jwilzewske: drew

Showing posts with label drew. Show all posts

Saturday, January 15, 2011

James Mulcro Drew and the Creation of Meaning

James Mulcro Drew, photo ©2005 by Kelly Drew Baskett

S ome years, ago I addressed an audience at an International Webern Society Festival ... The point of my talk was that although Anton Webern was a renowned master, his influence created a ‘dead end’ for countless academic composers who didn’t really know earlier traditions very well, let alone understand Webern’s immense steps. The ability to count to 12 was of no value whatsoever. That was not where the Music was... I was designated a controversial speaker, but no one disagreed with my assessment, as far as I know. When I finished my talk, there was total silence—until George Rochberg yelled out, ‘I think they believe you, Jimmy.’ Organization alone is not a sufficient condition to create a symphony or a painting or any kind of Art work. Somewhere behind the resonating shapes, textures and temporal connections, exists the Music. The task of any artist is to find something that has personal meaning, something to Believe in—that’s the beginning. This has nothing to do with style. It has to do with flashes of light and with contemplation.”
— James Mulcro Drew, Intention in the Arts, 2009.

A fter God was assumed to be dead and no one any longer seemed to be in control, the new twentieth century, with the bang of World War I, was well on its way to what was soon to be a series of disastrous human errors. Certainly it is common for both individuals and nations to engage in competitive rhetoric of a political or artistic nature, but the breakdown, instead of the strengthening, of values that occurred in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an age of spiritual disinheritance, was a collapse characterized by a kind of tittering hysteria... But, to confuse matters even further, the same general philosophy somehow managed to be understood, by many, as representing a ‘modern’ point of view and, therefore, sowing the seeds that equate ‘modern’ with the idea of ‘meaningless.’ The modernness of Monteverdi was not based upon meaninglessness, nor are the black paintings of Ad Reinhardt ‘meaningless.’ Meaningless needs no explanation, but the term ‘modern’ is another matter. Modern is anything that makes us feel new or renewed... As Eliot pointed out, ‘I can make nothing with nothing.’ Art, however, is dangerous—dangerous because, if its subject matter is crucial, it will reflect a doctrine of moral values and therefore will pose a threat to other ideologies. The moral and ethical battle in Art continues. The existential crisis, to quote Lloyd Rodgers, is yours.”
— James Drew, liner notes for Mirecourt Commissions CD, 1978.

J ames Mulcro Drew, beloved contemporary composer, died on 23-DEC-2010, aged 81, following a brief illness. He studied with Wallingford Riegger and Edgard Varèse and subsequently taught at Northwestern University, Yale University, UCLA, Cal State, and other institutions. He performed with and co-founded several musical groups, including Crossfire Mission Orchestra in the 1960s in New Haven, Connecticut. Drew combined superb technique and earnestness with humor and insight, to create a variety of original works that will last.

D rew’s style included subtle tonality and voice-leading, along with innovative figures that are challenging and, at the same time, illuminating to play. His contributions and honesty are perhaps most vividly remembered by his students, who experienced Drew’s energetic pedagogy first-hand. His enthusiasm was absolutely remarkable. Music was not a ‘subject’ to be ‘taught’; teaching music was something you did, in an up-close participative way. Nowhere to hide, you must own who you are.

I n a way, Drew’s prescience—his gravitation toward unusual topics and his investment of tremendous personal energy in them, years before other of his colleagues could grasp the point of it and decades before the topics grew to be popular—and his deep interest in Nature and in physics were characteristic features of his personality, ones that propelled the fascination that he held for many of his friends. The compositions of ‘Animating Degree Zero’ (link below) were manifestations of those life-long tendencies.

I n this respect, Drew was not unlike one of my old teachers, Rufus Lumry, a physical chemist at University of Minnesota, who intuited the importance of ionic liquids back in the late 1970s, long before the subject changed from a small, academic curiosity into a vibrant and popular industry.

E ven in his later years, Drew kept pace with the fast-moving areas his innovations had helped to create. With such prodigious activity comes a lot of fatigue and a lot of hype. But with it too comes a peculiar, memorable, enviable brand of perpetual youth. He will be greatly missed.

I nsisting that the meaningfulness of a work of art depends on its having been created exposes us to an objection: Surely, it may be suggested, the meaningfulness of a work of art can only depend on its having been created if what is there to be understood is the reason why it has been created as it is. That is, we will be driven to suppose that the meaning of a work of art is to be explained (1) by explaining the intentions of the artist or (2) by explaining the historical circumstances which gave rise to the work, and which the work may be understood to express. It may be very useful for understanding the life and mind of the artist to work out her intentions, and it may be important for understanding the history of a period to understand what is shown in a work about the circumstances of its production, but neither of these things—the objection goes—is understanding the work of art itself. As it happens, [to a degree] I agree with the objector... [but] the crucial point is that, at the time of the creation of any given work of art, there are properties of the medium which are there independently of the intentions and beliefs of the would-be creator.”
— Michael Morris, Doing Justice to Musical Works, in Philosophers on Music, 2010, p. 67.

Sunday, April 5, 2009

James Mulcro Drew, Chamber Music at Extreme Temperatures

James Drew, amid instruments made by sculptor Lin Emery

T he work’s timeless quality draws attention to a spatial world not unlike the movement within an Alexander Calder mobile, or parallel forms found in Asian court music ... a protest against the flow of musically-experienced time, rather than a space-drama imaginatively constructed from one fragment of a micromusical idea.”
— James Drew, program notes, Manhattan School of Music, 1970.

I aspire to incorporate spiritual immensities in my music through masses of sound which intensifies by the process of refraction or blurring, while allowing submerged melodic lines to appear and disappear. It’s like painting with a very large brush. Like those old fresco guys—or like Asian calligraphy on a massive scale—even with one tone. You know ... like a big swipe with a very loaded brush.”
— James Mulcro Drew.

I n thermodynamics, an adiabatic process is any thermodynamic process in which no heat is transferred to or from the surrounding space. The term ‘adiabatic’ literally means impassable, coming from the Greek roots ἀ- (‘not’), διὰ- (‘through’), and βαῖνειν ("to pass"). It means a total absence of heat transfer.

A t temperatures near 0°K, nearly all molecular motion ceases and the entropy change ΔS = 0 for any adiabatic process. Pure substances can (ideally) form perfect crystals as T→0.

Entropy change, adiabatic process, in the limit at absolute zero

[50-sec clip, Drew et al., Animating Degree Zero, ‘Animating’, 1.6MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Drew et al., Animating Degree Zero, ’12 Centers Breathing’, 1.6MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Drew et al., Animating Degree Zero, ‘Solemn Acts in Rain’, 1.6MB MP3]

I n this wonderful recording we have members of the Barton Workshop performing several works that James Drew composed between 2001 and 2005.

A t very low temperatures in the vicinity of absolute zero, matter exhibits many unusual properties including superconductivity, superfluidity, and Bose-Einstein condensates.

A t [musical] temperatures close to absolute zero, quantum [musical] particles begin taking on new ‘collective’ properties. Delinquent waves begin to act in concert. At low temperatures where everything occurs in slow-motion, the true nature of the most basic constituents of the ensemble are revealed. I wonder whether it could be measured... wonder whether quantum phenomena like the ‘observer effect’ occurs outside the subatomic world, in the world of macroscopic processes like human beings playing and listening to music. According to the second law of thermodynamics, all physical processes in the Universe can naturally flow only from a state of greater energy to lesser energy.

T hrow a stone into a lake, and the ripples it makes eventually die out. My cup of hot coffee can [left by itself in a setting where the ambient temperature is lower than the coffee] only get cooler, not hotter.

B ut near absolute zero the particles comprising an object behave differently. Although the ensemble ‘atoms’ are still part of a ‘gas’, they behave more like atoms of a metal—like one smeared-out single entity, similar to experiments with rubidium gas by Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman at the University of Colorado Boulder in 1995, for which they won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2001. The James Drew expressions form what I think is a musical equivalent to a Bose-Einstein condensate—a peculiar property of atoms slowing down so much that they are zen-like, almost at rest.

T he sonic attributes that I’m referring to can be heard in each of the compositions on this disc... the ‘direct sound duration’ of each note, as contrasted with indirect sounds and their durations and decay. Listen to the sympathetic resonance between notes and the quadratic effect, especially in the piano part [when applicable].

I n the piano, a very high soundboard Q-factor shortens high frequencies’ durations. The piano’s soundboard mechanical impedance affects the global sound duration of the instrument, and, for the instrument performed and recorded on this disc, the high impedance yields longer-duration sounds, slower decays. The tones ‘blossom’ after the initial attack, and sympathetic resonances bring the ensemble of waves in-line. Electron-cloud-like, metallic.

O n hard [piano key; viola; etc.] attacks, the nonlinear part of the string response increases, producing frequencies with twice the values of the normal ones. The quadratic effect influences the loudness of this nonlinear response, and, when the score has such low entropy [close to musical absolute zero], the nonlinearities are very prominent—and are probably related to the superfluid Bose-Einstein condensate-like quality of the collective, coalescing, long-range musical effects that are created here. Similarities to quantum software algorithms (see writings by Matt Hastings at LANL, and others), in terms of process and in terms of how you go about measuring statistical physics properties of music like this...

D rew was born in 1929 and studied with Wallingford Riegger and Edgard Varèse. He taught at Northwestern University, Yale University, UCLA, Cal State, and other institutions. He has performed with and co-founded several musical groups, including the Crossfire Mission Orchestra in the late 1960s in New Haven (radical performances, often behind barbed wire), the Mysterious Traveling Cabaret, the American Music Theater in California, the Blast Opera Theater. In his quasi-retirement he has undertaken concerts and arts education work with the Grey Wolf Project. Barton ‘Zero’ disk is simply excellent.