jwilzewske: emotion

Showing posts with label emotion. Show all posts

Saturday, May 12, 2012

Australian Brandenburg Orchestra: ‘Bach Eternal’ & Eternal Success

I t’s always a good sign when a music performance sends shivers down your spine… as last night’s Australian Brandenburg Orchestra program did. In fact, for the artistic director of any ensemble or presenter organization, it is, I think, vital that you program and perform works that are capable of doing this to the spines of your audience. The released endorphins, enkephalins, and other natural neuropharmacology of this primitive reflex of joy and emotion are part of what gets butts in seats and keeps money flowing in, year after year. Challenge us with new works, yes, but make sure they are ones that give us shivers down our spines!

Bach – Sinfonia from Cantata ‘Wir danken dir, Gott’, BWV 29
Bach – Chorale from Cantata ‘Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben’, BWV 147
Bach – Orchestral Suite No. 1 in C major, BWV 1066
Bach – Chorus from Cantata ‘Unser Mund sei voll Lachens’, BWV 110
Zelenka – Kyrie from ‘Misa Sancti Josephi’, ZWV 14
Telemann – Concerto for Two Horns in D major, TWV 51:D1
Handel – Coronation Anthem No. 2, ‘My heart is inditing’, HWV 261
Handel – Coronation Anthem No. 4, ‘Let thy hand be strengthened’, HWV 259

O ne aspect that is especially impressive about the ABO’s first-rate performance excellence is its personnel—a majority of the performers in ABO are part-time and are employed in other professions outside of music. This, and the fact that members hail not only from Sydney, but also from Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra, and other places that are a considerable distance from ABO’s Sydney home-base. Rehearsals and logistics no doubt present challenges. With the logistical and geography issues, performing in this ensemble is more than the usual ‘labor of love’. Yet ABO, founded in 1989 by its director, harpsichordist Paul Dyer, has endured, has performed worldwide, and has 16 recordings on the ABC Classics label, including 5 ARIA Award winners for ‘Best Classical Album (1998, 2001, 2005, 2009, 2010).

P ut another way, the provision of full-time orchestral work for graduates [would require] one quarter of Australia’s full-time orchestral musicians to retire every year. It also requires that no existing musicians, previous graduates, or overseas players apply for the positions. Even if this were to occur, four years later it will be [today’s] graduates’ turn to retire. In this context [of oversupply], part-time/seasonal orchestras rate special mention. In Australia, most part-time orchestras were founded by musicians... Most of the players in part-time orchestras come from academic institutions and from the pool of quality freelance players who engage in a number of different roles both inside and outside of music.”
— Dawn Elizabeth Bennett, Understanding the Classical Music Profession, 2011, p. 83.

D espite challenges for the many who have day-jobs outside of music, the approximately 30 period-instrumental musicians and approximately 30 members of the choir maintain this tremendously high standard of musicianship—the technical fluency and enthusiasm and spine-tingling crispness that projected to our ears last night. They achieve warmth, joy, and musical intimacy that might plausibly and paradoxically be nourished by the challenges and part-timeness that dog their members’ hard-won individual commitments to music—á la “that which does not kill you makes you stronger”, or something like that. The Australian Chamber Orchestra and other ensembles here likewise thrive relying on part-time personnel.

C ould ABO’s music business model be replicated in the U.S. and elsewhere? The facts that ABO’s personnel come from more than one city and ABO’s performances are regional or national and not geographically bound to one city help to ensure that ABO’s sources of philanthropic financial support and corporate donors can be sought in a variety of cities and catchment areas, so that support from a small set of donors in a particular city doesn’t get tapped-out over a period of years and so that the cyclical economic ups-and-downs that disproportionately affect leading donors in one city don’t become an Achilles heel or point of latent financial instability for the organization. Each city and its donors feel strong attachment to the organization and its brand. Market diversity and de-concentration are sensible aims for any arts organization that aspires to sustainability and long-term financial success to have.

S uffice it to say, this wonderful ABO performance gave me quite a lot to think about besides the endorphins and shivers. Eleven ABO Board members, all effective at fund-raising, none of them ‘figurehead’ material. Fifteen experienced staff members—with development and media relations firing on all cylinders. A charismatic artistic director known for affability and bridge-building and inclusive attitude. Lessons here for all of us! A few links below, for your interest.

Saturday, January 14, 2012

Gene Pritsker: William James and Pluralistic Consciousness Beyond the Margin

T he new recording of Gene Pritsker’s ‘William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience: A Chamber Opera’ is beautiful—musically and dramatically.

W illiam James was fascinated by what he termed our ‘selective interest’—our harmoniously adjusting ourselves to things seen and unseen. In the sea of evolving, conflicting stimuli in which we are immersed, we pay attention to a small subset of things... mostly things that match our predispositions and expectations: our interests and beliefs. A renowned psychologist and pragmatist and empiricist philosopher, James in the late 19th Century set about to assemble evidence that could reveal whether and how experiences that are gated by interests and beliefs in things unseen can catalyze positive changes in people—especially when people attach symbolic or emotional/spiritual importance to the experiences. “Explore the peculiarities of this attitude... All our attitudes... are due to the objects of our consciousness... the things we believe to exist. We feel a presence in the room... definitely localized... coming suddenly, and suddenly gone... I felt myself to be the less ‘real’ of the two...”

I n VRE (p. 55), James says “so far as religious conceptions are able to touch this reality-feeling [of objective presence of the Other] they would be believed in spite of criticism, even though they might be so vague and remote as to be almost unimaginable... even though they might be such non-entities in point of ‘whatness’...”

Gene Pritsker, guitar
Greg Baker, guitar
Dan Barrett, cello
Larry Goldman, contra bass
Lynn Norris, soprano
Chanda Rule, mezzo soprano
Marc Molomot, tenor
Charles Coleman, baritone
Chester Layman, narrator
Kim Pritsker, narrator

D elicate, taut, and incisive writing. Beautiful interplay between instruments and voices, between the rhythm/melodies/harmonies and the text. ‘Synaptic’ guitar picking; a really elegant solo improvisation on Track 5.

T he guitars-cello-bass instrumental ‘presence’ pervades the whole—this fact plus the fact that the voices in the foreground are so crisp and tangible make it seem as though the instrumental parts must collectively be ‘God’. But then the timbre of the voice changes, and I’m doubting that my sense of that was right. Maybe this is sonic evidence for some sort of pantheism? Everything is divine... everything that’s not being deceptive, anyway.

P ritsker’s ‘William James’s VRE’ is not a contemporary event-centric historical opera per se (not a “headline opera” about a famous historical figure and a famous moment in history, a la John Adams’s ‘Doctor Atomic’, on J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project to create the atomic bomb). Sometimes event-centric works feel too self-referential—‘program music’ or a suite of ad hoc ‘concept’ compositions that are too overtly seeking adherents.

T his chamber opera is not like that. It’s far too unpredictable! It does, though, share with historical operas an attractive ‘topicality’ in terms of (a) dramatizing interrelated subjects (spirituality; religion; multiculturalism; tolerance) that have plenty of currency these days and (b) grounding these in the life of one well-known historical protagonist.

I really admire the judicious excerpting of William James VRE texts for this libretto! Attention to the unbiddenness of how we recall things: verses, that bubble up in our minds, contrary to our ambitions or plans.

M any passages from James’s book (VRE) are dense and literary: the sentence structure was meant to be read by readers of 100+ years ago. When spoken aloud in this opera, these words engage our minds in provocative ways that highlight the finiteness of our attention as well as the alienness of the century-ago culture that produced the notions in VRE. Our relation to the music that is being performed while the voice-over narration is going on is altered, far more than happens in ‘conventional’ opera.

W hat’s more, some of the narrators/texts are more ‘reliable’ as narrators than others. Each is clearly earnest in his/her own way, and yet some of them make statements that are more accessible or less accessible to us, given our own beliefs and style and inclinations/disinclinations to share our feelings in ways that resemble what the narrator is doing. Listening to these different narrators/singers, we’re led to recognize more of what we ourselves are doing: selectively filtering, giving and getting, allowing and forbidding.

T he opera and the ‘arc’ of the 8 tracks of the recording ably convey dramatic tension of setting out on a journey to explore the diversity of spirituality; of encountering many instances and types of experience; of empirically assessing each of these; and finally integrating and summarizing what we’ve found out.

T he 43-min performance time is just sufficient to develop the ideas and the ambience and characterizations, and bring things in for a satisfying “landing”.

T he sound has warmth and intimacy throughout, perfectly matched to the subject and content. Beautiful performances by all, plus excellent engineering and production values on the recording.

I ’m uplifted by this new Pritsker CD—impressed by the authenticity of music that “had to come out”, had to be composed, had to exist. There is a wonderful ‘meta-meta’ aspect to the work as well. It is as though Pritsker has created a sonic picture of ‘William James’s Red Mood’ (see Arthur Danto’s famous book of 30 years ago, link below)—plus a further picture, an abstract minimalist exemplar of geometrical art which happens to be lush and sensuous and red and pulsating—plus yet a further picture, a metaphysical painting based on the fact that James knew the Nirvanic and Samsara orders are identical and that the Samsara world is fondly called the Red Dust by its deprecators.

J ames near the end of VRE says “Religious mysticism... is much less unanimous than I have allowed... It is dualistic in Sankhya and monistic in Vedanta” (VRE p. 336). He maintains that, rather than being adversarial or conflictual, the varieties of spiritual experience can in fact be harmonious with each other... there can be rapproachment between individuals and religions that hold what appear to be incompatible ‘over-beliefs’. James says that this can be done by looking to everyday feelings and to everyday acts—however unplanned and discordant with ambitions and ideologies as they may be—looking to these as comprising the essence of real religion (VRE p. 397).

T his opera by Gene Pritsker honors that Jamesian notion. The opera—and this recording—are a welcome invitation to self-discovery, to mutual respect and tolerance for the spirituality (or lack thereof) of others, and to joyous, mindful living in community. Look for the CD when it’s released in February. Very worth your listening!

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Party of Two? Valentines, Chamber Music & Health

I n writing a successful quartet, composers have to turn inward and look for their most personal musical message. So also do the performers. There is no room for deception—nothing to disguise it and make it superficially attractive. Seduction or manipulation will be obvious and will fail. Everything in quartets and other small chamber forms is about honesty and mutual discovery.”
— Saul Bitran, violinist, Cuarteto Latinoamericano.

T he only way to reanimate these pieces is to play them with friends... When you’re ‘on’, not only are you breathing together, but you are also feeding off each other. You’re playing with someone who does something spontaneously and you respond, also spontaneously, which takes your performance and experience together to another level entirely.”
— Kathryn Selby, pianist, Macquarrie Trio.

C hamber music, besides being very intimate, is substantially concerned with understanding the other performer(s) on deep levels—doing this in an open and undirected way—and concerned, too, with being generous and responsive to the significant other(s) and creating valuable and meaningful things together with them.

I n that regard, almost any piece of chamber music might be considered to be coherent with the values celebrated on Valentine's Day. Almost all chamber music nurtures a sense of closeness, immediacy, and anticipation.

Y ou want something that is already at least slightly familiar and known to be pleasurable to and enjoyed by your partner—so there will be low risk of disappointment and the greatest probability for delight.

T o heighten the anticipation, an experience that is already familiar can be the subject of hints or other gestures to plan for the experience and savoring that experience. But in order to be worthy of anticipation, the thing hinted at must also be novel in some way, not routine.

B ut there are side-effects each piece can have—inherent objective, physiologic consequences (unintended or otherwise) that accompany the music’s subjective emotional/cognitive/inspirational effects (see Lemmer and other links below). A little quickening of the pulse and transient high blood pressure is what you are after. What I had not expected is how long (many hours) it lasts!

Understand distinctions between history, entitlement, and managerial theories of the self and the significant other.
Avoid defensive, self-protective ‘Model I’ patterns of interpersonal interaction that blame others and limit learning.
Emphasize shared goals, fearlessness, and equality—mutual influence in relationship.
Emphasize modesty of proportion, pleasure of execution, resiliency in the face of set-backs, and durability of vision and passion.
Love is an organization—one that is deserving of deliberate, rational, caring management.
Love is an organization that, like any other enterprise, has explicit and implicit processes—and denying this or neglecting the processes can only but lead to chaos, low client satisfaction, and investor disappointment.
Communicate and critically test each other’s assumptions and beliefs openly and often.
Combine mutual advocacy with inquiry.
Combine shared exertion with shared relaxation and a minimum of irritability and aggression.

Lemmer, Rat Valentines, Hypertension, & Ligeti Quartets

M ozart’s and Haydn’s music had only a slight reducing effect on the heart rate of the spontaneously-hypertensive (SHR) rats, and the blood pressure remained unaffected. The normotensive WKY rats showed no reaction at all. Ligeti’s String Quartet No. 2, on the contrary, caused a massive increase in SBP of around 20 to 30mmHg in the SHR rats which remained discernable over more than 10 hours. The WKY rats also reacted to Ligeti’s music with a raised SBP.”
— Björn Lemmer, Institut für Experimentelle und Klinische Pharmakologie und Toxikologie, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg.

I am not saying to eschew the Ligeti in favor of Mozart or Haydn for Valentine’s Day—not at all; far from it. In fact, the Ligeti may be precisely what you two will prefer on that adventurous intimate occasion. You are looking for a string quartet whose climax is like the last lines of a poem that choke you up a bit; focus the mind and heart, so to say. Sort of like catching sight of the sea—unexpectedly; together. Twenty or 30 mmHg of higher blood pressure for a few hours is precisely what you two are looking for...

C oming back through the Chiba coast I thought of Shonagon’s list—of all those signs one has only to name to quicken the heart, just name. To us, a sun is not quite a sun unless it’s radiant; a spring not quite a spring unless it is limpid. There is a way of saying boat, rock, mist, frog, crow, hail, heron, chrysanthemum—a concise way that includes them all, implies them all.”
— Chris Marker, Sans Soleil.

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Meta-complexity in Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet

A nthony Burton’s program notes for the London Phil’s ‘Chamber Contrasts’ series at Wigmore Hall emphasize how impressed Brahms was with the potential of clarinet, as a result of his hearing clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld perform in 1891. But Brahms composed this Op. 115 clarinet quintet within a few years of his death from cancer, a period when many of his friends and family died (his sister Elise, his brother Fritz, Elizabeth von Herzogenberg, Hermione Spies, Theodor Broth, Clara Schumann, etc.). This makes me think that the recursive, ‘re-considering’ structures in this quintet maybe derive more from the emotional impact of those events on Brahms—than from any scheme Brahms may have had, to create in Op. 115 a virtuosic clarinet showpiece for the great Mühlfeld.

L arge-scale variation comes from relationships between variations (the theme included) and how these relationships are united into a pervasive algorithm that encapsulates the entire set—that is, an operating system governing the entire set. In other words, these are not a mere series of independent objects and methods (scripts) that are expected derivatives of a parent object or class. They are a ‘network-based object-oriented OS’.

W hat I mean is, Brahms’s variations feel to me ‘network-based’, not ‘hierarchical’. It seems (to me) that Brahms was exposing larger-scale connections, and transforming his idea into a multi-domain network rather than a hierarchical structure with conventional ‘parent’ exposition classes and ‘child’ instantiations. The arrangement of variations involves pairs of diatonic pitch-class cells derived from the theme. But the textural differences that follow are like remote procedure-calls that cross-link the tension-producing structures within the variations’ designs. This gives the piece an attractive sort of ‘meta-complexity’.

I n other people’s analyses (links below), variation sets in Brahms’s multi-movement instrumental compositions are usually only moderately complex. Variation sets in interior movements often do not have full ‘closure’. In the variations in this Clarinet Quintet in B minor, Brahms suggests or ‘projects’ closure by recapitulating first-movement phrases. But the promised closure doesn’t come until the very end. It is as though there is a latent, suspended complexity that is irreducible until the very end.

T his gets me to thinking about how Brahms does this, and how we might devise similar structures and mechanics in new music. The ‘Kolmogorov complexity’ (links below) of a software program or script, or a piece of text or a musical composition, is a measure of the computational resources needed to specify the object. Kolmogorov complexity is also known as descriptive complexity, Kolmogorov-Chaitin complexity, stochastic complexity, algorithmic entropy, or program-size complexity.

O ne of the appealing, intuitively plausible qualities of Kolmogorov complexity as a metric to characterize what I was hearing last night in the account of the Brahms clarinet quintet given by Robert Hill and his colleagues has to do with how the aggregate complexity goes, for large composite or ‘compound’ or ‘network’ or ‘cloud’ objects that are constituted from multiple smaller objects. For example, consider a compound object built up from objects X and Y. The Kolmogorov complexity of the two of them together K(X,Y) is:

K(X,Y) = K(X) + K(Y|X) + O(ln(K(X,Y)))

T his says that the shortest program that reproduces X and Y is no more than a logarithmic term larger than a program to reproduce X and a program to reproduce Y given X. This basically puts a quantitative ‘bound’ on the amount of mutual information there is between X and Y in terms of the Kolmogorov complexity.

T he amount of unresolved tension we feel in the inner movements in this Brahms quintet—and the intensity of the desire we feel for the eventual resolution of these tensions at the end—feels, to me, logarithmic. Maybe some future music theory PhD candidate will explore this notion properly and critically. For now, it’s happy enough for me to give you a few interesting links below and the glimmer of a potential reason why the complexities and proportions of this quintet seem so ‘right’ and so beautiful.

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Chamber Music-Induced Chills

L ast night I attended the candle-lit evensong choral services at Kings’ College Chapel. The 28-voice boys’ choir sang the service.

A t various moments, chills went up and down my spine, listening to the organ and the beautiful voices reverberate through the large sanctuary. “Why does the body do this?” I wondered. Go to PubMed and have a look!

C hills seem to be related to distinct musical structures and the “reward” system in the brain, including parts of the ventral striatum, the midbrain, the amygdala, the orbitofrontal cortex, and the ventral medial prefrontal cortex. Considerable research has recently been published on “chills”—as “leading indicator” correlates of emotional “rewards” that the brain is just now processing and propagating to other parts of the body, and as near-term “trailing indicators” of individual cognitive and emotional peaks just-past. Phenotypic measurements of physiological arousal (skin conductance response, heart rate, heart rate variability, etc.) consistently show peaks during chill episodes. Replication of the original studies have confirmed that chills are a reliable marker of emotional peaks that are induced by structures in music, that are temporally associated with self-reported subjective feelings with physiological arousal.

F or example, Oliver Grewe, Eckart Altenmüller, Reinhard Kopiez, Frederick Nagel, and others at the Institut für Musikphysiologie und Musikmedizin in the Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien, Hannover, find that people already familiar with the music are more likely to feel shivers up their spines at characteristic, predictable moments:

At transitions from loud to quiet;
Upon the entry of a solo voice or instrument;
When two (or more) parts have harmonic contrasts, such as close-harmony with beat-frequency interference between the notes'/formants' spectra; and
When the music evokes memories of past experiences that were emotionally intense.

T he responses of people who are not already acquainted with a piece of music are, in general, weaker and less predictable.

I n terms of programming for chamber music presenters and ensembles, these findings may lend some support to the traditional precept of including at least one familiar work in each program.

A s listeners or performers, in terms of explaining why our reactions to a work on first hearing are sometimes less vivid or shivery than we would like or expect, the lesson seems to be “Wait awhile. Give it multiple hearings. Assimilate the piece over time, and see what it does to you later.”

A nd, as composers, there is probably no surprise in these findings. Devising chill-inducing structures and mechanisms to create and resolve dramatic tension is what you do and have always done. Understanding the neurophysiology of music-induced shivering and spine-tingling doesn’t provide you with any new tools beyond the ones you already comprehend and routinely use. The aesthetic decisions about when and how often to use them remain the same as always.

I f you’re interested in the recent research on music and shivering, have a look at these papers (links below) to read about various bits of the physiologic mechanisms of music-induced “chills,” such as are known so far.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Minneapolis Trombone Choir 37th Annual Concert: On the Emotional Lives of Once and Future Brass Players

A frisky spirit makes my trombone sing.”
— Chris Barber, trombonist.

T he thirty-seventh annual concert by the Minneapolis Trombone Choir (MTC) was an exotic and thrilling experience. The performance this past Sunday evening at Judson Church in Minneapolis featured approximately 40 trombone players, some of them alternately switching to euphonium or tuba for several of the works that comprised the evening’s program. The pieces were conducted by Jim ten Bensel, Mike Bratlie, John de Haan, Tom Huelsmann, and Stan Bann.

S everal pieces of new music were performed, including Eric Ewazen’s ‘Concertino for Bass Trombone’, conducted by John de Haan, with soloist Derek Crosier and a trombone octet consisting of Neil Baumgartner, Doug Coleman, Zach Friesen, Lauren Husting, Scott Kruse, John Metcalfe, Greg Michnay, and Brian Wistrom. The 11-minute piece begins with an atmospheric chorale section, giving way to more aggressive, virtuosic, up-tempo writing. Crosier’s cadenzas (at 7 minutes and 9 minutes) were heart-felt, luminous things. Beautiful!

J im ten Bensel, who has directed MTC for many years, is a Yamaha trombone artist with Bachelor and Master degrees in music education from the University of Minnesota. He is currently on the faculty of MacPhail Center in Minneapolis, specializing in low brass and jazz combos. As a performer, Jim has toured with Stan Kenton, Henry Mancini, Ralph Marteri, and other bands. Jim currently plays with the Barbary Coast Dixieland Band, the Bella Gala Big Band, and the George Maurer group, among others. As a classical trombonist, Jim was in 1988 awarded ‘Best Classical Brass’ by the Minnesota Music Academy Awards.

S ome 40 years ago I’d received some lessons from Jim (who was then at U of M), and, through all these years, I’ve vividly remembered his engaging teaching methods. I’ve lived away from Minnesota most of the intervening years and have been logistically unable to attend his performances, so I looked forward to Sunday’s MTC concert with much anticipation.

M y anticipation was well-rewarded.

H earing a concert by Jim ten Bensel and his colleagues is a lot like having a heart-to-heart with a good friend. You alternately laugh and get misty-eyed, and, when it’s over, you feel a sort of renewed sense of what matters. Jim’s energy for putting sounds in the air is so genuine—so real—that you find yourself hoping it might linger in the air longer than is physically possible. Hoping.

I attended this event with family members, including my parents who are in their eighties. My dad has always held low brass instruments dear, having played euphonium in high-school band when he was a kid. When I was a child, my dad used to hum/improvise a hidden baritone part whenever a piece of classical music was playing on the stereo. Often, his humming would enable me to hear a part that was actually there in the score but was too colored-over by other, brighter instruments for my inexperienced ears to notice. At other times, his humming would be revealed to be completely spurious—an extemporized harmonizing with whatever else the composer had written. The mystery of how my dad was able to fluently/synchronously impute and hum a part into a piece of music that was unfamiliar to me (and to him?) fascinated me. Was part of what convinced me that music deeply made ‘sense’, despite the fact that it was pure magic.

A t any rate, with all the years of these built-up neuroendocrine ‘triggers’, and with all of us emotionally ‘locked-and-loaded’ just so, the MTC’s inspired performance of ‘Pilgrims’ Chorus’ from Wagner’s ‘Tannhäuser’ (well, not just that one, but other works on the program as well) proved more than sufficient to raise tears in the eyes of many in the audience, particularly us once-and-future brass-players. The MTC’s powerful transgenerational evocation of what music has meant to us—to each of us, throughout our lives, separately and together—was most welcome, handkerchiefs and all.

M inisters and priests, take note: the acoustic persuasiveness of 40 low-brass players pouring their hearts out in a modest-sized church sanctuary is a spiritual force to be reckoned with, one not unlike that of the world’s great cathedral pipe organs.

T he MTC encore (Meredith Willson’s ‘76 Trombones’) was icing on the proverbial cake for the enthusiastic 150+ lovers of brass ensembles and low-brass in attendance. Bravo!