jwilzewske: individualism

Showing posts with label individualism. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Marc-André Hamelin’s Impressionism: Place, Memory & Identity

I wrote a Prelude and Fugue without thinking it would be part of a collection. Then gradually the idea [for composing a set of Etudes] came to me, because I was inspired by the Twelve Etudes in the Minor Keys by [the French composer] Alkan. I was playing a lot of [his pieces] at the time. But [while these Etudes were composed incrementally, over 25 years beginning in 1986] the ‘cycle’ didn’t really take shape until just a little while ago... When I had about nine of them finished, that’s when I got a letter out of the blue from C.F. Peters asking whether they could publish my Etudes. So that was really an incentive to finish the series.”
— Marc-André Hamelin, interview with Topher Levin.

M arc- André Hamelin’s Harriman-Jewell Series recital on Saturday evening explored the relation of the individual to ‘place’—impressions and memories of place and identity.

Berg - Piano Sonata, Op. 1
Liszt - Piano Sonata in B minor
Debussy - Préludes, Book 2 (excerpts): La puerta del vino, Les fées sont d’exquises danseuses, Les tierces alternées, Feux d’artifice
Hamelin - Twelve Études In All The Minor Keys (excerpts): Études 2, 7, 8, 11, and 12

H aving never heard them before, the 13-minute Berg Sonata and the 24-minutes of excerpts from Hamelin’s ‘12 Études in All the Minor Keys’ were, for me, the highlights of the performance.

T he 12 Études are like a time-lapse self-portrait of Hamelin as a person and as a musician. Each person’s identity is actively created: of that there is no doubt. Impressions of new experiences and memories of experiences past engage us on a lifelong, daily basis as each of us constructs our [multiple] identities, multiple personae. The dimensions explored in these Études include the body [including the left-hand Étude, No. 7], the neighborhood and community and nation, Time (the epoch in which you live or the person remembered lived), and our mobility between settings (émigréness)—some settings that we ‘own’ or belong to; other ones that are not ours, or that we are displaced from against our wishes, or that we out-live—how these all shape, and are shaped by, people’s identities.

U nlike some composers, I don’t regard writing for one hand as an opportunity to display pianistic proficiency. Instead, I consider it a fascinating compositional constraint. There is not much point in composing for one hand unless one tries to make the textures as rich as possible, and it is a special delight to make one hand sound like two.”
— Marc-André Hamelin, program notes.

T hese Études argue that sense-of-place and belonging are the result of our imagination as individuals and as families, communities, societies... that our identities are actively constructed over time, not passively received. Our narratives of place-situated belonging and identity are time-sensitive, context-sensitive. They mutate and evolve. They are a product of the things that we hold dear, fear, obsess over, remember; they are a product of where and with whom we spend most of our time. Hamelin is very modest about the happenstantial way in which the Études came to be the way they are—asserting that they merely or mostly accumulated over time; that they were never envisioned as a collection of 12 and were never meant to be autobiographical. And yet a great part of their beauty, I think, is that they are this 25-year pianistic portrait of his own personal Canadian narrative.

T hat they are all in minor keys is, I hope, not a consequence of his living in Boston!

H amelin’s encore, an obscure Prelude by Leonid Sabaneyev (1881–1968), was a captivating little character piece, mysterious, inviting, poignant, jewel-like... a by-now-nostalgic example of Soviet modernism embodying the will of the individual rather than the Party. Self-actualization of each comrade, is what it sounds like. Contemplate, if you will, the utopian dream of the national unity of free-spirit comrades creating, producing, acting in concert, is what it seems to suggest. This Prelude made me think, among other things, of how ungodly far humanity has come (regressed?) in 100 years! The things that, to many, once seemed reachable, in one’s own country! It feels like we are all émigrés now...

T he ineffable qualities of instrumental music meant that the authorities continued to regard music as a less-than-critical ideological arena.”
— Amy Nelson, Music for the Revolution, p. 243.

Sunday, July 31, 2011

Matthias Kronsteiner: Futurism of Bassoon

M odified #3 is the modification and expansion of sound... a future of what can be done electronically with timbre... a full composition from one sound, manipulated and transformed into many sounds.”
— Gene Pritsker.

T he three solo pieces by Till Körber, Christof Cech, and David Lang each push the boundaries of bassoon playing in their own unique way.”
— Matthias Kronsteiner.

P lease have a listen to ‘modified’, a wonderful CD by bassoonist Matthias Kronsteiner and collaborators Lisa Preimesberger (bass clarinet), Thomas Frey (flute), Ernst Weissensteiner (double bass), Philipp Sageder (voice), and Gene Pritsker (electronics; percussion), a CD to be released this coming Tuesday by CCR/Naxos. The disc opens with two movements from Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas brasilieras No. 6, W392, but the rest of the recording consists of new compositions by Till Körber, Christof Cech, Gernot Wolfgang, David Lang, Johannes Berauer, and Gene Pritsker.

[40-sec clip, Matthias Kronsteiner, Heitor Villa-Lobos, ‘Bachianas brasilieras No. 6, W392 – Ária (chôro)’; (track 1), 2011, 1.3MB MP3]

V illa-Lobos’s entry into the Parisian art world took place in 1922, immediately before Modern Art Week in São Paulo. The composer was invited to a lunch in the studio of the painter Tarsila do Amaral where he met up with, among others, the poet, painter, and film-maker Jean Cocteau. After the lunch, the artists became engrossed in a lively conversation which drifted into a discussion on the art of musical improvisation. Villa-Lobos... sat down [at do Amaral’s grand piano] to improvise. Cocteau, known for his boutades and his playful behavior, sat underneath the piano on the ground, ‘so I can hear better.’ At the end of Villa-Lobos’s improvisation, however, Cocteau returned to his chair and launched a ferocious attack on what he had heard: in his opinion, the music presented by the composer was not futuristic at all, probably no more than an emulation of the styles of Debussy and Ravel. Villa-Lobos immediately began furiously improvising more. Cocteau, though, remained intransigent, questioning this time whether true improvisation could be made in this way, played-to-order. The two artists began a heated ‘discussion’ and thought about exchanging blows. Some years later, David Bowie took up improvising impromptu lyrics and melodies in this manner, the grandeur and menace of ‘Heroes’, and all.”
— Paulo Renato Guérios, Museu Nacional/UFRJ, 2006.

[30-sec clip, Matthias Kronsteiner, David Lang, ‘Press Release’; (track 6), 2011, 1.2MB MP3]

T he brilliant pieces that make up this disc are each virtuosic in their own way. Agogic emphases at downward leaps and fast passages with wide-ranging excursions spanning the entire range of the instrument provide lots of dramatic interest. One senses an affectionate irony in writing things that make the bassoon do extremely dangerous leaps, with a high probability of hard landings. The cumulative effect of these essentially asserts the concreteness and everydayness of [virtuosic] bassoon-playing, denying its mystical, expressive side as the performer navigates these hazards. That the attempt is ultimately successful, and that it is carried off with panache, takes it beyond the everyday, though, and turns it into something redemptive or transcendent (something like playing Czerny at-tempo).

T here are lyrical, genuinely lovely passages and other spiky, vehement ones. The quality is incontestable throughout, compositions and performances of excellent artistry. To this are added the promised merits of inventiveness of ‘futuristic’ timbres—both in the individual [analog and digital] sounds, and in the formulas and orchestrations, which at times assemble themselves into pantheistic sonic agglomerations where the Great Unity cannot be separated into constituent parts (esp. the Pritsker piece).

T he minimalism that is evident in several of the works—notably the Lang piece—is like looking at a portrait for many tens of minutes, to understand and enjoy its charm. Beyond a certain limit, it becomes a form of Zen meditation or hypnosis. Whatever it is, it is enjoyable and valuable.

C omposers Concordance Records (link below) production values are excellent. The studio recording and engineering processes have nicely captured the all of the expressive bassoonism here—athletic, taut key-presses; sharp attacks; emphatic articulations—particularly on Kronsteiner’s playing in the pulsatile Lang and Cech pieces. Never too much key-noise or reed and breath sibilants... just enough so that you feel like you are there, as if up-close in a live performance.

T he intimacy of this Studio Weinberg recording is captivating. There are beginnings, middles, and endings in these pieces—they are not entirely linear, and they always have intriguing complexities, but they are not severe ones that diminish their accessibility or joy. This is no priceless ceramic vase or objet d’art or museum gallery! The pieces on this CD invite you to friend them and use them.

[Matthias Kronsteiner, Christof Cech, ‘New Waves’, 2010]

S ome years ago, I was interviewing for a quant job on Wall Street and, as one of the provocations to challenge the poise of his interviewee, the head of the firm abruptly asked whether I had ever been with a mulata brasiliera. I did not laugh. I replied, No, I was happily married, but I had been with Bachianas Brasilieras Nos. 1 through 6 and found them deeply intriguing and satisfying. He did not laugh. I do not know if it was a good enough answer.”
— DSM.

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.