jwilzewske: cloud computing

S ome of the Microludes use simple dramatic devices such as long sustained notes, while others, such as the 10th, represent a terrifying tangle of string techniques. As there are moments of terror, so are there disturbing breaths of tragic lyricism and even a hint of gallows humor as suggested in the ninth. The total effect, however, is tragic desperation even if we cannot clearly define its source.”
— Lucy Miller Murray.

In China the short-short is called a ‘Smoke-Long’ story [the time it takes to smoke a cigarette].”
— Shouhua Qi.

O ne-page fiction should hang in the air of the mind like an image made of smoke.”
— Jayne Anne Phillips.

T he Parker Quartet’s performance last night in the UMKC Conservatory - Friends of Chamber Music Alliance Series was superb, their cohesiveness and intensity most impressive. The unusual program showcased a sort of vivid storytelling through music, a collectivistic mode of expression at which the Parker excels. You Can’t See Dogs on the Radio, as they say, but you have no doubt that they are there, that the dogs in the story are real live dogs. The Parker Quartet plays with imagination and realism that tops the most realistic video game or interactive fiction.

Daniel Chong, violin
Karen Kim, violin
Jessica Bodner, viola
Kee-Hyun Kim, cello

Dvořák — Cypresses, B.152 (I know that on my love; Death reigns; Thou only, dear one; Nature lies peaceful)
Kurtág — Twelve Microludes, Op. 13, ‘Hommage a András Mihály’
Hindemith — Quartet No. 3, Op. 22 (Fugato; Schenlle achtel; Ruhige viertel; Mässig schnelle; Rondo)
Mendelssohn — Quartet in E Minor, Op.44, No. 2 (Allegro assai appassionato; Scherzo; Andante; Presto agitato)

K urtág’s ‘12 Mikrolúdium Vonósné-Gyesre’ Op. 13 were composed in 1977–1978, commissioned by the Witten Festival, and were given their world premiere in Witten on 21-APR-1978 by the Éder Quartet. Each microlude is a “micro fiction”, phenomenally brief, the longest of them being 130 seconds and the shortest a mere 17 seconds. The emotional impact of each nanostory both is tremendous, and the impact of the concatenation of them even more so.

I n her pre-performance remarks, violinist Karen Kim encouraged the audience to consider these vignettes as similar to Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, each volume containing 24 preludes and fugues, chromatically organized in all the major and minor keys. Kurtág’s Twelve Microludes feature each key in ascending half-steps beginning with C.

P ieces so short as these carry tremendous risk. In micro fiction, if you are coercing concision, you run the risk that you will be overpowering or cruel or clichéd, as in Hemingway’s famous six-word story, ‘For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn.’ Plot and character development and meaning are eroded if the form is too severely truncated/compressed. The information-carrying capacity of the available bytes is too small; it is like lossy jpegs—hard to be sure of what scenes and meanings are depicted in the bits of blurry evidence.

B ut in the Kurtág we get rich and spontaneous observations of people in as little as 17 seconds; we get both their superficial expressions and their deep inner pathologies. What we experience in Parker Quartet’s performance—what is especially distinctive about it—is the crystal-clear, unambiguous consistency of their quartetly “we,” regardless of individualistic feelings, emotions, or extrinsic thoughts the quartet members may be having. We are, at this moment, all the same, they seem to say: an assemblage of 4 persons, creating one singularity, one reality. “See it? It floats above us, about 1 meter above our heads, in the column of air between our music stands.”

A nd we in the audience eagerly attach ourselves to the intangible forms—the images and fleetingly accepted ideas, which become our “anchors” in this plane of reality. Over the ensuing seconds, those fixations and attachments become the “bars” that cage us and constrain our understanding as well as entrance us. We remain in this plane; we attach ourselves to this plane; we go with the Parkers’ flow.

T he colors and shapes of our emotions within each piece: short-short stories, slices of life. As such, we narrow the time frame and geographical location of each piece. Kurtag’s ’12 Microludes’ is playful—10 minutes of experimentation and exploration of limits. The four voices pass contrariwise—languid sustained notes, accelerating to disorienting tangles. We listeners are not given much of any anchor to hang onto or point-of-reference to maintain our bearings. These invisible dogs are wearing collars and leashes; the Parkers are showing them to us; we pet them. We readers/listeners are empowered to ascribe whatever personalized significance we wish. Interactive fiction!

T he fifth movement is maybe the most fictional one—folk melodies—some in foreground; others backgrounded—people passing each other, all of them are walking their braces of invisible dogs now, bumping into each other, greeting each other. “See it? At the end of this leash? My dog likes to eat nuts, cashews mostly. And that one likes cheese and bacon.”

S peaking of which, the Dvořák ‘Cypresses’ are micro fictions, too, but they are more programmatic or cashew-representational than the Kurtág ‘Microludes’. Kurtág is full of post-structuralist rhetorics ... a ‘metanoia’, a beyond-knowing or about-knowing-and-the-limits-of-knowing, an epistemology of surprise and doubt. Have a look at Jay David Bolter’s chapter in Philip Cohen’s multi-author edited volume (link below) if you are interested in these cashew-ey lit-theory things...

T he music encodes a compiled program—it has a set of initializations; procedural logic and flow-of-control; conditions; contingent outputs—I mean a set of software design patterns and objects and behaviors, whether perceived by us users as tendencies, rules, methods, or procedures. For this reason the formation of an implied code is a normal (and largely unconscious) process for any of us interactors, regardless of our level of technical experience. To possess an “implied code” doesn’t require that we interactors be skilled programmers with an aptitude for conceiving syntax in the compiled language or an aptitude for imagining new data structures.

I n fact, the presence or absence of such imaginings is beside the point. We are... we are cloud-based ‘Imagination-as-a-Service’ (IaaS) agents.

S ometimes our initial notions turn out to be wrong. Our “implied code” contains errors, and we discover that something crucial has changed after we receive what feels like a pop-up error message. Our mental model gets revised.

I nteractive fictions like these embody a sort of command-line-interpreter CLI user-interface, a site of negotiation between the composer, the performers, and us interactors/listeners: our imaginations contain the “objects” and procedural “methods” code for simulation and animation. The composer emits instructions. We cannot help but receive them, but the instructions may or may not be honored by the “implied code” of our listeners’/interactors’ conceptions.

I nteractive fiction is not a painting or photograph containing a command-line prompt or a transcript of a command-line and a new command-line prompt staring at us, nor is it a story describing a series of input command-lines and command-line prompts. It is not Gibson’s ‘Neuromancer’ nor Stephenson’s ‘Cryptonomicon’. Nor is it a movie scene replaying a command-line interaction, like ‘The Matrix’.

W e interactors are processes in Time, our implied codes contributing to a ‘coming-into-understanding’ system-services ‘stack’. We interactors progress in learning to interact, paralleled by the progress of the protagonists within each Microlude, protagonists who likewise struggle to understand something within the reality of the story, dogs and all. Implied code mallocs an epiphany—the climax—which gives way to the conclusion: the character understands the world in the moment that we listeners understand the code, and at that moment the work ends, and then dealloc/free() and process-rundown.

S o “implied code” in Kurtag is neither a set of instructions nor a transcript of past interactions. The implied code and objects that are instantiated in the minds of us interactors are a reflection of the source code, byte code, or musical manuscript they stand in relation to, but the result is a rendering into a set of an abstractly conceived network of opportunities, allowances, and prohibitions. At the command-line, whose input mode encourages experimentation and ad hoc going-with-the-flow, these prohibitions such as error messages affect our subsequent implied code.

O ur intertwined aesthetic and technical developments can be cast in narrative theory (Iser’s gaps, and ‘fabula / sjuzet’ distinction), in game-theoretic [micro—] ‘ludology’ (player apprehension of rules, evaluation of strategic advancement), and in filmic representations (subjective POV, time-loops). I add more links for your interest below...

I n short, I was blown away by the Parker Quartet’s captivating imagery and flawless technique. The unusual repertoire in last night’s ‘microfic’ program is the epitome of chamber music ensembles’ effectively appealing to broader audiences. And for beautiful art in such a program to end in our making some discoveries, as fictive energy accumulated around the gaps, the ‘unknowns’ in the mind between the ‘knowns’, seems fitting: total success. The Parkers’ invisible dogs were members of the cloud-based potentialDogs class until, in a sudden beautiful and memorable synaptic arc, the connection was made: closure. IaaS gave us visible realDog instances, while the music lasted.

F ounded in 2002, the Parker Quartet was in 2009 awarded CMA’s prestigious Cleveland Quartet Award which honors rising young string quartets. Currently, the Parker is in its second season as the Quartet-in-Residence with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, and in 2010 they were the first-ever Artists-in-Residence with Minnesota Public Radio and American Public Media.

A nthony Burton’s program notes for the London Phil’s ‘Chamber Contrasts’ series at Wigmore Hall emphasize how impressed Brahms was with the potential of clarinet, as a result of his hearing clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld perform in 1891. But Brahms composed this Op. 115 clarinet quintet within a few years of his death from cancer, a period when many of his friends and family died (his sister Elise, his brother Fritz, Elizabeth von Herzogenberg, Hermione Spies, Theodor Broth, Clara Schumann, etc.). This makes me think that the recursive, ‘re-considering’ structures in this quintet maybe derive more from the emotional impact of those events on Brahms—than from any scheme Brahms may have had, to create in Op. 115 a virtuosic clarinet showpiece for the great Mühlfeld.

L arge-scale variation comes from relationships between variations (the theme included) and how these relationships are united into a pervasive algorithm that encapsulates the entire set—that is, an operating system governing the entire set. In other words, these are not a mere series of independent objects and methods (scripts) that are expected derivatives of a parent object or class. They are a ‘network-based object-oriented OS’.

W hat I mean is, Brahms’s variations feel to me ‘network-based’, not ‘hierarchical’. It seems (to me) that Brahms was exposing larger-scale connections, and transforming his idea into a multi-domain network rather than a hierarchical structure with conventional ‘parent’ exposition classes and ‘child’ instantiations. The arrangement of variations involves pairs of diatonic pitch-class cells derived from the theme. But the textural differences that follow are like remote procedure-calls that cross-link the tension-producing structures within the variations’ designs. This gives the piece an attractive sort of ‘meta-complexity’.

I n other people’s analyses (links below), variation sets in Brahms’s multi-movement instrumental compositions are usually only moderately complex. Variation sets in interior movements often do not have full ‘closure’. In the variations in this Clarinet Quintet in B minor, Brahms suggests or ‘projects’ closure by recapitulating first-movement phrases. But the promised closure doesn’t come until the very end. It is as though there is a latent, suspended complexity that is irreducible until the very end.

T his gets me to thinking about how Brahms does this, and how we might devise similar structures and mechanics in new music. The ‘Kolmogorov complexity’ (links below) of a software program or script, or a piece of text or a musical composition, is a measure of the computational resources needed to specify the object. Kolmogorov complexity is also known as descriptive complexity, Kolmogorov-Chaitin complexity, stochastic complexity, algorithmic entropy, or program-size complexity.

O ne of the appealing, intuitively plausible qualities of Kolmogorov complexity as a metric to characterize what I was hearing last night in the account of the Brahms clarinet quintet given by Robert Hill and his colleagues has to do with how the aggregate complexity goes, for large composite or ‘compound’ or ‘network’ or ‘cloud’ objects that are constituted from multiple smaller objects. For example, consider a compound object built up from objects X and Y. The Kolmogorov complexity of the two of them together K(X,Y) is:

K(X,Y) = K(X) + K(Y|X) + O(ln(K(X,Y)))

T his says that the shortest program that reproduces X and Y is no more than a logarithmic term larger than a program to reproduce X and a program to reproduce Y given X. This basically puts a quantitative ‘bound’ on the amount of mutual information there is between X and Y in terms of the Kolmogorov complexity.

T he amount of unresolved tension we feel in the inner movements in this Brahms quintet—and the intensity of the desire we feel for the eventual resolution of these tensions at the end—feels, to me, logarithmic. Maybe some future music theory PhD candidate will explore this notion properly and critically. For now, it’s happy enough for me to give you a few interesting links below and the glimmer of a potential reason why the complexities and proportions of this quintet seem so ‘right’ and so beautiful.

jwilzewske

Sunday, January 23, 2011

Parker Quartet: Microludes, Cloud Computing, and Imagination-as-a-Service (IaaS)

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Meta-complexity in Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet