jwilzewske: distance

Showing posts with label distance. Show all posts

Monday, February 7, 2011

It Was When the Nagging Became Music (1:41) that Love Became Clear to Me 腾讯QQ

I long with all my heart to return to my quiet home where I was born and have spent happy days in nature. Nature! Where can I find it here? Everything is so artificial...”
— Robert Schumann, letter from Leipzig to his mother in Zwickau, 24-OCT-1828 [Jugendbriefe, 2e., 2 vols., Clara Schumann, ed.].

M any composers have treated the subject of ‘Heimweh’ (German for homesickness)... Carl Gottlieb Reissiger (Op. 50, No. 1); Robert Schumann; Edvard Grieg; Arnold Schoenberg; Franz Schubert, Hugo Wolf, Johann Kalliwoda, Fanny Mendelssohn, Johannes Brahms, Franz Liszt, Max Reger, Mischa Spoliansky, Heinrich Proch, many others. Here in this Tencent QQ video we have it in an industrial marketing film. (Unfortunately, I am not yet able to find out who the performers of the soundtrack music in this video are, and I am not certain of the composition either.)

T he video is, I think, a fine example of how indispensable chamber music is for effective, impactful films, especially ones that address matters of family. Meaning is constituted not simply by its semantic content but also by its sonic content. Thirty years ago we had Roland Barthes’s concept of ‘the grain of the voice’. The effect of women’s voices, mothers in particular, was examined by Leslie Dunn and Nancy Jones in their book (link below). ‘Purely sonic’ features of the female voice in "the construction of its non-verbal meanings" involve roles played by (1) the person or people producing the sound, (2) the person or people hearing the produced sound and (3) the acoustical and social contexts in which production and hearing occur. The meaning of sound is co-constituted by performative as well as semantic and textual features.

I n the Tencent QQ video, the mother-son intersubjective acoustic space must be—and is—recovered. That is why this video and its supporting sound track work.

I n the aftermath of the notorious Amy Chua book, this is something of an anti-Tiger Mom video, complete with healing chamber music sound track. Reed-in-the-wind mother is mistreated by ambitious, impatient son who departs for U.S., makes good, feels remorse, gets a clue, starts treating mom better, from 20,000 kilometers away. There is not enough time to show whether son’s earlier irritability and maladjustment to parental implacability are in any way justified, nor whether there are any mitigating conditions, such as autism spectrum disorders. There is not enough time to show whether mom’s despair and hovering are related to ongoing chronic depression or other mitigating conditions.

A ll we see of son is the stage of exasperation and fuming resentment, followed by the stage of loneliness and isolation and regret. All we see of mom is stage of despair, sorrow, followed by stage of ecstasy at learning to use instant messaging and restoration of the relationship. Montemayor and Hanson (1985) reported a parent-adolescent child conflict event rate of 2 conflicts per 3 days, an average of 20 events per month, so maybe the video shows what is entirely within the bounds of ‘normal’. Warm, candid, poignant, gently humorous, it’s a story that has plenty of the cozy intimacy of chamber music in industrial ‘promo’ settings/jingles.

T his music amounts to a shamanic ceremony during which the shaman-surrogate commercial sponsor 腾讯 QQ produces this music and images to appease the spirits both within the family depicted in the story and within the broader community—by extension including you and me.

T he first violin makes three rhapsodic statements, each ending with a pause while the inner strings catch up with their parallel entries. The remainder of the track is comprised of pianissimo phrases on three voices, while the fourth voice carries a confessional folk melody (first and second violins, in turn). Cool, how this works...

12年相伴弹指间心无间.”
— 腾讯 QQ.

Friday, March 14, 2008

Horn Trio: Ian Dakin and Brahms’s Fractured Family, Fractured Idea of Requiem

H orn: the perfect emblem of distance and disembodiment.”
— John Daverio.

Ian Dakin (French horn), Elaine Clark (violin), and David Clark (piano) will perform horn trios by Brahms and Wood on Sunday, 30-MAR, at 12:00 noon at Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. The Brahms Horn Trio in particular merits more frequent performance than it receives. And it merits more analysis too, I think, along the lines Daverio pursues in his recent book.

Brahms’s Horn Trio Op. 40 in E-flat major (1865) was composed in memory of Brahms’ mother. She had been an older mom: at her death following a stroke in January, he was 32; she was 76.

As a child, Johannes had spent lots of time with his mother. Too much probably, to the exclusion of his developing other social skills and relationships. The maternal bond was maybe excessive: Christiane obsessed over him, broke into tears when reading newspaper accounts of his successes, and eventually despaired of the idiosyncrasies of her husband, Jakob, 17 years her junior. Jakob and Christiane separated in mid-1864, and Johannes got his father to move in with him. Try as he might, Johannes was unable to patch up his parents’ relationship. Christiane died 18 months later.

Brahms wrote the Trio for natural horn rather than valve horn despite the fact that the modern valve horn was already common. The natural horn has a frailer personality more given to intimating mourning: it lends a darker timbre than could reasonably be achieved with a valve horn. Of course! Natural horn: perfect choice!

But timbre was not the only reason. As a child Brahms had learned natural horn from his father. In view of the associations of the horn with his early life, Brahms’s choice of this instrumentation for the Horn Trio is symbolic as an autobiographical elegy for a mother by her son. It is also uniquely evocative in view of what is known of their relationship—and the disparity between their temperaments (her kindness, admixed with Lutheran piety, simplicity and logorhea; his sensitivity, admixed with a bit too much intellect and reticence; his father’s impulsiveness and incontinence, running roughshod over everything and everyone).

The work’s four movements:

Andante
Scherzo (Allegro)
Adagio mesto
Allegro con brio

carry the constitutional earnestness and cheerfulness of the tonic E-flat. But Brahms dispenses with sonata form and substitutes rhapsodic essay sections. Brahms also uses Early Baroque ‘church’ [chiesa] sonata form with the movements sequenced slow-fast-slow-fast. To me, this alternation has a gestural automaticity or reflexive ‘masking’ quality, like the ‘going-through-the-motions’ dynamic of one who has lost a loved one and is distracted by interior thoughts about that person and who manages to get through the passing days by putting on a stoic ‘front’ and going about the daily routine, no matter how incongruous the somber thoughts and the cheerful tempo might be.

Or maybe the interpolation of the disparate tempi is an ‘unpacking’ of Brahms’s pent-up feelings about the disparities between himself and Christiane—her cloying, kind-but-obsessive ways; her focus on superficialities and her inability to comprehend what really made him ‘tick’—disparities that were now things of the past, to be sorted and registered as part of his life’s experience and to be honored in memory.

The Scherzo is contemplative but still cheerful, in the way that E-flat characteristically is. Do we hear Kübler-Ross’s stages of mourning embodied in these four movements? Only as refracted by family dynamics!

The playfulness of the Scherzo tempo is maybe the most schizoid, mendacious, dissembling part of this Trio. Or, no, it’s the Adagio mesto, which opens with four measures of solo piano in the low register. Solemn, yes, as the violin and horn guilefully confirm. The Adagio: impassioned and genuine, but as if at arms’ length—as if Brahms is idealizing or mythologizing something that was never quite so, not really; brooding: as if he is still resisting the mother’s overt efforts to control his identity, to say through her praise and fawning what he was and what he was not. The Finale, incarnate in E-flat major, again up-tempo. Strange for a Requiem! The Finale—exuberant, joyful E-flat—gives us acceptance, the End of Mourning? Or is it instead the end of a life of masked conflict between pious mother and diverging son: an inescapable incompatibility of temperaments chronically collided under the compulsion of 19th-Century familial sense of duty, now finally over?

Fascinating drama. We look forward to Ian Dakin’s and the Clarks’ account of this beautiful, mysterious Trio-Riddle later this month.

[FYI, Kourakata and colleagues at Niigata University published an interesting paper in 2001 about dynamic perioral muscle biomechanics in French horn players. The lip valve function was studied by measuring contact pressure at the teeth-buccal interface during playing. Elite players used the depressor angulioris and levator angulioris muscles extensively, especially for high notes. The contraction of these muscles achieves smaller lip aperture, facilitating accuracy in high-register passages and enabling greater endurance control during long performances.]

Thursday, November 16, 2006

Biss: Little Pieces in Cosmic Context

“Schoenberg … leads us into a realm where musical experience is a matter not of the ear but of the soul alone—and from this point of view begins the music of the future.”
— Wassily Kandinsky (1911)

CMT: Biss’ playing ( Kansas City and New York ) is phenomenal. Spacious. Expansive in his ideas and references to other works and other ideas. His pre-concert remarks were also very good (Biss Interview with Cynthia Siebert. 15-NOV-2006. )—indicative of the way his mind works; how he reacts to musical and social stimuli across space and time. So what? Where does Biss lead me? Working from Heidegger’s and Adorno’s and Wittgenstein’s “Philosophy of Language” concepts, I would say that a piece of music is only meaningful by way of that work’s relations to other works within a larger group, by way of the person’s relations to other persons, and in relation to the “game” that’s unfolding in the society that the composer, performer, and listener are members of.

DSM: When I experience a piece of music, I experience it in the context of this community of other related works and events and motifs—which include other cultural and political motifs, not just musical ones. Even if you consider only the characteristic features of a single work, the exceptional features of the specific piece inevitably arise in proximity vs. remoteness to other pieces that are somehow related to it. Even if the composer and the players scrupulously avoid listening to or studying or performing other works, they inevitably manifest aspects of their native culture. They can’t escape that—even if their work doesn’t overtly aim to express it; even if their work deliberately strives to hold itself at a distance from the prevailing culture or avant garde-ishly, consciously avoids reference to it.

CMT: This is, I think, basically right. We never experience a piece of music as self-contained in isolation. Nor is it possible to create one in total isolation. Each piece is like a star within a constellation of other pieces in our gaze. Musical understanding happens when we situate a particular piece within such a musical galaxy. Thought of like this, a work isn’t so much an isolated point as much as it is a location of gathering together. A condensation of matter and energy.

DSM: Well, yes. And the sustained appeal of Schenker’s theory and method of musical analysis is due to their ability to situate tonal pieces in the galactic realm of the proverbial masterwork, a musical equivalent of a Grand Theory of Everything in physics, the desire for a universal Gesamtkunstwerk.

CMT: So if we privilege the concept of historical backward-and-forward continuity—if we make that the “card” that “trumps” all others—then atonality just serves to extend and continue the tonal tradition. Seen in this way, atonality isn’t “really” atonal, but is instead just a more complicated kind of tonality. The disruptive effect of “atonality” is an optical-acoustical-cognitive illusion.

DSM: An example from Schoenberg’s Six Little Pieces, Op. 19 (1911), shows what I mean. The second little piece contains this G-B dyad that’s repeated throughout the nine measures. In m. 7-9, a progression of major thirds descends against the ostinato dyad—producing a sequence that goes F-A, E-flat-G, D-flat-F, C-E. A tonal analysis of this might take these thirds as a stepwise descent from G to C interpreted under a rubric of the key of C. But it’s ambiguous. It could be interpreted in the key of G, or no key at all.

CMT: Mitsuko Uchida’s account of Schoenberg’s Klavierstücke covers emotional light-years in the few bars that comprise each piece. Different from Jonathan Biss’ treatment but also deep and beautiful. Lots of dark matter in the interstellar space she spins out. The pieces in Op. 19 are so short that it’s impossible to say that there are clear expository sections—they’re a study in compactness. They’re a gauntlet to test your expressive artistry—they are not a crucible for virtuosic stellar playing.

DSM: Yes, they’re so compact conceptually as to be unexpectedly daunting to the performer. You can easily turn in an uninspiring incarnation of these Sechs Kleine Klavierstücke—but it's surprisingly difficult to materialize an inspiring one. Maybe this is a consequence of how compact the process of composing them was. Nos. 1 through 5 of Op. 19 were, you know, composed in a single day, 19-FEB-1911. And No. 6 was composed on 17-JUN-1911 in one go.

CMT: The longest, No. 1, encompasses just 18 bars, while the shortest ones, Nos. 2 and 3, only nine bars each. Some melodic repetition and manipulation occurs in No. 3, Sehr langsam Viertel, but it too is really compact, like astronomy’s M39, a globular cluster. Because of its tempo, Rasch, aber leicht (No. 4) is the shortest of the Klavierstücke.

DSM: In No. 2, the repeated third (G-B dyad), played ostinato, contrasts with the legato melody at a higher dynamic level. The pauses create galactic cadences—sparse structure, spacious. The most dramatic of the pauses occurs just after the vertical build-up of the thirds.

CMT: And a pitch-class set analysis of this might explain the various collections that result from combining other pitch classes with the central G-B dyad. The piece seems to center on the important trichords (0 1 4) and (0 4 8) and culminate with the statement of the (0 1 4 5 8 9) hexachord at the end. At least that’s where my own telescope focuses!

DSM: So what are we doing here on this blog? I notice, by the way, that sometimes you bring out your microscope instead of your telescope! And your mirrors! Always your mirrors! Like Beethoven’s “Diabelli Variations”—looking backward and forward at the same time.

CMT: Well, to quote Jonathan Biss from his interview with Cynthia Siebert: [The responsible person] “… must nurture discourse. He/she must make music part of the public conversation.” Because we lack voices in other spheres of life—and also because you and I live 2800 kilometers apart [ 91 picoparsecs or 1.6 megasmoots ], in Boston and Kansas City—we meet here in this bloggy part of the galaxy. We add more music conversation to the public commons. We’re discharging what Biss says is a social moral duty. Cogito ergo obtineo! Velicamus ergo crearāmus! DiggIt ergo sum!