jwilzewske: islamei

Showing posts with label islamei. Show all posts

Saturday, December 8, 2007

Bronfman: Is Virtuosity ‘Necessary’? Is Sublimity ‘Measurable’?

I t is not true that the entire evening will be as hard as you say. There is one easy part in tonight’s program. I think you call it the interval, the intermission?”
— Yefim Bronfman, jesting repartee with audience, in reply to Cynthia Siebert’s words introducing him, 07-DEC-2007, Kansas City.

There are many instances of virtuosic writing in these pieces and, with Yefim Bronfman, many instances of virtuosic playing. The profusion of dazzle makes apprehending the pieces even harder—we find ourselves wanting to press a ‘◄’ button and hear each passage again. Even the asynchrony in the second movement of the Beethoven Sonata No. 13 (Op. 27, No. 1) is texturally and rhythmically complex—it resists decomposition or deconstruction. But Bronfman’s account of Balakirev’s ‘Islamei’ may be the first time when I had to set aside the whole process of comprending the music, step back from it, throw up my hands and just marvel: How did he do that? ... Intricate sets of nonlinear relationships such that only certain aspects of them can be grasped at a time, to use Paul Cilliers’ phrase, defining complexity.

Look below — think of all the cognition and neurophysiology needed to absorb all that’s happening even in this short little introductory bit: the rhythmic and contrapuntal complexity, and how these link up so seamlessly with what has come before and what is yet to come, not only within these 6 bars but within the next 29 pages. I’m impatient, not a fan of protracted development. Very few composers can pull long thematic developments off gracefully and, even when they do, the listener thinks, ‘Okay, that was impressive, but — was it necessary?’ But with Yefim Bronfman the virtuosic passages not only ‘work’ — we glimpse how the passages are necessary to the expressive goals of the piece. We suspend our disbelief and immerse ourselves in the thing, and we take it to heart and rapidly accept the composer’s/Bronfman’s goals as our own.

I should like now to play something easy: Chopin… Now, Prokofiev, something that is, finally, easy… The Schumann Romance and Intermezzo: at last, easy!”
— Yefim Bronfman, remarks to audience, winking puckishly, prior to performing encores #1, #2, and #3 [Chopin Etude Op. 10 No. 12; Prokofiev, Finale from Sonata No. 7 Op. 83; and Schumann Op. 26, respectively], 07-DEC-2007, Kansas City.

How, then, would we measure virtuosity? Could musical virtuosity be quantified? I think the answer is ‘yes’. A good ‘virtuosity metric’ would not only be longitudinal—a velocity correlate of the number of notes per unit time. Velocity or longitudinal complexity is not enough to capture what we routinely mean by the word ‘virtuosic’.

Virtuosity is also related to the degree of rhythmic irregularity and vertical harmonic complexity and pitch span, the slew rate (how fast the span is traversed, in individual jumps; how long is the cumulative duration that such rapid jumps, hand-crossings, etc., are sustained), the jump rate (how many jumps per minute), the degree of multi-processing and rendezvousing between the parallel processes (in the right and left hands of the pianist, in regard to Bronfman’s playing), and the precision required in all of these moves. This last part—the precision—is important. It’s closely related to ‘system identification’: our intuitive ‘Can you detect a mistake or not?’ criterion.

In regard to these factors, I think ‘processual’ musical virtuosity (or a virtuosic composition) would be measured like complexity in nature is measured—and how it is mathematically measured in computer science: pi algebras, minimum description length, Hausdorff fractal measure, and Kolmogorov complexity measure. So far, only a few have looked at applying Kolmogorov complexity to music (Paul Vitányi; Ming Li; handful of others), but I think it will be a fruitful avenue to pursue further ...

A complex system is one that is thermodynamically open (participates in a matter and energy budget and exchange) and operates away from equilibrium. A complex system is one whose history matters; whose present and future behavior are, in part, determined by its past.”
— J. Ricard, Complexity and Dynamics of Life Processes.

C omplexity results from the interaction between the components of a system, and therefore complexity is manifested at the level of the system itself.”
— Gregoire Nicolis & Ilya Prigogine, Exploring Complexity.

A complex system is one in which there are far more possibilities than can be actualized.”
— Niklas Luhmann, Sociological Theory of Law.

It’s also related to philosophy-of-mind and artificial intelligence and Turing Machines and Searle’s Chinese Box: can a listener tell whether the performer hidden inside the machine/box is human or not? If the sounds emitted are implausibly complex in terms of their cognitive and motor nervous system implications and the composition is syntactically well-formed and precisely ordered, then we ordinarily deduce that the box may contain either a very good synthesizer and a very good software-driven sequencer attempting to deceive us to believing it is a live human, or it may contain a new super-human being whose virtuosic skill is simply beyond anything that we’ve ever before encountered or imagined. (I close my eyes and listen to Bronfman... My conclusion, especially in view of his casualness and humor, is that he must be super-human.)

(On the other hand, if a composition is implausibly complex but doesn’t consist of syntactically ‘well-formed’ expressions——is instead comprised of random sounds whose structure strikes us as arbitrary, chaotic, and imprecise, as, say, in a piece by the late Karlheinz Stockhausen——then we can’t make any such deduction.)

Schumann, Faschingsschwank, Intermezzo, mm. 1-2

In the case of a human performer—Yefim Bronfman, last night—whose sounds, virtuosic in their precision and in their emotional aptness, were beyond our imagining, we experience a sublime sense of wonder: sheer wonderment at possibilities not thought to be humanly achievable. Virtuosity like this is empowering of all humankind. It doesn’t only redound upon the individual virtuoso. And that is really why we find it sublime. Our witnessing such virtuosity can be transcendent, in much the way that gazing through a large telescope on a clear cold night can be so … gazing abjectly into the chasm of possibility.

What I mean to say is that virtuosity and unearthly complexity are psychologically connected with the innate human drive for awe and spirituality. Tonight, Bronfman’s cosmic playing forced me to confront this fact.

K olmogorov complexity is a notion of randomness dealing with the quantity of information in individual objects; that is, pointwise randomness rather than average randomness as produced by a random source. Known as ‘descriptional complexity’, ‘shortest program length’, ‘algorithmic entropy’, and others. Martin-Loef tests for randomness and Gödel’s incompleteness are related to this.”
— Ming Li & Paul Vitanyi, Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications.

T raditional wisdom has it that the better a theory compresses evidence, the better the theory predicts unknown data. With the advent of Kolmogorov complexity this was rigorously proved in a general setting. Making these ideas rigorous involves the length of the shortest effective description of an individual object: its Kolmogorov complexity. Ray Solomonoff invented the notion of universal prediction using Kolmogorov complexity-based universal distribution. Universal prediction is related to optimal effective compression.”
— Jorg Rothe, Complexity Theory and Cryptology.

D efine it by example—societies, governments, corporations, the stock market, families, the body, an organ system, memory, a cell, an organelle, the weather, ecosystems, flow in a river, the snap of a whip: these are undeniably complex. Chief properties of such systems include: components, modularity, spatial dispersion, interactions among components across space and time, self-organization, multiple relevant spatial and time scales of formation and operation, diversity, instability, nonlinearity, variability, functional activities and the existence of objectives. The latter properties confer autonomy, anticipativeness, and adaptiveness. In other words, complexity admits of degrees and types.”
— Yaneer Bar-Yam. Dynamics of Complex Systems.

S ome systems have a very large number of components but can be analyzed in the full sense of the word. Such systems are merely complicated. Other systems are constituted by intricate sets of nonlinear relationships such that only certain aspects of them can be analyzed at a time. Such systems are properly termed complex.”
— Paul Cilliers, Complexity and Postmodernism.

D istinction between simple and complex is a function of our distance from the system.”
— Roberto Serra & Gianni Zanarini, Complex Systems and Cognitive Processes.

P eople stare contemplating the ocean as it swells and crashes on a rocky shore. They gaze fixedly into a fire until the sting of smoke raises their awareness. People lie on their backs and follow passing clouds or marvel at the glittering of the stars. There are many things that fascinate us, that mesmerize us, that cause us to forget ourselves and our situations as we become lost in a timeless appreciation. ...Kant introduces the dynamically sublime as relating to encounters with the ferocity of nature and the sense of vulnerability this entails, coupled with the triumph of reason over fear. And in his own writings on the sublime, Edmund Burke takes the view that the sensation of incomprehensibility, the fear of hopelessness, coupled with the knowledge that one is able to reason about something beyond one’s senses... causes a kind of delight through internal conflict: a sublime experience.”
— Alan Dorin, Wonder and The Sublime in Art and Nature, in Adamatzky & Komosinski, Artificial Life in Software.

Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Bronfman and Everest: Balakirev’s and Ravel’s Virtuosic Fantasies

In the U.S. the new season of DiscoveryChannel’s documentary, ‘Everest: Beyond the Limit’, is currently being broadcast as an ongoing series of television programs. Each episode shows climbers—young and old ones, highly-skilled ones and relative novices—risking their lives trying to reach the summit of Everest. Not surprisingly, the drama revolves around the steepest, riskiest, most hostile parts of the climb. We viewers feel a [morbid?] fascination with the ever-present possibility of catastrophe—a fascination equal to the admiration we feel for the climbers’ endurance and achievements and successes. The spectacle of the natural beauty that’s connected with the pursuit captivates us, too, as does the diversity of humankind when (self-) driven to these extremes——when (self-) driven to accept such suffering and risk, in pursuit of an extreme, world-class goal.

‘Summits’ of a different kind—musical comparables to Everest—are in store when pianist Yefim Bronfman performs on Friday evening in the Kansas City Friends of Chamber Music Master Pianists Series. The program includes Balakirev’s ‘Islamey’ and Ravel’s ‘Gaspard de la nuit’, among other works. The program requires a capacity to play these technically demanding works—prodigious athleticism—but never decoupled from the capacity to play with interpretive skill. In other words (and to paraphrase Stephen Pettitt, music critic of The Times in London), true virtuosity requires as much poetry as athleticism—or so Bronfman implies, in devising a program like this.

A virtuoso is a musician who can play with panache a score of seemingly impossible technical difficulty... The north face of the Eiger has been conquered. The musician has, once again, triumphed over impossible adversity... A significant part of the musician’s craft has to do with the acquisition—through many hours, many years, of arduous, repetitive practice—of a very particular athleticism, one that enables the accurate playing of a large number of notes within a small amount of time while still making a pleasing sound. Virtuoso playing is a high-wire act, and the sensation it delivers to the audience similar. Surely he’s going to fall off at that speed, we think. When he gets to the other side intact we still think it a miracle. … Surely some dark magical force must be at work to enable such superhuman miracles of execution. … Indeed, is what seems like virtuoso playing necessarily that? Don’t misunderstand me. Even if its purpose is simply to thrill its audience, much as a particularly adroit footballer thrills with a piece of consummate skill, there’s nothing wrong with this showy variety of virtuosity. It’s fun to hear — and see — a violinist skate across a Paganini Caprice now and again. Yet it’s hardly a test of the most insightful musicianship. The player isn’t required to see between the notes, because between the notes there lies precisely nothing. There’s no insight into the human condition. No miracle of contrapuntal logic. Just a musician showing off his or her amazing skills. But maybe we should recognise more generously than we do the exercise of the inconspicuous brand of virtuosity... Virtuosity need not be a matter of playing lots of notes brilliantly at all. The truth is that all serious music worth the playing and singing, no matter how physically simple it might seem, requires a certain virtuosity of the mind. … Although the notes in Mozart might come relatively easily, the contextualising of them, the weighing of them, the nuancing of them, does not. Mozart demands such precision of touch, colour and phrase that an interpretation can fail on the slightest contextual faux pas. Moreover, it’s the performer who must find a personal context, since playing Mozart is no more a matter of choosing one correct way than is playing anything else. Control and freedom need to co-exist in perfect balance, so that the mysterious eloquence of the music is allowed to emerge, the player opening a window on to the soul of a miraculously gifted person. That is true virtuosity.”
— Stephen Pettitt.

In 1928, Ravel wrote, “ ‘Gaspard de la nuit’, piano pieces after Aloysius Bertrand, are three romantic poems of transcendental virtuosity.” Well, Mozart can be technically demanding, too—the two-part cadenza of the opening allegro of K 466, for example. But we usually think of the virtuosity required for Mozart as predominantly interpretive virtuosity. Similarly tough: revealing the emotion in Chopin without falling into cliché, or articulating the voices within Bach without being stilted and suppressing the emotion or creating a fugue-pastiche. Ravel’s ‘Gaspard de la nuit’ imposes demands that are simultaneously interpretive and technical/athletic——hideously, dauntingly so. Aloysius Bertrand’s prose-poems, ‘Gaspard de la nuit: Fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot’, were published posthumously in 1842 and re-issued in 1895, when Ravel’s friend Ricardo Viñes discovered them and introduced them to Ravel. Later Ravel returned to the poems and was captivated by their grotesque, hallucinatory imagery as an evocative subject for a piano composition.

And what about ‘Islamey’—composed in 1869 by Mily Balakirev, then 32 years old? The first theme is a folk dance from the Caucasus. The prevalent augmented seconds lend a south Asian ‘islamic’ aspect. The central section is lyrical and derives from an Armenian folk song. The slow, exotic middle section contrasts with the energetic outer parts. In the third section, Balakirev reprises the thematic material of the opening, culminating in a pyrotechnical coda. ‘Islamey’ is comprised of variations with increasingly, insanely, demonically complex elaborations. (Maybe we should note that Balakirev had a nervous breakdown in 1872, three years after composing this piece?) So our definition of ‘virtuosity’ gets worse: virtuosity is defiant and risky; it tempts fate; it scoffs at danger. It wouldn’t be virtuosic if catastrophe were impossible. You have to work without a safety net! (Balakirev punched out—became a railway clerk for awhile; worked as a school inspector until 1883; then returned to music as Director of the Imperial Chapel and conductor of the Imperial Musical Society, where he remained until retiring in 1895.)

I n music, no less than in athletics, audiences thrill at witnessing exceptional feats of physiological accomplishment, and they fête and reward those who
afford them such thrills.”
— Jane O’Dea, p. 40.

H e did not appeal to the emotions, except those of wonder—for his playing was statuesque, cold, beautiful, and so masterly that it was said of him, with reason, that he would play with the same care and finish if roused out of the deepest sleep in the middle of the night.”
— Sir Charles Halle, review of Thalberg, quoted in O’Dea, p.39.

In ‘Performance as an Extreme Occasion’, Edward Said writes that the contemporary concert is an extraordinary event, highly specialized and totally alienated from ordinary life. Before the mid-20th century performers were often also composers, and listeners were also often amateur musicians. Today the audience is marginalized. The specialized artist so ‘owns’ the work today! The recital has come to be an occasion for the display of extreme ability—on a level that’s totally alien to the listeners, most of whom are neither familiar with the scores nor play any instrument or sing. Their ‘regression of hearing’ (Adorno’s phrase) is manifested in “the listener’s poignant speechlessness as he/she faces an onslaught of such refinement, articulation and technique as almost to constitute a sado-masochistic experience.”

The audience has become more passive and concurrently we get this spectatorly cult of virtuosity. But why has social power recently captivated the imagination of popular culture—and academic anthropologists as well? Surely it’s not just a consequence of fewer practicing amateurs! Is it instead a society-wide reaction to our diminishing power as individuals? Is it a reaction to the decimation of social cohesiveness by the recent emergence of long-tailed, fragmented, web-based culture? Is it a backhanded way to oppose the ‘colonization’ of our selves—that is, an endorsement of and vicarious participation in demonstrations that individual victory over mass culture is still possible—more than gazing at an athlete/artist’s literal victory over physical difficulty?

Stanley Barrett asserts that the answer can be found in the effect of the past 100 years’ warfare throughout the world; the end of old colonialism and emergence of new forms of colonialism under the guise of multinational corporate globalization; the information and technology revolution, mass culture and cultural fragmentation. “The notion of a homogeneous, cohesive, geographically-bounded local culture consisting of people who share a putative common ancestry is obsolete,” he says. The diversity of distinctive cultures and identities “has become constricted, and ‘culture’ has become the new equivalent of ‘race’: difference-as-inferiority; new structures of exploitation and domination; new relations of power saturated with new possibility of inequality and disparities.”

I hope that hearing Bronfman perform on Friday may shed additional light on these issues. Me, I’ll be listening from a moderate elevation, at ‘Base Camp #3’!

T he question of the relationship of the individual person or subject to domination carries ‘resistance’ to the level of consciousness, subjectivity, intentionality, and identity.”
— Sherry Ortner, Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject.

Everest: Cairns (memorials to those who have died on the mountain)

[Mr. Bronfman was born in Tashkent, in the Soviet Union, on April 10, 1958. Bronfman immigrated to Israel with his family in 1973, and made his international debut two years later with Zubin Mehta and the Montreal Symphony. In Israel, he studied with pianist Arie Vardi, at the Samuel Rubin Academy of Music at Tel Aviv University. In the United States he studied at Juilliard and the Curtis Institute—with Rudolf Firkusny, Leon Fleisher, and Rudolf Serkin. He made his New York Philharmonic debut in May l978 and his New York recital debut in January 1982 at the 92nd Street Y. Bronfman became a U.S. citizen in 1989. In 2006, Bronfman partnered with Emanuel Ax in Mozart's ‘Concerto for Two Pianos’ conducted by Lorin Maazel. Early in 2007 he premiered Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Piano Concerto, written for him and commissioned by the New York Philharmonic. In addition to solo recital appearances, he recently served as the Pianist in Residence with the Berlin Philharmonic and completed recordings of all the Beethoven piano concerti and the Triple Concerto with violinist Gil Shaham and cellist Truls Mork with the Tönhalle Orchestra Zürich under David Zinman for the Arte Nova/BMG label. Bronfman is a “Perspectives” artist at Carnegie Hall during this 2007-08 season.]