jwilzewske: fractals

Showing posts with label fractals. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Mara Gibson’s ‘Canopy’: Arboreal/Neuronal soundscape/artscape for viola, percussion, and tape

I recently had the privilege to experience a new chamber music composition by Mara Gibson at the opening of a new art exhibit in Kansas City. The work was commissioned by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Premiered in April by Michael Hall, ‘Canopy’ was inspired by ‘Ferment’, Roxy Paine’s (1966-) outdoor installation in the sculpture garden at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.

I n the 13-min composition, Gibson meditates on Paine’s conflation of neuronal dendritic architecture and treeness... the multiplicity of meanings of what we perceive in nature is called into question. We all are trees; we all are neurons now.

L arge-scale sculptures and exotic mixed-ensemble chamber music (viola-percussion-tape) aren’t commonly paired with each other. However, in this instance it is an inspired piece of programming, an account that plumbs the depths of the sculpture’s seeming desolation... a melancholy that stems from the constitutional rootedness of a ramifying, arborizing structure that is situated where it is with little prospect of changing its venue (you; the neurons that make up your brain and make you who you are; the tree). And yet the composition culminates in a radiant, nature-affirming performance that leaves the listener-viewer with more than solace—a sense of quiet optimism.

H all takes great care with the score’s myriad directions, resulting in an intensity and beauty that would delight any composer, as well as any audience. There is a brief pause/silent_stasis at about 07:00. The solo_viola/denuded_tree resumes with a soliloquy. Then, with a harrowing climax, the percussion and recorded track of the viola reappear with renewed vigor, and with the live viola layered on top of them—effecting a grieving voice of the solo viola answering its echo and the percussion more quietly, survivors against all odds! The micrometer-precise diminuendo from 11:00 to the end is perfectly realized—and we immediately appreciate why Gibson wrote it in this way.

H all’s technique is superb throughout and manages to sound like 5 different violas, by using combinations of diverse pressures on the bow, bowing near and far away from the bridge, etc.—pensive, taut, with some ‘extended’ viola techniques. Bob Beck’s recording and production values aptly serve the intimacy of this beautiful piece. Few recordings achieve such a level of detailed commitment from the artists and the recording engineer! (I am grateful, too, that Gibson has made digital recordings of ‘Canopy’ available for download on BandCamp.com.)

A nyone who has tried to devise a likeness of a tree—sculpting one as a kid in school, or, with more serious intent as an older person—will recognize how difficult it is to do well. The fractal character of the branch points and the Fibonacci-like decimation of the caliber of the branches as you go further and further out on the limbs is hard to emulate. It is so easy to end up with a ‘fail!’—a crude likeness that looks contrived, a caricature of a tree! But Paine achieves a high level of fractal verisimilitude—a tree representation with enough character-development and complexity and depth to be believable as a tree or as another living organism with moral standing. Gibson’s writing is not ‘representational’ as such, but with equal care and finesse achieves comparable moral weight and attractive, believable, attention-holding verisimilitude.

I n summary, Gibson’s sonic stimuli synergize nicely with Paine’s sculpture’s visual and haptic stimuli. I enjoyed being immersed in both of them at the same time. The visual and musical elements are independent and exciting in their own right and (in the case of Paine’s sculpture, ‘have already stood’ and--) will continue to stand ably on their own. But, together, the two works manifest a cohesion that is evident to listeners/viewers as they encounter the works simultaneously. It is a brilliant success as a tandem installation, and ‘Canopy’ is commendable as a commissioning project. Other galleries and museums should take note of this as an example they can replicate—commissioning companion chamber compositions to accompany major new acquisitions, and organizing gala première performances (with food and wine, as the Nelson did) to cultivate new membership and community involvement! No better way than this to dispel the ignorant museum stereotype of grey-hair elites!

H all is a former president of the Chicago Viola Society and a founding member of the Lake String Quartet. He has performed at numerous summer festivals, including the Grand Teton Festival, the National Orchestral Institute, Kneisel Hall Chamber Music School, and the Aspen Music Festival. Hall serves on the faculties of Illinois Wesleyan University, VanderCook College of Music, and the Chicago Academy for the Arts. He is a graduate of Ball State University, with graduate studies with Peter Kamnitzer and with the LaSalle and Tokyo String Quartets, at the University of Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, and doctoral studies with Michelle LaCourse and Scott Rawls at the UNC, Greensboro.

G ibson graduated from Bennington College and completed her PhD at SUNY Buffalo. She attended London College of Music; l’École des Beaux-Arts, Fontainebleau, France; and the International Music Institute, Darmstadt. She has received grants and honors from the American Composer’s Forum, the Banff Center, Louisiana Division of the Arts, Arts KC, Meet the Composer, the Kansas Arts Commission, the National Endowment for the Arts, the International Bass Society, ASCAP, and the John Henrick Memorial Foundation. She is also founder of the UMKC Composition Workshop for Young Composers and co-director/founder of ArtSounds, now in its seventh year. ArtSounds specializes in “immersive art-music fusion” experiences, similar in spirit to ‘Canopy’.

T he greatest hindrance in the understanding of life lies in the impossibility of accounting for it by the enumeration of its properties. It must be understood as a unity. But if the organism [tree; neural network] is a unity, in what sense are its component properties its parts? Who is it, really, and why? How does this unity arise? To what extent must it be considered a property of the organization of the organism, as opposed to a property emerging [undeliberated] from its mode of life? These questions remain open....”
— Humberto Maturana & Francisco Varela.

Sunday, January 1, 2012

Jan Beran’s ‘Winter711’, fractional Brownian motifs, long-range interdependence

D reams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again. And this interdependence produces the highest form of living.”
— Anaïs Nin.

A new year; an occasion for us to meditate on how our mutual feelings and actions—our own; those of friends and family members—are meaningfully intertwined over long stretches of time.

H ere’s an MP3 of Jan Beran (piano) and Christopher Raphael (oboe) performing Beran’s ‘Winter 711’. Beautiful and evocative of long-range interdependence/entanglement.

I f you’re interested, some of the mathematical underpinnings of the compositional method used to create ‘Winter 711’ can be found in the links below. Happy New Year!

I believe it is not possible to coordinate musical parts in a purely responsive manner. That is, a system that simply triggers its events on the detection of notes in the solo part will perform badly in most musical contexts. This is due, in part, to the inherent detection latency that is built into the problem which makes the responsive system perpetually late. Instead, Music++ schedules the accompaniment’s note times by continually predicting into the future based on what it has currently observed.”
— Chris Raphael, Indiana Univ.

J an says of ‘Winter711’ that he tried to avoid any familiar sense of musical flow. In other words Jan’s music doesn’t give the performer (and listener) the usual cues needed to rhythmically organize the music. While the music is sometimes highly rhythmic, many sections contain no recognizable steady pulse, nor clear points of emphasis whose times differ in simple ways, as in much mixed meter music. While I think these pieces are engaging on their own terms, they work as a wonderful showcase for the [sequencer] accompaniment system, since I doubt they could be played by an all-human ensemble.”
— Chris Raphael, Indiana Univ.

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.

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Dr. Atomic: John Adams’s Photographer’s Gaze

It is useful to think of chamber music as ] a narrow deep area between the novel and film.”
— Lewis Baltz.

There was a time when we thought it was enough just to photograph objects at eye level, standing with both feet on the ground. But then we began to move around, to climb mountains, to fly in space, to go to the bottom of the sea—and to document what was there and our responses to what was there. John Adams’s compositional ‘concision’ is tremendous—he is able to imply so much with so few notes, with so few compositional gestures! He is not satisfied with things apprehended at eye level.

Adams’s opera, Dr. Atomic, is nominally about the history of J. Robert Oppenheimer and others who participated in the Manhattan Project in the 1940s, to create the atomic bomb. But the text fragments that were incorporated into the opera or adapted to become part of its libretto offer close-ups so extreme as to become abstract—studies of textures, microscopic studies of the ethos of the period. In places, it’s as though we have waveform-sampled, electroacoustic still-lives of Oppenheimer and colleagues. The opera is painterly—or, more accurately I think, photographerly.

The images affect us on the physical level, the depictive level, the mythic level. The setting of a John Donne sonnet is made to sound archaic by Adams’s choice of a slow, solemn D minor chaconne. All the typical 17th-century ingredients of a breakfast still-life painting are here. On the left is a large römer, a green wine glass with prunts on the stem. Next to it is a salt cellar with a Chinese porcelain dish on top. It contains capers, which go well with fish. The still-life is subdued in color—only the yellow of the lemon grabs the eye. Delightful details, such as the curling lemon peel and pewter plates jutting out from the table, divert our attention. Dr. Atomic has still-life compositional qualities like these.

R eality has started to be understood as a type of writing—one that can be decoded [through photographs]… Photographs are not so much an instrument of memory as an invention of it, a replacement for it.”
— Susan Sontag, On Photography.

This type of still-life is sometimes called a ‘vanitas painting’, in which arrangements of fruit and flowers, or lavish banquet tables with fine silver and crystal, are accompanied by symbolic reminders of mortality. A skull, an hourglass or pocket watch, a candle burning down, a book with pages turning, serve as a moralizing message on how short life is. Look! The fruits and flowers themselves are starting to spoil and droop. Look! The boy comes to get a glass of milk from the nanny! Look! The bomb!

D r. Atomic came out very fluidly, and largely without my analyzing it [in the process of composing it]. [Don’t] make the mistake of walking through the kitchen to get to the restroom—and come back having lost your appetite. [Don’t] look in my kitchen here, but for the moment just enjoy what’s on the plate.”
— John Adams, in interview with Thomas May, FEB-2005, p. 233.

Interplay among the levels of experience that Adams devises for us is what creates tension and meaning in this opera. The collapsing of depth, foreshortening of events, telescoping of time by way of the festinating micro-marches that Oppy and Groves make together across the stage—these create new relationships; they don’t just reveal and characterize existing historical ones.

Some of the moral or ethical implication of Dr. Atomic is diminished by the libretto’s obsessing over trivial and self-absorbed dialogue of the scientists and military characters. But this, too, is a choice on Adams’s and Sellars’s part. Possibly their intent is to portray the Americans’ inhumanity and hubris even more brutally, by downplaying the characters’ attention to the destructive implications and casualties that the bomb will have. But the effect of this choice—minimizing the characters’ attention—also tends to reduce our own.

Dr. Atomic, ‘Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God

General Groves’s candy-bar eating and weight management issues—his recitative about the 200-calorie brownies and three pieces of chocolate cake—are maybe genuine historical artifacts, but their inclusion here is conspicuous for the vacuousness and/or sociopathy they imply.

Kitty Oppenheimer spends the majority of the second half of the opera on center stage, passed out in her chair from consuming too much scotch whiskey. This, too, may be historically accurate. But the choice to have one character inert and stationary—whether due to psychological strain or moral incontinence or some other cause—is a curious one for the composer and librettist to make.

T he photographer can identify with the circumstances. Choosing is the final, essential act of creativity. If, as Poincaré suggests, the subconscious brings up ideas in pairs or in crowds, then it is up to us to choose what makes sense to us. If, as he suggests, this bringing into consciousness is directed by an aesthetic force, the best one can do is not undo it but take it as it is... What I call imagination is simply that active link between intuition and rationality.”
— David Travis, p.77.

Dr. Atomic is a work that can hold special significance to people of a certain age, say, those who are today 55 years and older and who have a clear personal recollection of the milieu of the 1950s or of the 1940s. Adams and Sellars take imagery and texts from that period and make them more complex and multi-layered by injecting them into this latter-day composition. Although in many ways the historicism of the quoted texts and images makes them ‘stay the same’, the farther we go in this process the more different they become and the more intriguing the results are—and the more those results play to our imagination and compound the complexity. There’s a ‘fractal’ quality of memory that Adams evokes in us—and we’re led to recognize a mathematically recursive quality of our memory—led to recognize the inherently, unavoidably ‘revisionist’ nature of our human cognitive process. Our minds continually re-contextualize everything! We cannot help it!

V ertov is right. The task of cinema and of the camera is not to imitate the human eye, but to see and record what the human eye normally does not see. The cinema and photo-eye can show us things from unexpected viewpoints and in unusual configurations, and we should exploit this possibility.”
— Ossip Brik, in Wells, p. 90.

This opera is chock-full of implication—open-ended imagery that empowers the audience to enter into constructing individualized meanings. Adams is aiding and abetting curiosity and conjecture. This is not mere ‘optical’ fidelity—a claim to correctly transcribe visual appearances (‘It happened, and it looked this way.’). It’s emotional fidelity—accurate, in part, because we’re engaged by Adams in actively generating its truth. That said, this is not an opera for anyone incurious—anyone who’s unprepared to be engaged and unwilling to be actively implicated.

The sparseness of the set, its raising and lowering mountains-scrim and bomb and gantry/scaffolds, and the repetitiousness of the choreographed movements all present challenges to audience members who are expecting activity on-stage to have a purpose, advance the story, or make a point. In many ways, the point seems to be the utter lack of a point—the absurdity of the process of making the bomb, the impersonal and unstoppable momentum that the process has when it is underway, the existential horror that that zombie-like activity has.

Unexpectedly, the imagery in the Dr. Atomic production was reminiscent of the Pieter Ombregt XYZ photographs I had seen earlier in the day, at the Columbia College Chicago exhibit at the Water Tower on Michigan Ave.

Angular, inhuman geometry and architecture. Harsh, inhuman light bathing depersonalized human figures as morally impoverished objects, not subjects. Entering and exiting doors and apertures, to fulfill purposes unknown or no purpose at all.

Found Art’ can be the epitome of a consumptive, exploitative capitalistic political economy. But this opera is not ‘Found Art’. It’s not shameless appropriation and naked, direct presentation of historical texts set to music. Instead, it creates new connections, creates an aura—empowers us to find these connections, discover our own aura. The aura may be ugly and disheartening, though. The quiet recorded Japanese voices that percolate down on us from the balconies as we wait for the bomb test detonation in the final 5 minutes of Dr. Atomic are terrible reminders of how needless, how cruel, and how avoidable the deployment of these weapons was. There is no catharsis here. And it is difficult to applaud afterward. Dr. Atomic might be best done with instructions to the audience to exit the theater silently, to go home and meditate on how to make amends and how to be better human beings.

I have never attempted to squelch the kind of energies inherent in my music in order to avoid a catharsis or ‘crisis’ or climax. I don’t view my expressive world as teleological. Rather, I try to allow what’s latent in the material to flower naturally. I think a lot of being a good composer is like being a good gardener. You have to know when to wter something, to cultivate it, and also when something needs judicious pruning.”
— John Adams, in interview with Thomas May, FEB-2005, p. 28.

Adams is—in this opera and in other of his work—a specialist in creating quasi-historical scenic wonderment for the audience. It’s as though, say, he (re-)introduces the mid-Century concept of phosphorescence, as it was before the era of television and fluorescent lights—before the wide public experience of phosphors and phosphorescence had expunged the cultural remembrance of what ‘phosphorescence’ had been in the literary age that went before.

T he concept of revelation—one hears, one does not seek; one accepts, one does not ask who gives... Everything happens involuntarily but, as in a gale of a feeling of freedom... The involuntariness of image and metaphor is strangest of all: one no longer has any notion of what is an image or a metaphor... It actually seems as if the things themselves approached and offered themselves as metaphors.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.

Adams’s detached, clinical observation—leads him to compose still-lives of these carefully selected and edited ‘found’ objects. His material and inspiration lead him to construct views through barn doors and beyond relay-racks filled with arrays of meters and glowing pilot-lights, to mountains and prairie grass and historical people outside. It is very much in the aesthetic realm between the novel and the film, as photographer Lewis Baltz once said. Very much like the objectification that happens in the Ombregt photographs.

Adams’s wife, Deborah O’Grady, is a photographer. I wonder whether she sees photographerly influences in his work, with regard to John’s compositions and compositional techniques. I wonder if harmonious ways of seeing are part of what brought them together.

Truth in photography may involve some degree of verisimilitude to the objects seen, but the primary reference shifts from object to subject. Truth now refers not to accurate representation of the objects but rather to accurate representation of the artist’s response or interpretation of the object. Truth now means fidelity to the subjective experience, of the artist and the viewer.”
— Jerry Thompson, p.22.

Music Hall, Madison Ave, Szarkowski, 1943