jwilzewske: composing

Showing posts with label composing. Show all posts

Thursday, December 13, 2012

Beiser/Harrison/YPC: Joyous Time Loops, Just Intonation

T his is the basic premise of the Transient Glory® project: that a child’s voice is a unique instrument during that fleeting time between childhood and after-childhood... and that this instrument can tackle the most challenging and uncompromising music written for them. Children leave something behind [as they grow up and leave childhood]. I don’t know what it is, but children are able to communicate in a way we adults have forgotten how to do.”
— Francisco Núñez, YPC, 09-MAY-2011.

T he entirety of ‘Time Loops’ is performed using ‘just intonation’ tuning, based on whole number proportions. With ‘Time Loops’ I am demonstrating the simpler and more harmonious aspects of just intonation. As a result the tunings on the CD don’t push boundaries per se, but rather they sound clearer and more direct than the normal equal-tempered scale that is used in most Western music.”
— Michael Harrison, 23-AUG-2012.

T he new recording ‘Time Loops’ is a superb stimulus to joy and reflection. Meditation to bring peace at this or any time of year.

I n concert performances, cellist Maya Beiser plays the lead part live accompanied by pre-recorded, digitally-processed tracks forming an auto-ensemble of many sonic layers. Multi-media artist Bill Morrison created a film for ‘Time Loops’ that incorporates archival footage and CGI images that illustrate the movement of the planets, celestial mechanics mathematically conforming to the integer ratios of the music’s just intonation. Composer Michael Harrison performs the piano part with sensitivity and feeling. Even amidst the complexity and conflict of everyday life, we rediscover here the beauty and solace that are immanent in the natural world—the patterns and harmonics of a clockwork Universe whose physics was first formalized mathematically by Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and others—and rediscover that our own homo sapiens processes are as real and natural and immutable as those.

T he last and largest-scale work on the CD, ‘Hijaz,’ was composed by Harrison for Beiser and the Young People’s Chorus of New York City under the direction of Francisco Nuñez, as well as composer and percussionist Payton MacDonald on tabla and shaker. The text combines a prayer written by Harrison with spoken South Indian rhythmic syllables, which merge with the choral textures to evoke a sense of joy and unity and transcendence—deeply fitting for this holiday season.

E specially vivid and poignant are the perspectives of the school-age voices in the choir (see blockquote above). Wise beyond their years; empowered and uplifted by the music. To me, joy is mainly what music is for, and people should, through writing and performing music, feel joyous and acquire a better ability to create more joy. This CD—the compositions and performances—is first-class evidence supporting this idea. Evidence, too, of how crucially important opportunities are for kids to learn and perform music—before adulthood overtakes them as it does us all. Not a nostalgia for a childlike simplicity, but instead a meditation on clarity, on earnestness, on wonder, on the youthful drive to penetrate the truth of things, on receptiveness to joy.

[50-sec clip, Beiser/Harrison/YPC, ‘Hijaz’; (track 8), 2012, 1.4MB MP3]

M y intention was to invoke a sense of pilgrimage, either to a wondrous or holy place, or, metaphorically, to a sacred place within each of us. The chorus is the soul of the journeyer... The pulsing rhythms trace our footsteps, and those of our camels, as we make our way on the path of self-discovery.”
— Michael Harrison, 23-AUG-2012.

T he recent release of ‘Time Loops’ coincided with the first productions of Maya Beiser’s ‘ELSEWHERE: A CelloOpera,’ created by Maya with director Robert Woodruff, composers Missy Mazzoli and Eve Beglarian and writer Erin Cressida Wilson. For more information, visit www.elsewherecelloopera.com.

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Experiencing ‘Map of Rain Hitting Water’ in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy

W   hen at last Justine arrives, he’s at the piano
     the hammers strike and rise
with his fingers, and the pedal’s damp
   shifting carries through the instrument
as waves echo through the frame of a ship...
Now he thinks perhaps the music’s
More like a map of rain hitting water—
He’s moving closer to her without moving;
And how wonderful to be held from her
   at last by nothing but the song's duration—”
  — Wayne Miller, ’What Night says to the Empty Boat’, p. 73.

I ’d first listened to Mara Gibson's new 16:30 work commissioned by Mark Lowry of newEar Contemporary Music Ensemble in July. The DVD has Mark performing vibraphone, log drum, woodblock, gong, tam-tam, songbird whistle, cymbal, and miscellaneous percussion, accompanied by video imagery and film by Caitlin Horsmon. Bob Beck rendered a high level of engineering and production values achieved in this recording.

T he beauty of the chromatic intoning of vibraphone, punctuated by tolling woodblock, drum, and, less frequently, other instruments captured my interest from the first listening. The glisses and pitch-bent post-processed sounds of the vibraphone acoustically paralleled the imagery, the lateral motion of water in the foreground and in the distance; the water droplets in air, falling under gravity in parabolic arcs; the globules of water separating from a stream; the intercalating pastel cloud layers.

B ut now several months later—having just last week returned to the midwest after a period at our home on the East Coast, and having driven through some of the areas of hurricane-caused power outages and natural devastation—these textures and narrative arcs of ‘Map of Rain Hitting Water’ evoke different meanings for me. The watery surfaces now seem ominous and obscure what lies beneath.

T he reflections imply sky and sun, but these seem untrustworthy. The eddies and vortices imply structure and hidden currents, turbulence: the violence and indifference of Nature to humanity.

T he speed of the current makes abundantly clear how rapidly we will be swept away, annihilated, pointlessly. The accelerando/ritardando phrasing imparts a large-scale 2+ minute hypermeter to the piece.

N o animals or other sentient creatures are seen anywhere in Horsmon’s imagery here... bulk matter only, liquid and air. The abruptly changing frame-rate... declares a capriciousness of our frame of perception, together with Nature’s propensity to precipitous, emergent change, against which our human wishes and needs are respectively futile and irrelevant.

T here is midway through the film a montage of stop-action stills, with different transparency/saturation settings, calling into question what is motion. It brings to mind horror film sequences built up out of successions of freeze-frame stills.

T he very high-speed video of the water droplets, together with digitally-stretched contrast and/or edge-sharpening, gives heightened perception of the separateness of the individual [droplets].

W e have here a sort of ‘video-monitor-as-painter’s-canvas’ effect... a palimpsest of successive masks and over-writing of previous images and surfaces.

T he film draws our attention to the very thinness and 2-D nature of our existence in the biosphere, between the sky and the depths of water.

I n fact, most of the film is of deep water: the first 5:45 is sky; second 6:00 is water; third 4:45 is water hurled into sky—with gradual transitions between these segments.

T he piece conveys feelings of loneliness and alienation that arise from our understanding that we are alone in the universe and insignificant in its workings. Underneath the performer’s punctuated observations and soliloquy about fate and the stream of events that occupies our attention while we are alive is a certain forboding, a fear of nothingness.

T hat we are in some inescapable way alienated from Nature is an old concept, going back at least to Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18th Century. It is also a notion that coheres with our current environmental problems, insofar as our estrangement from Nature involves a hubris that forecloses upon developing an awareness and regard for how we depend upon Nature, in such a way that we would stop harming Nature.

R elinquishing whatever agency I have in the presence of the bulk matter around me reveals my beholdenness to the agency of other humans who are living now and who will take care of me in my dying days and who will outlive me, and the susceptibility of my remains and the residue of my life’s work to the agency of all creatures and natural processes that persist beyond my tiny lifetime.

T he harsh contrast and unblinking lens of the camera—together with the continuous, unflinching sound of the music—announce the abject hopelessness of our achieving any anonymity in the flesh, or participating in any genuine reciprocity with Nature.

S uch existential worries are absent when reciprocal trans-corporeality involves the definitely spiritual, or “more than human”, or involves an ambiguity or reversibility afforded by the hardly-human-at-all, or as-minimally-human-as-possible, as in Wilderness or Zombieness.

O ne can make some sense then of this piece’s assertion that we might be estranged from the flesh without that meaning either that such estrangement puts us really outside the flesh, or that landscapes including sky and water are themselves not fleshy. We are estranged, every bit as much as sky and water are patently fleshy.

T his is a superb composition, an excellent film, a beautiful performance, an excellent recording—sufficient to propel an evening’s meditation and beyond.

Thursday, May 17, 2012

MUS-501 final exam question: Late Schumann Lieder were hip-hop anthems. Evidence? Discuss.

I n 1989’s ‘Fight the Power’, Public Enemy’s Chuck D spits a working definition of rhyme’s reason: ‘As the rhythm’s designed to bounce / What counts ... is that the rhyme’s / Designed to fill your mind.’ He is speaking of ‘rhyme’ here both as the practice of patterning sounds and as a name for the verse as a whole. In both meanings, rap’s rhymes have filled our minds with many things, not all of them good. But it is more than a matter of content—be it women and cars or prisons with bars; it is also a question of poetic form.”
— Adam Bradley, p. 55.

T he prominence of dark themes in Schumann’s lieder in 1851 and later, featuring violent language and desultory circumstances and the characters’ defiant reactions to them, is strong evidence in favor of this thesis. Likewise, there is a radically different relationship between the music and the text compared to Schumann’s earlier lieder: in the late lieder there is a much stronger emphasis on syllabic stresses, on rhyme, and on systolic pulsatility of the voice strongly sync’ed to the instrumental beat. Schumann’s settings of Kullmann poems especially are, essentially, rap over music.

D ominated by the energy of insistent repetition—from perfect rhymes to assonance and consonance—delivering on the promise... apocopated rhymes, where a one-syllable word rhymes with the stressed portion of a multisyllabic word. He matches the first line’s monosyllabic internal rhymes ‘last’ and ‘blast’ with an apocopated rhyme ‘fastball’ on the next line. He does the same thing in reverse with another rhyme as well—using ‘hit’ to rhyme with ‘splitter’. This creates a structure that binds the two lines together... almost every word is doing some kind of rhyme work... using rhyme to fashion rhythm.”
— Adam Bradley, p. 62.

Und die mich trug im Mutterarm	And she who carried me in arms
Und die mich schwang in Kissen	And rock me in the nest
Die war ein schön, froh, braunes Weiß	She was beautiful, happy, *red*—hot—but
Wollte nichts vom Mannsvolk wissen	She never want to mess
Sie scherzte nur und lachte laut	‘Round... She only joke and laugh,
Und liess die Freier stehen.	Dissin’ those who hit on her.
„Möcht’ lieber sein des Windes Braut	“I’d rather be fucked by da wind
Als in die Ehe geh’n!”	Than have sex with any of you!”
Da kam der Wind, da nahm der Wind	And dat wind came, and dat wind chose,
Als Buhle sie gefangen,	And beat her and rape her too,
Von dem hat sie ein lustig Kind,	And that how she birthed me, packin’ heat.
Jung Volker, mich, empfangen.	Know dis: Jung Volker is my name.
—Eduard Mörike (1804-1875)	Op. 125, No. 4 (1851)

P ianist Graham Johnson maintains that Dichterliebe (Op. 48) contains what is arguably “the nearest thing in lieder to the modern phenomenon of ‘rap’ ” (liner notes to Vol 3, Hyperion CDA67676, pp. 101-2, specifically regarding ‘Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen’, No. 11, a song about a young man’s rejection by the woman he loves). In my opinion, dubstep is the sound that Schumann was going for, instead of brostep. And a ducking ‘pump’ sound that you hear in techno and electro that comes from side-chaining. That and electro house drums. Kind of a ‘dark garage’ hip-hop dubstep with kicked-up bass. The late lieder would be great with custom Ableton controllers for that sound. Don’t get that on no Hyperion CD, though!

C ogan’s timbral reading of a piece is informed by the words sung in the performance. In his ‘Sounds of Song’, Cogan compares spectrographs of four recordings of Robert Schumann’s ‘Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet,’ a song he describes as ‘always obsessive, but uncertain, lost — quite literally traumatic.’ ”
— Smith Reed, Univ Pittsburgh, 2005.

Der leidige Frieden	Peace make me nervous,
Hat lange gewährt—	It last too long—
Wir waren geschieden,	We ‘part for weeks,
Mein gutes Schwert!	My blade, its song!
Derweil ich gekostet	Down in the cellar
Im Keller den Wein—	I drink dat wine—
Hingst du verrostet	You hanging rusty
An der Wand allein.	By the wall, bidin’ your time.
Von Sorte zu Sorte	Each juice
Probiert’ ich den Wein—	I tasted when my turn to—
Indessen dorrte:	Meantime, dat blood:
Das Blut dir ein.	It’s dried on *you*.
Ist endlich entglommen	Battle when you right
Der heisse Streit,	Ain’t no crime—
Mein Schwert, und gekommen	Blade, here comes
Ist dein Zeit.	Your thirsty time.
Ich geb’ deiner Klingen,	Wipe some more,
Den blanken Schliff:	You bright, smooth steel:
Ich lasse dich singen	I let you rap
Den Todespfiff.	Your deadly spiel.
Im Pulvernebel	In gunpowder haze
Die Arbeit rauscht—	You slash, rip steep—
Wir haben, o Säbel,	You ’n’ me, Blade,
Die Freuden getauscht.	We put ’em all deep.
Im brausenden Moste,	In foamin’ wine,
Mein durstiges Erz	Blade thirsty and smart,
Betrinke dich, koste	Drink deep and taste
Von Herz zu Herz;	From heart to heart;
Derweil du gekostet	While you’ve been tastin’
Das rote Blut,	Your crimson blood,
Is mir eingerostet,	My throat—it’s parched,
Der Hals vor Glut.	Waitin’ for a flood.
—Nikolaus Lenau (1802-1850)	Op. 117, No. 2 (1851)

O bscure poems that portray dysfunctional or oppressive gender relations, cars and money or jewels, and weapons—a throw-away objectification of people and ‘live-for-the-moment’ violent materialism—are also characteristic of these late Schumann lieder, in a fashion that presages modern hip-hop themes and postures. Braggadocio and lyrics that proclaim the singer’s greatness—these appear in Op. 117, Op. 104, and others.

W hile rap may be new-school music, it is old-school poetry. Rather than resembling the dominant contemporary form of free verse—or even the freeform structure of its hip-hop cousin, spoken word, or slam poetry—rap bears a stronger affinity to some of poetry’s oldest forms, such as strong-stress meter of ‘Beowulf’. As in metrical verse, the lengths of rap’s lines are governed by established rhythms—in rap’s case, the rhythm of the beat itself.”
— Adam Bradley, p. xv.

Du nennst mich armes Mädchen	“Po’ ho’,” you call me;
Du irrst! Ich bin nicht arm!	You full o’ shit! I’m not po’!
Entress dich, Neugier halber,	Wake up, you pimp,
Einmal des Schlafes Arm und schau’	from yo’ drunk-ass sleep,
Mein niedres Hüttchen	An’ look at my mansion
Wenn sich die Sonne	Wit da paradise sunrise
Hold am Morgenhimmel hebet:	When da morning sun come to me:
Sein Dach ist reines Gold!	Dat roof is pure gold!
Komm’ Abends, wann die Sonne,	Or come in da evening when da sun,
Bereits zum Meere sinkt,	Sinking in da sea,
Und sieh’ mein einzig Fenster,	See only my window,
Wie’s von Topasen blinkt!	Sparklin’ wit da topaz jewelz!
Du nennst mich armes Mädchen	“Po’ ho’,” you call me;
Du irrst! Ich bin nicht arm!	You full o’ shit! I’m not po’!
—Elisabeth Kuhlmann (1808-1824)	Op. 104, No. 3 (1851)

E mblematic of all rap music is constructing an image of power through gestural cues, which may be in the words or the music or both. The cues include punched-up rhythms and phrases about money, expensive clothing, jewelry, killing and dying, and going places and doing things. Late Schumann lieder got those!

T he situational exigencies of late Schumann lieder are accessible to anyone whose mind is open, and are not dependent on exterior markers for their manifestation. Instead, they are rooted in demonstrating values in interacting with others—values such as defiance, aggression, and action; support, mutuality, and reflection—‘power over’; ‘power with’. Don’t need no fancy or subtle analysis to identify features of hip-hop in late Schumann. Jus’ need to open our minds to the sonic and textual evidence that’s right there in front of us.

T wo hundred years ago popular music and art music were joined at the hip. Beethoven’s works and the birth of the Romantic Era coincided with the rise of the middle classes. Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann composed lieder that could be sung and played in the home by amateur musicians. At the same time that the middle classes expanded, they received a more formalized and substantial education and formulated an idea of art and music. The masses were able to sing and play music that did not require the same technical ability as music that one would ﬁnd in the concert hall, but was more suited for the salon. The music was ‘attainable’, and it featured poetic verses with melodies that were relatively easy to sing.”
— Gabe Kanengiser.

Saturday, April 28, 2012

Giya Kancheli on the [marital] virtues of revealing, accomodating

M usic, like life itself, is inconceivable without romanticism. Romanticism is a high dream of the past, present, and future—a force of invincible beauty which towers above, and conquers, the forces of ignorance, bigotry, violence, and evil.”
— Giya Kancheli.

I ’m listening to a recording of Tblisi-native composer Giya Kancheli’s 26-minute-long 1997 Piano Quartet ‘In l’istesso Tempo’ performed by Bridge Ensemble. The consistent pulse and the narrative epicness of it intrigue me. I replay it twice and the complexities and layers that I’d missed on the first listen gradually become more apparent...

G iya Kancheli’s sustained tones build in layers; melodic lines hover like chant, either offered plainly or decorated with trills and turns befitting a liturgical cantor. The mostly-smooth surface gives way to bare plucks, crackling outbursts and grand crescendos with a Romantic sense of drama... The wide-open space of his music stems more from silence than the repetitive structures of minimalism.”
— Aaron Grad, 2009.

A nephew of mine and his fiancé are getting married next month; I think about them as I listen to this ‘In l’istesso Tempo’. GoogleTranslate says ‘in l’istesso tempo’ means ‘in the same body’—which seems poetically fitting, given the line of thought that Kancheli’s piano quartet and its pulse has induced in me. This piano quartet is full of musical artifacts of a healthy intimacy... a kind of transcendence through durability, with the relationship between lovers deepening and diversifying as things change and as time passes. No [Nietzschean?] pre-conception of will-to-power with forces/personalities/resources coming together, pushing and pulling. Instead, a [Heideggerian?] will-to-dwell: mutual, enduring attention and being present for the other, present-in-body and present-in-mind.

A nd a pluralistic view of truth that does not insist on any one voice (partner) being ‘right’ and the other ‘wrong’... a kind of aletheia (ἀλήθεια).

T he Italian tempo designation ‘in l’istesso tempo’ signifies a musical passage where the speed of the underlying pulse does not change, even if the division of the beats within a bar does so. Music written this way can create an impression of stillness.”
— David Lewis.

K ancheli’s enduring pulse—affirms that love is not love that alters when it alteration finds. There is what music cognition researchers would call ‘event-salience’ in these piano quartet rhythms as-written, leading to automatic beat-induction (BI) for the listener/performer. Auto-BI, in turn, leads us to recognize nature—our bodies!—and how out of our control they are! This is no determinism or fate in which we have no choice or in which human free will plays no part; instead, just an important dimension of reality, and one that we’d do well not to ignore. By the time I’ve finished listening to this the third time, I’ve come to regard the quartet’s accomodation of meter to a pervading, faithful pulse as a romantic gesture—an inspiring acknowledgement of constancy and mutual devotion of friendship, marriage, or civil union founded on true love. No idea as to whether that was what Kancheli had in mind, but the notion is plausible, and I am grateful that the music happened to propel my thoughts in this direction. Unexpected effects like this are a big part of why any person likes music, I think.

T he nothingness of the individual, expressed in simple musical ideas, and its relationship to a more meaningful whole lie at the heart of Georgian composer Giya Kancheli’s work, often disconcerting in its profoundly sad take on modern society. The composer’s aesthetic is admirably served on this exceptional ECM disc by performers who appear to share his vision of a world afflicted by destructive turmoil.”
— Andrew Stewart, Music Week.

O ther ‘in l’istesso tempo’ pieces include Elgar’s Enigma Variations, Op. 36, v. 1; or Ginastera’s Variazioni e Toccata sopra Aurora lucis rutilat, Op. 52, vv. 3,5,6; or Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 43, vv. 1,2,3,6,9,10,14,23. I’ll plan on immersing myself in those on some future evening. Maybe they will lead me further on this path.

B y the way, Artemis String Quartett and pianist Jacques Ammon will be performing at Le Poisson Rouge in NYC on 01-MAY-2012. Their account of Kancheli’s ‘In l’istesso Tempo’ is really superb. Their performance of ‘In l’istesso Tempo’ was positioned in middle of program in last night’s concert in Kansas City and received a standing ovation—which is a pretty uncommon occurrence in mid-program in any performance in any country, you must admit.

A gain and again, with deep regret, we see how alongside obvious achievements of the civilized world we are being worn down. Our planet is being torn apart by bloodshed and antagonisms, and no creative deep is able to withstand that destructive force, which so easily strikes out the fragile means of progress. Taking very close to my heart all that is happening around me, I am trying to express in my music the state I feel in my soul, writing basically for myself, without illusions that ‘beauty will save the world,’ as Dostoyevsky said. That is why my music is more sad than happy, and is addressed more to the lone individual rather than to society. Here you won’t find appeals for striving, equality, or ‘a bright future.’ Most likely, you will find threads of sorrow caused by the imperfection of the world, which keeps disregarding the most horrendous examples in human history. My thoughts are expressed in extremely simple musical language, and I hope that the audience ... will not mistake my deliberate simplicity for what, in my opinion, is the most dangerous phenomenon: indifference.”
— Giya Kancheli.

T he biggest tragedy is to write music.”
— Giya Kancheli.

Monday, April 23, 2012

Sex, Lies, and Music: Schumann’s Poet-Lover Alter-Ego

D ichterliebe’, the title chosen or accepted by Schumann for his choice of Heine’s texts, involves a double-meaning. Schumann the composer-poet found in the poems evidence that their protagonist is a poet-composer: one who is inspired by bird-song (No. 1), one whose sighs become nightingales (No. 2), one who inspires the lily to sing (No. 5), one who dreams magical fairy-music (No. 15), and one who finally buries all his songs at sea (No. 16). That persona, originally Heine’s surrogate [was embraced by Schumann as his own surrogate]... For the purposes of the poems, Heine spoke through the role of the unhappy Dichter; for the purposes of the songs, Schumann transformed that figure into a Dichter of his own.”
— Edward T. Cone, ‘Poet’s love or composer’s love?’, in Steven Paul Scher, Chapter 10.

T he relation between Schumann and poetry is pretty revealing,” said pianist and long-time chamber music presenter Cynthia Siebert at a recent dinner party. “It is? How is it revealing and what is it that’s revealed?” I wondered. The conversation proceeded off in other directions. But my curiosity was piqued! Challenge accepted!

M usic theorist/pianist/composer Edward Cone wrote 20 years ago that Robert Schumann’s Dichter (poet) is dramatically different from Heinrich Heine’s Dichter. According to Cone, Schumann’s Dichter chooses music as the primary means of expression while words are secondary.

B ut the music depends on the other. The piano is inseparable from the vocal melody and the words. The piano persists in completing the voice’s unfinished cadences in No. 2, with the prolongation of each B. Every B, relinquished by the voice, resounds briefly before it resolves to A. The same prolongation-resolution motif appears also in No. 3.

N o. 4 has piano doubling the voice, and the two parts alternately imitate each other—a kind of counterpoint that might either suggest the complete co-dependent behavior of both, or the deliberate independence of each from the other. The rhetorical reversals [“He went to the country; to the town went she.”] are chiasmic: miniature embodiments of musical absorption of two-into-one where the two quasi-orgasmic experiences paradoxically highlight the separateness of the two at the peak of their union.

N o. 7 has voice and piano extensively doubling each other throughout—a kind of lovemaking or lovers’ dance. The voice is “on top” or leads through most of the song, but the piano is the one whose outburst at the climax has the voice in an inner or lower position.

M ost subtle in the ‘interpenetration’ of voice and accompaniment is the very first song of the cycle, which sets the tone for all that follows. The doubling is delicately heterophonic—as when the voice, but not the piano, anticipates the resolution of a suspension; or when the piano, but not the voice, remains suspended; or when the voice, after inserting an appoggiatura, resolves a suspension. The effect is the kind of blurring that might result if the piano could pedal the vocal line, treating the voice as a strand of the piano texture [and subduing it, see m.4, image above].”
— Edward T. Cone, ‘Poet’s love or composer’s love?’, in Steven Paul Scher, Chapter 10.

I look up the date and see that Dichterliebe, Op. 48, was composed in 1840, when Schumann was 30 years old, the year he and Clara at long last became married, against her father’s will. Susan Youens and others see nothing too subtle about the motivations and construction of Dichterliebe:

T he persona sings of his tears and sighs transforming themselves into [sprouting, turgid] floral offerings and love’s nightingales in ‘Aus meinen Tränen spriessen’; he sings in hectic, [pumping] alliterative excess of ‘die Kleine, die Feine, die Reine, die Eine’ in ‘Die Rose, die Lilie, die Taube, die Sonne’; and finds that he cannot trust the beloved’s words of love in ‘Wenn ich in deine Augen seh’.’ In ‘Ich will meine Seele tauchen,’ the persona longs to submerge his soul in the lily’s chalice. That this is a sublimation of sexual imagery is evident in the post-coital sobbing in the piano at the end.”
— Susan Youens, Carnegie Hall program notes, 2010.

T here are 14 excellent essays on music-text relationships in the multi-author volume edited by Steven Paul Scher (link below), including several that address music-text manifestations in Schumann’s compositions. Juicy bedtime reading!

Friday, April 13, 2012

Jonathan Biss: Proairetic & Hermeneutic Codes In Action, Realtime Beethoven-Janáček Message-Passing Protocol

I ’ve done all-Mozart, all-Beethoven, all-Schubert programs, but there is always the danger of a stylistic sameness, or rather a lack of confrontation between the pieces. Concerts of works of two composers are great because they still offer enough music of each to create a sense of immersion in the composers’ sonic worlds, and yet the concert becomes a dialogue between the two, which often moves in surprising directions. The question of which composers work well together (and which don’t) is particularly alchemical, and I think it is one of both similarity and difference. The success of Beethoven and Janáček as a pairing relies in part on the terrific intensity that characterizes both... The intensity may be similar, but the language is utterly different... Beethoven’s sonatas are incredibly tightly argued... Janáček, by contrast, is perhaps the greatest master of the musical non-sequitur... Beethoven and Janáček could not be more different, which makes the similarities in temperament between the two all the more fascinating.”
— Jonathan Biss, 2012 essay.

N ot ‘non-sequiturs’ exactly. More like the worldview of peoples who have for centuries lived along a foggy seacoast and whose language now innately reflects their inability to see or predict what will loom into view in front of them from one moment to the next.

F orgetting, the renunciation of cause-and-effect and the obverse of forgiving. Beethoven afflicted with abject loss and despair (as in the Adagio of Op. 27 No. 2); Janáček surprised by optimism, welling up from where?

I just returned from Jonathan Biss’s Beethoven-Janáček recital at Kansas City’s Folly Theater (Sonata No. 5, Op. 10, No. 1; Sonata No. 14, Op. 27, No. 2; Sonata No. 26, Op. 81a; V mlhách, JW 8/22; Sonata 1.X.1905, Z Ulice, JW 8/19).

T he ‘affective’ content and contrasts of these intense works—both the composers’ affect or psychological state and intentions, and the performer’s affect—are what makes the program spellbinding—emotionally compelling to experience (confirming what Biss has written in his essays; see blockquote above)!

T here may be elements that denote a similar state of mind or parallels in terms of Beethoven’s temperament and Janáček’s temperament, as Biss says. But the orderliness and certitude of Beethoven—contrasted with the randomness and the existential acceptance of doubt and uncertainy, even the recklessness of Janáček—these features make us think about our differences, not just the differences between these composers or their respective eras.

T hese antithetical qualities—and how such personalities or such ‘stances’ that we adopt influence what happens to us in life—are constitutional, innate, inherited styles. Well, they are partly inherited and partly learned/habitual.

E very mixture, every conciliation, every passage through the barrier of our inherited and habitual style is a transgression with self-discovery.

N ot every transgression is transcendent or momentous. Some of them are ironic, trivial, or tame—much like when a belovèd pet cat trips and experiences embarrassment at its clumsiness, so out-of-character and façade-dropping. Sometimes events bring out the best in us. We appear virtuous and do and express commendable things. At other times, our undesirable qualities come out.

A nd some transgressions are outrageous or transformative. Putting these two composers next to each other makes for an intense two-way street—stylistically and emotionally. This program forces/enables the two to ‘mediate’ each other’s views and to rhetorically critique the other.

I t is as though Biss has learned from literary theorist Roland Barthes and reveals the “hermeneutic code” that governs the semantics of each of the two composers’ worldviews, the “semiotic code” of the musical motives of each, the “proairetic code” that governs the formal structure (or, for Janacek, the renunciation of cause-and-effect structure), and the “referential code”—musical abstractions and metaphors and borrowings.

T he ‘next-to-ness’ Biss creates in formulating this program conjures the main forces that drive the narrative—and that drive our own desires to listen attentively.

T he “hermeneutic code” (see links below) refers to those plot elements that raise questions on the part of the reader of a text or the viewer of a film or the listener to a program of music. For example, in the Beethoven Op. 10, we get tragedy—the anxiety becoming mourning, weeping, descending (Movement 1, Theme 1, Phrase 1) leading to violence (Movement 3, Theme 1)—which leads us to wonder about the reasons for these traumatic events. Then, in the Janáček, we get a fatalistic indifference to a world in which cause-and-effect processes break down, or in which some events can’t be prevented or explained. We need the ‘loose ends’ of the narrative ‘tied up’ in order to feel satisfied, like a good detective story—and that is what Biss does for us by the end of the concert. The entire narrative of a story like this operates via hermeneutic encoding. We witness a murder, and we enthusiastically spend the rest of the concert learning answers to the questions that were raised by the initial Beethoven scenes of violence. That is one half of how this concert program works.

P roairetic code”, on the other hand, refers to ordinary actions—those musical phrases or plot events that simply lead to yet other phrases/consequences/actions. Suspense is driven by action rather than by a reader’s or a listener’s desire to have unsolved mysteries solved. This “proairetic code” is the other half of how or why this particular concert program works—event or ‘message-passing’ between the works, in a fashion resembling what happens with remote procedure calls (RPC) and protocol buffers in software systems.

B iss’s idea of programming this seemingly-disparate-but-narratively-confrontational repertoire is really an excellent one—attractive, interest-holding, suspenseful—provoking us to reach a deeper understanding of the human condition, as well as deeper understanding of the mental states of two specific composers and of the nature of the works made to confront each other in this way. One could hardly wish for a higher form of “fun” than this. Bravo!

C an a piano work convey a bustling ‘severalness’, or the sense of many people congregated in a social gathering, as convincingly as a chamber work? I think so — parts of Schumann’s ‘Carneval’, Mussorgsky’s ‘Marketplace at Limoges’, and Ravel’s ‘La Valse’ spring to mind as trivial examples. One tempting view is that the composer is aiming to depict the entirety of the human condition: everything is in here and, just as in the real world, the profound and the banal are constantly rubbing shoulders. I don’t think this is wrong, but the truth may go further... By presenting a unified work in which the high and the low aspects of humankind are contained together, the composer invites the listener to find these worlds contained inside each other, not merely nearby. The piano sonatas may have a touch of this ‘adjacent’ humor—the riotous trio in the second movement of opus 110, or the manic dotted-rhythm variation in opus 111.”
— Jonathan Biss, 2012 essay.

Friday, March 30, 2012

Kinesthetics/Biomechanics of Instrument Design governs the music that comes out

S ome works begin their performance life in a shocking way but, with further performances, come to feel ‘more normal’. Not so with David Del Tredici’s ‘Syzygy’. It was composed in 1966, yet it retains all of its novelty and magic. It continues for me to be a source of wonder … and terror…”
— Michael Tilson Thomas, introductory remarks, Zankel Hall, 29-MAR-2012.

A fine program at Zankel Hall last night! Excellent New York premiére of Mason Bates’s 2011 ‘Mass Transmission’ for choir, organ, and electronica. A chamber orchestra comprised of members of San Francisco Symphony members gave a stirring account of Lou Harrison’s 1973 ‘Concerto for Organ and Percussion Orchestra’. And Del Tredici’s 1966 ‘Syzygy’ was just as disturbing as Michael Tilson Thomas promised (esp., the pyrotechnics by soprano Kiera Duffy and Nicole Cash, French horn).

B ut the highlight of the program for me was the 8-person ensemble who performed Harry Partch’s 1958 ‘Daphne of the Dunes’, using Partch’s original one-off, home-made instruments that had been shipped cross-country in two semi tractor-trailers for Carnegie Hall’s ‘American Mavericks’ programs. (Performed by Dean Drummond, harmonic cannon & spoils-of-war; Joe Bergen, harmonic cannon & chromelodeon; Charles Corey, kithara, surrogate-kithara, harmonic cannon; jeffery irving, surrogate-kithara & harmonic cannon; Jared Soldiviero, boo, spoils-of-war, kithara; Bill Ruyle, diamond marimba; Joe Fee, cloud chamber bowls; Greg Hesselink, tenor violin, gourd tree, missile-cone gongs, pre-recorded tape.)

T he spatial arrangements of the instruments’ parts give rise to a spectrum of motions that lie well under the human hand. The physical distances between the strike-positions that produce the notes; the non-monotonic relationship of the parts’ positioning to their pitches; the practical biomechanics of what it is feasible for human arms, and fingers, and feet to do; the sensitivity of the parts, namely, how much force is required to generate a particular sound intensity: all of these contribute to the sonic qualities and musical tendencies of each instrument. The geometries of each instrument are associated with patterns and playing motions and sounds that are natural or characteristic for the instrument and the music to which it contributes. This is true of all instruments, of course; but we tend to under-recognize the fact when we listen to or observe performers of ‘normal’ instruments. With Partch’s compositions, the kinesthetics and biomechanics of the user interface are in our face.

F or example, plucking vertical strings that descend down by your knees, where you have difficulty seeing the strings in the shadows—leaning forward, bending down, and plucking them while standing, perched on a tall, narrow, possibly-catastrophically-tippy bench—while the music is located on a frail, kludgy stand way up above your head—these features impart an inherent, peculiar urgency and anxiety to the playing, which on account of these reasons is very different from the sound of a harp played by a performer who is comfortably and safely seated. The emotional quality of the sound is dramatically different, despite the fact that the mechanism of sound production is substantially the same in the two instruments.

W hat an evening!—showcasing compositions that have their own internal reasons for being, mostly refusing to cater to any external audience! And, with the exception of the Mason Bates piece (commissioned by San Francisco Symphony, with support of Michele and Laurence Corash), innovating things with slim expectation of popularity or compensation within the composer’s lifetime. Price of vision.

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Morgenstern Trio: Ravel, the Amateur Mathematician

P antoum poetical form—where each subsequent line changes function to become an antecedent line in the next stanza. Ravel’s music shows a love of the musical equivalent of this, playing on in-built ambiguities between antecedent and consequent to build up large-scale forms and at the same time hold our attention by letting the ambiguities surprise us.”
— Roy Howat, 1993.

T he Morgenstern Trio (Catherine Klipfel, piano; Stefan Hempel, violin; Emanuel Wehse, cello) have a uniquely intense, incisive style, as was abundantly demonstrated in their performance of Debussy, Mozart, and Brahms in a Music Alliance Series program Friday evening.

T he trio also have a characteristic, wry sense of humor, as befits the eponymous Christian Morgenstern, a German poet who was born in 1871 and died of TB in 1914.

T he Trio’s whole performance was superb—fresh; exciting; technically flawless—no surprise, given the many prizes they have received in competitions.

B ut even their encore—the second movement of Ravel’s piano trio, entitled ‘Pantoum’—delivered more, more than one routinely expects from an ‘encore’. The piano opens with the edgy, intense first theme, and the strings respond in double octaves. The short scherzo and trio ‘A-B-A’ structure makes for a perfect encore-length morsel. But there are ironies and meta-meanings in this piece. The repetitions and surface-level structures of the piece are not as straight-forward as they seem. The structure is like a ‘spell’ cast by a witch in a folktale. The rhetoric is one not of declamation but enchantment.

R avel wrote the trio theme in a completely different metre (4/2) from the scherzo (3/4), and the two time signatures co-exist—a kind of metrical dissonance that adds a lot of drama to an otherwise ‘dèpouiller’ (‘pared-down’, to the level of a children’s fairytale) narrative.

T he ‘piano-against-strings’, ‘4/2 vs. 3/4’ meter switches with the 4/2 that is initially in the piano part later swapped as the strings go from 3/4 to 4/2 and the piano returns to 3/4. The “competing meters” metrical dissonance persists for a long, long stretch: 168 quarter notes at 192 bpm, almost a whole minute’s worth.

T he ornaments are ‘reflexive’, as if they are compulsory, happenstantial features of how the music lays under the physical hand for each instrument, and as contrasted with a fully-deliberated, polished, composerly gesture.

T he reflexive, organic sounds wash over us, and we develop a suspicion of ambient, non-human order; a sense of diabolical, out-of-control natural forces at-work; a mix of awe and wonder and foreboding.

T he tension between the different meters—the different time percepts—inducing us to switch between an ‘ensemble algorithmic level’ and an ‘individual voice level’ depending on what is more significant or more commanding of our attention—is the primary reason why this ‘Pantoum’ movement is so exciting, I believe. In the languid section between numbers 11 and 15 in the score, the trio “sound grains” are large, and the listener attends to the ensemble sound and its algorithmic metrical structure.

B ut in the emphatic pizzicato passages, our attention is absorbed in the motion of the individual string parts, and we suspend attending to the algorithmic interactions associated with the metrical dissonance.

T he metrical dissonance persists and “lurks”, though. It is still within our awareness—and we feel apprehensive about the finiteness of our attention and the risks that might come true on account of shifting our attention away from the metrical dissonance “ensemble” features and onto the individual parts, much as a child hearing a fairytale experiences apprehension as her attention is absorbed by some new story development but the wolf is without doubt still in those woods and nightfall is not long off.

O ne may say that the number of functions is extremely small whereas the number of characters is extremely large. This explains the two-fold quality of a folktale—its amazing multiformity, picturesqueness, and color... and, on the other hand, its no-less-striking uniformity—its repetition.”
— Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, p. 20.

I t captivates us—it fully absorbs us, this fairytale-like pantun of Ravel’s—all the way to its ending flourish. We are spell-bound, returned to a primitive state of wonder, feeling much like we felt as children listening to thrilling stories—ones we had never heard before—told to us by belovèd grandparent or parent. You don’t get this entrancing music experience from recordings—not really. You need to attend a “live” performance, like the especially fine one given by Morgenstern Trio Friday night!

L ass die Moleküle rasen,
was sie auch zusammenknobeln!
lass das Tüfteln, lass das Hobeln,
heilig halte die Ekstasen.

[Let race the molecules,
tossing together what compounds they may!
Let the random tinkering continue; let the atoms’ planes and dihedral angles,
Keep holy the ecstasy.]”
— Christian Morgenstern, Lass die Moleküle rasen.

[Lehmer Sieve, 1932, solving Diophantine equations]

D iophantine Pantoum where A=7, B=3

¹Lehmer sieve’s ribbon o’er Diophantine field;
²White paper slides to the tune of rods’ switches.
³Sieve sings congruences, linear aria concealed,
⁴Seeks solutions to be found in theory which, as

²White paper slides to the tune of rods’ switches,
⁵Ribbon infers nineteen B minus eight A equals one.
⁴Seeks solutions to be found in theory which, as
⁶A father’s age AB is one less than twice BA the son,

⁵Ribbon infers nineteen B minus eight A equals one.
⁷Polynomial conjecture, in Fermat’s margin centuries’ toil!
⁶A father’s age AB is one less than twice BA the son
⁸Yields seventy-three and thirty-seven, algebraically closed foil.

⁷Polynomial conjecture, in Fermat’s margin centuries’ toil!
³Sieve sings congruences, linear aria concealed,
⁸Yields seventy-three and thirty-seven, algebraically closed foil—
¹Lehmer sieve’s ribbon o’er Diophantine field.”

— DSM.

Sunday, March 11, 2012

Savvy Musicianship: Marti Epstein’s ‘Troubled Queen’

W hen I am painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. It is only after a sort of ‘get acquainted’ period that I see [in the painting-in-progress] what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I just try to let it come through.”
— Jackson Pollock.

H ave a listen to Marti Epstein’s new composition, ‘Troubled Queen’:

I t’s a 21-minute piece for mixed ensemble consisting of flute, bass clarinet, trombone, 2 violins, viola, cello, piano, and percussion—commissioned by the Callithumpian Consort, and premièred on 19-DEC-2011 at New England Conservatory in Boston.

B rooding, dark, and pulsatile... inspired by Jackson Pollock’s brooding, dark, pulsatile 1945 painting of the same name, one of the holdings of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

C allithumpian Consort was founded by Stephen Drury in the 1990s and is dedicated to the proposition that music should be, and is, an ‘experience’. The ensemble is deeply committed to supporting new music. Besides frequent performances of new music, Callithumpian also seeks to foster a vibrant and financially sustainable environment for composers and composing, and has commissioned many compositions over the past 15 years.

I would say that the composition students here are not composing jazz. Specifically, they’re not composing commercial music; they’re not composing ‘jingles’. They may be composing film music, because we have a lot of dual majors. They’re usually composing music that’s artistically interesting and specifically for the concert hall... To graduate [from Berklee], students have to have a portfolio of pieces and—very important—they have to have a certain number of these pieces performed. Because one of the aspects of a composer’s training is, how do you get people to play your music? So we try to get them to start doing that right away.”
— Marti Epstein.

I hope her composition students had a chance to attend the première. Epstein leads by example. She doesn’t play musical ‘hardball’ with the listener or with the performers but instead pitches balls that are hittable, ‘accessible’. Not predictable or ‘easy’ pitches, surely. But captivating; natural; intuitive; emotionally moving and ‘fair’, not off-putting. This new ‘Troubled Queen’ is emblematic of the practical philosophy Epstein expresses in her remarks on Berklee’s website (quote above).

W hen I’m asked the inevitable question ‘What kind of music do you write?,’ I am always embarrassingly at a loss for words. Musicians want to know details of my harmonic language: is my music tonal or atonal? Nonmusicians often ask nervously if it sounds ‘modern’. Here’s the best way I can describe it: it is neither tonal nor atonal; I adhere to no preexisting method of pitch or harmony organization. I am more interested in the use of sounds as organizing musical materials than I am in melody or harmonic relationships. I also do not believe that atonality even truly exists; the term was an attempt to describe the music that broke away from Common Practice Tonality... My music is generally slow-paced. I always tell people that ‘You can take the girl out of Nebraska, but you can’t take the Nebraska out of the girl.’ The wide-open spaces that I experienced as a child, not so much in my living environment, but in the many car trips we took to Colorado to see my grandparents, were—and are—an integral part of my artistic psyche... I love living in the East, but I long for the space and expanse of the place in my childhood memories. I feel like my music is an expression of that longing.”
— Marti Epstein.

L ike the Pollock painting for which the piece is named, Epstein’s ‘Troubled Queen’ ably evokes/represents psychiatric illness-as-storm—these looming clouds; this mixture of scary unrealness and can’t-look-away awe; these oppressive feelings that elude attempts to control them. This dark-grey, nightmarish 4-bpm thunder and lightning—or is it a deranged heartbeat? [bradycardic between 07:09 to 09:01, becoming asystolic at 20:30]

T he self-doubts, the dread and anxiety, the fractured esteem: are these contributing ‘causes’ or triggers of depression, or are they merely some associated ‘effects’ or symptoms of the condition? Chaotic arpeggios in the piano part; strokes of blue and green and yellow in the winds and strings and percussion—random sonic hail pelting us unbidden, as if formed by Pollockian flicking: flung up into the air, falling now under the unstoppable force of gravity. Callithumpian Consort members’ playing is sensitive and inspired in capturing this ‘Nature is not kind’ harshness...

G othic interiority. Obscure totems; we’re not sure what they mean or how we got here.
Reduction of life to crashing, heaviness. Primitive glare, no escape.

T he interleaved string, woodwind, and brass passages around 14:00-15:00 are especially poignant, and contribute yet more evidence demonstrating the ‘organic’/biologic origins of depression, disabusing the listener of any misconception he/she might have held regarding the depressed person’s responsibility to ‘prevent’ the condition or exercise more self-control and simply ‘Get better!’ under his/her own steam.

W hat’s more, the 21-minute timescale of this piece offers enough latitude to explore the wide range of colors and cognitive states that characterize moderate-to-severe clinical depression. In other words, this is the sort of subject that demands considerable scope; a ‘miniature’ would not be right at all, and would at best be pastiche, unless it were a cue in a film score, subject to constraints of the script and action. Fully developed in this 21-minute work, the character/subject becomes very real. The suffering/horror this depressed protagonist experiences is fully animated and convincing, and, through the performance, we can’t help but care about this person and about the plight of other such people in society. In summary, this new Marti Epstein composition is a beautiful work: it illustrates not only wonderful artistry and craftsmanship, but also conveys the political and social savvy that ‘the arts’ (artists/musicians, and the supporters who finance them and commission works from them) can have, to bring about wider and deeper appreciation for socially/clinically important issues and provoke concord and action to make things better.

E very so often, a painter has to ‘destroy’ painting. Picasso did it; Pollock; numerous others, too. And every so often, a composer has to destroy composing. Here, Epstein smashes conventional ideas of a composition—as John Cage and many others have done. But this ‘Troubled Queen’ is very clearly a composition—and a very beautiful, moving one at that.