jwilzewske: composition

Showing posts with label composition. Show all posts

Saturday, November 10, 2012

Xenakis Matters

Xenakis, photo (c)1999 Ulf Andersen/Getty Images

T he Demiurge (1) creates from an intuition of Good; (2) takes disorder and friction and waste and makes it orderly and efficient, so far as is possible to do; (3) places Reason within the soul, and the cosmic soul within the cosmic body; (4) models the cosmos on the form of a generalized sentient lifeform, i.e., an animal with moral standing; (5) creates the cosmic body on principles of geometric proportionality; (6) creates the world soul out of population-level sameness and difference; (7) blends these into a durable alloy; and (8) divides the alloy into useful, value-generating harmonic intervals.”
— Plato’s ‘Timaeus’, quoted by Eric Lewis in Kanach, p. 81.

U nlike Schoenberg, who controls and organizes his music at the level of the individual note, Xenakis works at the level of the whole population [of all notes, taken together, as a sound-mass].”
— Brian Kane, in Kanach, p. 97.

T he new book, ‘Xenakis Matters’, the latest in the multi-author, multi-volume series edited by Sharon Kanach and published by Pendragon, provides a superb and many-faceted view of the enduring impacts of composer-artist-architect-engineer Iannis Xenakis, who died in 2001. Sharon Kanach is Vice-President of Centre Iannis Xenakis in France and Founder and President of the Xenakis Project of the Americas of the Brook Center at CUNY. She served as Xenakis’s assistant for two decades prior to his death in 2001.

X enakis was an iconic, formative influence on me, even though I encountered him and his teaching only for a short while in 1972. Xenakis was then still on the faculty at Indiana University at Bloomington in 1972... IU with its beautiful-and-powerful-and-then-new Control Data 6600 computer, sylvan wooded paths of the campus, and its quiet, clear-flowing limestone creek so incongruous with the intensity of the University and the minds gathered there.

S pringtime 1972 was, I suppose, before many of us recognized that the Sixties were over. It was when students at the University of Minnesota were protesting the War and barricading Washington Avenue with piles of lumber set on fire, an incendiary deconstructionist action undertaken not far from the School of Architecture where I attended Xenakis’s lectures.

S pring 1972 was when my life still straddled music and engineering equally—and when Xenakis, his music, his cross-disciplinary, fusion-avid compositional methods and materials, and his talks and writings were the epitome of innovation—his compelling, unifying vision a convergence of nature, science, engineering, and art.

H is mathematical models as automatic generating functions—not only for making music but for representing it—where equations accomplished this in a manner so much more compact than mere notes on paper could ever do: so crystalline, the beauty of this.

T he idea becomes the machine that makes the art .”
— Sol Lewitt.

H is programmatic transformations of acoustic forms and found-sounds—embodying a mode of creativity beyond pitch and rhythm and traditional music pedagogy—a random and happenstantial process can nonetheless have statistical self-similar or fractal properties across the ensemble of parts/voices and across time, and can manifest and evoke specific, real meanings.

C an order be established from noise? Well, your music was the first to discover this.”
— philosopher Michel Serres, remark during Xenakis’s PhD thesis defense.

H is physicality and love of ‘immersive’ media and sonic productions—in which the raw and elemental and cranked-up challenged us to (re-)discover the boundaries between Nature and the human.

H is famous book, ‘Formalized Music’, wherein he referred to some of his work as the musical equivalent of the “phenomena of a political crowd... protesters forming a human ‘river’, and their shouted messages propagating from front to back, comprehensible to an observer situated at a distance from the crowd but often not coherent, as such, to individuals within the crowd”.

I ’ve spent the 40 years since then in very different ways than I would have imagined, most of them doing software engineering. But the maieutic* debt that I owe to Iannis Xenakis as an important teacher in my life is great. [*uncovering through analysis; eliciting knowledge by provoking or questioning; assisting-in-coming-into-being; midwifing]

I suppose only as we get older do we really begin to appreciate/apprehend the entire cycle of Life. There is a sense of totality to life and its review, a summing-up. The emphasis is on the ‘examined life’, on how we assess our life and how we have lived it, and assess what truth we have synthesized from the events that have accumulated, from our own efforts and decisions, and from the acts of others and how they have filled and inhabited our lives.

A powerful mixture of emotions—happy memories; regret; guilt; 40 years’ longing and loss—is part of what this book caused to well-up in me—part of what will lead me to read and re-read this volume in years to come. The poignancy of what is remembered so vividly across the decades is staggering. I become reattached to my past as it is reanimated by these authors on these pages.

S ignificant for many readers besides me, though, is how this book works as historiography—revealing how life crystallizes itself in the artifacts that remain in us, emblems of the impact that others have had on us.

I n hindsight, it’s impossible to exaggerate Iannis’s importance to my development, as a person and as an engineer. While insisting on holding students to high standards, he also took an active, personal interest in each one’s well-being. Puckish and provocative, but always seeming to accurately gauge the limits of each. Xenakis’s legendary generosity/hospitality/charity is part of his legacy and, no doubt, a major reason why he is remembered so vividly by so many people, even ones like me who only encountered him briefly.

R emembering now Iannis Xenakis’s smiling face, remembering his exuberance and enthusiasm—how he confided his uncertainties about what some of his music meant, while he simultaneously professed that each motive and pattern did have meaning(s), however ineffable those meanings may be; how he excitedly expressed his ideas and showed his students how to make them work, or, at a minimum, how to believe sufficiently in the possibility so that they fearlessly strived to make it happen—redeems me a bit from my long history of sinning by transience and forgetting.

G enuine problems are... both necessary and impossible. Possibility arrives right when you no longer expect it. That is what an ‘event’ really is.”
— Alain Badiou, quoted by Olga Touloumi in Kanach, p. 101.

I n summary, reminiscence can be dynamic and creative—it can be productive of new discoveries; reminiscence does not have to be reductionistic or static—and I thank Sharon Kanach and her co-authors for this gift.

A ll of the essays in ‘Xenakis Matters’ are engaging and a joy to read. Each essay advances the scholarship regarding the composer’s ideas and influence. And each conveys the kindness, humanity, and something of the humor and kindly nature that are what I remember of him. Robert Wannamaker’s chapter (pp. 127-141), especially, on math exhorts composers to emulate Xenakis’s use of ‘discretion’ in humanizing the combination of mechanical/programmatic musical elements with human ones, to achieve a synthesis that can touch the heart and move us in valuable or even life-changing ways.

M usic is a mathematical exercise, disguised in such a way that the mind does not realize it is counting.”
— Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

I love this book—for reasons noted above, universal as well as personal. Whether or not you have personal memories of Xenakis as an excellent human being, you will, I’m confident, love the book too.

Recording of Pianist Yuji Takahasi performance of Xenakis’s ‘Herma’

I n 1963 I became [Xenakis’s] composition student. When I showed him my piano piece, he pointed to two sections in the piece and offered me a big eraser... I can still feel the notes of ‘Herma’ at my fingertips. Performing ‘Herma’, I discovered the gravity-free state of sound. It was the feeling of lightness, rather than the violent movement other people surmise from the pianistic virtuosity of the work... I hear through those hundreds of notes—and I sense from them at unexpected moments—something like a voice of the inexplicable.”
— pianist Yuji Takahashi, quoted by Roger & Karen Reynolds in Kanach, p. 13.

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Mara Gibson’s ‘Canopy’: Arboreal/Neuronal soundscape/artscape for viola, percussion, and tape

I recently had the privilege to experience a new chamber music composition by Mara Gibson at the opening of a new art exhibit in Kansas City. The work was commissioned by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Premiered in April by Michael Hall, ‘Canopy’ was inspired by ‘Ferment’, Roxy Paine’s (1966-) outdoor installation in the sculpture garden at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.

I n the 13-min composition, Gibson meditates on Paine’s conflation of neuronal dendritic architecture and treeness... the multiplicity of meanings of what we perceive in nature is called into question. We all are trees; we all are neurons now.

L arge-scale sculptures and exotic mixed-ensemble chamber music (viola-percussion-tape) aren’t commonly paired with each other. However, in this instance it is an inspired piece of programming, an account that plumbs the depths of the sculpture’s seeming desolation... a melancholy that stems from the constitutional rootedness of a ramifying, arborizing structure that is situated where it is with little prospect of changing its venue (you; the neurons that make up your brain and make you who you are; the tree). And yet the composition culminates in a radiant, nature-affirming performance that leaves the listener-viewer with more than solace—a sense of quiet optimism.

H all takes great care with the score’s myriad directions, resulting in an intensity and beauty that would delight any composer, as well as any audience. There is a brief pause/silent_stasis at about 07:00. The solo_viola/denuded_tree resumes with a soliloquy. Then, with a harrowing climax, the percussion and recorded track of the viola reappear with renewed vigor, and with the live viola layered on top of them—effecting a grieving voice of the solo viola answering its echo and the percussion more quietly, survivors against all odds! The micrometer-precise diminuendo from 11:00 to the end is perfectly realized—and we immediately appreciate why Gibson wrote it in this way.

H all’s technique is superb throughout and manages to sound like 5 different violas, by using combinations of diverse pressures on the bow, bowing near and far away from the bridge, etc.—pensive, taut, with some ‘extended’ viola techniques. Bob Beck’s recording and production values aptly serve the intimacy of this beautiful piece. Few recordings achieve such a level of detailed commitment from the artists and the recording engineer! (I am grateful, too, that Gibson has made digital recordings of ‘Canopy’ available for download on BandCamp.com.)

A nyone who has tried to devise a likeness of a tree—sculpting one as a kid in school, or, with more serious intent as an older person—will recognize how difficult it is to do well. The fractal character of the branch points and the Fibonacci-like decimation of the caliber of the branches as you go further and further out on the limbs is hard to emulate. It is so easy to end up with a ‘fail!’—a crude likeness that looks contrived, a caricature of a tree! But Paine achieves a high level of fractal verisimilitude—a tree representation with enough character-development and complexity and depth to be believable as a tree or as another living organism with moral standing. Gibson’s writing is not ‘representational’ as such, but with equal care and finesse achieves comparable moral weight and attractive, believable, attention-holding verisimilitude.

I n summary, Gibson’s sonic stimuli synergize nicely with Paine’s sculpture’s visual and haptic stimuli. I enjoyed being immersed in both of them at the same time. The visual and musical elements are independent and exciting in their own right and (in the case of Paine’s sculpture, ‘have already stood’ and--) will continue to stand ably on their own. But, together, the two works manifest a cohesion that is evident to listeners/viewers as they encounter the works simultaneously. It is a brilliant success as a tandem installation, and ‘Canopy’ is commendable as a commissioning project. Other galleries and museums should take note of this as an example they can replicate—commissioning companion chamber compositions to accompany major new acquisitions, and organizing gala première performances (with food and wine, as the Nelson did) to cultivate new membership and community involvement! No better way than this to dispel the ignorant museum stereotype of grey-hair elites!

H all is a former president of the Chicago Viola Society and a founding member of the Lake String Quartet. He has performed at numerous summer festivals, including the Grand Teton Festival, the National Orchestral Institute, Kneisel Hall Chamber Music School, and the Aspen Music Festival. Hall serves on the faculties of Illinois Wesleyan University, VanderCook College of Music, and the Chicago Academy for the Arts. He is a graduate of Ball State University, with graduate studies with Peter Kamnitzer and with the LaSalle and Tokyo String Quartets, at the University of Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, and doctoral studies with Michelle LaCourse and Scott Rawls at the UNC, Greensboro.

G ibson graduated from Bennington College and completed her PhD at SUNY Buffalo. She attended London College of Music; l’École des Beaux-Arts, Fontainebleau, France; and the International Music Institute, Darmstadt. She has received grants and honors from the American Composer’s Forum, the Banff Center, Louisiana Division of the Arts, Arts KC, Meet the Composer, the Kansas Arts Commission, the National Endowment for the Arts, the International Bass Society, ASCAP, and the John Henrick Memorial Foundation. She is also founder of the UMKC Composition Workshop for Young Composers and co-director/founder of ArtSounds, now in its seventh year. ArtSounds specializes in “immersive art-music fusion” experiences, similar in spirit to ‘Canopy’.

T he greatest hindrance in the understanding of life lies in the impossibility of accounting for it by the enumeration of its properties. It must be understood as a unity. But if the organism [tree; neural network] is a unity, in what sense are its component properties its parts? Who is it, really, and why? How does this unity arise? To what extent must it be considered a property of the organization of the organism, as opposed to a property emerging [undeliberated] from its mode of life? These questions remain open....”
— Humberto Maturana & Francisco Varela.

Sunday, May 20, 2012

Terry Riley’s Aleph (א): Music to Code By

A leph in Jewish mysticism represents the oneness of the Divine. The letter can been seen as being composed of an upper yud, a lower yud, and a vav leaning on a diagonal. The upper yud represents the hidden and ineffible aspects of God while the lower yud represents God’s revelation and presence in the world. The vav connects the two realms.”
— Wikipedia.

T he 1-hour 53-min recording of Terry Riley’s solo synth performance of his composition, ‘א’, is beautiful—and precisely the sort of experience you would expect from Riley.

B ut, apart from whatever else it may be and apart from its merits as a composition and as a performance, I have found it to be especially conducive to my own productivity when working on complex math problems and coding software to solve them. For me, silence works only up to a point, after which I need minimalist music.

B ut not just any minimalist music. For example, Michael Nyman’s music interferes with concentration. La Monte Young’s music contains, for me, too many distractions. I do find Ellen Fullman’s recent work conducive, though, in the same way that Terry Riley’s ‘Aleph’ is conducive.

T he timbre of the Korg Triton Studio 88 Synth is bright like a Chinese single-reed or double-reed, but with a lot of spectral flux like a car horn... or a choir of Chinese tenor and bass suonas. Spectral flux and spectral irregularity are distinguishing features in car horns (see Lemaitre 2003, link below).

T he two-hour performance is filled with dense, organic, continually-changing textures—nimble car horns, if car horns can ever be nimble, and these are supernaturally nimble. The automaticity of preschool kids’ trying out their fingers on a keyboard, enjoying the raw pleasure of making notes and reproducing patterns and sequences... reflexive movements of their fingers and arms, yielding arpeggiation that involves just those notes that are within easy reach without stretching.

T he effect, some minutes into listening to it, evokes a freedom from intention and planning that is unknown to sober adults, and this is what facilitates my problem-solving and coding mind. The uncertain continuation of woodwind-like fingering patterns without aim, as long as they last, until superceded by some new motif... the stochastic, aleatoric innovations... Riley discounts the creative value of mind and deliberation and discounts it again, and again... the dollar-store of intellect... until the passion of meat is all that’s left, and animal instinct is restored...

O nly connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect...”
— E.M. Forster, ‘Howard’s End’, Ch. 22, 1910.

H ere’s a short MP3 clip.

T here is a ceremonial, magisterial, quasi-liturgical quality of ‘Aleph’ that reminds me of requiem forms. Or of chant, which can be heard as both archaic and contemporary. It is a mystical piece that unfolds at an implacable, glacial pace. The tone is largely meditative and serene, which provides space for contemplation and veneration. There are dozens-of-voices atmospheric Ligeti-like sound-fogs... fields of dissonance that convey an inhuman, infinite, primeval power—this surely is part of the Hebrew significance of Aleph; as is true also of the meaning of ‘א’ in mathematics—fitting as well in the context of requiem-writing.

I t has been said that my ‘Requiem’ does not express the fear of death and someone has called it a lullaby of death. But it is thus that I see death: as a happy deliverance, an aspiration towards happiness above, rather than as a painful experience. The music of Gounod has been criticized for its over-inclination towards human tenderness. But his nature predisposed him to feel this way: religious emotion took this form inside him. Is it not necessary to accept the artist’s nature? As to my ‘Requiem’, perhaps I have also instinctively sought to escape from what is thought right and proper...”
— Gabriel Fauré, 1902.

T hroughout, the piece is prodigiously inventive, with prolific layers upon layers of rhythmic and harmonic complexity, yet all presented with what appears on the surface to be minimalistic... it embodies the best of what minimalism can be: full of latent variety that captures and nourishes the listener’s awareness. (Which is why I find it helpful to listen to when I am tackling a hard problem, and why I am writing this blogpost you are reading. If you are interested in reading more about quantitative evidence concerning music listening and work productivity, have a look at the links below, esp. the book by Vikram Kiran.)

T he seamless, cluster-like blends fan out like a spilled liquid on a flat surface—part of the organic quality of just intonation, providing a support structure for the synth suona-like parts, a Toop-style “rawness” of intonation that sustains the emotional intensity of the piece.

M ost a cappella ensembles naturally gravitate to just intonation because its ‘stability’ or ‘target-pitch predictability’ is comfortable. In that regard, maybe the spectral flux and on-again-off-again frisson of this Terry Riley recording will be of special interest to people of a vocal bent, both amateur and professional singers alike.

T his sound of synth suonas keening, synth voices keening, choir of synth car horns keening... bears some resemblance to the György Ligeti piece in ‘2001 A Space Odyssey’, ‘Lux aeterna’... A friend who was overhearing my repeated playing of the 2 Riley ‘Aleph’ CDs wondered aloud “How can you stand that!? It’s driving me nuts!” So, to be truthful I should say that this is an acquired taste, or reveals a patience borne of equanimity. It is like being transported by William Kraft’s music in the walkway between terminals underneath Chicago’s O’Hare airport. It is like listening to a choir of chainsaws in the forest at a great and comfortable distance. Or like the persistent-but-beautiful bleating and tintinnabulation of sheep in a high alpine meadow in the Swiss alps, below the Jung Frau Joch in the late mornings of mid-summer. In other words, the bleating and tintinnabulation signify tolerant, salutary, and humane qualities that are implicit in our planet’s troubled story. Children of the Universe, you (every living creature) are here, hurray. Have a good life.

I n short, these are qualities which make humans, the sum of which could be seen in love (esp. agape, which in turn can be seen as an embodiment of the ‘idea of One’). The musical gaze cast from this sphere upon the story world is distanced, more or less withdrawn, non-judgemental, calm, quiet, and slightly melancholic, yet non-sentimental. As film music, tintinnabuli music often qualifies as an ‘against all odds’ score capable of making the complicated plot-level matters more poignant.”
— Kaire Maimets-Volt, p. 172.

I f you were in a foreign country and experiencing the local people performing on their native instruments, a long raga, for example—you would exhibit a tolerance toward such bleatings and tintinnabulations. But if instead, like my friend, you regard it as a choir of annoying car horns—multiple car alarms being set off repeatedly by marauding kids on a street a couple of blocks away—you just want it to stop.

I n summary, playing these 2 CDs consecutively without a break induces an awareness that can facilitate productive concentration at work and lift you into a realm beyond human understanding or hearing. The music requires an audience who must be willing to accept the spirit of the work and suspend their disbelief in order to receive its many rewards.

Saturday, November 5, 2011

Object-oriented operator-overloading in Fauré’s Fantaisie for Flute and Piano Op. 79?

B y overloading standard operators on a class, you can exploit the intuition of the users of that class. This lets users program in the language of the problem domain rather than in the language of the machine.”
— Marshall Cline, ParaShift C++ FAQ.

A ttended James Galway’s recital the other evening. Thoroughly enjoyed it.

G alway is not subtle. His technical virtuosity, charismatic personality, and emphatic, extroverted playing style are incomparable.

B ut, beyond that, his performance of Fauré’s Fantaisie for Flute and Piano, Op. 79, led me to notice “key-undefining” and “-redefining” elements that strike me as similar to “operator overloading” in compiler design, or, more specifically, to runtime “polymorphisms” in parallel computing and cloud computing, where multiple processes that are interacting with each other concurrently implement more than one version of an operator, and the different operator instantiations have different semantics.

L ook at the score snippet above! In the Andantino movement we have middle-register F-natural (Ddim) against piano’s E in the LH. Other dissonant passages involving the flute object/process communicating with the piano object/process. Finale’s chord-analysis plug-in labels this as Ddim9 (third inversion), then Bdim. Your brain is like a master process that is executing and integrating multiple parallel child processes. If the scope of your brain’s attention encompasses all of the pitches in m. 17 in Op. 79, say, then it receives a hexachord back from the flute object class and the piano object class—an E major triad invasively intermingled with an F major triad... triads that are a dissonant semitone apart... a sort of exotic suspension.

I t is like operator overloading in C++, C#, Scala, Python, Ruby, R, and other languages.

T he interval of the fifth serves as a melodic frame for flute class execution and piano class execution in each of the ‘mélodie’s’ sections, its space gradually rising and becoming more chromatic—making the timbre brighter and the emphasis stronger or more individualistic or ‘recitational’. Melodic motion expands both registrally and chromatically. This is not so much subjectivity/ambiguity or vagueness/tentativeness that are aspects of impressionism, so much as it is concurrent, deliberate polymorphism of operators implemented by different object classes!

T he Allegro movement has rampant elisions of phrase completions, such that cadences are implicit and there is implied emphasis on what is omitted. That’s another feature in Op. 79 that, to me, presages parallel and cloud-based computing... Eager quitting by the Map-Reduce master process when ‘reducer’ jobs have by now yielded enough to enable the master process to abort the rest of them and proceed to the next task.

G abriel Urbain Fauré was, shall we say, an erstwhile compiler engineer who lived, oh, about 100 years “before his time”.

F or your interest, some Op. 79 videos on YouTube are here, and here, and here, and here, and here. In them you will see that the “object polymorphisms” in Op. 79 are not necessarily evident unless the flute playing is as strong as Galway’s.

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Faster than Sound: Acoustic-Electronic Compositions and Combined Visual-Music Performance at Aldeburgh

M usical sound is too limited in its quantitative variety of tones. The most complex orchestras boil down to four or five types of instrument… This limited circle of pure sounds must be broken, and the infinite variety of ‘noise-sound’ conquered. ”
— Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises, 1913.

T he ‘Faster Than Sound’ program was held at Snape Maltings in the Britten Studio last Friday (12 November), one of Aldeburgh Music’s events. The performance was preceded by a 10-day composing workshop led by composers Milton Mermikedes (Univ Surrey and Royal College of Music, London), Martin Suckling (Somerville College, Oxford), and Ted Machover (MIT and Royal College of Music, London).

T he compositions each involved either one or two performers and utilized a combination of conventional acoustic (‘analog’) and signal processing software (‘digital’) idioms.

Adrian Gierakowski – Unitas Multiplex (eDrum tablets and software DSP)
David Ibbett – Impulse Imagined (miked and processed cello and software)
Charlie Williams – e to one million pieces (miked and processed piano and video)
Gregor Riddell – Skyfish (miked and processed cello and software)
Enrico Bertelli – Drumactica (eDrum tablets and software DSP)
Tod Machover – Michael’s Dream (K-bow processed cello and software with lights)
Tod Machover – Spheres and Splinters (K-bow processed cello and software with lights)

A pre-performance talk was given at 6 p.m. in the Jerwood Kiln Studio at Snape. Among the 5 panelists, Ash Nehru (Software Director) from United Visual Artists (UVA) explained the multiple ways in which the 25-pole LED tower array is engineered to respond to inputs from the various sensors on the K-bow and on the cellist’s body. Ben Bloomberg (MIT student) explained some aspects of the Max/DSP and related software that controls the array of 16 loudspeakers positioned around the performance hall. The pre-performance talk was attended by an SRO crowd of about 70 people on this damp, dreary Friday evening in November. The performance itself was attended by about 150. Aldeburgh is famous, but such a turn-out is pretty remarkable given the considerable distance from Cambridge or London in darkest Suffolk on a Friday night. Fantastic to see!

T he gist of Tod Machover’s preconcert remarks was that electronic and multimedia technology can lead ‘classical’ music into new, financially viable markets and young audiences who are not now disposed to spend money consuming classical music. For my part, I strongly doubt this will happen. I have attended concerts of electronic chamber music for years and occasionally write about them in this blog, but see no evidence of market ‘traction’ or audience growth, certainly not among the youth segments Machover was referring to. The affinities, such as they are, are among those who already are devoted to serious music, new or otherwise. That and things like Classical Spectacular, which is about as far from ‘chamber music’ as one can get.

A nd, honestly, the capital expense for acquiring all the gear required—and the expense to ship it and set it up and tear it down for each performance, and the technical complexity of managing it—are out-of-reach for all but a very few classical musicians. The ‘Faster Than Sound’ faculty do not acknowledge this.

T he financial growth opportunities are considerable, though, for combined electronic-acoustic and multimedia compositions in film or recorded on-demand HD downloadable media that are not ‘live’ performances. Home theatres with synths and lights?

T he Ibbett and Riddell e-cello compositions were the ones that I found most accessible and compelling. Gregor Riddell’s cello performances were passionate and elegant, and the use of electronic DSP software effects was tasteful. The textures and timbres provided by the DSP contributed meaningfully to the compositions’ narrative arc and lent extra emotional tension and complexity to the pieces.

I n other pieces on the program the DSP effects proliferated. Sometimes ‘less’ really is more?

O ne begins with a mark, another mark, a third mark, a splash, a smudge, a drip—until the whole work energetically completes itself and the artists can then see [hear] what has been achieved [if anything]. It is not something in which all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand with ‘the execution a perfunctory affair’! How could Pollocks’ ‘Autumn Light’ have been planned? Or de Kooning’s ‘Woman I’? In Abstract Expressionism, hand and eye were everything, and for those who can remember that era, the intellect could hardly have been more suspect. The painter’s studio and the philosophy seminar room were at one in repudiating the ‘ghost in the machine.’ ”
— Arthur Danto, Unnatural Wonders, p. 98.

T he quality of some of this was a bit like Abstract Expressionistic painting, with cascades of disparate effects—ones that are responsive to telemetered measurements of the performers or their instruments, yes, but not ones that are intentional or deliberated, anymore than Pollock’s dribbles were deliberated in detail. There is an aleatoric, ambient ‘found’ quality to such music, though, and that ain’t a bad thing...

O rson Welles once said, that a movie studio was ‘the biggest electric train set a boy ever had.’ I think [McMillen’s] TrioMetrik® [software] just may be the modern composer’s ‘electric train set.’ ”
— Jay Cloidt, Composer.

B y far the most inspiring aspect of the performance, in my opinion, was the United Visual Artists light installation that accompanied the Machover ‘Spheres and Splinters’ composition. The equipment consisted of 25 poles about 3 meters tall equipped with high-intensity LED lamps from top to bottom. The poles were arrayed in two concentric rings (6-meter and 10-meter diameter) about cellist Peter Gregson who was seated on the darkened stage in the middle of this forest of light-poles. The signals from his K-bow and instrumentation that measured his muscle tension, arm gestures, and other physiological variables were processed by software that then controlled the dynamic geometrical 3-D patterns and changing colors on the light-poles.

H ow much ‘control’ or ‘reproducibility’ there may be to this spectacle from performance to performance is anybody’s guess. But there is no doubt that the combination of light and sound can be emotionally engaging and genuinely moving.

I n the pre-performance Q&A session, one professional cellist inquired as to what, if any, of the DSP and lighting is amenable to ‘notation’ in the conventional sense of musical scores and orchestration. ‘How much of what comes out is a surprise to the performer? How much of it is, shall we say, improvisational and how much of it is explicitly notated?’

T he responses of the panelists were, frankly, unconvincing. If graphical scoring methods à la Stockhausen and Xenakis and others are used, they did not say so. Instead they insisted that everything is exquisitely ‘controlled’ by the performers.

N otwithstanding the fact that the patches and loops and software init parameters and so forth constitute a network of procedural and declarative code, it should be confessed that these bricoleurs’ constructions of dozens of disparate elements and subsystems must be documented, in a manner that can not only be replicated and performed by others (not just by the original composer and collaborators) but can be performed by others in decades yet to come, on future equipment and software that can emulate the equipment and software used today. The equipment and software you are performing on will be obsolete in 2 years! In 15 years you won’t be able to boot one of those things you are performing on today or find replacement parts for it when it fails—they will be inoperable ‘antiques’ by then! You must have a notation and waveform specs and filter specs and patch specs, or your ‘composition’ will be like so much disappearing ink!

A rchival characterizations of current system and DSP object-classes and instances? [Crickets chirping] MusicXML representations, with extensions to MusicML? [More crickets]

T he cellist and I were disappointed with the ‘Faster Than Sound’ faculty members’ answers. But we (and, I think, the rest of the audience, based on their enthusiastic applause) were delighted with the performances, regardless whether they prove to be one-of-a-kind, ambient, impossible-to-replicate, incompletely-documented ‘improvisations’ or installation-art ‘happenings’. These were wonderful new works (works-in-progress), composed, engineered, and produced under the duress of a 10-day-long workshop. Bravo to one and all!

C ombining the visual and classical is not as blasphemous as many would think. More than a century ago Alexander Scriabin notated his 1909 symphonic poem ‘Prometheus, the Poem of Fire’ for the Luxe, a custom designed light projector built by Russian physicist Alexander Moser. In the mid-20th century, as a biography explains, conductor Leopold Stokowski often had lights set up for concerts to cast huge shadows of him on the walls of the concert hall. In the 21st century we maintain the visual convention of dimming the auditorium lights to provide engagement betwen audience and musicians. Light installations such as the one that accompanied Spheres and Splinters at Snape yesterday simply strengthen this engagement... Combining visual and classical could press the important hot button for funders, and a little bird tells me UVA may have some speculative work waiting to be picked up by someone quick off the mark in the classical field. Bring on music and movement.”
— On an Overgrown Path blog, 13-NOV-2010.

Friday, May 15, 2009

Piano and Combinatorial Inspiration: Fred Rzewski

B esides his composerly skill, Rzewski is—] a granitically overpowering piano technician, capable of depositing huge boulders of sonoristic material across the keyboard without actually wrecking the instrument.”
— Nicolas Slonimsky, Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians.

T hose who have been criticizing contemporary music for lacking true melodic lines, may be consoled to learn that some composers now are very much concerned with melody. I don’t mean that they are writing romantic melodies, or popular melodies, or any other familiar kind of melodies, but they are certainly writing melodies. I heard two very good new pieces of this sort last week. One was Frederic Rzewski’s ‘Coming Together’.”
— Tom Johnson, Village Voice, 13-APR-1972.

T he piano music of Frederic Rzewski kept me company during the wee hours this morning.

[50-sec clip, David Jalbert, Fred Rzewski, ‘North American Ballads, No. 2, Which Side Are You On’, 1.6MB MP3]

F red’s music... often exhibits a chromatic background that intercalates with a diatonic contrapuntal background. Chromatic events are initiated by dyadic conflicts in the foreground—the interactions of chromatic and diatonic species. In his piano works he often manipulates a single pitch-class so as to bring about large-scale harmonic motions. Henry Burnett’s and Roy Nitzberg’s analyses resonate deeply, based on the evidence in Rzewski's writing. Which leads me to wonder whether Fred would feel that Henry’s and Roy's characterization of the compositional process rings true. My guess is yes.

I do not have the score (yet), so I rock the MP3 of Jalbert’s recording back and forth and pick off the notes, transcribe some of the figures...

H₀ + T_t I H₀ = A, for some t

where the hexachord H has a subscript denoting the order number associated with the hexachord’s first element, I is the inversion (permutation) operator, and T is the transposition operator with subscript t denoting the transposition number, any odd integer.

L acking 2s and 6s (whole-tones and tritones), the ‘6-20’ hexachord has a high degree of symmetry—and Rzewski resorts to it, maybe in part because of its mathematical/structural beauty and diverse possibilities. It [‘6-20’] is paradoxically ‘malleable/slippery’ and ‘crystalline/interlocked/solid’ at the same time. According to John Rahn’s calculations, ‘6-20’ maps into itself 3 times under transposition and 3 times under inversion: the prime form (0 1 4 5 8 9) duplicates itself under transposition at 0, 4, and 8; under inversion at 1, 4, and 9. In pitch-class content, there are only 4 distinct forms of ‘6-20’; only the whole-tone hexachord ‘6-35’ is more redundant. Under transposition or inversion it yields sets that are either completely identical or nonidentical—whence comes the slippery crystallinity of it.

S everal segments are F# minor, the Dominant of home key B minor. Patterns of transposition levels are generated either 2 semitones or multiples of 2 semitones apart—except for one, I think. The transposition levels convolve as modulo-2 multiples of semitones, in contrary motion within octaves. The distance between each transposition becomes smaller and smaller until it meets the middle of the octave, the tritone.

J albert’s account of the ‘North American Ballads’ adheres nicely to the political agenda set forth by Fred—not ‘Leftist’ so much as ‘Ethical-Humanist-Concerned-with-Justice’.

W hich side are you on’ is basically asking ‘Are you for war or against it?’ There are minimalist idioms in the middle section, with obsessive repetitions of the rhythms with slowly proliferating deviations/convergences, noted above. These reinforce the obstinacy of the political question, which demands to be answered. It won’t go away by ignoring it. But the majority of the piece is melodic, wry, playful, lyrical Rzewski.

O f course, besides these ‘North American Ballads’ (1978-9) many of Rzewski’s works over the years have been inspired by social and political themes—for example, ‘The People United Will Never Be Defeated!’; ‘Coming Together’, a setting of the letters of an inmate who was murdered at the State Prison at Attica at the time of the riots in 1971; ‘The Price of Oil’ and its questions about the legitimacy of societies’ priorities; ‘Les Moutons de Panurge’, about aggression and mutual destruction; ‘Antigone-Legend’, a meditation on principled opposition to the policies of the State; ‘Struggle’, whose text is taken from a letter written by Frederic Douglass in 1849, about the constant struggle necessary to achieve social reforms.

S tudied at Phillips Academy, Harvard and Princeton. Studied under Randall Thompson, Roger Sessions, Walter Piston, Milton Babbitt, and Luigi Dallapiccola. Professor of Composition at the Conservatoire Royal de Musique in Liège, Belgium, since 1977. Politically active always; honest as a matter of conscience and constitution. Belovèd in Boston and everywhere. Delightful sense of humor and irony, humane, wonderful teacher. I learn quite a lot before dawn, taking his music apart, putting it back together.