and Yang Yi’s guzheng were masterful and incisive—at times forcefully and at other times poignantly and delicately contrasting with the rest of the ensemble’s Baroque Italian harmonies.

Huang Ruo – Fisherman’s Sonnet
A. Gabrieli – Benedictus Dominus Deus Sabaoth
A. Gabrieli – Ricercar
A. Gabrieli – Alla Battaglia
Anon. – Tianfeng huanpei (Jade Pendants of the Immortals)
G. Palestrina – Quan pulchri Sunt
G. Nanino – Amor m’ha posto; I pensier so saette
G. Palestrina – Nigra sum, sed formosa
Bartolomeo de Selma – Vestiva i colli
G. Palestrina – Vestiva i colli
Anon. – Gaoshan liushui (Lofty Mountains and Rolling Waters)
A. Gabrieli – Ricercar arioso
G. Palestrina – Surgam et circuibo civitatem
Huang Ruo – My Promises are Above

T he readings were graceful and passionately delivered. Some of the readings are excerpts from Ricci’s diaries and letters—poetical in their own way and manifesting not so much the worldview of a missionary of the Roman Catholic Church as the personal and good-hearted expressions of a human being who is deeply and continually interested in other people and how they live, continually interested in learning, and in Life. Over his 30+ years in China, Ricci was fluent in writing and speaking Chinese and came to be highly regarded by the local Chinese scholars with whom he came into contact.

R icci [Li Xitai] … there is not a single one of our books that he has not read… In a noisy gathering of several dozen people with everybody speaking at once, the arguments he is following do not disturb him at all… [Other people] err through an excess of either inflexibility or compliancy… they are all inferior to him.”
— Li Zhi, letter to a friend regarding Ricci, 1600.

I f one totes up the durations of the various segments of the performance, the Chinese texts and music occupy considerably less time than the Baroque western music and Ricci texts. This is, after all, a production about Ricci and his activity and travels and his map. But the Chinese material is not merely ‘context’ or ‘backdrop’ for the Ricci saga; it is aesthetically and expressively as strong as the rest. The guzheng and sheng music is, if anything, revealing of a greater depth of existential reflection and contemplation on the part of the Chinese—of a great intellectual openness and spiritual preparedness to receive whatever insights a new experience [with Ricci, or with others] might offer—contrasted with the still-transcendent-but-more-constrained conceptions of Gabrieli or Palestrina. From the performance, we get the strong message that the illustrious Chinese Ricci encountered and whose writings survive were extraordinary human beings, every bit as much as Ricci was extraordinary.

T here are, naturally, other, less sanguine perspectives on Ricci and his accomplishments (see some of the books linked below). Indeed, some of Huang Ruo’s music conveys the diversity of Chinese opinion about the Jesuit(s) in their midst. Ricci’s chronic reluctance to forthrightly state what his or the Church’s purposes and intentions were in China evidently wore thin at times—graciousness has its limits, and there has to be an acceptable bilateral flow of value, or convincing and ongoing prospects of future value flow, for the relationship/exchange/intrusion to be sustainable. Huang Ruo’s music and the ensemble’s playing provide a balanced and empathetic, speculative account of this cross-cultural give-and-take. This is not surface-level alternating now-Chinese-now-Western-sacred-music collage or ‘documentary’; instead, the dramatic tension of the work derives from the fact that the sequence of compositions does recreate this diversity, this give-and-take, complete with the politics and misapprehensions in it. Not inscrutable! Quite the opposite.

M any thanks to the IU and U of M for producing and performing this beautiful and exciting work! International Relations par excellence!

Friday, June 3, 2011

Just returned to U.S. from several weeks in China, inspired by the possibilities

S oft power is derived from both state and society. Savvy states are able to harness the creativity and vibrancy of their societies for soft power purposes while understanding that it is civil society’s independence from the state that contains the real persuasive power. When authoritarian states deny the global public the ability to directly access their domestic civil society, they are potentially depriving themselves of a key soft power asset in the information age.”
— Shanthi Kalathil, ISD Working Papers in New Diplomacy, MAY-2011.

I ’ve just returned from several weeks in China—a wonderful, profoundly stimulating experience. I attended chamber music performances in Beijing, including a delightful concert at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (“The Egg”) by pianist Igor Levit and three of his colleagues (Evgenia Rubinova, Michail Lifits, Herbert Schuch).

U nfortunately, due to Chinese government policy Google Blogger, Twitter, and Facebook are all blocked in the PRC, which is why I have posted no blogs or tweets in recent weeks. (Did not try to use a proxy-server. Hotel ISPs were dodgy enough as it was...)

T here were interesting ‘audience compliance enforcement’ practices in China that we would never see in the West. For example, the concert hall staff aim red ‘marksman’/gun-sight-type lasers on the heads and backs of audience members who make noise or who move or try to take a forbidden photo during a performance. Everyone in the audience sees the bright red dot ‘painted’ on the body part of the offender. We don’t see that kind of enforcement of etiquette in the U.S. or Europe, that’s for sure. But the effectiveness of the social censure by the other audience members who are seated near the ‘offender’ is total and nearly instantaneous. From a performer’s perspective, this is kind of cool—especially when the behavior is disruptive and selfish on the part of the person doing the picture-taking or recording or moving-around.

I gor Levit gave a fantastic left-hand-only rendering of BWV 971 (among other things). I asked him and he says the transcription was Brahms’s, published by Breitkopf & Hartel, but I look in Breitkopf catalog and do not see it... I will have to buy a copy of their EB-6018 to look... maybe it is in there and only the Breitkopf pdf file online is in error. There are lots of LH transcriptions of BWV 1004 Chaconne, BWV 1006, BWV 1002, BWV 1031, and so on. I so far do not find the LH tr. of 971...

T he unlikely LH as proponent of subject, object, everything: this reveals new dimensions in, and sheds new light on, a piece I thought I understood. The RH stands by like a watchful parent, saying nothing.

L eon Fleisher and others have had dystonia or other reasons to pursue such literature, but here in China I hear Igor Levit and learn new things. Some might consider one such piece in an otherwise normal program to be a ‘novelty’ or ‘gimmick’, but it was not. Absolutely masterful.

I visited hospitals—crowded but fastidiously clean and well-run—so many things different from the West, but so many things the same. Visited the Central Conservatory where Chen Yi and Zhou Long and others trained. Oh, the food! The friendly, gracious Chinese people!

S o China blazes this prodigious, distinctive, iconoclastic path—many paths, actually, reflecting mixtures of Han Chinese plus 55 minority groups: regional, metropolitan and rural—always diverging from the West, because why? Because what is distinctly Chinese embodies the belovèd “national circumstances” and reinforces the honorable “Chinese characteristics”, or guoqing (国情). That is why... that is why this Chinese ‘autopoietic’ tendency is self-sustaining. It is a little like Richard Dawkins’s ‘Selfish Gene’ on a large social scale. Based on my 3-week exposure, I think it’s not a deliberated process and not a politically-coerced one. Instead, it feels organic, inevitable. So many people, who mostly seem so happy, so long as the ‘boom’ lasts! I can hardly wait for the chance to return...

Brahms transcription of the Bach Chaconne of Violin partita BWV 1004 for the left-hand (Peters)
Brahms transcription of Italian Concerto (Clavier-Ubung II) for the left-hand (Breitkopf)
Joseffy Violin partita BWV 1006 transcription for the left-hand
Kistler-Liebendorfer Choralvorspiel BWV 711, violin sonata BWV 1001, violin partita BWV 1006, orchestra suite No. 1 BWV 1066, orch suite No. 3 BWV 1068, musical offering canon BWV 1079... transcription for the left-hand
Philipp violin partita BWV 1002, violin partita BWV 1004 transcription for the left-hand
Raff Violin partita No. 2 BWV 1004 Chaconne transcription for the left-hand
Sitsky Violin partita No. 2 BWV 1004 Chaconne transcription for the left-hand
Sosa Chromatische Fantasie und Fuge BWV 903 transcription for the left-hand
Sosa Invention B-Dur BWV 785 transcription for the left-hand
Wittgenstein Violin partita No. 2 BWV 1004 Chaconne transcription for the left-hand
Wittgenstein Schule für die linke Hand III/2: Präludium c-Moll transcription for the left-hand
Wittgenstein Siciliano aus der Flötensonate Es-Dur BWV 1031 transcription for the left-hand

Monday, February 7, 2011

It Was When the Nagging Became Music (1:41) that Love Became Clear to Me 腾讯QQ

I long with all my heart to return to my quiet home where I was born and have spent happy days in nature. Nature! Where can I find it here? Everything is so artificial...”
— Robert Schumann, letter from Leipzig to his mother in Zwickau, 24-OCT-1828 [Jugendbriefe, 2e., 2 vols., Clara Schumann, ed.].

M any composers have treated the subject of ‘Heimweh’ (German for homesickness)... Carl Gottlieb Reissiger (Op. 50, No. 1); Robert Schumann; Edvard Grieg; Arnold Schoenberg; Franz Schubert, Hugo Wolf, Johann Kalliwoda, Fanny Mendelssohn, Johannes Brahms, Franz Liszt, Max Reger, Mischa Spoliansky, Heinrich Proch, many others. Here in this Tencent QQ video we have it in an industrial marketing film. (Unfortunately, I am not yet able to find out who the performers of the soundtrack music in this video are, and I am not certain of the composition either.)

T he video is, I think, a fine example of how indispensable chamber music is for effective, impactful films, especially ones that address matters of family. Meaning is constituted not simply by its semantic content but also by its sonic content. Thirty years ago we had Roland Barthes’s concept of ‘the grain of the voice’. The effect of women’s voices, mothers in particular, was examined by Leslie Dunn and Nancy Jones in their book (link below). ‘Purely sonic’ features of the female voice in "the construction of its non-verbal meanings" involve roles played by (1) the person or people producing the sound, (2) the person or people hearing the produced sound and (3) the acoustical and social contexts in which production and hearing occur. The meaning of sound is co-constituted by performative as well as semantic and textual features.

I n the Tencent QQ video, the mother-son intersubjective acoustic space must be—and is—recovered. That is why this video and its supporting sound track work.

I n the aftermath of the notorious Amy Chua book, this is something of an anti-Tiger Mom video, complete with healing chamber music sound track. Reed-in-the-wind mother is mistreated by ambitious, impatient son who departs for U.S., makes good, feels remorse, gets a clue, starts treating mom better, from 20,000 kilometers away. There is not enough time to show whether son’s earlier irritability and maladjustment to parental implacability are in any way justified, nor whether there are any mitigating conditions, such as autism spectrum disorders. There is not enough time to show whether mom’s despair and hovering are related to ongoing chronic depression or other mitigating conditions.

A ll we see of son is the stage of exasperation and fuming resentment, followed by the stage of loneliness and isolation and regret. All we see of mom is stage of despair, sorrow, followed by stage of ecstasy at learning to use instant messaging and restoration of the relationship. Montemayor and Hanson (1985) reported a parent-adolescent child conflict event rate of 2 conflicts per 3 days, an average of 20 events per month, so maybe the video shows what is entirely within the bounds of ‘normal’. Warm, candid, poignant, gently humorous, it’s a story that has plenty of the cozy intimacy of chamber music in industrial ‘promo’ settings/jingles.

T his music amounts to a shamanic ceremony during which the shaman-surrogate commercial sponsor 腾讯 QQ produces this music and images to appease the spirits both within the family depicted in the story and within the broader community—by extension including you and me.

T he first violin makes three rhapsodic statements, each ending with a pause while the inner strings catch up with their parallel entries. The remainder of the track is comprised of pianissimo phrases on three voices, while the fourth voice carries a confessional folk melody (first and second violins, in turn). Cool, how this works...

12年相伴弹指间心无间.”
— 腾讯 QQ.