jwilzewske: innocence

Showing posts with label innocence. Show all posts

Sunday, March 9, 2008

Tallis Scholars: Historically-Informed Alterity Causes Ecstatic Shivering and Paroxysmal Tearing

T wo stanzas, and the tune is done. Silence hangs over the hall. It drifts above the seats like a balloon across the horizon. For two downbeats, even breathing is a crime. Then there’s no surviving this surprise except by applauding it away. The noisy gratitude of hands starts time up again, sending the dart to its target and my brother on to the things that will finish him.”
— Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing, p. 4.

M usical liturgical life does unquestionably contain this potential [to elicit a thrill of existential elation and fear and longing]: its legacy even now supplies much of the repertoire for secularized concert-goers; and its visual art stocks our galleries and continues to inspire... The phenomenon of ‘edge’ experience certainly links worship to universal human apprehension. It does more: it directs worship itself back to an original evocative power, a force which seems mostly to have been overtaken by the mundanity it was supposed to overcome.”
— Graham Hughes, Worship as Meaning, p. 276.

L iturgical theology for late modern times must show how worship can make sense for people shaped within the modern paradigm... Worship’s recognizability lies in its coherence with other human ‘boundary’ experiences. Worship cannot be simply coextensive with generalized human experience. ‘Meaning,’ hence liturgical meaning, lies in the play on one another of similarity and difference. Characteristic of ‘edge’ experiences is that these heighten or intensify—and in this way disclose—what has always been the case. Perturbation can range in intensity from the annoyance of missing my train, to a disbelieving discovery that my job no longer exists. And elation can be either the joy of a spring morning or beaing head-over-heels in love. But this sliding scale between normalcy and the extraordinary also means that there are infinite degrees according to which I will allow the ‘alterity of the edge’ to assert itself... The sensed security can be illusory: it is possible to be hurled from assured self-determination to uttermost dread in seconds. Even should I be so fortunate in life as never to have been plunged in crisis my equanimity conceals the fact of my ‘thrownness’: that I had no say in whether and in which circumstances I would be born, nor about my eventual departure. At the borders, exposed and concealed, I am anything but in-control. And at these edges—whether of disaster or of fortune—it will not be uncommon to use language such as ‘undone’, ‘coming to pieces’, ‘at my wits’ ends’. In a word, alterity which had been kept at bay in ordinariness is now terrifyingly (or wonderfully) real.”
— Graham Hughes, Worship as Meaning, p. 276.

It’s usually two singers per part (SSATB), donning the surprise of flesh and emitting celestial notes here on earth. And so it was this evening in Kansas City when The Tallis Scholars performed.

Peter Phillips and colleagues presented a concert of works from Spain and Portugal, including:

Mendes - Asperges me
Cardoso - Lamentations; Magnificat
Lobo - Pater peccavi; Audivi vocem
Melgas - Ajuva nos; Domine hominem
Victoria - Requiem.

The Victoria six-voice Requiem was particularly novel. Like all Requiem settings, the music is predominantly dramatic in character and intent—taking off with the introspective/hermetical Requiem æternam, ascending through the ecstatic and terrifying vision of a furious and wrathful God, and coming in for a feather-light ‘landing’ with a subdued Kyrie, singers on the brilliantly-lit altar platform at Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, audience in the dark. The Spanish mystical brand of Catholicism communicated in this piece seems oddly premonitory of present-day self-styled liturgies.

A fter seeing the Tallis Scholars, the Renaissance doesn’t seem remote at all.”
— Chicago Sun Times, August 2006.

This superb recital gave us an aerial view of religious conviction as ‘acting-out’—aspirations toward an innocence and goodness that would not only be acceptable to God but also quieting to one’s own conscience, enacted in public. The appeal that this had in Renaissance times—and that it still has today—cannot be overestimated; not just the innocence and expiation as motives, but the seductiveness and popularity of institutionalizing it as public ritual.

The counterpoint alternating with homophony is especially dramatic and evocative of other-worldliness, in support of the liturgical ‘acting-out’ of conviction and supplication.

In fact, the evocativeness is so powerful and profoundly moving that it boggles my mind: how one can sing this music without tears rolling down one’s cheeks the whole while? How can one not come undone? Rehearsing and performing it repeatedly cannot possibly immunize one against its power!

The magic of it is that music can do this at all. The terror of it lies in the fact that music is so potent, that it works so well, and that it can make us go where we don’t necessarily want to go. (That may have been the whole liturgical ‘point’ ... )

Thyrotropin-Releasing Hormone (TRH; (pyro)Glu-His-Pro-NH₂ ) when suddenly released in large amounts (by the hypothalamus, into the pituitary’s hypophyseal portal system) can produce this shaking and shivering and the spine-tingling qualitative sensations that are associated with experiencing ecstatic awe. It does this by direct action of TRH on receptors in the brain. And 1-[2-hydroxyphenyl]-4[3-nitrophenyl]-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyrimidine-2-one, an experimental drug, can do this too—it has been used as an experimental model to try to understand spine-tingling—but the drug has a peripheral site of action instead of only in the brain, so its mimicry of TRH’s action on the pituitary is not exact.

And after the TRH hits its receptors, then the multi-faceted signalling cascade begins. How does this work?! Shaking and shivering and spine-tingling sensations are elicited by a variety of stimuli. The sensations can be inhibited by central administration of drugs that act as agonists on opiate receptors, muscarinic cholinergic receptors, and alpha-adrenergic receptors. We know that from experiments with laboratory animals, plus anecdotal accounts by anesthesiologists—whose practice in the operating room and in the PACU involves administering drugs that potently affect those receptors; and whose practice also involves recovering patients as they emerge from anesthesia and those medications are washed out or metabolized away. [Bear in mind that the neurophysiology of how ‘spine-tingling’ emotional reactions happens is different from the cell biology of nerve synapses—a scientific field that recently has co-opted the phrase ‘spine-tingling’ as a colorful way of referring to spiny structural changes and variations in nerve cell synaptic membranes. See Huettner and Spires and Hyman and others (Spine-tingling excitement from glutamate receptors. Science STKE 2003; 210:53; Neurobiol Aging 2007; 28:687). Keep in mind, too, that there is a lot of appallingly incorrect disinformation/bullshit (via YahooAnswers.com and other web sources) about the physiology of spine-tingling. Needless to say, spine-tingling has not been a heavily funded area of research, insofar as it is (a) not related to an important medical problem or disease {not even Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy (RSD) or neuropathic pain or Familial Dysautonomia} and (b) it is transient {each paroxysm unpredictably comes and goes in seconds} and would therefore be very difficult to study.] A considerable amount is known about the neurophysiology of spine-tingling in general, but not a lot is known about the neurophysiology of spine-tingly music specifically.

At any rate, for me in Saturday night’s Tallis Scholars performance there was no pharmaceutical protection from spine-tingling, no remedy in sight at all. Just a few bars into the 6-voice Requiem (Tomás Luis de Victoria, 1605) and here come the shivers—up and down the whole length of the spine, uncontrollably, continuously, my dorsomedial hypothalamus (DMH) and brainstem going wild.

You must realize I didn’t go there expecting this to happen; I did not attend this concert with the aim of being moved to tears in this way by the singing. Nor do you attend concerts with this aim, with some exceptions. And yet it does happen, this reflex, this shivering tearing neurophysiology of the ancient hind-brain of our mammalian prehistory. The rest of our Saturday had been ‘normal’, and now this—in this darkened cave of a cathedral, full of echoes and faintly redolent of Saturday 2:30 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. Masses and a funeral held here earlier in the day, for a dear 88.9 year-old someone we did not know. But we now see that we are just tiny bystanders, ceremoniously hurled into emotional depths on a cold March evening; bystanders undone by sacred music written by clever Lusitanians and Spaniards some 400 years ago. Hyperhedonic existential adventure! Acoustically-evoked hyperautonomia! Syncopal musical psychotourism! You need to read Phillips’s book, What We Really Do, to better understand their art. Better still, go to one of The Tallis Scholars’ performances and get your spine tingled yourself. Don’t understand Latin? Doesn’t matter. Deist, or atheist, or somewhere in between? Doesn’t matter. The cosmic beauty—and the shivers—induced by Tallis Scholars are universal.

T he embellishments that the soprano sings on the way down from the top C [in Allegri’s Miserere] were not composed by Allegri but were instead improvised by generations of singers in the Sistine Chapel. These embellishments were guarded even more jealously than the written music…”
— Peter Phillips.

C onvinced that people shape their meanings from those available to them, Graham Hughes inquires into liturgical constructions of meaning, within the larger context of late twentieth-century meaning theory. Drawing particularly upon the work of Charles Peirce, Hughes employs semiotic theory to analyze the construction, transmission and apprehension of meaning within the worship service.”
— Jacket blurb, Hughes book.

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Robert Taub: Aesthetics, Quantum Tunneling, and the Musical Path of Most Resistance

Mountain Paths of Greater and Lesser Resistance

R obert Taub, a Babbitt champion, played ‘Reflections’ (1974), a stunning work for piano and synthesized tape, and ‘Canonical Form’ (1983), a seminal piano work in which contrapuntal lines get put through innumerable combinations and permutations. Yet on the surface, the piano piece captivates with its bold shifts of mood and texture: incisive and clipped one moment, delicate and pensive the next.”
— Anthony Tommasini, NYT, 12-MAY-2006.

I recently heard a portion of Robert Taub’s account of Beethoven’s Sonata in F minor, Op. 2, No. 1, on NPR’s Morning Edition program while in the car, on my way driving to work. Robert Taub is a Princeton- (class of 1977) and Juilliard-trained American pianist known for his performance of contemporary classical music. He has performed and recorded many of the works of Babbitt, Powell, Persichetti, and Brümmer—as well as Beethoven, Scriabin, and others. Robert Taub was Artist-in-Residence at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study from 1994 through 2000. Robert Taub appeared in November 2005 with Rob Kapilow at the Folly Theater in Kansas City on the Friends of Chamber Music’s ‘What Makes It Great?’ series. And I had heard him play many years ago, when Taub was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. But I have not heard him perform live for a long while. Hearing him on the radio prompted me to revisit Taub’s recordings and try to understand why I admire his playing so much.

M y conclusion is that, while he creates an illusion of relative ease, Robert does not take any ‘easy’ routes—not in the Sessions or Babbitt, and not in the Beethoven. In fact, he seems always to cleave to paths less traveled. He takes the ‘path of most resistance’, not the ‘path of least resistance.’

W hy? I would ask Robert if I get the opportunity. But for now, and in view of the previous post’s reflections on Andrew Armstrong’s playing, I think the reason—for Robert, for Andrew, for many others—has to do with personal temperament and avidity for risk, and with personal motivations and how music comes to be a prominent part of one’s life. After all, this playing is not a ‘job’. Artistic integrity is not about free-will, choosing, and then cohering with one’s choice—as if one could simply decide what one is or could be, pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps, and become that. Instead, it’s about discovery—of the truth in the music, and of one’s own ‘chops’—and acceptance of what one has been given or what one has found out.

In his ‘Principia Ethica,’ G. E. Moore asserted that the property ‘Good’ is simple, indefinable, and non-natural [timeless]. Good has an immediacy and immanence that are impervious to analysis: the indisputable aesthetic unity of the fine wine in the glass. That’s what I hear in Taub’s playing, just as I hear it in Armstrong’s playing. The playing is beautifully crafted, yes, and with no unnecessary tension—only the amounts and types necessary to accomplish the aesthetic and expressive purposes. But there is their clear musical ‘vision’ and this burning desire to express it. The fact that the need to express it entails arduous treks up very high peaks—or tunneling straight through them—that’s just the way things are.

W hat is a ‘path of most resistance’? Well, the path of least resistance describes the physical or metaphorical pathway that provides the smallest resistance to forward motion by a given object or entity, among a set of alternative paths. In physics, the concept is often used to explain why an object or entity (electrons, for the flow of electricity) follows a given path. So the path of most resistance is the opposite: the one path among the set of alternatives that presents the maximum obstacle or energy requirement, the most improbable path.

But in quantum physics there is the possibility of ‘tunneling’, where particles behave in a probabilistic rather than deterministic manner. My impressions of Taub’s playing of Sessions or Babbitt are that he is engaging in quantum tunneling, phrase to phrase.

A n aphorism is not a mere fragment, a morsel of thought: it is a proposition which only makes sense in relation to the state of forces that it expresses, and which changes sense, which must change sense, according to the new forces which it is capable of attracting.”
— Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche & Philosophy, p. xiii.

T aub plays Babbitt as though the phrases were quantum Nietzschean aphorisms—a totally different way of doing philosophy, and a totally different way of doing aesthetics: this is maybe the difference in how Taub enters into this music so beautifully, how he makes it his own.”
— DSM.

In a manner reminiscent of Jacques Lacan’s, Jacques Derrida’s or Hélène Cixous’s sense of ‘performing,’ Taub’s playing is like a text that resists stereotypical acts of reading by acting-out his own idiomatic identity. Some may think his taste ‘out-of-step’ with conventional wisdom, but that waywardness and deviance are the basis for his originality and timeless [non-natural] beauty. He’s a musicians’ musician, but one whose diverse, novel, and sometimes dissident styles of playing are accessible to almost anyone with the inclination to listen.

W hat else? There is an innocence about his tone and his phrasing that belies his scholarship and worldliness. There is no law of physics against what he is about to do, and so he does it. Whatever is not forbidden is permitted! A barrier looms in front of him—a musical passage that presents formidable technical challenges—and quantum tunneling kicks in. Suddenly, he is on the other side.

His pedaling technic, among other things, is noteworthy. Listening to it, I was led to revisit the papers that Bruno Repp at Yale published about ten years ago. In that research, Bruno studied conservatory pianists and the biomechanics of their pedal depressions and pedal releases as a function of tempo and musical style. Excerpts from Beethoven and Brahms sonatas were a particular focus of Repp’s research.

Repp found that there was no stable or consistent aspect of personal pedaling style that generalized among the pianists he studied. There was no constant phase-relationship between the periodic key depressions and either peda depressions or pedal releases, nor was there a consistent delay of pedal actions relative to manual actions.

But pedal-change time (PCT) can’t decrease indefinitely as tempo increases. And the kinematics of hand and foot actions changes with global changes in tempo—the velocity of pedal depressions and releases tends to increase with tempo, and the depth of pedal depressions tends to decrease—so that motor delays (both absolute, in milliseconds, and relative, as a percentage of inter-onset interval (IOI) ) are a function of tempo.

Repp found that there were different individual tolerances for overlap between successive sonorities. Long PRT and long key overlaps result in more appealing legato and tend to be mastered relatively late in a pianist’s development. In terms of the neurophysiology, the longer these intervals are, the harder they are to control, according to Repp. But the skill to achieve long PRT and long key-pedal overlap enables elite pianists to systematically vary these times over wider and wider ranges to achieve their expressive purposes—one of the ‘secrets’ of elite legato technic that we hear in Taub’s playing—the Beethoven Sonata in F minor, Op. 2, No. 1, that I heard on the radio, for example.

T he sense of disappointment philosophers suffer from becomes the fundament of profoundly reformist religious and political philosophies called ideologies. Because ideologues radically underestimate the amount of value that is contained—that could be contained—by the world, they suffer from a deep-seated, ever-to-be-frustrated feeling that the world stands in need of a special kind of transformation, or that it must somehow be transcended if human life is to be made worth living. The unique feature of the sought-for change is that it depends on a thoroughgoing reconception of the world. Their thought is that, since the value of the things in the world as we presently conceive it to be is insufficient, we must conceive it wholly anew as the first step toward remaking it—if we are ever to discover the things that would give it sufficient value. Moore responds to this by arguing that such a reconception is not merely unnecessary and self-defeating, but the cause of great unhappiness. Whatever value is to be had by new things results from their being things human beings have known to be good from time immemorial. To try to make any of these things into something never before beheld is to try to make something into what it is not... Our attitude toward the [real things in the world in its current configuration] must then be one of inadvertent denigration rather than enjoyment.”
— Brian Hutchinson, G.E. Moore’s Ethical Theory, p. 172.

M oore’s argument for the indivisibility of Good leaves no room for regret upon the sacrifice of a smaller good for the sake of a greater good. More importantly, although his doctrine of organic unities leaves it open for him to say that the greatest of goods depends on something bad, this is a possibility he explicitly rejects. Immediately, this is suprising, as he finds tragedy—the artistic representation of suffering and evil—to be a very great good. But he maintains that the actions and emotions that art displays for our wonderment (in its presentation of the eternal struggle between good and evil) can rest on make-believe rather than reflect anything real... Moore’s thought is an exercise in the dialectic of innocence rather than of lost innocence itself.”
— Brian Hutchinson, G.E. Moore’s Ethical Theory, p. 175.

T o be completely innocent is to be unaware that there is any perspective or condition in opposition to which a case for innocence needs to be made—it is to be unaware even of the tricks of thought that lead the misguided to deny innocence. It follows then that anyone who attempts to diagnose those tricks of thought in order to make the case for innocence cannot be completely innocent. But if only someone who is no longer innocent can make the case for innocence, then to make the case is to guarantee its defeat. The possibility of innocence as a permanent condition of life cannot be said. But because it could only be done against a backdrop that is impossible, it also cannot be shown. For it even to occur to someone to try to state Moore’s [theory of innocence], he must consider that a simple and easily recoverable misunderstanding lies behind the thought of those who see the world as standing in need of redemption. The impulse to see the world falsely ... must be of the depth of a simple arithmetical mistake.”
— Brian Hutchinson, G.E. Moore’s Ethical Theory, p. 176.

Robert Taub recording of Scriabin sonatas