jwilzewske: duty

Showing posts with label duty. Show all posts

Friday, March 19, 2010

Yo-Yo Ma: Ask Not What Your ‘Ax’ Can Do for You, but What You Can Do for Your Cyborg ‘Ax’

B asically, everything I’ve learned about Art has been from ‘finding my way inside’. [searching and growing through relationships with other artists, with history, and with the Spirit of all humankind].”
— Yo-Yo Ma, Gramophone, 2005.

I f your cello feels like dancing, by all means go! Take it out for a night on the town. Bounce your bow on its strings. Hug it. Cradle its neck tenderly. Praise it in the presence of others, when it can hear you. Fondle its tuning pegs as though they were earlobes, as Yo-Yo Ma did during the superb performance last night in the Harriman-Jewell Series in Kansas City.

Y our instrument has rights, and you have duties—toward your instrument as well as your co-performers.

Y o-Yo Ma shrugs his shoulders after performing—not after each and every piece, but after many of them—as if he were surprised that the result was so felicitous as it turned out to be, and as if he and the pianist Kathryn Stott were not wholly ‘in-charge’. It is not an ‘apologetic’ shrug, just one of genuine modesty and self-effacement. Gee. Aw, shucks.

I n these collaborations, too, Ma sometimes plays as though he were accompanist to pianist Stott: another aspect of Ma’s well-known modesty, incongruous with his stature and fame.

Franz Schubert: Sonata in A minor, D. 821
Dmitri Shostakovich: Sonata in D minor, Op. 40
Astor Piazzolla: Le Grand Tango
Egberto Gismonti: Bodas de Prata & Quatro Canto
Cèsar Franck: Sonata in A Major

M a’s main performance instrument is the 1733 Montagnana called ‘Petunia’. (The instrument was named this by a young girl after she asked Ma whether it had a name and Ma replied that it did not.) Another of Ma’s cellos, the 1712 Davidov Stradivarius, was previously owned by Jacqueline du Pré and by the Vuitton Foundation.

J acqueline du Pré’s unbridled dark qualities went ‘against’ the Davidov [conflicted with the Strad’s personality]. The more you ‘attack’ it, the less it returns.”
— Yo-Yo Ma.

L ate in her life, du Pré confided her frustration with the ‘unpredictability’ of this cello. Ma, however, has opined that the variability and her resulting frustration with the instrument came, not from the instrument, but instead from du Pré’s impassioned and autocratic style of playing. He has been famously quoted as saying that this Strad cannot be ‘dictated-to’ but instead must be ‘coaxed’ by its player. He speaks of his ‘rehabilitating’ the instrument after he had received it from du Pré—in much the same manner as a physical therapist or a rehab physician or nurse might speak of the journey helping a human patient recover some function that had been lost—after, say, a stroke.

T here is a mysterious relationship between performer and instrument. Since 1983, this cello’s sound has been ‘growing’—growing constantly during the years I have had it—becoming richer, deeper, and fuller. Partly, this can be attributed to now-constant playing that it receives, which causes it now to vibrate more fully than it did when it first came into my possession ... I had to learn not to be seduced by the sheer beauty of the sound in my mind before trying to ‘coax’ it from this cello. Many instruments sound beautiful in an intimate setting but may lose their quality of sound in the vastness of a concert hall. The Stradivarius does not. The integrity of its sound-picture, the warmth, the clarity and overtone structure—these are, I think, maintained through space much like a laser beam.”
— Yo-Yo Ma, Foreword from the book, Antonio Stradivari: The Cremona Exhibition of 1987, by Charles Beare.

If your aging cello develops some kind of ‘Cello Alzheimer’s’, Ma is the kind of gerontologist you would want to look after it—one who could and would bring out the best of its strengths and minimize vulnerability associated with its limitations. He would take it to gatherings where familiar subjects will be discussed by familiar people and not too fast. He would not sedate it or park it, mute, alone in a chair in an atrium.”

I n other words, according to Yo-Yo Ma, your instrument is not ‘instrumental’ in a superficial, ‘ends-justify-the-means’, deterministic, teleological, human-centric, master-slave way. Instead, it has its own spirit: its own personality; its own capacity for belief and intention; its own ‘free will’; its own inalienable dignity and moral standing, in much the way that a pet has these things.

W e often say ‘Take care!’ off-handedly—as routinely or thoughtlessly as a quick ‘Goodbye!’ or some abbreviated, perfunctory expression, devoid of emotion and, really, devoid of attention, except for our attention to habitual protocol.

B ut even then it does convey some sense of connectedness. When said with feeling and forethought, it means something like ‘Take care of yourself, because I care about you.’ I thought about this as I watched Yo-Yo and Kathy on-stage, during the works that they performed after the intermission.

T ake care!’ is something that one can (should!) say to a companion animal—or to a musical instrument; it is not something that must be restricted, to say only to human beings. Yo-Yo Ma’s interaction with his companion instrument—his empathetic attacks with the bow; his jocular brushing of its shoulders; his playful querying of its tuning with the fingers of his left hand; etc.—are gestures of a loved-one/lover toward a belovèd person, not the gestures of a ‘craftsman’ toward a mere ‘tool’. Watching Ma handle and play his belovèd cello, I wonder whether, later in the evening, he will wish it ‘Good night’ and settle it in [its] bed. The cello is a ‘subject’, not an ‘object’. The generosity and dignity that continually flow from Ma make this fantasy entirely plausible.

T he same generosity and moral standing are bestowed upon each composition as well—reflecting the person-like regard in which Ma holds it. Some of the pieces afford more opportunities to detect and assess this; others (esp. Baroque ones) somewhat less. Take, for example, Piazzolla’s ‘Le Grand Tango’, composed in 1981, originally for Mstislav Rostropovich. Ma and Stott animate the strange, tango-ish blend of tenderness and vigorous resolve/conviction that inhere in the score--they do this in a generous way that no one else does.

A nd, in various passages, Ma takes a back-seat and ‘accompanies’ Stott’s piano’s robust expressions—robustness that is implied and authentic, consistent with Piazzolla’s score and the spirit of tango as an intimate-yet-public lovers’ dance—a ‘duet’ of equals. To hear Kathy and Yo-Yo play together is to gain new understandings of the possibilities—and of the depth and breadth of truly ‘collaborative’ musicianship.

A nd when Kathy Stott played ‘Tres minutos con la reálidad,’ people whispered, ‘She must be Argentinian!’ ”
— Horacio Malvecino, liner notes, ‘Soul of the Tango’ CD.

T hrough their playing and their treatment of each other and through their rapport with their companion instruments, we learn something—or are vividly reminded—about being fully human, and about the joys of behaving well, virtuously even, despite challenges and provocations and injustices that we face: an experience far more fulfilling than witnessing admirable technical achievements or finding delight in a [musical] story well-told.

F uturists at MIT and elsewhere talk as though advances in robotics and A.I. and cloud-computing and so on will change our relationships to technical devices and systems in new and unprecedented ways (see links below). I doubt this—at least the ‘new-and-unprecedented’ part. Thoughtful, empathetic musicians like Ma and Stott have, for a long time, been in full-fledged symbiotic ‘relationships’ with their [companion] instruments, and with compositions, and [within limits of ‘partial personhood’ and philosophy of Mind] vice versa. To recognize or appreciate this, you have only to look and listen.

[50-sec clip, Yo-Yo Ma and Kathryn Stott, Astor Piazzolla, ‘Le Grand Tango’, 1.6MB MP3]

I can tell if someone else has touched my Quenoil bass, [even touched it] ‘by accident’. The instrument takes on a ‘different’ energy from my own—a different quality that I can detect and that persists for a considerable time after the other person’s touching it has ended.”
— François Rabbath, in Barry Green: Mastery of Music, p. 129.

A prodigy who played for President Kennedy at age 7, Ma is no snob, performing Bach to pop to tangos… If Yo-Yo Ma didn’t exist, no novelist in the world would have dared invent him. The combination of virtues—musical, intellectual, personal—is simply too implausible.”
— Joshua Kosman, Smithsonian Magazine, NOV-2005.

Thursday, November 29, 2007

Chasalow’s Piano Trios: Exploring Torts in Ensembles

W hile my studio technique derives from Davidovsky, the musical character is quite different. My instrumental writing is often at an energy level drawn from my experience with improvised jazz. My recent electronic music reflects this as well. By adding layers of manipulated recordings of spoken or sung text, the sound of the human voice often emerges in surprising ways.”
— Eric Chasalow.

Chamber musical dialogue usually lacks textual reference to tangible things, but it abounds in internal references: expressions by each ensemble member directed toward the other members; associations among individual segments, lines, and instruments.

Look at the musical dialogue among ensemble members through the lens of musical segmentation and voice-leading. The approach to any given passage can be characterized by our answers to four questions:

Do individual segments form mostly within one instrument’s part or across two or more?
Are the strongest associations between segments mostly individual and ‘longitudinal’—within each part over the course of the composition—or sectional and ‘transverse’—between instruments on a shorter timescale?
How many distinct streams of association are active simultaneously? and
How do the answers to (1), (2), and (3) change over time?

Chasalow’s piano trio ‘Yes, I Really Did’ (1998) is a great case for studying this—in part because it totally violates our conventional expectations for normal narrative and dialogue among the ensemble members. Characterized by the composer himself as a dialogue that develops among three instrumental personae, this trio at times seems a collection of individual voices—inadvertent, unwitting or unwilling acquaintances who are distinguished by characteristic rhythms, articulations, and intervals. At other times, it’s an ensemble whose members acknowledge the fact of their mutual situation and the impossibility of turning back the clock to undo the reality that has materialized, the predicament in which they find themselves together—and in which significant harmonic and motivic features emerge in the totality of the parts’ interactions.

Much has been written about the dialogical nature of string quartets and other chamber music genres, yet the dialogue itself is seldom subjected to a detailed analysis. Chasalow’s own comments on pitch structure in the trio give us clues as to what an analysis of dialogue of this piece ought to include or directions that such an analysis might ought to take. Subtle changes in the structure of voice-leading, cadences, and segmentation manifest cumulatively as changing modes of interaction among the parts and produce a series of shifts from instrumental individualism to integrated ensemble—and from contrapuntal to sculptural, texture-oriented writing. This is not your grand-daddy’s piano trio.

Note too that these aspects are not merely matters of form and compositional technique. They hint at Chasalow’s deep views on the nature of interpersonal dignity and respect, and at his philosophy regarding what it means to pick up an instrument and behave like a decent human being. These aspects are also consistent with the ‘moral’ qualities that arise in other of his compositions. Eric Chasalow compositions from the early 80s through 1992 are on his CD, ‘Over the Edge’, with Speculum Musicae String Quartet; Fred Sherry, cello; Patricia Spencer, flute; Christine Schadeberg, soprano; Bruno Schneider; horn; Amy Knoles, Arthur Jarvinen, percussion. Each piece is in the style of a character piece. For example, The Furies, consists of four pieces for soprano and electronica that set texts from Anne Sexton’s ‘The Death Notebooks’. It may require a bit more imagination on the listener’s part to ascertain the moral content of these musical essays, compared to apprehending the moral implications of Chasalow’s piano trio ‘Yes, I Really Did’. But the moral thread that runs through much of Chasalow’s writing is there if you look for it.

Chasalow’s ‘Yes, I Really Did’ (composed in 1998; performed by Christopher Oldfather, piano; Andrea Schultz, violin; Michael Finckel, cello) takes Beethoven’s techniques for orchestrating and voice-leading in Piano Trios (Op. 1, Nos. 1-3 (1792-4); Op. 38 (1802-3); Op. 44 (1792); Op. 63 (1796); Op. 70, Nos. 1-2 (1808); Op. 97 (1810-15); Op. 121 (1803-16) ) as a point of departure. There are ‘avoided cadences’ and other deceptions, sleights, and feints—standard stuff in composition and analysis textbooks. But here they are employed to call into question what the nature of dialogue among ensemble members is really about. This piano trio questions whether any member of the ensemble has any moral duty to the other members, what the limits of that duty might be, whether breaches of duty cause pain or injury, and what the value and remedies of these might be. Torts!

Musical drama like this naturally intrigues us. The drama arises from tonal relations that elicit our expectations, and proceed to subtly manipulate and subsequently fulfill or frustrate them. This happens regardless whether we’re Schenkerians or not. But contextual processes may elicit expectations of their own, producing allusive effects that contribute to the work’s fascination. Formed from ordered sequences of evocative events existing within Chasalow’s tonal fabric, these successions of distinct-but-similar moments are unique and present a narrative that complements the unfolding of the piece. These processes gradually reveal their goals as they unfold—they’re dynamic, progressive systems of organization.

M usical ideas are … combinations of tones, rhythms, and harmonies that require a treatment like the main theses of a philosophical subject. [The musical idea] raises a question, puts up a problem, which in the course of the piece has to be answered, resolved, carried through. It has to be carried through many contradictory situations, it has to be developed by drawing consequences from what it postulates, it has to be checked in many cases and all this might lead to a conclusion, a ‘pronunciamento’… The furtherance of the musical idea... may ensue only if the unrest—the problem—[that is] present in the Grundgestalt or in the motive (and formulated by the theme or not, if none has been stated) is shown in all its consequences… Every succession of tones produces unrest, conflict, problems... Every musical form can be considered as an attempt to treat this unrest either by halting or limiting it, or by solving the problem.”
— Arnold Schoenberg, The Musical Idea, and the Logic, Art and Technique of its Presentation.

Schoenberg once suggested that a musical idea, by nature, embodies some sort of conflict. Such an idea—which Schoenberg regarded generally as a unified combination of tones, durations, and harmonies, and sometimes also referred to as a Grundgestalt, or basic shape—expresses a musical ‘problem’ that demands a contextually coherent ‘solution’. For Schoenberg, a musical idea is a discrete entity that can be recognized and agreed upon by a majority of listeners, often as a component of a theme. The ‘problem’ that corresponds to a musical idea, in turn, entails/requires a motivic ‘force’—one that, if it is sufficiently effective at pushing or pulling us, stimulates meaningful collateral response(s) within the unfolding music, within the performers, and within the listeners.

Ensemble balance is a fundamental feature of ‘conventional’ trios, quartets, quintets, etc.—and Chasalow’s work does not dispute this. But traditional chamber musical texts seldom create situations where the composer deliberately intends that one or more players should exchange the honorable role of respectful discussants for that of virtuoso-narcissist, bully, or other deviant character. In ‘Yes, I Really Did’ we do not have banal theatrics. Instead, we get an 8-minute dialogue that suggests that ‘established’ Truth must be continually open to honest dissent, self-doubt, and Schoenbergian inter-voice drama and conflict. Chasalow’s composition asserts that such openness and healthy tension are fundamental to a civil society in which the dignity of the individual, the dignity of the group, and the dignity and moral standing of the environment (or other species) are all respected.

Chasalow and Striped Bass, Conomo Point, Essex/Gloucester, Massachusetts, 2004.

In the liner notes for the ‘Left to His Own Devices’ CD, Chasalow says that ‘Yes, I Really Did’ is about “misdirection ... [and] withholding [by ensemble members, from each other].” Listening to this wonderful piano trio, we cannot doubt the authenticity of this remark. In a genre that routinely and implicitly exalts the virtues and satisfactions of mutual ‘words’ and ‘deeds’ between ensemble members or pits a righteous ensemble in solidarity against external conflict and politics, here is a deeply meaningful piece that explores the nature of discord, admissions of wrongdoing, breaches between the ensemble members, redress, and forgiveness. The work achieves a remarkable textual plausibility that is a credit to Chasalow’s writing and to the skill and empathy of Oldfather’s, Schultz’s, and Finckel’s playing. We trust that they are all still friends and that no real torts were involved in the creation of this fascinating trio.