jwilzewske: communication

Showing posts with label communication. Show all posts

Friday, June 17, 2011

Minimalism/Designing Simplicity: Jordi Savall’s Celtic Viol

S hort motifs predominate... any feeling of meter is, basically, ‘local’. The majority of sections are only 8 bars long, with strong downbeat emphasis. Each section/variation offers new and different kinds of transparency, some more arpeggiated, some less so. The music may be Irish and Scottish in origin, but through this 2-hour recital I am drawn more than anything toward comparisons with Indian ragas—evolutions of a series of waves progressing over the ocean’s surface for hundreds of miles.

C omparisons with other kinds of minimalist music, a la La Monte Young, Reich, Nyman, Riley, and others seem apt as well.

[50-sec clip, Jordi Savall, ‘Macpherson’s Lament’; 2011, 1.4MB MP3]

I n Savall’s conception of the Scottish folk tune ‘MacPherson’s Lament’, the prospect of being hanged focuses the mind wonderfully. [The prisoner condemned to die requested the privilege to play one last tune, and this is the tune that he performed. Many fast trills, initiated on downbeat and then tapering—little symbolisms of trembling, waning life. After finishing the last note, the prisoner smashed the fiddle: the fiddle would die with him, a second homicide, violating the personhood of the instrument and compounding whatever other crimes MacPherson may have committed.]

T here are surely many musicians who have continued playing up to within a short while before their deaths, usually from cancer or other chronic illness. Consider the gesture as a form of palliative self-care. This is terminal abjection. The music is not meant to be salvific or curative, like a Tarantella! The musician knows full-well that s/he is about to die, and that there will be no reprieve, no escaping this fate. If anything, we hear a brave, dignified aesthetic of fast-approaching doom. [Did Shackleton’s Expedition have amateur musicians abord, I wonder? If so, what did they play toward The End?] All told, the repertoire of those whose lives are ended by the State must be a very small and specialized one. Savall’s performance suggests that jewish musicians of the Theresien (Terezin) Holocaust prison camp do not have a world monopoly on this literature. But I digress.

T he feature of the Jordi Savall-Paul O’Dette-Shane Shanahan performance last night that most fascinated me was the minimalism of it—and how this music (which is ordinarily performed in a freewheeling, raucous manner—at noisy dances with liberal imbibing, lots of stomping and shouting and carrying-on) resembles error-correcting codes in communications and software. The intermittent loss of phase-lock (due to signal attenuation, or multi-path reflections and other interference, or fluctuating changes in signal-to-noise ratio in the communications channel) in ballads and dance music is rapidly detected, the parts (treble viol in Jordi’s lap; Paul’s cittern/lute; Shanahan’s bodhran) are de-skewed, and phase-lock is recaptured, in large part due to the structure of these low-entropy framing “packets”, these 8-bar phrases.

H ave a look at Prof. Hartmut Obendorf’s recent computer science book (link below) to see what I mean.

I wish that Paul O’Dette and Shane Shanahan had had more substantial parts to play during the Celtic Viol concert last night, parts more illustrative of their expressiveness and musicianship. But despite their relegation to low-key ‘accompaniment’ roles, O’Dette and Shanahan seemed to enjoy themselves a great deal on-stage. Accompanists manifest a unique dignity arising from modesty, nurturing, and support—another species of minimalism, I suppose, providing the ‘canvas’ for the soloist’s artistic vision. It was all pretty cool.

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.

Sunday, April 29, 2007

Mentoring the Inner Chamber Musician

I t just doesn’t seem that long since those days of not knowing what young musicians should or shouldn’t be able to do. Having had a ‘little more’ experience now, I am amazed that you and your classmates were able to play, pretty well, charts that were written for pros.”

— Bruce Pearson, reminiscing in 2007 about his early teaching in the late Sixties

CMT: It’s hard to know what someone should or shouldn’t be able to do at a particular point in her/his artistic development!

Angela Myles Beeching, New England Conservatory

DSM: Well, the fact is that you never know until you try. The brave thing involves enthusiastically “pushing the envelope” —both the teacher and the student are ideally doing this. Is there ever a teacher so wizened and hoary that the process with this student is not throwing off sparks of new pedagogy? I don’t think so. Every person is so open-ended and so different from every other person that the teaching or mentoring process is perpetually new and unique.

Danel Kvartetti, in sauna, in Kuhmo Finland, 2006

CMT: Unless burn-out or hubris sets in. With music especially—which, like mathematics and a few other virtuosic pursuits, is to a large degree a young person’s realm—there really ought not to be preconceptions as to what a person ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ be able to do. No, you don’t want to put together young ensembles whose members’ abilities are light-years apart and frustrate them by putting literature in front of them that is at the level of the least-able lowest-common-denominator member. Nor do you want to frustrate them by giving them literature that’s at the level of the one prodigy in the ensemble. It’s truly an art: finding literature that adequately stretches the capabilities of each member, and then evolving that literature as the complexion of their abilities changes over the passing months together.

DSM: If there’re one or two reallly gifted players in the group, the lessons to be learned are a bit different for them than they are for the others, aren’t they! The issue becomes more one of balance and adaptation, accommodating one’s own playing to the realities of the notes around you. The elements of musicianship then have more to do with interpersonal communication. The stronger players, ideally, become sub-mentors—in some ways like the principal chairs in an orchestra. It’s very like the idea of ‘induction’, which has some cachet lately in the scholarly teaching/pedagogy journal literature.

CMT: Well, as Bruce Pearson says, there’s the [population epidemiology] of technic—an empirical distribution of abilities that one can reasonably expect in a given class. You’re delighted when you encounter abilities and synergies that are above the median. But you have no right to feel disappointed when you encounter deficiencies and dissension that are below it.

DSM: And, of course, it’s a matter not only for members of ensembles who are experiencing personnel changes, or for teachers or leaders of ensembles in an education setting, but also for the composers who are composing or arranging pieces. Music, like any other kind of literature, either finds its natural readership or else it doesn’t. The practical composer has, just as much as any good author, a clear sense of the epidemiology of technic—a clear sense of who is going to be able to play what she/he is writing; a clear sense of who is going to want to perform it, given the difficulties and risks that the composer builds into the piece. If you’re composing and are oblivious to this, you’ll be composing for a very small market—maybe a market of zero.

CMT: Regardless of the ages of the ensemble’s members—and regardless of the natural norms for what middle school, or high school, or college students may generally be expected to do—I think chamber music is, like jazz, one of the genres most congenial to exploration. There are social supports and incentives in a string quartet, say—supports that you wouldn’t necessarily find in a one-on-one mentoring relationship with a viol master. Your failures are very visible, yes, but you are bathed in the empathy of the other members. And your successes have a tremendous immediacy and are shared in a way that is far more nourishing than the drier, more abstract appreciations that come in solo work or in larger orchestras. That was one of the lessons I learned from Bruce Pearson, back in the late Sixties.