M ozart’s ‘Requiem’ brings a shift in mood—with the terror, the sorrow, and the sheer drama of Life … and Death.” — Sydney Symphony, program notes, MAY-2012.
T he performance of Mozart’s Requiem in D minor, K.626, by members of the Sydney Symphony led by [guest] conductor David Zinman challenged our patience last night. The Süssmayr completion of the Requiem is something that many ensembles perform in 57 min or longer, full of pathos. But speeding it up more than 15%, to come in at less than 49 min, is aesthetically not a great idea. Specifically, it’s not a good idea when the acoustic delay of the stage that is more than 14 meters deep from the conductor to the rearmost chorister makes the performers sound as though they are not ‘together’.
A lthough I’ve been in Australia previously, this was the first time I’d heard a performance in the Sydney Opera House… a very warm, responsive hall.
T he vocal parts were ably performed by Jennifer Welch-Babidge, soprano; Fiona Campbell, mezzo-soprano; Paul McMahon, tenor; Paul Whelan, bass; and the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs.
A nd a diverting and expansive pre-concert talk was given by singer and musicologist Natalie Shea, who cued up more than a dozen clips of recordings to illustrate the points she was making.
T o me, I hear this Dies Irae as an ‘appogiatura’ within a Lacrimosa-esque life; or Mozart saying, in full view of his own fast-approaching death, “Life is hard, and then you (and we all—) die.” In that kind of frame of mind, I’m troubled by Robert Levin’s view that Mozart scholar Simon Keefe is asserting that accurately understanding the Requiem necessarily requires an historically-informed sense of context or that late 18th-Century judgments of the work are ‘privileged’ or somehow more valid than anything we might grasp or express. It just seems that the work is more naturally accessible than that. (I do like Levin’s own completion of the Requiem, though—complete with a fugue ending of the Lacrimosa.)
U nsanctimonious’ to the point of ‘willfulness’... like musically rendering a [personal] prayer, not a Mass.” — Natalie Shea, pre-concert remarks, 03-MAY-2012.
T he mystery of how much of the Requiem was Süssmayr’s and how much was Mozart’s will maybe never be resolved. But ultimately, the nature of the piece seems to me to be more individual/idiosyncratic—an individualistic expression of what it is to be mortal; a personal ‘music-of-the-soul’—than requiem-idiomatic or ‘normative’ of what a requiem should be or say.
P .S.—I’m looking forward to the release later this year of Professor Keefe’s new book, which reevaluates the nature of the incomplete manuscript and its context. Keefe covers the history of the work and extensively reviews the accumulated criticism, analysis, and performance practices that pertain to it. Keefe particularly focuses on the autograph score and on Franz Süssmayr’s 1792 completion, which is the one that the Sydney Symphony and Philharmonia Choirs performed tonight. Keefe recommends that evidence that is confined only to records of Mozart’s life and correspondence and notations in the incomplete manuscript are not enough—understanding the Requiem instead requires broader, hermeneutics-based methods of analysis.
I ’ve done all-Mozart, all-Beethoven, all-Schubert programs, but there is always the danger of a stylistic sameness, or rather a lack of confrontation between the pieces. Concerts of works of two composers are great because they still offer enough music of each to create a sense of immersion in the composers’ sonic worlds, and yet the concert becomes a dialogue between the two, which often moves in surprising directions. The question of which composers work well together (and which don’t) is particularly alchemical, and I think it is one of both similarity and difference. The success of Beethoven and Janáček as a pairing relies in part on the terrific intensity that characterizes both... The intensity may be similar, but the language is utterly different... Beethoven’s sonatas are incredibly tightly argued... Janáček, by contrast, is perhaps the greatest master of the musical non-sequitur... Beethoven and Janáček could not be more different, which makes the similarities in temperament between the two all the more fascinating.” — Jonathan Biss, 2012 essay.
N ot ‘non-sequiturs’ exactly. More like the worldview of peoples who have for centuries lived along a foggy seacoast and whose language now innately reflects their inability to see or predict what will loom into view in front of them from one moment to the next.
F orgetting, the renunciation of cause-and-effect and the obverse of forgiving. Beethoven afflicted with abject loss and despair (as in the Adagio of Op. 27 No. 2); Janáček surprised by optimism, welling up from where?
I just returned from Jonathan Biss’s Beethoven-Janáček recital at Kansas City’s Folly Theater (Sonata No. 5, Op. 10, No. 1; Sonata No. 14, Op. 27, No. 2; Sonata No. 26, Op. 81a; V mlhách, JW 8/22; Sonata 1.X.1905, Z Ulice, JW 8/19).
T he ‘affective’ content and contrasts of these intense works—both the composers’ affect or psychological state and intentions, and the performer’s affect—are what makes the program spellbinding—emotionally compelling to experience (confirming what Biss has written in his essays; see blockquote above)!
T here may be elements that denote a similar state of mind or parallels in terms of Beethoven’s temperament and Janáček’s temperament, as Biss says. But the orderliness and certitude of Beethoven—contrasted with the randomness and the existential acceptance of doubt and uncertainy, even the recklessness of Janáček—these features make us think about our differences, not just the differences between these composers or their respective eras.
T hese antithetical qualities—and how such personalities or such ‘stances’ that we adopt influence what happens to us in life—are constitutional, innate, inherited styles. Well, they are partly inherited and partly learned/habitual.
E very mixture, every conciliation, every passage through the barrier of our inherited and habitual style is a transgression with self-discovery.
N ot every transgression is transcendent or momentous. Some of them are ironic, trivial, or tame—much like when a belovèd pet cat trips and experiences embarrassment at its clumsiness, so out-of-character and façade-dropping. Sometimes events bring out the best in us. We appear virtuous and do and express commendable things. At other times, our undesirable qualities come out.
A nd some transgressions are outrageous or transformative. Putting these two composers next to each other makes for an intense two-way street—stylistically and emotionally. This program forces/enables the two to ‘mediate’ each other’s views and to rhetorically critique the other.
I t is as though Biss has learned from literary theorist Roland Barthes and reveals the “hermeneutic code” that governs the semantics of each of the two composers’ worldviews, the “semiotic code” of the musical motives of each, the “proairetic code” that governs the formal structure (or, for Janacek, the renunciation of cause-and-effect structure), and the “referential code”—musical abstractions and metaphors and borrowings.
T he ‘next-to-ness’ Biss creates in formulating this program conjures the main forces that drive the narrative—and that drive our own desires to listen attentively.
T he “hermeneutic code” (see links below) refers to those plot elements that raise questions on the part of the reader of a text or the viewer of a film or the listener to a program of music. For example, in the Beethoven Op. 10, we get tragedy—the anxiety becoming mourning, weeping, descending (Movement 1, Theme 1, Phrase 1) leading to violence (Movement 3, Theme 1)—which leads us to wonder about the reasons for these traumatic events. Then, in the Janáček, we get a fatalistic indifference to a world in which cause-and-effect processes break down, or in which some events can’t be prevented or explained. We need the ‘loose ends’ of the narrative ‘tied up’ in order to feel satisfied, like a good detective story—and that is what Biss does for us by the end of the concert. The entire narrative of a story like this operates via hermeneutic encoding. We witness a murder, and we enthusiastically spend the rest of the concert learning answers to the questions that were raised by the initial Beethoven scenes of violence. That is one half of how this concert program works.
P roairetic code”, on the other hand, refers to ordinary actions—those musical phrases or plot events that simply lead to yet other phrases/consequences/actions. Suspense is driven by action rather than by a reader’s or a listener’s desire to have unsolved mysteries solved. This “proairetic code” is the other half of how or why this particular concert program works—event or ‘message-passing’ between the works, in a fashion resembling what happens with remote procedure calls (RPC) and protocol buffers in software systems.
B iss’s idea of programming this seemingly-disparate-but-narratively-confrontational repertoire is really an excellent one—attractive, interest-holding, suspenseful—provoking us to reach a deeper understanding of the human condition, as well as deeper understanding of the mental states of two specific composers and of the nature of the works made to confront each other in this way. One could hardly wish for a higher form of “fun” than this. Bravo!
C an a piano work convey a bustling ‘severalness’, or the sense of many people congregated in a social gathering, as convincingly as a chamber work? I think so — parts of Schumann’s ‘Carneval’, Mussorgsky’s ‘Marketplace at Limoges’, and Ravel’s ‘La Valse’ spring to mind as trivial examples. One tempting view is that the composer is aiming to depict the entirety of the human condition: everything is in here and, just as in the real world, the profound and the banal are constantly rubbing shoulders. I don’t think this is wrong, but the truth may go further... By presenting a unified work in which the high and the low aspects of humankind are contained together, the composer invites the listener to find these worlds contained inside each other, not merely nearby. The piano sonatas may have a touch of this ‘adjacent’ humor—the riotous trio in the second movement of opus 110, or the manic dotted-rhythm variation in opus 111.” — Jonathan Biss, 2012 essay.
I n everything Chopin wrote, no matter how complex and virtuosic, that powerful simplicity is there at the core. Although he wrote some very difficult and impressive stuff, the ultimate effect of his music, I feel, should never really be to ‘impress’. But that’s exactly what the pianists we usually hear are striving to do: impress the contest judges, the critics, the public. The world we classical performers live in gives us very little room not to play big ‘show’ pieces, or make everything we play into one... Chopin’s third ballade suffers particularly from this problem. The ballades are all difficult, but No. 3 is the easiest of them—sort of like the shortest Himalaya. It seems as though all the star performers I’ve heard end up trying to make it as hard as the others, plowing through it with virtuosic flare, and thus trivializing it. [And how wonderful it is when, instead, someone like Richard Goode plays this piece with selfless transparency. –DSM]” — Paul Cantrell blog, In the Hands, 02-MAR-2005..
M y favorite part of Richard Goode’s performance last night in Kansas City [a program that included Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, and Chopin] was the Chopin Ballad No. 3, Op. 47. This 9-minute piece is maybe the strangest of Chopin’s four ballades, on account of its unrelenting optimism. Goode’s expressive dexterity handles the staggering complexity with seeming ease and imparts a vigor suffused with warmth... perfect for this sweet, cheerful work.
G entle A-flat 6/8-meter dolce, evoking donkeys Chopin observed in the hills of Majorca? Donkeys with jobs, but happy jobs that they enjoyed doing.
T he technique [of musical gesture] is perhaps a musical version of what is referred to as a ‘suture’ in film theory: placing the camera in such a way that it functions as the eye of the protagonist of the film, thereby drawing us, as unwitting spectators, to become the subject of the film ourselves, since we share the same visual field and same [Majorcan] point of view.” — Patrick McCreless, in Almén & Pearsall, p. 13.
W hat a narrative trajectory! What storytelling! Social media of 1841! Our minds engage, imagination runs free, and we ‘friend’ or ‘follow’ this peripatetic, vacationing Chopin voice from the beginning to the end. The feeling is physical, not just emotional; it coheres—for Goode, and for us in the audience—throughout the piece, all the way to the satisfying, happy ending. For example, the motion from C (mm. 230, 232) down to the E-flat (mm. 231, 233) suggests the subsequent plunges to the low A-flat at the end. Energy flows! We “feel” the path that we are on, anticipate things along the way, anticipate them accurately. And this experience of uncanny accuracy is part of what is pleasant and thrilling for us: in material that is this complex and unpredictable, we don’t usually experience ourselves as being so graceful or right as this. We love being unexpectedly better than we are!
U ltimately, our minds and bodies gladly go everywhere Chopin’s and Goode’s narrative aims to take us. Theirs is a higher-order virtuosity that doesn’t strive to impress. It strives only to reveal what’s True, to tell this true story. But it’s not just ‘telling’, not just a musical ‘text’. The human body is involved—fingers, arms, flesh, nerves, mortal gifts, physical mass. The higher-order virtuosity inhabiting the body averts its gaze and embodies Laws of Physics in action—beauty incarnate; a kind of transcendence—something for which we surely hadn’t planned on our Friday night out, and something for which we feel thrilled and grateful. Bravo!
V iewed as a sign, ‘formative repetition’ refers to what is repeated: it is usually a marker of segmentation, a grammatical feature. When a figure is repeated more than once, the attention begins to be attracted by the repetition itself; instead of focusing on the repeated material only, we focus on the act of repetition as an activity signifier per se and seek a symbolic interpretation of it. It is then a sign, not of segmentation or grammar, but of connotative meaning. It evokes extra-musical associations of... emphatically [re-]emphasized speech, dancing, laughing, etc.” — Raymond Monelle, p. 88, quoting Lidov.
A passage of music could have a ‘semantic range’ that is essentially the same as that of any word in a language, only much broader in scope—sharing the same kind of elasticity but of a much greater degree than is typical in language... Choosing whether the French overture [Var. XVI] in Bach’s Goldberg Variations connotes ‘sublime confidence’ or ‘deep despair’ is easy because the semantic fields of those expressions are so completely separate. One seems coincident with the music—and the other, far from it!” — Joseph Swain, p. 55.
T he hypothesis that syntax mediates tension—and its corollary, that if there is no sense of tension and resolution then there is no sense of syntax—do not entail that all tension is ‘syntactic’ in origin... The tension and resolution of this passage depend more on harmonic progression and meter than on the variety of rhythmic durations and texture.” — Joseph Swain, p. 32.
K onstantin Lifschitz’s performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations BWV 988 last night was staggeringly beautiful, unified in conception and spiritually cohesive all the way through the Variations to the reprise of the Aria at the end.
T he left-hand/right-hand equality of voices that Lifschitz maintains is astounding—that it is biomechanically/anatomically very difficult goes without saying, but it is conceptually/expressively exceedingly difficult as well. (The intentions of the composer—and of the performer, and, now, of ourselves—are complex and tremendously varied through the course of this work. And they must emerge in the performance as fresh and totally genuine—a factor that learning and technically mastering and memorizing the musical text threaten to a degree, as anyone who has ever memorized and performed music in recital knows well...)
I ntentionalism [in music]... not so much a coherent philosophical position but rather a kind of ‘antidote’ to hermeneutic analytic approaches that treat musical works as ‘organic matter’—in short, like vegetables—rather than as products of thinking [,feeling] people. Ideally, this means encouraging analytic results that might please composers if they were told about them... Intentionalism is meant as a heuristic device that asks that we pose the question: What might the composer have thought about this composition and its sense? It has become common practice for musicologists to invoke the warning of the Intentional Fallacy as if it were law accepted by everyone. In fact, the entire hermeneutic tradition stands opposed to this doctrinaire apologia for New Criticism, so that merely calling the quest for intentions structuring a work of art a ‘victim’ to a fallacy does not make it so.” — Laurence Dreyfus, p. 171.
T he interplay between the rhythmic, metric, melodic, harmonic, and textural tensions in Goldberg variation—notably in the French overture (Var. XVI)—was fascinating. When harmonic tension predominates, it “frees-up” the melodic syntax and vice versa. The realism of the multi-line, multi-voice dialogue or story-telling is enabled and augmented by the parity/equality of the hands, each tension-generating modality taking its “turn” and providing scope and opportunity for other modalities to express things freely.
L ast night our imaginations were permitted to run, taking all the “rope” they could, until close to the end near the 70-minute mark, when we realized in retrospect that the “story” explored by Bach (and Lifschitz) through all of these Variations is our very own. We had not only understood the story; we had in a palpable, true sense ‘said’ [to ourselves] the things that Bach—and Lifschitz—had just said. The story and these thoughts had come a huge distance to find us, as if meant (intended) to be found by us.
W e were inscribed by them, but we found that we, too, were, in a real sense, inscribing/authoring the thoughts. The attentiveness, the transcendent wide-awakeness that Bach has impelled us to with these Variations: like a newly-discovered, implausibly effective form of prayer. An unforgettable performance and a really wonderful evening.
A poem as a persisting manifestation of language—and, therefore, essentially ‘dialogue’ [that can be indefinitely-extended, with unnamed or yet-to-be-named respondents]—can be a message in a ‘bottle’: sent out in the not-always-greatly-hopeful belief that somewhere and sometime it might wash up on land—on some heartland. Poems [and music] in this sense, too are ‘under way’: they are making toward something... Wirklichkeit ist nicht! Wirklichkeit will gesucht und gewonnen sein! [Reality is nothing apart from our individual construction of it. It must be sought and won!]” — Paul Celan.
I ’ve come to feel over the years that a musical work, however long it may be, ought to have basically—I was going to say ‘one tempo’ but that’s the wrong word—one ‘pulse rate’; one constant 'rhythmic reference point'. Now, obviously, there couldn’t be anything more deadly dull than to exploit one beat that goes on and on and on indefinitely. That’s what drives me up the wall about rock and about minimalism. Anyway, I would never argue in favor of an inflexible pulse. That just destroys any music. But you can take a basic pulse and divide or multiply it—not necessarily on a scale of two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, but often with far-less-obvious divisions—and make the result of those divisions or multiplications act as a subsidiary pulse for a particular movement or section of a movement... So in the case of the Goldbergs, there is in fact one pulse, which, with a few very minor modifications—mostly modifications that I think take their cue from ritards at the end of the preceding variation, something like that—one pulse that runs all the way throughout.” — Glenn Gould, 1982 radio interview with Tim Page.
Y ou just have to ‘see’ more music in this music.” — Valery Gergiev, regarding Shostakovich’s musical/spatial imagery, quoted by Fanning, p. 77.
T here is a sense of space and gravity... of invisible forces and large-scale coherence in the moves by Midori (五嶋 みどり, Gotō Midori), especially in her performance of the Shostakovich, Op. 134, with pianist Özgür Aydin. It is as though each phrase is a consequence of something more remote than what the immediately preceding bars contained. Her recital tonight was like an expedition...
Mozart - Sonata in E-flat Major K.380
Shostakovich - Sonata Op. 134
Schumann - Sonata in A minor, Op. 105
Schubert - Fantasy in C Major, D.934
T he Andante first movement of the Shostakovich with its twelve-tone parts embodies a kind of spacy ‘otherness’—an alien mysteriousness in this otherwise predominantly tonal movement. The violin’s expression of Shostakovich’s musical signature: D—eS—C—H (the music notes D—E-flat—C—B)... feels more like a “quotation” in this context—feels more like a citation of a statement made at another time by someone else, than a statement in its own right.
W hy does this sonata’s first movement evoke Bach for me? And what about the idiomatic ‘jazz’ figures in the piano part, about 2 minutes into the second movement (Allegretto) and about 8 minutes into the third movement (Largo)?
T he phrases are played as if they are in “double quotes”—reporting where they’ve been and what they’ve seen. They have an arresting effect. Are they accurate? Are they really meant by Shostakovich to reference artifacts of our own culture or are they instead a kind of caricature or impostor? Shrewdly constructed by an alien intelligence from outer space and sent to us for some alien purpose? Or is it devised by an empathetic terrestrial intelligence?
T he Allegretto scherzo in E-flat major is impulsive, vehement. The Largo is infused with drama, but it too is mysterious—ambiguous in its direction and tonality and genre... A Bach-like passacaglia that has now returned from outer space, changed by contact with unknown extraterrestrials? (Maybe I should not have had the absinthe before the concert...)
K ristian Hibberd’s 2005 dissertation was the first application of the ideas of philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin to understanding Shostakovich’s music—theories of ‘carnival’ and ‘registers,’ voiced in discourse. Since then, others have likewise found Bakhtin’s concepts helpful (see the Chapters in Part II of Pauline Fairclough’s multi-author edited volume, plus Chapter 6 and the Epilogue in Judith Kuhn’s book, links below). They examine Shostakovich’s musical language, exploring controversies pertaining to the composer’s labile and contradictory meanings.
T hese authors give an account of the diverse interpretations by partisans in the musicological “Shostakovich Wars,” reporting that the Wars have demolished the notion of one, fixed meaning in Shostakovich’s music. Political? Hard to tell for sure whether Shostakovich was a loyal communist or a dissident! Expressions of post-modern subjectivity, filled with various voices, inscribing each other, filled with uncertainty? Hard to tell whose narratives these are!
T o me, Shostakovich’s design in Op. 134 seems prophetic of our current hyperlinked, cross-referential age. In each movement I wonder: Is Shostakovich expounding, or quoting, or inline linking (referring to the expressions of others)? Did the Soviet authorities hold him liable for his musical deep linking? for carnivalizing or caricaturizing or referencing Soviet and Western culture? Do Midori and Aydin?
A nd, 40-plus years after it was composed, how should we feel about these deep-link references? Its gestures are “late-20th Century” through and through, and I wonder how it will be received in 50 years or 100. But I am after this performance impressed by it also as a composition about composing—a ‘meta’ commentary about reporting and referencing and linking. It is that aspect of this music that interests me most. And I wonder whether it is that aspect that will contribute most to this sonata’s continuing attractiveness and relevance in the distant future.
T he ‘inner’ sounsdcapes of writing and reading bear resonance of [and refer to, or link to—] ‘outer’ soundscapes... the world is always full of sounds... they enter and depart in processions as events pass us or as we pass them. This is why the music of the streets has no beginning or end but is all middle.” — Marianne Ping Huang, ‘Gestures of the Unheard,’ in The Novelness of Bakhtin, p.168.
I have a hard time with music I can’t hear and construe tonally. I suppose it’s a habit of ear.” — Richard Goode, interview with Cheryl North, 2002.
R ichard Goode performed in Rockport today…
Schumann: Kinderszenen, Op. 16
Schumann: Kreisleriana, Op. 16
Chopin: Nocturne in E-flat No. 2, Op. 55
Chopin: Scherzo No. 3 in c-sharp minor, Op. 39
Chopin: Waltz in A-flat No.3, Op. 64
Chopin: Waltz in C-sharp minor No. 2, Op. 64
Chopin: Waltz in F Major No. 3, Op. 34
Chopin: Ballade No. 3 in A-flat Major, Op. 47
T he performance reminds me that the delicacy of Chopin involves not only the delicacy of touch but also delicateness of the mind. The Scherzo Op. 39, especially, illustrates this. The C# minor tonality is latent, deferred for a long time, 24 bars or so, depending on how you interpret some of the bars. This was composed during one of the periods when Chopin’s tuberculosis was exacerbated—a time when we naturally imagine his uncertainty about his health and what would come next was also exacerbated.
T uberculosis was never confirmed, and the Chopin autopsy report has never been found. Both cystic fibrosis and alpha-1-antitrypsin deficiency are possible differential diagnoses that can explain his symptoms.” — Ulf Kongsgaard, University Hospital, Oslo, 2011.
T he tension abates a bit when the original pattern is overcome by C# sonorities that are more persuasive both metrically/cadentially and tonally. The stable major harmonies that began the composition are transformed into contrapuntal chords, ones that evoke passing tones—naturals, flats, double-sharps—on the path toward a less-complex C#. The meaning of what’s gone before gradually emerges as the complexity recedes. The essayist’s/composer’s/performer’s ideas are not expounded so much as they’re ‘discovered’. (The Op. 39 Chopin descending D-flat major ‘sparkle’ figures in the upper register presage Ray Lynch’s celestial electronica by more than 100 years.)
I n other words, these ‘character pieces’ reveal the composer-as-discoverer or composer-as-kluger/tinkerer/experimenter, and stand in stark contrast to the usual notion of composer-as-omniscient-designer/architect.
G oode gazed out the windows at various moments during the Schumann, looking at the large waves crashing outside on the rocks. How could this scene not influence his next move? How could the liveliness of the waves not have an impact on the ‘Sehr lebhaft’! How could the excitement of the wheeling gulls not impart something extra to the ‘Sehr aufgeregt’!
O ne or two attendees asked whether the screen could be drawn, to darken the hall and “Could you please put a spotlight on Mr. Goode’s face?” David Deveau, MIT Senior Lecturer and founder and Artistic Director of Rockport Music, replied after the intermission that, no, no changes would be made: the lighting and the open view of the sea were precisely as Mr. Goode had requested. Goode finds the late afternoon light of the Atlantic stretching off to the northeast a fine and rewarding view to contemplate while performing these particular works.
I n summary, it was a performance that was intensely enjoyable, warmly recommended, with even more of the spontaneity and essayistic qualities for which Goode is so well known. Perfect for this complex, chilly, drizzly Sunday in October. The F-minor Chopin waltz and Bach’s Sarabande from the B-flat partita were Goode’s parting encore gifts to us all. We went away satisfied and grateful.
T he new Shalin Liu Performance Hall is very nice, by the way—acoustically as well as visually. The irregularities of the dry-laid stone walls on the main floor are enough to prevent any notable resonances or dead zones. And the multi-glazed windows and reception hall on the third floor provide excellent acoustic isolation. There was a 25-knot breeze blowing outside and 1-meter chop in Sandy Bay, none of which was audible inside the Shalin Liu hall. Delightful.
P .S.—Cystic fibrosis was only recognized as such in the 1930s [Andersen D. Cystic fibrosis. Am J Dis Child 1938;56:344-99] and alpha-1-antitrypsin deficiency was only discovered some 30 years after that. So the fact that Chopin’s death was attributed to “tuberculosis” is not surprising, given the minimal medical knowledge at the time.
I have a photo of Richard Goode in my office. I have known Richard for 25, no, 30 years. When my son was small, he asked ‘Dad, is that picture Beethoven?’ And I laughed and replied, ‘No, but almost. As good as if it were Beethoven. He plays almost as if he were Beethoven.’ ” — David Deveau, pre-concert remarks.
T he impetus for composing in specific musical forms may be partly extra-musical, connected with the function of the music in question. The fact that humans have two legs greatly influences the structure of dance, which in turn is responsible for the symmetrical forms of most dance music. The dialogue between priest and congregation in religious services is the functional background for the responsorial forms in Gregorian chant. [And by analogy, the random, desultory, and deleterious functional patterns of illness may have motivated the forms developed by Michael Gardiner in ‘Course of the Symptom’. DSM.]” — Finn Egeland Hansen, p. 312.
P revious generations of musical scholars attributed [phrase structure schemata and evolution] to a spiritual life-cycle. They held that artistic forms shared periods of birth, growth, flowering, aging, sickness, and death because all living things share these periods.” — Robert Gjerdingen, Northwestern Univ, 'Formation and Deformation of Classic/Romantic Phrase Schemata', Music Theory Spectrum x.
F inally, a deep, scholarly accounting of the aesthetics of failure. Props to Caleb Kelly for laying bare the various histories of ‘malfunction’ as a compositional device. This book should be required reading for anyone working in electronic music today.” — Kim Cascone, composer and writer, jacket blurb for Caleb Kelly’s book, ‘Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction’.
I am deeply touched by the new Michael Gardiner composition, a 9-movement piece entitled ‘Course of the Symptom’ (link to CD and MP3s below). Maybe the reason why this music hits me so hard has something to do with my training as a doctor, and with the experiences of trying to help people who are very sick or dying during the years when I was working in hospice.
T hen I think, no, the music’s effect does not depend on having been conditioned by those experiences or that training. Anybody who is ‘primed’ by reading the title and the liner notes and by even one first-hand experience of life-threatening illness involving a friend or family member can hardly help but be affected.
B ut in just such a case as this, I am grateful for the ‘set-up’—grateful for the composer’s cues as to the context and imagery that motivated the process of composing and performing (and recording and engineering/post-processing). The hints do not diminish or constrain the subsequent hearing; instead, the hints enrich it.
T he thing that Michael Gardiner’s new composition most reminds me of is the poetry of Donald Hall’s memoir of the illness and death of his wife, Jane Kenyon—the tedium of prolonged periods of sickness and dying; the upwellings of hope, sometimes triggered by the flimsiest of new evidence; the fulminations and the “witless” love that refuses to acknowledge imminent loss—all of these seared in the pages of ‘Without’, unbidden layers upon layers, through which Hall’s voice persists and copes; the metrical irregularities of it and the malady (cancer) that was her adversary. Pain in general, and cancer pain in particular, brings a special emphasis on time and meter.
S usan Sontag’s writing does not have the rhythmic or poetical musicality of Hall’s, but some of the ideas are the same.
G ardiner’s composition is direct, honest. It leverages algorithmic procedures—including stochastic, aleatoric procedures—to override determinations made by human voluntary structures and by algorithmic serial structures, such as Gardiner’s deterministic intervals. The declamatory narrative of the casual human is overtaken or overridden by ‘the symptom’—a virtual organism that possesses an independence or autonomy that is distinct from its host’s body, like an infection or a cancer or an inherited disease that emerges in adulthood—overriding even one’s ability or will to reason, subsequently falling prey to self-delusions and scamsters who address the symptom with potions or ‘fields’.
S ystemic overrides in ‘Course of the Symptom’ are manifested in duration material. If you notate rhythmic durations as fractional values, denominators represent the number of units that divide a quarter note, i.e., beat-divisions. An eighth-note dividing a quarter-note into halves has a denominator of 2; an eighth-note triplet has a denominator of 3; and so forth. Numerators are factors given by serial and stochastic systems, which beat-divisions then distort. For example, a duration factor 12 strongly bears the influence of the beat-division applied to it. With a beat-division of 3, the duration (12/3) has a duration equivalent to four quarter-notes. With a more finely-granular beat-division such as 4, the duration (12/4) gives a shorter length, equivalent to three quarter-notes only.
A large factor can be applied to a small beat-division (12/6, equivalent to two quarter notes) and cause a shorter duration than a small factor applied to a large beat-division (5/2, equivalent to two-and-a-half quarter notes). Beat-division distortions impart rhythmic diversity, which Gardiner utilizes to lend extra dramatic tension within whatever base-duration series prevails in the piece.
C ourse of the Symptom’ explores schemata of music on different temporal/gestural scales—large-scale idioms analogous to sonata form, rondo form, etc.; small-scale idioms like voice-leading rhythmic motives, cadences, rules of counterpoint, etc.; intermediate-scale schemata—hypermeter; sequences; phrasing and compound phrases or segments—these are more indeterminate or unpredictable. Download the MP3s or listen to the CD in WindowsMediaPlayer with the ‘BarsAndWaves’ visualization display plug-in ‘on’. In the low-frequency range, you will see cues that are associated with rumble and other hypermeter structures that are not obvious when listening unless the volume is cranked way up. There are rhythmic and phrase-frequency ambiti in here, as well as melodic ambitus.
T he composition of music has evolved into an interactive process of directly sculpting sound morphologies on multiple time scales... [Vaggione’s] durations were, in general, very short. Silences of different lengths were placed between events. The density (or speed of succession) was very high: more than 20 events per second. This rate exceeds the limit of applicability of the Poisson law, which is valid to control sound distributions whose density are lower than 10–20 events per second. Beyond 20 events per second, one is no longer dealing with sounds as individual entities. However, the goal in building this structure by combining high density of sounds with highly contrasted parametric values was to create a texture showing a kind of kaleidoscopic ‘internal’ behavior.” — Curtis Roads, 2005.
T his ‘Course of the Symptom’ would make excellent film soundtrack, evoking concepts of time, memory, tradition, and expectation in music listeners/viewers. The musical rhetoric is aggressive, riveting—very realistically embodying features of serious chronic illness... phrase structure; illocutionary acts.
T he distorted, noisy digital synth sound intrudes upon and overrides analog atonal piano sound ... each of these are gestural ‘signs’ that stand for other concepts, such as pain and the processes of illness and the body’s responses to it. Gardiner’s post-processing involves extensive timbre/palette filtering with EQ. The piano gets infected by the electronics; the disease progresses through multiple tissues and organ-systems... contagion; metastasis.
I nitially, the abnormalities are intermittent, and intense anticipation through the silences and pianississimos predominates in the epoch surrounding the onset of the symptom... the patient (and family) hold doubts as to whether the abnormality is real, whether it will persist, etc. Everyone hopes that it will subside and go away. But it does not. The disease and its large-scale generators of noise and music persist. Gardiner’s digital audio workstation editing reveals itself as fundamental to composition and to performance...
I n ‘Location of the Symptom’, small-scale linear progressions draw attention to position and sequence. More locally, descending motions might be contra-structural to a deeper level ascending line. This would usually exclude melodic activity “in service of the fundamental line”, such as initial ascent or motion out of an inner voice; Schenkerians would have a field-day with this... A contra-structural directionality deflects Gardiner’s Urlinie away from the obligatory register (usually upwards in the electronics tracks). But ascending impulses turn out to be frequently misleading, adding dramatic tension as to what the next phase or the ultimate outcome of this insidious illness might be.
O r if you prefer, Leonard Meyer’s notions of implication/deflection could be applied to Gardiner’s complex noise/atonal/tonally-inflected musical language—the forms built up by the accretion of fragmentary utterances by the synth and by the piano, the personae of the movements’ two ‘characters’—the patient and the symptom-producing disease.
I f you utter “Is it time for my Actiq yet?” in your sick bed, the illocutionary force is that you are having breakthrough pain and desire pain relief, as distinct from your explicit locutionary act (a question about the existence of opiates in the nursing station medicine cabinet) and the perlocutionary act (causing somebody to administer you the pain med). The suffering piano does this beautifully, and we fear for its life. Gardiner’s EQ post-processed synth samples are themselves capable of illocutionary acts. The human pianist continues on his/her way, programmatically, deterministically, while, by contrast, the symptom machine becomes the dominant character...
A bout 30 minutes length, combining text, ambient sound of various sorts, sampled quotations from composed electro-acoustic music and possibly Schoenberg’s 6 Kleine Klavierstücke Op. 19? The piece embodies a dialectical balance between a number of polarities: speech/music, gesture/texture (e.g., Denis Smalley), linear time/multiply-directed time (e.g, Jonathan Kramer), and sick/well and male/female representations, a rich interplay of polarities with regard to timbral content and instrumentation.
T his is one brutal illness—a malady that gives no quarter to tenderness or recovery. A complex ‘patchwork’ of collocated elements and repetitions, the ‘Course of the Symptom’ invites a variety of listener-imagined meanings. Very convincing and more than a little ‘too close to home’ for clinicians and caregivers who tend to the needs of those with life-threatening illness. But clinicians and caregivers are the very ones who may benefit most from hearing this work. So, too, the participants and faculty in courses in Medical Humanities (see links below), for whom this recording may become an iconic element of the syllabus in years to come.
W e are reassured that the composition is not autobiographical, and we sincerely hope that Gardiner’s family members are all okay. At least at times of future health problems, from this music they know they can count on Michael’s empathetic and effective support...
[30-sec clip, Michael Gardiner, Course of the Symptom, ‘Character of the Symptom’, track4, 1.1MB MP3]
[30-sec clip, Michael Gardiner, Course of the Symptom, ‘Radiation of the Symptom’, track7, 1.1MB MP3]
[30-sec clip, Michael Gardiner, Course of the Symptom, ‘Course of the Symptom’, track9, 1.1MB MP3]
N ono’s work with electronic media revolved around spatial considerations and their acoustical effects. For instance, a sound approaching a listener rises in dynamics and fades as it passes. Its pitch level also rises and falls. By imitating the acoustic effects produced when a sound moves in relation to the perceiver, electronic instruments could simulate spatial motion. Actual spatial motion could also be achieved by having a signal travel across several acoustic sources. More importantly, a single electronic source could project several simultaneous movements quite clearly; multidimensionality required a large number of performers in comparison and created motion in several simultaneous dimensions much less audibly. Nono would refer to the spatially rendered music yielded by his electronic experiments as ‘il suono mobile’.” — Jeannie Ma. Guerrero, MTO, 2006, commenting on Luigi Nono’s ‘Il canto sospeso’ and later works.
