jwilzewske: impressionism

Showing posts with label impressionism. Show all posts

Saturday, November 5, 2011

Object-oriented operator-overloading in Fauré’s Fantaisie for Flute and Piano Op. 79?

B y overloading standard operators on a class, you can exploit the intuition of the users of that class. This lets users program in the language of the problem domain rather than in the language of the machine.”
— Marshall Cline, ParaShift C++ FAQ.

A ttended James Galway’s recital the other evening. Thoroughly enjoyed it.

G alway is not subtle. His technical virtuosity, charismatic personality, and emphatic, extroverted playing style are incomparable.

B ut, beyond that, his performance of Fauré’s Fantaisie for Flute and Piano, Op. 79, led me to notice “key-undefining” and “-redefining” elements that strike me as similar to “operator overloading” in compiler design, or, more specifically, to runtime “polymorphisms” in parallel computing and cloud computing, where multiple processes that are interacting with each other concurrently implement more than one version of an operator, and the different operator instantiations have different semantics.

L ook at the score snippet above! In the Andantino movement we have middle-register F-natural (Ddim) against piano’s E in the LH. Other dissonant passages involving the flute object/process communicating with the piano object/process. Finale’s chord-analysis plug-in labels this as Ddim9 (third inversion), then Bdim. Your brain is like a master process that is executing and integrating multiple parallel child processes. If the scope of your brain’s attention encompasses all of the pitches in m. 17 in Op. 79, say, then it receives a hexachord back from the flute object class and the piano object class—an E major triad invasively intermingled with an F major triad... triads that are a dissonant semitone apart... a sort of exotic suspension.

I t is like operator overloading in C++, C#, Scala, Python, Ruby, R, and other languages.

T he interval of the fifth serves as a melodic frame for flute class execution and piano class execution in each of the ‘mélodie’s’ sections, its space gradually rising and becoming more chromatic—making the timbre brighter and the emphasis stronger or more individualistic or ‘recitational’. Melodic motion expands both registrally and chromatically. This is not so much subjectivity/ambiguity or vagueness/tentativeness that are aspects of impressionism, so much as it is concurrent, deliberate polymorphism of operators implemented by different object classes!

T he Allegro movement has rampant elisions of phrase completions, such that cadences are implicit and there is implied emphasis on what is omitted. That’s another feature in Op. 79 that, to me, presages parallel and cloud-based computing... Eager quitting by the Map-Reduce master process when ‘reducer’ jobs have by now yielded enough to enable the master process to abort the rest of them and proceed to the next task.

G abriel Urbain Fauré was, shall we say, an erstwhile compiler engineer who lived, oh, about 100 years “before his time”.

F or your interest, some Op. 79 videos on YouTube are here, and here, and here, and here, and here. In them you will see that the “object polymorphisms” in Op. 79 are not necessarily evident unless the flute playing is as strong as Galway’s.

Friday, April 8, 2011

Musorgsky’s Dream Worlds: I Musici and Natasha Turovsky’s Animations

W hen Victor Hartmann, an artist, designer and sculptor, died of a heart attack in 1873, his close friend Modest Mussorgsky was devastated and slipped into a depression aggravated by his alcohol problem. Vladimir Stasov, a music critic and friend of both Mussorgsky and Hartmann, arranged an exhibit of about 400 works of the deceased artist, hoping that this tribute might relieve Mussorgsky's depression. Thanks to Stassov, Mussorgsky was inspired to create a suite of ten musical portraits for piano, but it did not achieve popularity in any form until Maurice Ravel orchestrated it in 1923. ... Two years ago, Yuli Turovsky made his own arrangement for string orchestra. Each musical portrait of the original work is based on one of Hartmann’s paintings, though the visual element has been reinterpreted in surrealistic terms by Turovsky’s daughter Natasha.”
— Robert Markow, program notes.

K nowing that most of the paintings by Victor Hartmann which inspired his friend Mussorgsky were lost, I asked Natasha to paint new pictures, pictures inspired by the music, just as the music had been inspired by the pictures. After this was done, the next idea was to make these pictures and their personages ‘dance’ with the music. In this ‘symbiotic’ form, the audience will listen as well as ‘see’ the music.”
— Yuli Turovsky.

P ossibly the best, most compelling imagery to accompany music ever, these animated paintings [mainly watercolors] by the talented artist/violinist Natasha Turovsky, daughter of I Musici’s founder, Yuli Turovsky that were projected during their performance in Kansas City tonight.

I was reminded of Guerino Mazzola’s and Stefan Müller’s work on music information retrieval (MIR), semantic matching, and visualizations of music vector-fields with his Corebounce and EspressoRUBETTE® software (2003, pp. 920ff)... a set of notes comprising a score S, a corresponding performance P, and the associated set of field vectors F.... The animations reminded me of Mazzola’s so-called ‘Inverse Performance’... how expressive shapes can be extracted from performance and can then be re-represented in other media.

M odest Musorgsky began with a combination of title and then music... It is natural that anyone listening to music probably will have images going in his or her mind. Painting these pictures simply captured some of them for me, our version of images, in a concert. I would listen thousand times to the same piece... some are inspired more by ideas, some more by actual music color... At that point, when I was doing these paintings, there was no question about [the possibility of] doing something more with a painting [an extended opportunity to amend and enhance it]. But when I was asked now to do animation, then I thought, okay, now it [conventional painting] is not enough. If I would have known in advance the details of the performance or animation production that [Yuli] had intended, probably I would have done the paintings differently; I would have made different pictures. It is okay. In animation, I thought, how to make this stand out, since this character is very small? I did maybe ten drawings of a rooster... which became all 10 into one animated rooster that moves around on the screen. It is like a ballet: this movement, you try to see how the image, how this particular part of the image corresponds to [signification in—] the music... It’s not just animation; it’s not just music: they became ‘one’.”
— Natasha Turovsky, NPR interview with Laura Spencer, 06-APR-2011.

S ocial pressures shape anybody’s personal expression, composers maybe more so than others. But while both internal and external issues imbue the composition with its material and color, meaning does not imply pathology. Handel’s ‘O, Sleep, why dost thou leave me’ doesn’t necessarily mean that Handel was an insomniac or obsessing over his sleep patterns. Writing ‘Kindertotenlieder’ wouldn’t necessarily mean that Mahler was morbidly depressed, even though this was composed to memorialize the death of a friend’s child.

S o the message sent does not necessarily define the sender. And yet, “poiesis is concerned with the individual condition of the work’s creator as a consequence of the history [of the work’s] development as well as with the role of the broader frame of the work... neither the frequency of the vibration nor the envelope of its amplitude is uniquely determined... In fact, Fourier’s Theorem only states uniqueness of the coefficients if the fundamental period is given; but the latter is not automatically inscribed: such parameters are part of poiesis... the way of making the sound, not a ‘neutral’ sound-object.” [Mazzola, p. 12]. Here we have in Yuli Turovsky’s chamber orchestral arrangements of Musorgsky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ Natasha Turovsky’s ‘inscribing’ us, just as she was herself ‘inscribed’ by this music. Truly beautiful.

B y 1871 [age 32] he was already becoming irrelevant, and he sensed this. His intensifying depression made him fair game for anyone who might seem to have an answer, and he fell under the influence of a soothsayer who turned him from a freethinker into a fervent believer... For four years he withdrew completely from Russian musical life...”
— David Brown, p. 204.

T he sync’ing of the animated montages to the orchestra’s playing was flawless, crisp, elegant. The moods of the Natasha Turovsky’s paintings (and Gäel Hollard’s choreography and digital renderings and animations of the paintings by Hollard and Marie-Josee Auclair and Jean-Philippe Traore) embody the best of atmospheric aesthetics in animated film production. The imagery powerfully evokes the fantastical hallucinations, the playfulness, the vivid dreams and nightmares, the bipolar depression, the impressionability of Musorgsky near the end of his short life—evokes his inertness leading to dependence on others to get him to act, alternating with extreme agitation. The paintings are edgy and have wonderful visual 'depth'... they are at times sweet but not sentimental. Turovsky’s brush and pen and charcoal techniques are varied, capturing and keeping the audience’s attention and lending dramatic emphasis to the sonic gestures and arc of the music—exciting yet coherent throughout the work, despite the considerable variety in technique and visual composition.

W hen many struggle to integrate light and imagery with serious music, Ms. Turovsky and Mr. Hollard, Ms. Auclair, and Mr. Traore succeed. If you wish to have an iconic example of an approach that works, combining imagery and music, this is it. Bravo!

T abaimo’s installations clearly propose a notion and position of implicated ‘spect-actorship’ for viewers, where ‘implicated’ designates simultaneous participation and immersion—physical, political, theoretical, poetic... ‘Spect-actorship’ captures our strangely split positionality of being a part of this installation—we act like, and even become, additional characters in the animated film... the work's mechanical reproduction of a double reflexivity: the reflexivity inherent in the artist’s implicit conception of the virtual image and creative evolution as animation; and the reflexivity of the animated film as an art that is endlessly fascinated by its own elastic capacity for world-making.”
— Steven Brown, p. 209.

F rom the back room the sound of plates crashing and uncorking of bottles was to be heard. Each time Musorgsky emerged, he was becoming ever more ‘tight’. After supper the concert began, where Musorgsky would appear already completely ‘plastered’, as accompanist and solo performer. He played his own compostions with amazing perfection, making a stunning impression... At this time he was suffering from frightening hallucinations so often observed in alcoholics. Leonova reported on this in her recollections.”
— Sergey Rozhdestvensky, Univ. St. Petersburg Dept. of History, passage from Keldish & Yakovlev, 1932, ‘Musorgsky k pyatidesyatoletiyu so dnya smerti’, quoted in Brown, p. 352.

Sunday, September 27, 2009

Stefan Jackiw: Violin Atmospherics, Where They Come From

Stefan Jackiw, photo (c) Lisa-Marie Mazzucco

V iolinist Stefan Jackiw and pianist Max Levinson performed last night at Kansas City’s Folly Theater, as part of the Harriman-Jewell 45^th season.

Beethoven: Sonata No. 1 in D major
Copland: Sonata for Violin and Piano
Lutosławski: Subito
Brahms: Sonata No. 3 in D minor, Op. 108

F or me, the highlight of the evening was the performance of Witold Lutosławski’s ‘Subito’ for violin and piano. Lutosławski was noted for his striving to achieve a unity of effect and expression through a 'system' of composing, for his love of drama, and for his penchant for high-saturation coloristic effects. Jackiw’s tendencies align perfectly with Lutosławski’s.

M akes me wonder what Jackiw would do with Debussy’s violin and piano Sonata, L.140... Color for color’s sake.

E mphasis on small-scale, phrase-length features... anticipating the very next interval, the current ‘arc’. ‘Operatic’ sense of drama and discovery!

C all it ‘animated canon’—reverential, recursively referential to what has gone before, sentiment upon sentiment, until you are airborne.

M ore than this, Jackiw’s violinistic ‘voice’ is both liminal and abject in its submissiveness to the atmospherics as they unfold. The fascination with boundaries and liminality is sometimes forceful, as in the presto agitato of the Brahms, and at other times delicate in the andante semplice and lento of the Copland. Delicate, delicate vibrationless decrescendos, vanishing into thin air.

N ot surprisingly, as an encore Jackiw frequently performs ‘Méditation’ from Jules Massenet’s opera ‘Thaïs’, a wonderful vehicle for Jackiw’s interpretive sense of where the ‘earth’ ends and the ‘sky’ begins.

E lizabeth Lorenzo (UCLA) has argued that Massenet intentionally imbues his female characters with aggression and overt sexuality, so much as to place them well beyond the realm of acceptable feminine conduct, exulting in their defiant refusals to be contained—rhetorically anticipating French feminism. In the instance of Thaïs, Massenet’s opera with a libretto by Gallet based on the novel by Anatole France, set in Egypt under Greek occupation, we have a Cenobite monk, Athanaël, who tries to convert Thaïs, an Alexandrian courtesan and devotée of Venus, to Christianity. Eventually Athanaël acknowledges that his obsession with Thaïs is really only lust... the licentious courtesan, pure of heart, opposite the outwardly abstemious religious man who is carnal and deluded through and through... an object lesson in religious eroticism vs. erotic spirituality?

S o Thaïs is afraid of dying; she knows beauty is only skin deep; a violin is only a mortal box with strings. After a bumpy struggle in her soul through the night she hooks up with Athanaël in the morning, to go with him to the desert. Later Thaïs is almost dead with fatigue—really bad case of the flu? we’re not sure what. Athanaël plunks her at the oasis—more boundaries and liminality—in the care of Albine and the nuns, and then returns to the desert. But he can’t get the beautiful woman he has “saved” out of his mind. He sees her in his dreams; he hears voices telling him she is dying. He goes and finds Thaïs on her death-bed/boundary. He tries to revive her, exhorting her with sweet carnal nothings, so inappropriate we can hardly believe it. But visions of heaven already occupy her mind, and she dies:“I see God” are her last words.

Y es, well. Massenet was fascinated by the conflict between the secular and the sacred. And a courtesan who turns from the God of Love toward the Love of God is sentimental Massenet in spades.

B ut for Jackiw such a piece is an exploration, not so much of an eternal tension/conflict between the divine and the carnal, but of pure emotion itself. Jackiw embodies not a revivified sentimental, dramatic Massenet or Copland or Lutoslawski but instead a fresh incarnation of the muse that makes a composer create these things in the first place.

W hich is actually a far more valuable and inspiring trick! Bravo!

J ackiw has performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and the orchestras of Baltimore, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Minnesota, Nashville, Oregon, Rochester, San Francisco, Seattle, and St. Luke’s, among others. Born in 1985, Mr. Jackiw began playing violin at the age of 4. His teachers have included Zinaida Gilels, Michèle Auclair, and Donald Weilerstein. Mr. Jackiw holds a B.A. from Harvard University, as well as an Artist Diploma from the New England Conservatory. In 2002, he was awarded the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant. These days, Mr. Jackiw makes his home in New York City.

L utosławski sent the work to Rostropovich as it progressed, with explanations couched largely in terms of the work’s dramatic scenario, in which the cellist and the orchestra confront each other as adversaries. This concept appealed strongly to Rostropovich, and he developed a deep identification with the dramatic persona represented in the solo part.”
— Steven Stucky, Lutosławski and His Music, p. 92.