jwilzewske: ethnomusicology

Showing posts with label ethnomusicology. Show all posts

Sunday, November 25, 2012

Sväng’s Arrangements of Chopin for Harmonica Quartet

W e use a special bass harmonica microphone manufactured by Suzuki. This mic is attached directly to the body of bass harmonica, so it gets really close to the source of the sound. The mic module is as long the instrument, and there are several electric condenser mic capsules in it. The capsules are engineered to have different frequency responses depending on their location in the bass harmonica, according to register. The mic has an built-in preamp operating on battery power. Because the capsules are omni-directional condenser mics, the mic module is very prone to feedback on-stage. It feeds back really easily in the monitors and sometimes also on the main PA. To solve this problem, we use in-ear earbud monitoring and very careful equalization on the bass harp.”
— Sväng.

F or diatonic and chromatic harmonicas, we use handheld Audio Technica ATM350s. The mic is held between player’s left-hand fingers, but there are seldom problems with any handling-related noises. Microvox has its own belt clip preamp with volume control knob.”
— Sväng.

O nly recently I came across Sväng’s 2010 recording of their arrangements of Chopin piano etudes, mazurkas, and polonaises. Sväng—the award-winning harmonica quartet from Finland—was commissioned by the La Folle Journée de Nantes festival to create these arrangements. Eero Grundström and Jouko Kyhälä, two of the group’s members, responded to this challenge with dazzling facility, adapting and orchestrating Chopin in such a way that the ethnic texture and musical intent of the originals are honored and preserved and yet new and interesting possibilities are revealed.

I n much the same manner as Chopin wrote the bulk of his compositions while living on ‘foreign’ soil, so too this work by Sväng feels deeply ‘transnational’.

T he arrangements have the motorics of festival dancing and outlawry, and all the confessional intimacy of close friends. The tuba-like bass lines alternately convey polka-like or gypsy-like feel. We have klezmer/ladino clarinet figures in here, rendered by harmonica with awe-inspiring technique. Story-telling, pneumatic phrasing of free-reeds clasped to emphatic lips, the music hovers between conserving traditional values and surrendering to pressures for assimilation into an alien culture.

T here are sad songs of separation, improvised deployments of non-standard instrumentation in service of musical ideas that hail from another culture. The collection co-opts Chopin, infusing it with Baltic jazz sensibilities.

T he informality of the recordings makes you want to get up and dance and join in song. The arrangements of the mazurkas are all bright and uplifting.

[50-sec clip, Chopin - Mazurka Op. 68/2 arr. Eero Grundström ; (track 1), 2010, 2.4MB MP3]

M ore than anything, the effect is a ‘caravan’ soundscape—like a great kumpania—a nomadic band of families, traveling with horses and sleeping in the rough. The sonic ‘wagons’ in this caravan are elaborately carved and fantastically painted; the outlook of Sväng is heterogeneous, with a strong sense of the whimsical and the absurd.

T he music evokes nostalgia, but nostalgia for what? A return home? No. This is a musical pattern of chronic displacement; of families who have winter digs but are of uncertain origins; of clans who have no permanent place and few possessions. Or maybe you feel a resemblance to the saudades and fatalism of portuguese fado. Or you listen, as you might listen to a ribald uncle telling aphorisms. The fascination in which he holds you derives from his concision, which stuns... and also from his wit, which throws you down. The Disenfranchised and Appropriated become the Appropriators!

T he engineering and production values achieved at Studio Kyhättö do great credit to the arranging and performing on this disc. The sound has great warmth and intimacy, with just enough reverb/chorusing for liveliness. (For harp players who wish to learn about the miking equipment and techniques that Sväng utilizes to such advantage, have a look at their website.)

Saturday, December 10, 2011

Silent Steppe Cantata: Serendipitous transport, to places of unexpected illumination & healing

M usic can—and often does—transport us to places that no other artform can.”
— Anne LeBaron.

T his international project presents fresh ideas by opening new and often unexpected horizons of creativity. The serious nature and deep content and design of the cantata aroused genuine interest from the public. The Cantata is one of the most important international events of contemporary classical music in Central Asia.”
— Aigul Beisenova, Business Kazakhstan.

T here are artistic projects that heal and redeem and enlighten. And then, to our even greater delight, there are those that achieve this across vast cultural and political chasms, auguring well for world peace.

A nne LeBaron’s Silent Steppe Cantata receives its world première today (10-DEC-2011) at the Palace of Peace and Reconciliation in Astana, Kazakhstan.

T he Silent Steppe Cantata Project is an artistic consortium, consisting of composer Anne LeBaron with her co-producer, tenor Timur Bekbosunov, plus filmmaker, Sandra Powers. The multi-media cantata is a sonic and visual portrait of Kazakhstan. Together with Bekbosunov, the Sary-Arka Folk Instrument Orchestra and the Chamber Choir of the Astana Philharmonic Society will perform the official premiere.

T he libretto incorporates Kazakh stories and mythology, and draws upon poems of Russian and Kazakh writers, including the poet Olzhas Suleimenov. Suleimenov has authored more than 16 volumes of poetry and prose, and his 1975 novel Az-i-Ia received both wide recognition in Kazakhstan and abroad, plus censure by Soviet authorities.

T he Palace of Peace and Reconciliation is a 77m high pyramid-shaped facility designed by Foster+Partners Architects and built by Sembol Construction at a cost of 8.74B Kazakh tenge (about USD$58M). Among other things, it houses a 1,500-seat concert/opera hall. It opened in late 2006. What a fitting venue for today’s première!

L istening to excerpts online, I am intrigued by the exposition of Kazakh ethnogenesis that the cantata and film portray. Without being revisionistic or grinding any particular philosophical “axes,” the cantata (the music, and the historical and contemporary texts comprising the libretto) reveals the inherently slippery, shifting imagination of Kazakh ethnic origins. It is their shifting, not a Western shifting; it is an indigenous acceptance of transitoriness/ephemerality that may derive from the primordial “geography” of the Kazakh nation and tribes. Acceptance without relativism/fatalism/determinism.

T he cantata demonstrates evidence of local elders and a musicoliterary elite struggling through the millennia to come to terms with the evolving political demarcations of Central Asia. Through their struggle, they created a handful of discrete ‘nationalities’, sustained through the centuries. If anything, the impression (from the bits of the cantata and film that we can experience online) is one of the indomitability of the spirit and of authentic human diversity. Needless adversity and suffering destroy things; they are never ‘noble’ or ‘desirable.’ But there is this residue of survivors—people, and music, and stories, and culture—and this once-dogged, now-expansive persistence of the will to peace. This cantata inspires as well as teaches!

W ish we could be there for the première!

Saturday, June 18, 2011

¡Sacabuche! Matteo Ricci: His Map and Music

J ust as western countries have never heard the teaching of the sages of China, so we Chinese have never heard of the books of their ancient sages. Both now enlighten each other; both benefit one another.”
— Feng Yingjing, acquaintance of Fr. Matteo Ricci, 16th-Century China.

S acabuche! is an ensemble of Chinese and western instruments and voices directed by Linda Pearse. Sacabuche! performed a series of concerts and workshops in Beijing, China, in December, 2010, and yesterday at BEMF in Boston offered a multimedia performance of their work about the Italian Jesuit priest (and mathematician, scientist, cartographer, and all-around polymath), Matteo Ricci, whose decades spent in China in the late 16th century resulted in the first map in Chinese. Ricci’s detailed map, completed and presented to the Wanli Emperor in 1602, showed the entire world—eastern and western hemispheres—surprising and edifying both the Chinese and the Italians.

I U Jacobs School of Music faculty members Stanley Ritchie and Wendy Gillespie contributed to the collaboration, as did University of Minnesota professor of History, Ann Waltner. The performance combined historical readings with early music from both sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe and China, along with new compositions by Oberlin/Juilliard-trained now-New-York-based composer Huang Ruo, commissioned for the Sacabuche! project.

T he multimedia performance reanimates the seminal political and cultural exchange between Italian Jesuits and Chinese literati in 16th/17th-century China and unifies (1) Italian music of Ricci’s Italy performed on period instruments, (2) Chinese music of Ricci’s China performed on traditional Chinese instruments, (3) Huang Ruo’s new music, (4) dramatic readings, and (5) historical imagery, including a projected digitized version of Ricci’s map (an old original, James Ford Bell Library, U of M) Chinese paintings and calligraphy and other artworks.

Linda Pearse, artistic director & sackbut
Ann Waltner, co-director, speaker, author of program notes/script
Qin Fang, speaker
Yang Yi, guzheng
Carrie Tsujui Chin, sheng
Eunji Lee, piano and organ
Sarah Barbash-Riley, Ray Horton & François Godère, sackbut
Martie Perry & Janelle Davis, Baroque violin
Wendy Gillespie, viola da gamba
Elise Figa, soprano
Andrew Rader, countertenor
Benjamin Geier, tenor
Huang Ruo, composer
Cathy Barbash, producer

T he thoughtful selection of 16th-Century Chinese imagery alternating with Italian Baroque Catholic Church imagery was accompanied by short descriptive and poetical Chinese and English texts read by Qin Fang and by Ann Waltner, respectively, interleaved with the Chinese and Italian Baroque music. The pace and the variety of sonic textures were really exciting—informing those of us who do not know very much about Chinese or Jesuit history; capturing and holding our interest throughout; and inspiring our expanding wonder about what the decades-long contact that Fr. Ricci and his Chinese hosts had with each other really entailed.

H uang Ruo’s “Fisherman’s Sonnet” is patterned after kun opera but includes a number of exotic orchestrations of Chinese and western instruments that have probably never been heard playing together before (sackbuts! viola da gamba! Baroque organ! with sheng and guzheng!).

C arrie Tsujui Chin’s sheng playing and Yang Yi’s guzheng were masterful and incisive—at times forcefully and at other times poignantly and delicately contrasting with the rest of the ensemble’s Baroque Italian harmonies.

Huang Ruo – Fisherman’s Sonnet
A. Gabrieli – Benedictus Dominus Deus Sabaoth
A. Gabrieli – Ricercar
A. Gabrieli – Alla Battaglia
Anon. – Tianfeng huanpei (Jade Pendants of the Immortals)
G. Palestrina – Quan pulchri Sunt
G. Nanino – Amor m’ha posto; I pensier so saette
G. Palestrina – Nigra sum, sed formosa
Bartolomeo de Selma – Vestiva i colli
G. Palestrina – Vestiva i colli
Anon. – Gaoshan liushui (Lofty Mountains and Rolling Waters)
A. Gabrieli – Ricercar arioso
G. Palestrina – Surgam et circuibo civitatem
Huang Ruo – My Promises are Above

T he readings were graceful and passionately delivered. Some of the readings are excerpts from Ricci’s diaries and letters—poetical in their own way and manifesting not so much the worldview of a missionary of the Roman Catholic Church as the personal and good-hearted expressions of a human being who is deeply and continually interested in other people and how they live, continually interested in learning, and in Life. Over his 30+ years in China, Ricci was fluent in writing and speaking Chinese and came to be highly regarded by the local Chinese scholars with whom he came into contact.

R icci [Li Xitai] … there is not a single one of our books that he has not read… In a noisy gathering of several dozen people with everybody speaking at once, the arguments he is following do not disturb him at all… [Other people] err through an excess of either inflexibility or compliancy… they are all inferior to him.”
— Li Zhi, letter to a friend regarding Ricci, 1600.

I f one totes up the durations of the various segments of the performance, the Chinese texts and music occupy considerably less time than the Baroque western music and Ricci texts. This is, after all, a production about Ricci and his activity and travels and his map. But the Chinese material is not merely ‘context’ or ‘backdrop’ for the Ricci saga; it is aesthetically and expressively as strong as the rest. The guzheng and sheng music is, if anything, revealing of a greater depth of existential reflection and contemplation on the part of the Chinese—of a great intellectual openness and spiritual preparedness to receive whatever insights a new experience [with Ricci, or with others] might offer—contrasted with the still-transcendent-but-more-constrained conceptions of Gabrieli or Palestrina. From the performance, we get the strong message that the illustrious Chinese Ricci encountered and whose writings survive were extraordinary human beings, every bit as much as Ricci was extraordinary.

T here are, naturally, other, less sanguine perspectives on Ricci and his accomplishments (see some of the books linked below). Indeed, some of Huang Ruo’s music conveys the diversity of Chinese opinion about the Jesuit(s) in their midst. Ricci’s chronic reluctance to forthrightly state what his or the Church’s purposes and intentions were in China evidently wore thin at times—graciousness has its limits, and there has to be an acceptable bilateral flow of value, or convincing and ongoing prospects of future value flow, for the relationship/exchange/intrusion to be sustainable. Huang Ruo’s music and the ensemble’s playing provide a balanced and empathetic, speculative account of this cross-cultural give-and-take. This is not surface-level alternating now-Chinese-now-Western-sacred-music collage or ‘documentary’; instead, the dramatic tension of the work derives from the fact that the sequence of compositions does recreate this diversity, this give-and-take, complete with the politics and misapprehensions in it. Not inscrutable! Quite the opposite.

M any thanks to the IU and U of M for producing and performing this beautiful and exciting work! International Relations par excellence!

Saturday, January 8, 2011

AntiPatterns: Classical Banjo, Code Refactoring, and Short Time-scale Acoustical Physics

O ne has merely to hear the banjo’s strings touched, or one double-stop drawn out on the fiddle, to recognize the sense in which the meaning of bluegrass begins simply with what these instruments essentially are: it is the aim of bluegrass style to set forth what the instrument—or for that matter the person playing the instrument—essentially is.”
— Robert Cantwell, Bluegrass Breakdown, p. 203.

A thousand kilometers away, one of my nephews is tackling learning banjo. I give him Bullard’s book (link below) and begin listening to exotic recordings by Bela Fleck and John Bullard and others, in hopes of having mutually fun dialogues with my nephew, via email and face-to-face when I go and visit him.

T he banjo sounds on these recordings remind me of the sound—the ‘interiority’, the ‘earnestness’—of traditional shamisen or samisen (三味線, literally “three-taste strings”) music. Shamisen is similar to banjo in that the dō, the skin-covered box, is a lightly-damped resonator, much like the banjo’s. Both instruments are highly percussive and relatively ‘bright’. Both are plucked with the fingers or with a plectrum.

S o I go looking around to see what spectral analysis studies have been published about banjo or shamisen. I am curious to better understand the reasons that explain the unusual tone or timbre of each. Välimäki and coworkers spent a lot of effort on the matter in the mid-1990s (link below). Unlike guitar and other stringed instruments, for banjo the 5th harmonic (fourth overtone; 2P8+M3) and higher harmonics are rapidly attenuated, except for the 8th harmonic (3P8; 3 octaves above fundamental).

S olid body electric guitars don’t lose much string energy to the bridge. As a consequence they have a distinctive sound and are very long in sustain. Banjos on the other hand dump energy from the strings very easily to the rest of the instrument, and their characteristic sound is in large part related to that.”
— Liutaio Mottola.

T he directionality of the instrument’s sound radiation has a lot to do with banjo-ness, too, I think. Plucked string instruments have complex sound radiation patterns for various reasons. The resonant-mode frequencies of the box account for most of the radiated sound pressure. And different mode frequencies of the body have their own directional patterns, such as monopoles, dipoles, quadrupoles, and their combinations (see examples at UNSW, Joe Wolfe’s site, link below).

A nother distinctive factor is ‘masking’ caused by occultation of the sound by (and reflections from) the performer’s body. Masking plays an important role in environments where the listener (or the recording microphones) and the sound sources are positioned off-axis from each other or are freely moving with respect to each other.

T he influence of “X” vs. “Y” hand position for passages that involve the right-hand moving up the neck of the instrument is yet another factor, one I must remember to explore with my nephew when I next see him. The “X” position lends a bright timbre, and the “Y” position gives a rounder, darker quality. What the the player does with the right-hand on the head of the banjo also changes the timbre/color a lot.

A nd then there is picking technic. Fleck’s jazz-influenced single-string picking style lends an extra “impulsion” to the banjo timbre—a consequence of sympathetic acoustic coupling to and from the other un-plucked strings? The “impulsion” is one of the qualities that I am most attracted to in these recordings.

O h, the sheer exoticness of them, though! The sound calls into question the locale, the culture and politics, and the epoch of each musical text and of each of the speakers (composer, performer) and hearers. The ‘rurality’ of banjo timbre... the instrument’s architecture preserved even in the most refined, expensive ones of modern manufacture with technical polymer engineered-composite materials and high-tech strings.

T he ‘interiority’ of chamber banjo sound is radically different from the interiority of lute or harpsichord. If our own interiority is an object, then the music embodies that ‘objective’ world. Not ‘mimesis’ or ‘representation’; more like incarnation...

P hysical strings vibrate in both the vertical and the horizontal directions (well, actually, more like a lissajous curve in the plane perpendicular to the string’s length, so the polarization directions are changing and are only intermittently orthogonal to each other). If the effective length of the string is not the same in the two predominant polarization planes, we get mixing of the subsignals of slightly different frequencies, which in turn creates beat-frequency pulsations in the sound. This is a distinctive feature not only in banjo but in the Finnish kantele’s timbre as well, where the mechanism has to do with the peculiar way in which the strings have been terminated on the box.

V älimäki and colleagues emphasize that distinctive timbral properties of banjo are associated with the “attack”, the early transients in the waveform in the few tens of milliseconds immediately after the string is plucked or frailed. But there are wonderful, deeply banjo-ey aspects in the notes’ “decay” as well. We hear those in the Bullard and Fleck recordings. The ‘openness’ of these transcriptions of baroque, classical, and romantic compositions affords closer examination of those timbral spectral features than would ordinarily be possible to do in, say, idiomatic bluegrass and other banjo repertoire.

I t seems to me that these recordings of Bach and other composers’ works on banjo draw our attention to what neurophysiologists call “event fusion” (the formation of unitary musical events from the micro-evolution of waveforms on a time-scale of tens of miliseconds, too small to exhibit rhythm or voice-leading) and its inter-relationships with harmony and melody and rhythm and larger-scale form.

T hese banjo transcriptions and arrangements are unusual, musically speaking, but they register for me as very familiar in other ways. ‘Refactoring’ and ‘porting’ musical “code” from one performance “platform” to another—in the manner that Bullard and Fleck exemplify—feel to me very much like refactoring and porting computer code from one computing platform/language/operating-system/architecture to another. The process calls into question the [psychological; physical] conditions necessary for making large-scale—that is, ‘formal’—interfaces and system services-stack clear in music, just as the refactoring process does in software. The process in both cases invites or even demands reconsideration of the work’s design constructs and architectural components.

I n both, it vividly reveals the different levels of abstraction that are supported or not-so-well-supported by the different platforms. And it can uncover the essence of our interior selves, by making us pay attention to neural logic-races, multi-timescale communications phenomena, and hard-coded “antiPatterns” that the composer or performer (or listener) might not otherwise have noticed. So even if the target transcribe-to platform (banjo) manifests some antiPatterns of its own, it is still always healthy and illuminating to be outside our “comfort zones” and gleaning what we can from the refactoring process.

T he beauty and elegance of these classical banjo recordings make me want to revisit some of my own code that I have recently [re-]written; improve it; maybe understand it from novel and useful perspectives.

A ll sounds, all colours, all forms—either because of their preordained energies or because of long association—evoke indefinable and yet precise emotions, or, as I prefer to think, call down among us certain disembodied powers, whose footsteps over our hearts we call emotions.”
— W.B. Yeats, The Symbolism of Poetry.

H ow can we know the dancer from the dance?”
— W.B. Yeats.