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Saturday, December 20, 2008

Matthusen: Biblical Imagination, Deep Play, and Theology in Chamber Music

A nd in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth, to a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary. And the angel came in unto her, and said, ‘Hail, thou that art highly favored, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.’ And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be. And the angel said unto her, ‘Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God. And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.’ Then said Mary unto the angel, ‘How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?’ ”
— Luke 1:26-34, KJV.

I t is a rather firmly patriarchal and relatively transcendental notion of Deity that sets the grisly logic of sacrifice in motion in the first place.”
— Ivan Strenski, Professor of Religion, Univ California Riverside.

A s I was talking to a software engineer friend at work, he mentioned that the minister in his church had given an Advent sermon/homily about ‘emergence’. I confided that I was (am) skeptical about ‘innovation’ in the context of organized religious practice and theology. I averred that innovations/neologisms seem to me often to be a sign of predatory marketing, a pastor’s ego needs rampant, or even a sign of cultish heterodoxy and obfuscation. But, given that he and I both write code, I did recommend to him a couple of recent books on emergent architectures for software game design, especially massively multi-player online games. I suggested that he might read those and use them as comparators, to gauge the soundness and completeness of the ideas that his pastor had been putting forward. After all, if you are writing game software, the game gets played; the software either works or it doesn’t. You get to find out pretty quickly whether the features and behaviors that are supposed to be supported are real or vapor.

Other parts of our experience and belief-states are also amenable to good-hearted experimentation.

In that regard, I recently had the opportunity to hear some of Paula Matthusen’s electroacoustic compositions. Her works typically explore multi-vocality—multiple conflictual types of evidence; discrepancies in perceptions of space and timbre; the vagaries of imperfect memory; reconciliations between corroborating and discorroborating views; the evolution of who we understand ourselves to be; the real, imagined, and remembered changes that happen to us over the course of our lives; the impossibility of ever really controlling anything, even our own bodies.

For solo performer, live-electronics, quadraphonic sound, and eight mini-speakers, here is an MP3 clip from Matthusen’s ‘and believing in…’ meditation on Mary, on the occasion of the angel Gabriel visiting her, to tell her that she is to bear the baby Jesus:

[50-sec clip, Paula Matthusen, ‘and believing in…’, 1.2MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Paula Matthusen, ‘rosenthaler’, 1.2MB MP3]

M atthusen’s ‘and believing in…’ composition was commissioned as part of the ‘Re-thinking Mary’ project led by Eve Beglarian and in collaboration with Corey Dargel, Joseph Hallman, & Joshua Palay at the Atlantic Center of the Arts.

Paula Matthusen, who currently resides in Brooklyn, is noted for her electroacoustic and acoustic music and multimedia sound-art installation pieces. She’s collaborated with choreographers and theater companies and has written for widely-imaginative and eclectic orchestrations … “run-on sentences of the pavement” for piano, ping-pong balls, and electronics, for examle. Her music has been performed by Alarm Will Sound, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), orchest de ereprijs, Ballett Frankfurt, noranewdanceco, Kathryn Woodard, Diesel Lounge Boys, and Jody Redhage. Her work has been performed at Merkin Concert Hall, WAX, Judson Dance, Joyce SoHo, the Construction Company, Das TAT, the Aspen Music Festival, Bang on a Can Summer Institute of Music at MassMoCA, Aural Tick Festival, the Gaudeamus New Music Week, SEAMUS, NWEAMO, and the Florida Electroacoustic Music Festival, among others. She performs frequently with the electroacoustic duo ouisaudei, Groundwave New Music Collective, Object Collection, and recently winter company. Paula is the recipient of a Fulbright Grant, ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers’ Award, First Prize in the Young Composers’ Meeting Composition Competition, and a MacCracken and Langley Ryan Fellowship. Matthusen has also held residencies at create@iEar at Rensselaer Polytechnic, STEIM, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida. Matthusen did her doctoral studies at NYU and has recently joined the faculty of Florida International University in Miami, as Asst Prof of Music Technology and Composition.

Revelation 12 talks of the ‘sign of the woman’ ??

A nd there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars: And she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.”
— Revelation 12:1-2, KJV.

Pope Benedict (Ratzinger) in his recent book describes the Church’s biblical positioning of women (Gen 3:15), the so-called ‘Protoevangelium’ where, even as early as the Fall in the Garden of Eden, there is the promise of Christ “in chiaroscuro ... a promise to and through Woman” (p. 52). “Revelation is a way, [but] it does not speak its message until the whole is present.”

M atthusen begins with the proposition that there are experiences, both ones that are intentional and conscious as well as ‘revelatory’ ones that are happenstantial, unbidden and undeliberated. She projects herself into imagining Mary as a woman— as a woman who has a stream of experiences, experiences having ordinary intentional content; as a woman who has coherent notions of what those experiences are about. The content of Mary’s experiences is distinct from the experiences themselves: the content could exist or not, or could be true or not, regardless of whether her experiences occurred to her, regardless of whether or not she were alive to experience them.

And then the angel Gabriel appears, radically altering the fabric of reality, the coherence of it, the ‘aboutness’ of it. The musical gestures that Matthusen’s composition puts forward amount to an electroacoustic chamber music essay on the necessity of Mary’s experiences, both at the Annunciation and subsequently. It is a radical sort of ‘deep play’ that Matthusen engages in. ‘Deep play’ is a phrase coined more than 30 years ago by anthropologist Clifford Geertz—referring to a complex topography of perception and decision-making and belief; cultural loci where multiple levels of structure, explanation, and meaning interact and establish the regimes in which will, reason, and language operate. In objection to Brentano’s assertion that intentionality is the hallmark of human personhood and identity, Matthusen argues (in the music) that there are without doubt conscious, mental experiences which are not intentional. Zen-like transcendental receptiveness—this seems to be the state that Matthusen implies as characterizing Mary’s disposition toward the angel Gabriel and, later, toward Jesus after he is born.

A nd I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel. Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.”
— Genesis 3:15-6, KJV.

For Matthusen, if Mary becomes a symbol of whatever is deemed to be the ‘highest’ or ‘best’ or ‘most commendable’ or ‘most womanly’ in a given culture, then she can become a symbol of almost anything. A symbol points to something other than itself; otherwise, it would be the thing signified rather than the symbol of it. The social ‘constructedness’ of the concept of Mary that the Church has transmitted to us is what Matthusen’s work tells us of; that and the necessity of our individually reaching our own understanding—informed by the Church, yes, but also influenced by our other happenstantial (and emergent), non-intentional experiences. Matthusen challenges us to consider critically the views we have received—challenges us to question whether Mary is a symbol of a facile determinism, legitimization of a monarchy, libertarianism, nonconformity, socialism, a force for civilizing humankind, repudiation of one’s own body, renouncing violence, etc.—or something else entirely. For Matthusen, not a ‘waiting for the immanent whole’ as Pope Benedict, anyhow.

True christianity vs. a politicized, relevance-chasing, charisma-obsessed ‘Christendom’ of secular convenience and instant dominion. True christianity vs. instrumental-Mary: the scary cooptation of Mary as an emblem, by a politicized socially-conservative faction that wishes to roll back liberal/progressive trends involving feminism, LGBT rights, women’s ordination, birth control, etc. The conservatives are pugnaciously confident that their Mary, the Mary that is so pwned by them, loathes all of that, so the more prominent this instrumental-Mary’s role in the Church, the better. Conservatives will not like Matthusen’s ‘and believing in…’ very much, I think. Not if they grasp what how it’s constructed and how it works…

A nd it came to pass, as he spake these things, a certain woman of the company lifted up her voice, and said unto him, ‘Blessèd is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked’. But he said, ‘Yea, rather, blessèd are they that hear the word of God, and keep it.’ ”
— Luke 11:27-8, KJV.

Ever since I was a kid it amazed me that the gospel of Luke doesn’t allow for the possibility of Mary’s refusing the angel Gabriel’s ‘request’. Luke doesn’t seem to consider that Mary is to be commended for choosing the ‘right’ decision. Cynthia Rigby has a nice essay on this in her recent book (link below). Rigby argues that considering Mary’s free will (or Luke’s lack of attention to it) amounts to regarding the relation between Mary and God as a merely instrumental or contractual one. She recommends that it is more productive to consider Mary’s cooperation in giving birth to Jesus as ‘kenotic’ [spontaneous, Zen-like ‘self-emptying’]. ‘Kenotic’: at least Rigby’s use of that fancy word has a few hundred years’ endorsement of theologians and scholars to recommend it, in contrast to this sketchy ‘emergence’.

So Paula Matthusen’s ‘and believing in…’ amounts to a reading of the biblical Mary from the perspective of literary and cultural criticism. It moves away from historical methods of exegesis—the traditional methods that aim at finding the one true meaning of the original actors in their original context. Paula’s contributions are a sort of literary and composerly criticism that engages with the texts as they have been handed down to us—concerned with cultural exegesis of social settings that have influenced the formation of ideas through history.

Joel Green, writing in the book edited by Cynthia Rigby and Beverly Gaventa, holds that Mary’s role—at least in the gospel of Luke and in the writings of Paul—is mostly that of an ‘accessible exemplar’, not just an exemplar of holiness but also an exemplar of discovering and maintaining good ways of thinking. Mary, according to Green, is an exemplar for ways of seeing the world and seeing “beyond the world, whose rhythms and patterns we take for granted; beyond to fresh ways of making sense of our lives, including especially our relation to God and our relationships with one another.”

W hat we have in Matthusen’s ‘and believing in…’ meditation is ‘Mary-as-emblem-of-narrative-theory’—discovering her story; a story that necessarily exhibits strange, surreal ways of the Divine: creatively, responsibly, defensibly generating her own (and, as we follow Paula Matthusen, generating our own) inner disposition towards reality and the Divine, whatever we conceive the Divine to be.

The woman offering the blessing in Luke 11:27-8 is disposed to ‘re-up’ with the patriarchal regime defining the place of woman in society in terms of relatedness to men and children. Jesus’s reply is often read as a rebuke or ‘correction’, but to some it’s more an addendum or poetic decoration than a stern corrective. I think Paul Matthusen would favor the latter interpretation...

A nd all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds. But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.”
— Luke 2:18-9, KJV.

I am sure my friend’s faith can stand up to a few MMRPG ‘emergent programming’ books and some hard-core electroacoustic music by Matthusen. Indeed, it could be said that it must hold up against those.

Sunday, January 20, 2008

Musical Ergonomics: Aesthetic Unity, Narrative Control, and Shared Authorship/Readership

Neuromancer massively-multiplayer role-playing game

A s for CoCo™, it was a charming, agreeably quiet, and effective companion. The program notes were informative, and for those who simply wanted a visual aide, the live feed of Morgan conducting (shot from the orchestra’s point of view) was an attractive enhancement. The commentary was useful, particularly in a new and unfamiliar piece such as Bunch’s — the texts linked the music to Lichtenstein’s paintings (shown on the hand-held screen) and directed the listener to changes in mood and instrumentation. But even a well-known work such as Beethoven’s 8th yielded an engaging summary of exposition and development. It wasn’t until the second half, however, that the device proved worth its weight in gold. With the Mahler texts on the hand-held screen, it was no longer necessary to search for them in the program (as any vocal recital fan can tell you, the sound of hundreds of audience members turning pages in unison can be a big distraction). Recital lovers also know that presenters often provide the texts but keep the lights so low no one can read them. Here they were in your hand, illuminated and easy to read! Suddenly, I was convinced: The gadget’s a very good thing.”
— Georgia Rowe, Andante, 25-FEB-2005.

One of the biggest problems in compositional ‘form’ (or programming ‘form’, as covered in the previous post ) is achieving a ‘unity’ of style, expressive aesthetics, and meaning. ‘Lack of unity’ assaults the mind and emotions. ‘Expressive incoherence’ is aesthetically ugly and annoying.

But the issue of coherence isn’t just whether the ideas and feelings make sense in the sequences or the mashups and overlaps that are composed/arranged. It also has to do with the slew-rate—how fast the transitions are (as Robert Kirzinger put it) in the context of who’s listening or participating, and in the context of what the listeners’/participants’ skills, training, mood, intentions and goals, and other factors are at the time. The question is not just pertinent to the juxtaposition of pieces by disparate composers. The question of coherence is also raised at the level of movements’ relations to each other within works—how coherent are the movements with each other, in the sequence in which they are arranged—and even down to the phrase level, as David Lewin points out. Or even at the ‘ambient’ configuration level, as Jesper Kyd points out.

Hypothetically, unity can be guaranteed simply by using the same ‘material’ from beginning to end, as is done in some fugues or in some of Steve Reich’s or other minimalists’ pieces. Morton Feldman’s ‘Rothko Chapel’ and ‘Why Patterns?’ on the same disc: same composer, similar meditative intent, similar sound intensity, similar acoustic performance spaces and timbres, similarities in ‘vocality’ among the instrumental and choral parts, different orchestrations but nonetheless cohesive. ‘Why Patterns?’ for flute, glockenspiel and piano, a dissonant vegetative proliferation. The work doesn’t seem to have a beginning or ending. A cosmic, zen-like piece of music, where the audience members are incidental. Coming in half-way through or leaving before the end may not detract from your apprehending its meaning. This has unity and coherence with zen-like qualities of ‘Rothko Chapel’. Just one example, but one that illustrates the multiple dimensions around which aesthetic value judgments must be made and are made.

Morton Feldman: Rothko Chapel; Why Patterns? CD

[50-sec clip, Morton Feldman, Rothko Chapel-3, UC Berkeley Chamber Chorus, 1.2MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Morton Feldman, Rothko Chapel-5, UC Berkeley Chamber Chorus, 1.3MB MP3]

You can’t tell what 50 sec of the third movement of Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel I excerpted, could you! Shall I excerpt 50 sec of John Cage’s 4’33’’ ? The entire piece consists of silences—silences of different lengths, as they say. As a musical piece, 4’33’’ leaves almost no room for the pianist’s interpretation. As long as the pianist watches the stopwatch, she/he can’t play it too fast or too slow. She/he can’t hit the wrong notes. She/he can’t play it too loud or too soft, too flatly or too floridly. What you hear when you listen to 4’33’’ is entirely a matter of chance—nothing of what you hear is anything the composer ‘wrote’ in any ordinary sense. It’s nonetheless a composition—Cage, the godlike Blind Watchmaker, intended for you to have an antiphonal, aleatoric musical experience, without explicitly specifying what the content of that experience will be—only specifying that it should have a pianist, a piano, and be 4’33’’ in duration. It is symbolically rich and it has its own peculiar aesthetic unity and coherence. Different if someone coughs, say, than if a city bus goes by and is heard faintly through the walls of the concert hall. It would be sacrilege if I excerpted 4’33’’ and gave you a 50-sec clip of it. More than sacrilege, it would be incoherent to do so.

E ven more telling is a psychological rationale that suggests why something new should happen at this moment. To assert an I-relation between mm. 29-32 and mm. 33-36 has entailed our obtruding the idea of rows into a piece based, so far, on ‘configurations’. This precipitates a critical point in our reception of the music [Dallapiccola’s ‘Simbolo’]. We may not be fully aware of the crisis, to be sure, but perhaps we sense it obscurely, as suggested by the composer’s indication ‘oscuro’ on the dyad {G, A-flat} at m. 33. Given this state of affairs, something ‘large’ should happen just after mm. 33-36. Perhaps a row will appear in the music. Perhaps some new configuration-type will appear—possibly generating a new ‘variation’. Or perhaps the piece will close, as it in fact does, via the references to the original configuration in mm. 37-42 and then in mm. 42-46. The enigmatic effect of those references is not simply due to a ‘stimmung’ inherent in the material itself. Rather, our puzzlement involves a sense of incompleteness; the music withdraws from us, withholding something from us—that is, the row. We are impelled onwards.”
— David Lewin, Dallapiccola’s ‘Simbolo’, in Musical Form & Transformation, 2007, p. 14.

Poorly-constructed fugues can be deadly. If we listen to music that continues for too long without enough rhythmic or harmonic texture to hold our attention then we tend to go to sleep. Carnatic and other asian music presents challenges to those of us whose minds were raised in western traditions; in spite of our concentration, attention becomes an effort.

If the rhythm and/or harmonic textures change, though—not excessively frequently or precipitously, and not too infrequently or glacially—then our attention is captured and remains in focus. We listen to the succession of messages with pleasure, or angst, or whatever emotions are consistent with the content and intent of the music. Each new message must last long enough for it to be meaningful and aesthetically effective. If it doesn’t last long enough, or if it violates our expectations (as Robert Kirzinger said in his email response to the previous CMT post), then it’ll frustrate and irritate us or wear us out. Continuous change or scatological change makes it impossible for us to remember what’s gone before, or to relate one part to another. Inevitably, the lack of completion or fulfillment leaves us dissatisfied and forgetful of what we’ve heard. Do not put your iPod on ‘shuffle’ and expect fulfillment or aesthetic coherence, unless you have a very tiny, already-coherent iTunes library on that iPod.

Human factors engineering for avionics and cockpit-design has many of these same ‘durability of attention’ cognitive issues. In conditions of poor visibility, inexperienced pilots get into spiral dives in several ways, but this is the most common: While the pilot (John Kennedy Jr?) is looking for lights on the ground or other horizon reference, the airplane slowly rolls into a banked attitude. With no horizon visible, the pilot looks at the ‘artificial horizon’ indicator in the cockpit and notices that the horizon bar is not level. The initial reaction is to roll the horizon bar back to level, which rolls the airplane into a steeper bank. This is known as a ‘horizon control reversal’.

In a steep bank, the nose of the airplane drops, and it starts to lose altitude. To maintain altitude, the pilot pulls back, which tightens the turn and steepens the spiral dive. At this point the pilot is confused, disoriented, and no longer in control of the airplane. Such a sequence can and does happen rapidly, and the resulting crash is invariably attributed to ‘pilot error’. No doubt the pilot made the error, but what caused the ‘error’ is never determined nor the probable cause reported.

The term ‘pilot error’ is misused when such errors can be prevented by an experimentally proven equipment modification. In the case of flight attitude control, all that is needed is to cause the ‘little airplane’ symbol on the artificial horizon gauge to rotate in direct response to aileron control inputs. So, to return to a wings-level attitude, the pilot merely has to align the airplane symbol with the displaced horizon bar and maintain that alignment as the real airplane and the artificial horizon bar, rotating in opposite directions, both return to wings-level.

To illustrate, if the airplane rolls to the right, the horizon bar rolls left. The pilot notices this and applies left aileron to align the airplane symbol with the horizon bar, causing the plane to start rolling back toward wings level. As this is going on, the pilot gradually reduces the left aileron input to maintain alignment until the ailerons are neutral when the wings are level. Thus, straight-ahead flight is restored. The three display modes all indicate a bank to the right. The left indicator is rotated counterclockwise. In the center indicator, the airplane symbol is rotated clockwise. In the right indicator, the horizon is the same as on the left, but in addition the airplane symbol is rotated clockwise by the pilot’s aileron input, indicating that the plane will continue to roll to the right. The instrument represented on the left is the standard system in today’s airplanes including John Kennedy’s Piper Saratoga II. With the display at the right, pilots maintain wings-level flight merely by aligning the airplane symbol with the horizon, a natural response.

Each of the three gauge designs has the advantage of ‘judgment-neutrality’. That is, none of the gauges strongly says at any time that the pilot is making a wrong decision—they simply show the fact of pitch-yaw-roll (right-banking/left-banking and nose-up/nose-down attitude) with respect to the ground. You may have your reasons for piloting the plane in the attitude it is taking—that’s up to you; the gauge doesn’t tell you you are wrong to do so, and it doesn’t prejudicially tell you that something bad is probably going to happen if you keep steering that way. That’s just the way a gauge should be!

So, maybe orchestras and presenters should try ‘musical avionics console’ graphical PDAs or VR heads-up goggles to hand out to audience members who want them, to give the audience notice of aesthetic turbulence ahead, or advance views of the aesthetic terrain below. You thought the CoCo™ ConcertCompanion™ text-plus-video RF PDA guides that’ve been tried in 2003-2007 were distracting, aesthetically disturbing? Well, get a load of ConcertFlightSimulator™.

My cup of tea? No, no wireless virtual consoles or PDAs for me. Technophile though I am and alternative-venues classical/newmusic person though I am, I don’t really want more ‘gear’ when participating in a live ‘meat-world’ performance. And I don’t want to hear or see other concert-goers fumbling with the glarey little gizmos either. Not even nice Studierstube PDAs. People dropping their programs on the floor is distracting enough as it is. And I don’t want to be subjected to other people ‘crashing’ their augmented-reality concert flight-deck hand-helds. I don’t want a concert hall full of ‘gamers’ to intrude on my listening (or performing).

No, you [concert presenters, artists, composers, recording/broadcast producers] have the ‘con’. The aesthetic unity and musical ‘safety’ of your ‘flying’ are fine with me just as they are, even when you deviate from the flight-plan or ‘normal’ sequence of movements. I can live with it. I may prefer some other unity, some other coherence. But, then again, I may learn something from you, and from the choices you make. Or I may learn something about the reasons for my deep preferences for hearing all of the movements of Brahms’s Op. 111 Quintet in G major together, with respectful/meditative silences before and after. Either way, I’m happy. Citizenship includes following others, enabling others and just simply trusting others to lead. I would not come down on you for failing to make the best aesthetic decision, and you know that I have every confidence in you, that you will successfully complete our aesthetic/experiential ‘mission’.

Different story, though, in SecondLife or classical music in other VR realms. If some ‘aesthetic avionics gauges’ were available in SL and I could configure my own in-world virtual-concert cockpit the way I want, I might in fact use them. Happy, in SL, to have you as co-pilot. The SL script language isn’t quite up to that yet, though.

Microvision Windshield heads-up augmented reality monitor

[Laurie & Fry, on linguistic coherence]

Kamata Psychology of Product Development book