Jonathan Kolm: Air on a Super-String

L    ove is most nearly itself
When ‘here’ and ‘now’ cease to matter.”
  —  T.S. Eliot.

J onathan Kolm’s recent compositions reveal that physics can be a rich source of compositional ideas. In particular, Jonathan’s ‘Quantum Music’, a 24-minute chamber work for oboe, clarinet, violin, and cello that received its première in Richmond, Virginia, in 2001 is explicitly evocative of quantum uncertainty, entanglement, and randomness/stochastics. This piece won the third place prize in 2002’s National Federation of Music Clubs Contest. The textures are interesting throughout, and the narrative arc is accessible and deeply moving. Surprisingly so, considering the ‘representational’ motivations and title of the piece.

A ccording to Susan Strehle, [Binghamton University (SUNY) Dept of English], artists who are ‘actualists’ balance attention to questions of art with an engaged meditation on the external, actual world. While ‘actualist novels’ or ‘actualist paintings’ or ‘actualist compositions’ diverge markedly from ‘realist’ representational practice, Strehle claims that they do so in order to reflect more acutely what we perceive as ‘real’. Reality is no longer merely or conventionally ‘realistic’. In the new physical or quantum universe, reality is discontinuous, energetic, relative, statistical, ‘subjectively seen’, and ‘uncertainly known’—all terms taken from physics.

A    ccording to conventional aesthetics, [music] aims either at realistic representation of life or at the anti-realistic exploration of artistic processes. It selectively focuses either on human reality or on the linguistic and formal rendering that constitutes its art. Fictional choices work this way because, for traditional theorists, perception itself functions in ‘either-or’ fashion... [Composers] therefore direct the [listeners; performers] to observe either the garden outside the window or the glass through which the garden appears... The legacy of these assumptions becomes especially restrictive—even blinding, I would argue—for critics of post-modern [music].”
  —  Susan Strehle, p. 1.

A nother of Kolm’s physics-inspired pieces, this time on a cosmology/astrophysics scale, is ‘The Primitive Cosmos’ for 10 percussion (3 marimbas (one 4 1/2 octave), 2 vibraphones, xylophone, bells, timpani and 2 multi-percussionists). This won second-place in 2001’s Percussive Arts Society competition. This piece is intensely rhythmic, taut yet somehow simultaneously tranquil—astonishingly so. Rhythmic ‘mass’ is interconvertible to-from ‘energy’. Beautiful!

O ur minds have difficulty visualizing higher dimensions because we can only move in three spatial dimensions. One way of dealing with this limitation is not to try to visualize higher dimensions at all, but just to think of them as extra numbers in the equations that describe how the world works—or, in the case of Jonathan Kolm, how his music works. This opens the question of whether these ‘extra numbers’ can be investigated directly in any experiment/performance (which necessarily give different results/effects in 1, 2, or 2+1 dimensions to a human scientist/listener/performer).

T his, in turn, raises the question of whether models that rely on such abstract modeling—and potentially impossibly-huge experimental apparatus/ensembles—can be considered scientific/musical. Six-dimensional Calabi-Yau shapes (like the jpeg above) can account for the additional dimensions required by superstring theory. Superstring theory says that every point in space (or whatever we had previously considered a ‘point’) is in fact a tiny topological ‘manifold’ where each extra dimension has a size on the order of the Planck length/nanoquaver. Kolm’s ‘Quantum Music’ evokes impressions along these lines, especially the woodwind parts’ articulations.

B ohmian mechanics’ was formulated in 1952 by David Bohm as an ontological theory of quantum phenomena. It was revisited and expanded some decades later by John S. Bell. Bell investigated the ‘nonlocal’ structure and implications of Bohm’s theory and was led to formulate Bell’s inequalities. Experimental tests of the inequalities verified that Nature is nonlocal—capable of long-range correlations and ‘entanglements’ between two or more particles separated in space. Bohmian mechanics has since then prospered as a logical counterpart of quantum mechanics. Bohmian mechanics concerns the motion of elementary particles. Statistical analysis of these yields the formalism of quantum mechanics in terms of mathematical Hilbert spaces, self-adjoint operator-observables, and projection and positive operator-valued metrics. Tunneling times, ‘arrival times’, and ‘first-exit times’ are mathematically modeled in Bohmian mechanics. I do not know whether Jonathan Kolm has employed the mathematical abstractions of Bohmian mechanics as part of his compositional practice, but the features of his instrumental writing suggest that this may be so.


J onathan Kolm’s music combines emotional intensity and rich harmonic colors and has been recognized with awards and prizes in national competitions—in choral works in addition to his instrumental compositions. In 2008 he participated in the American Composers Forum workshop for new choral music working with conductor Philip Brunelle and Vocal Essence. He has had several choral commissions by the Young New Yorkers’ Chorus and other groups. ‘A Dream within a Dream’ (soprano, cello and piano) and ‘Winter Heavens’, premiered in New York City by the New York Virtuoso Singers, are notable. He was a Symposium Fellow at MUSIC05 in Cincinnati where his piece for three percussionists on one vibraphone ‘Warrior from the Deep’ was premiered. ‘Crystal Fantasy’, for violin, cello, flute, and clarinet was performed at the Dallas Museum of Art where it won second place in the 2005 Voices of Change Composition Contest. In 2006 a cantata for choir and orchestra was commissioned and premiered in April, 2006 in Austin, Texas, as well as set of pieces for violin and piano that were commissioned by the Austin Eurhythmy Ensemble and premiered in St. Paul, Minnesota, in May, 2006, and has been favored with many subsequent performances. His work for SATB chorus ‘Cedo Maiori’ was premiered in October 2006 in New York City by the New York Virtuoso Singers at Columbia University.

U nlike many composers of new music with unswerving devotion to white-on-white, Jonathan Kolm is clearly unafraid of sonic ‘color’. He floods his compositions with natural light to achieve a constantly-changing interior and multiple gradations of intimacy. He is unafraid of introducing bold acoustic colors, covers Le Corbusier celloistic club-chairs with purple oboe and blue clarinet fabrics.

N ature and physics give us an uncountable infinity of variations on the theme of quantum ‘indistinguishability’. In some variations, the theme is obvious; in others it is hidden. In physics, quantum ‘entanglement’ has priority over ‘indistinguishability’. Entanglement is the heart of quantum physics. If there were no entanglement but only one-particle interferences, then why should we not just accept a wave theory as an adequate account of the phenomena? We are able to know that this photon or this clarinet expression is a quantum object because we know that two photons or an oboe and a clarinet can become entangled even though they are spatially separated. Their quantum structureness is made palpable by the parts’ entanglement—the way they are written, the way they are played.

B y ‘quantum structures’ we mean systems of events that model abstract quantum mechanical processes. If you are interested in this stuff (for your own use in composing, or as an aid to analysis of music like this) there is a highly-readable discussion of these things in Mirko Navara’s chapter in Engesser, Gabbay, and Lehmann’s book (pp. 335ff).

J onathan received his DMA in Composition from the University of Texas at Austin in 2007. He previously had taken his MM in Composition at Virginia Commonwealth University (2000). He is currently Asst. Prof. of Composition and Music Education at Grove City College in Pennsylvania.

• Jonathan Kolm, Pittsburgh (Grove City College)
  
• Jonathan Kolm page re: composition and piano teaching
  
• Kolm J. Primitive Cosmos, for 10 percussion. HoneyRock, 2002.
  
• PittsburghNewMusicNet.com
  
• IonSound, ensemble-in-residence, Univ Pittsburgh
  
• Jonathan Kolm scores at Honeyrock Publishers
  
• 'Purposeful Incoherence' discussion at NetNewMusic (I claim that quantum music is not 'purposefully-incoherent' or stochastic but is instead 'unknowably/imprecisely coherent/entangled')
  
• Quantum Music page at Vrije Universiteit Brussel
  
• International Quantum Structures Association (Belgium)
  
• IBM page on quantum computing and entanglement-based teleportation
  
• Quantum bit (qubit)
  
• Quantum parallel computing
  
• Quantiki.org
  
• Quantum computation wiki
  
• Quantum computation page at MIT
  
• Albert D. Quantum Mechanics and Experience. Harvard Univ, 1994.
  
• Bell J. Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics: Collected Papers on Quantum Philosophy. 2e. Cambridge Univ, 2004.
  
• de Berry S. Quantum Psychology: Steps to a Postmodern Ecology of Being. Praeger, 1993.
  
• Dürr D, Teufel S. Bohmian Mechanics: The Physics and Mathematics of Quantum Theory. Springer, 2009.
  
• Engesser K, Gabbay D, LEhmann D, eds. Handbook of Quantum Logic and Quantum Structures: Quantum Structures. Elsevier, 2007.
  
• Maudlin T. Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity: Metaphysical Intimations of Modern Physics. 2e. Wiley, 2002.
  
• Roederer J. The Physics and Psychophysics of Music. Springer, 2008.
  
• Rosenblum B, Kuttner F. Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness. Oxford Univ, 2006.
  
• Satinover J. The Quantum Brain: The Search for Freedom and the Next Generation of Man. Wiley, 2002.
  
• Scarani V. Quantum Physics: A First Encounter: Interference, Entanglement, and Reality. Oxford Univ, 2006.
  
• Strehle S. Fiction in the Quantum Universe. Univ North Carolina, 1992.

Within-Ensemble Dialogue: Cresswell’s ‘Soliloquy on a Lambent Tailpiece’

S oliloquy on a Lambent [double-bass] Tailpiece’ is a piece that was commissioned by Roger Dean and Ensemble LYSIS in 1980. It is, to me, both challenging and extremely attractive in its design and execution.

T he piece begins with ruminations of the double bass. The tapping on its ebony tailpiece its provokes the clarinet and then the violin, who are in turn driven to explore the outer ranges of their instruments’ timbres, pitch-ranges, and expressive textures.

T he control that both Jenkin and Smith and Dean achieve, in going from delicate sounds to aggressive/overtones-dense/multiphonic ones and back again, sometimes within a single breath or bowstroke, is impressive. Cresswell’s markings on the clarinet and violin parts counsel them to “revel in whatever sound results”. Hmmm! That’s a permissiveness that really empowers the performer.

W hile this kind of thing might be de rigeur in jazz, it is surely not in chamber music. The composer’s instruction to exploit the effects that emerge extemporaneously is one that seems foreign to most classically-trained musicians.

O ther pieces that specify improvisational tapping include Will Gay Bottje’s ‘Suite for Six Violins’ (1965). “Use the flat part of fingers on different parts of the box. Some differentiation in timbre can be made using different areas and pressures. Dampen the strings so they won’t sound.”

Y ou get definite, pitched percussive sounds by tapping the tailpiece—low, resonant pitches of the bottom parts of the box itself, as opposed to the fuller, rounder sounds that would come from tapping belly of the instrument.

T he right-hand finger-trill or tremolo on the double-bass tailpiece in ‘Soliloquy’ is mostly finger-pad and finger-tip based. Not the finger nails... the harmonics/partials would be too high, too “clicky”.

T he challenge/problem is that novel effects like these can easily be taken too far—somewhat like the issue of ‘chord-worship’ in barbershop quartet singing. It’s an “intra-ensemble indulgence”: interesting among the ensemble members during rehearsals but maybe not suitable for performance or recording.

H owever, in the AustraLYSIS performance of ‘Soliloquy’ a wonderful balance is struck, between within-ensemble dialogue and interpretive communication to listeners/audience. The ‘suspension’ of Time for the harmonic and rhythmic enjoyment of the ensemble members is “a different process from the manipulation of durations as an interpretive act”, as Liz Garnett says (p. 127), and this difference can potentially detract aesthetically from the performers’ relationship to the audience. But in this AustraLYSIS performance the different processes productively coexist, in a way that enables us listeners to follow their internal dialogue, enter into it, understand it and enjoy it. It’s a mutual, interactive search for patterns that unify the music that’s being created, in the sense of David Cope’s terms ‘virtual music’ and ‘unification’. ‘Soliloquy’ is a pretext for enacting some risky, interesting, raw within-ensemble ‘unification’.



    [50-sec clip, AustraLYSIS, Lyell Cresswell, ‘Soliloquy on a Lambent Tailpiece’, 1.6MB MP3]

T he last section of ‘Soliloquy’ has the instruments playing separate, independent meter/time-signatures, but these combine to create a single pulse. ‘Soliloquy’ embodies the activity of one collective mind, and this rhythmic architecture is a wonderful symbolic evocation of the hidden parallelism that underlies much of our behavior. Not sure whether this parallelism or polyrhythmic design is derived from some Maori tradition or is instead one of Cresswell’s innovations...


    [50-sec clip, AustraLYSIS, Lyell Cresswell, ‘Soliloquy on a Lambent Tailpiece’, 1.6MB MP3]

• Roger Dean, double bass
  
• Peter Jenkin, clarinet
  
• Hazel Smith, violin

L yell Cresswell is a native New Zealand composer born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1944. He studied in Wellington, Toronto, Aberdeen and Utrecht. In 1978 he won the Ian Whyte Award for the Orchestral work ‘Salm’, and in 1979 received the APRA Silver Scroll for his contribution to New Zealand music. In the 1980s he taught composition at Glasgow University and Edinburgh University. Since 1985 he has been a full-time composer based in Edinburgh. Many of his works are well-known, especially his cello concerto. Some of them (like ‘Walata Tangi’, also commissioned by LYSIS) incorporate elements of traditional Maori folk music.

• Lyell Cresswell page at SouNZ.org.nz
  
• AustraLYSIS. Windows in Time. (Tall Poppies, 1994.)
  
• Benson B. The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue: A Phenomenology of Music. Cambridge Univ, 2003.
  
• Brown D. Noise Orders: Jazz, Improvisation, and Architecture. Univ Minnesota, 2006.
  
• Cope D. Virtual Music. MIT, 2004.
  
• Fox D, Weissman D. A Guide To Non-Jazz Improvisation - Fiddle Edition. Mel Bay, 2007.
  
• Garnett L. The British Barbershopper: A Study in Socio-Musical Values. Ashgate, 2005.
  
• Hyder R. Brimful of Asia: Negotiating Ethnicity on the UK Music Scene. Ashgate, 2004.
  
• McLean M. To Tatau Waka: In Search of Maori Music. Auckland Univ, 2004.
  
• McLean M, Orbell M. Traditional Songs of the Maori. 3e. Auckland Univ, 2004.
  
• Peters G. The Philosophy of Improvisation. Univ Chicago, 2009.
  
• Sarath E. Music Theory Through Improvisation. Routledge, 2009.
  
• Shaw P. Experiencing Risk, Spontaneity and Improvisation in Organisational Life: Working Live. 3e. Routledge, 2006.
  
• Bass chamber music at Ludwin Music

L   am⋅bent adj. 1. running or moving lightly over a surface: lambent tongues of flame.
2. dealing lightly and gracefully with a subject; brilliantly playful: lambent wit.
3. glowing, as when a photoluminescent compound absorbs and then re-emits a photon of light, esp. phosphorescence involving triplet spin-states”

New Music for Harpsichord: Terra no longer ‘Incognita’

S    peed creates ‘pure’ [sonic] objects. Speed is itself a pure object, since it cancels out the ground and territorial reference points, since it runs ahead of time to annul time itself, since it moves more quickly than its own cause and obliterates that cause by outstripping it. Speed [such as that of which virtuosic harpsichord is emblematic—] is a triumph of ‘effect’ over ‘cause’, a triumph of ‘instantaneity’ over ‘Time as depth’—the triumph of the ‘surface’ and pure ‘objectality’ over the profoundness of desire. Speed creates a space of initiation which may be lethal; its only rule is to leave no trace behind... Triumph of forgetting over memory, an uncultivated amnesic intoxication!”
  —  Paul Dolden, program notes for ‘Physics of Seduction, Invocation #2’, performed by Vivienne Spiteri [comme si l’hydrogène… the desert speaks (1992)].

T he Boston Early Music Festival and the Utrecht Oudemuziek Festival and other festivals are important for presenting a variety of Baroque harpsichord music. But they are also important as convocations of harpsichord artists and fine instruments, enabling a lot of new music for harpsichord to be performed and heard. The recent BEMF festival, for example, had several ‘fringe’ events that were devoted to harpsichord new music.

A nd that led me to immerse myself in harpsichord, listening to all the recordings I could get my hands on—anything composed in the last 30 years. My intent in this CMT blog post is not to ‘review’ anything but, rather, just to confess my amateur excitement about the whole of it.

T here are a variety of recent compositions where the harpsichord is part of an electroacoustic ensemble, the harpsichord’s piercing timbre and steep attack contributing to and ‘holding its own’ with the overall ‘spikiness’ of the rest of the instrumental textures. Some works adopt Baroque compositional practices and earnestly reveal that we still today have Baroque thoughts that are best (or maybe ‘only’) expressible with harpsichord and Baroque idioms. There are other compositions where the harpsichord’s association with Baroque ideas and gestures is calculatedly used to impart an anachronism or disorienting effect to the piece. The hesitancy of the plastic plectra against the strings, the increasing strain/deformation of each plectrum before it finally yields and plucks its string, can convey a mechanical rhetoric of foreboding—hyper-rationality to the verge of obsession/compulsion and beyond.

T here are yet other works where the harpsichord’s motoric tendencies—the fact that the plucked strings’ sound dies out relatively quickly, inviting them to be struck again soon, sixteenth notes begetting sixteenth notes—are used to impart a psychology of sheer organic activity.

A ll of this is incredibly fun to hear, to play—and, presumably, to write.

E lisabeth Chojnacka, Jane Chapman, Jukka Tiensuu, and other performers clearly delight in the imaginative use of the harpsichord’s vast variety of timbres, its rhythmic drive, its motoristic movements of all shades of neo-Classicism. The joy of my past 4 weeks of listening is finding how many of these ultimately achieve cognitively and emotionally accessible expressions. (Ad hoc lists below are not imagined to be anywhere close to ‘complete’. Only meant to suggest how many there are, how much there is... Tip of proverbial ‘iceberg’.)

Baroque styles

• Hendrik Bouman
  
• Grant Colburn
  
• Miguel Robaina
  
• Fernando de Luca
  
• Gianluca Bersanetti
  
• Claude Arrieu [pseudonym for Louise Marie Simon]
  
• John Fodi ‘Sonata’, ‘Toccata’, and ‘Divisions II’
  
• Jean Papineau-Couture ‘Nocturnes’ and ‘Dyarchie’
  
• Bernard Naylor
  
• Bengt Hambraeus ‘Capriccio I’
  
• Rudolf Komorous ‘At Your Memory the Transparent Tears Fall Like Molten Lead’ (viola da gamba and harpsichord)
  

Modern [sic] styles

• György Ligeti
  
• Henri Dutilleux ‘Les Citations’
  
• Elliott Carter ‘Double Concerto’ [harpsichord, piano, and 2 chamber orchestras]
  
• John Cage ‘HPSCHD’ and ‘Untitled’
  
• Louis Andriessen
  
• Iannis Xenakis
  
• Frank Oteri ‘Machunas’, 3 solo works, ‘Six of One, Half a Dozen of Another’, ‘e.e.cummings song cycle’
  
• Douglas Boyce ‘Concerto grosso’ (strings, clarinet, harpsichord)
  
• Marti Epstein (alto sax, harpsichord)
  
• Kyoko Abe ‘Metamorphose’, ‘Solo’
  
• Maria d’Agnesi-Pinottini’s 3 concertos [harpsichord, 2 vn, db or string qt], ‘Allegro ou presto’ and 3 sonatas [harpsichord solo]
  
• Liana Alexandra
  
• Isabel Aretz
  
• Zygmunt Krauze
  
• Maurice Ohana
  
• Henryk Górecki
  
• Toshi Ichiyanagi
  
• Franco Donatoni
  
• Cristobal Hallfter
  
• François-Bernard Mâche
  
• Graciane Finzi
  
• Stephen Montague
  
• Yves Prin
  
• Tomàs Marco
  
• Cristobal Halffter
  
• Mauricio Sotelo
  
• Grant McLachlan
  
• Ástor Piazzolla
  
• Marius Constant
  
• Luc Ferrari
  
• André Boucourechliev
  
• Aldo Clementi
  
• Roberto Carnevale
  
• Betsy Jolas
  
• Joseph Horovitz
  
• Roberto Sierra
  
• Krzystof Knittel
  
• Gustavo Beytelmann
  
• Jean Wiener
  
• Krzysztof Meyer
  
• Dimitri Yanov-Yanovski
  
• Kaija Saariaho
  
• Jukka Tiensuu
  
• Lou Harrison
  
• Ellen Taaffe Zwilich
  
• Gardner Read
  
• Walter Piston
  
• Robert Starer
  
• Lester Trimble
  
• Timothy Brady
  
• Micheline Coulombe Saint-Marcoux
  
• Ton de Leeuw
  
• Bengt Hambraeus
  
• Hope Lee
  
• Rodney Sharman ‘Kore’
  
• Denis Gougeon ‘Rondeaujour d’hui’
  
• Ka Nin Chan ‘Phantasmagoria’
  
• Hope Lee ‘Melboac’
  
• Jan Jarvlepp
  
• David Eagle ‘Toccare’
  
• Alice Ho ‘Arc’
  
• Jean Lesage ‘La Tentation d’Arlequin’, ‘Thanatopsis’
  
• André Villeneuve ‘Vers la Quatrième Terre’
  
• Wendy Prezament
  
• Pierre Desrochers ‘Cinema-mode d’emploi’
  
• Linda C. Smith ‘Gravity’
  
• Brian Cherney ‘Déploration’, ‘Hommage à Morton Feldman’
  
• François Rose ‘A perte d’espace’
  
• Bruce Mather ‘Saumur’
  
• Tim Brady
  
• Serge Provost ‘Crètes’
  
• Denis Lorrain ‘La Nuova Ricordanza’ (two harpsichords)
  
• Bruce Pennycook ‘The Desert Speaks’
  
• David Keane ‘Turbo Toccata’
  
• Stéphane Volet ‘Retors’
  
• Micheline Coulombe Saint-Marcoux ‘Miroirs’
  

Electroacoustic styles

• Paul Dibley
  
• James Dillon
  
• Paul Dolden ‘Physics of Seduction’ (harpsichord and tape)
  
• Sam Hayden
  
• Paul Newland
  
• Roger Redgate
  
• Sohrab Uduman
  
• Mike Faughan
  
• Paul Whitty

F rom the recent harpsichord compositions that have engaged my ears over the past month, I find it harder and harder to understand why the piano had ever so totally eclipsed the harpsichord by the early 1800s. Fashion; the dynamics of the ‘market’ for public performances in larger halls, where more ‘volume’ was needed; the preferences of famous performing artists favoring piano over harpsichord... We tend to think of the homogenizing effect that mass-market pop culture has had on music in recent decades, but how about the eclipse of harpsichord by piano? Similar pressures, even 150+ years ago?

T he originality of the recent writing for harpsichord is phenomenal. Very few composers writing for the instrument leverage archaisms of color, orchestration, technique. Instead, everybody’s been tremendously busy exploiting the natural textures and sonorities of harpsichord sound in the myriad contemporary idioms that they call ‘home’.

Just a few of the performers who have championed new music for harpsichord

• Elisabeth Chojnacka
  
• Vivienne Spiteri
  
• Christopher Lewis
  
• Annelie de Man
  
• Jane Chapman
  
• Laura Tivendale
  
• Carole Cerasi
  
• Pamela Nash

T o summarize, I am delighted to have immersed myself in recent works for harpsichord this past month, and I enthusiastically recommend that you try it, too. For me, an amateur with (at best) modest amounts of time to spend, the experience has been long-overdue. It’s like a view has opened for me onto a big continent that I hadn’t previously known about. I feel a peculiar mix of embarrassment at my ignorance and enthusiasm for exploring these unfamiliar harpsichord territories and all who inhabit them. Sheepish first-world anthropologist? They were here on the globe all along, industrious, prospering, but I’d never before spun the ‘globe’ around to look (hear).


    [50-sec clip, Elisabeth Chojnacka, Gyorgy Ligeti, ‘Passacaglia’, 1.6MB MP3]


    [50-sec clip, Elisabeth Chojnacka, Gyorgy Ligeti, ‘Continuum’, 1.6MB MP3]


    [50-sec clip, Arditti Quartet, Jukka Tiensuu, ‘Arsenic & Old Lace for String Quartet and Microtonal Harpsichord’, 1.6MB MP3]


    [50-sec clip, Jane Chapman, Paul Dibley, ‘INV I’, 1.6MB MP3]


    [50-sec clip, Jane Chapman, Paul Dibley, ‘INV III’, 1.6MB MP3]

• Jane Chapman page at Royal College of Music, London
  
• Spiteri V. New Music for Harpsichord from Canada and The Netherlands. (SNE/ElectroCD, 1988.)
  
• DRAM: American Music for Harpsichord
  
• Christopher Lewis website
  
• Vivienne Spiteri page at NewAdventuresInSoundArt, Toronto NAISA.ca [Sewing-machine music, or, is there life after ‘Continuum’?]
  
• British Harpsichord Society
  
• Paul Dibley page at Oxford Brookes Univ
  
• Paul Dibley website
  
• Chapman J. Paul Dibley: Wired. (NMC, 2009.)
  
• Chojnacka E, et al. Ligeti: Mechanical Music. (Sony, 1997.)
  
• Heinrich A. Organ and Harpsichord Music by Women Composers. Greenwood, 1991.
  
• Johnson C. Soliloquies: New Japanese and Chinese Music for Harpsichord and Organ. (Albany, 2008.) [hyper-motoric]

Adina Spire: Music of Universal Devotion, Protest, Ecstasy

D    ark 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.


    [50-sec clip, Adina Spire, ‘Kontakion’, 1.6MB MP3]

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?

1. 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.
   
2. 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.
   
3. 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!
   
4. 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.
   
5. 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.

• Adina Spire website
  
• Festival La Folia 2010
  
• La Folia page at Wikipedia
  
• La Folia - A Musical Cathedral
  
• St. Romanos the Melodist. On the Life of Christ: Kontakia. Harper, 1995.
  
• Kontakion page at Wikipedia
  
• Marin Marais 'La Folia'
  
• Archangelo Corelli 'La Folia'
  
• Antonio Vivaldi 'La Folia'
  
• Tarantella page at Wikipedia
  
• Backman E. Religious Dances in the Christian Church and in Popular Medicine. Allen & Unwin, 1952. Pp. 244-50.
  
• Burkholder J, Giger A, Cox F, Bircher D. Musical Borrowing. Center for History of Music Theory & Literature. Univ Indiana.
  
• Chafe E. Tonal Allegory in the Vocal Music of J.S. Bach. Univ California, 1991.
  
• Donaldson L, Cavanagh J, Rankin J. The dancing plague: a public health conundrum. Public Health. 1997;111:201-4.
  
• Hauser A. The Social History of Art: Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque. 3e. Routledge, 1999.
  
• Koerner B. A medieval dance craze. Was twisting a disease? U.S. News World Rep. 1999 Dec 20;127(24):61.
  
• Krack P. Relicts of dancing mania: the dancing procession of Echternach. Neurology. 1999;53:2169-72.
  
• Kriwaczek R. The Art of Funerary Violin. Overlook, 2006.
  
• Maniates M. Mannerism in Italian Music & Culture, 1530-1630. Univ North Carolina, 1979.
  
• Park R, Park M. Saint Vitus’ dance: Vital misconceptions by Sydenham and Bruegel. J Roy Soc Med 1990; 83:512-8.
  
• Smith T. Why did Bach write canons? Sojourn, 1996.
  
• Stowell R. Cambridge Companion to the Cello. Cambridge Univ, 1999.