jwilzewske: kansas city

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Saturday, November 17, 2012

DiDonato, Sinkovsky, Il Complesso Barocco Bring Down the House

W e singers tend to boast that our careers offer the best form of psychotherapy in existence, for we are allowed to work out the bulk of our inner demons courtesy of the larger-than-life drama queens we encounter on the stage—divine ladies who weep, love, moan, and avenge more grandly and stylishly than in any other art form.”
— Joyce DiDonato, 2012.

T he Joyce DiDonato/Dmitry Sinkovsky/Il Complesso Barocco performance last night in the Harriman-Jewell Series was really phenomenal. Many extraordinary, seldom-heard works by lesser-known Baroque composers, like Antonio Cesti (1623-1669), Geminiano Giacomelli (1692-1740), Giuseppe Orlandini (1676-1760), and Giovanni Porta (1675-1755). Extraordinarily dramatic and vivid vocal and instrumental interpretations. Extraordinarily tight and responsive interactions between the ensemble members and Ms. DiDonato throughout.

A scending cadences, each with the forte dynamic they require, imparting a strong sense of closure. Descending cadences to pianissimo, imparting a sense of sorrow with aspiration. The sort of gestures that Hatten once characterized as “yearning” (see links below).

F ormalized emotion—a dialectic of ‘drama queens’—DiDonato rations her body movement, reserves it mostly for recitative passages, while her body is relatively still during arias: her regal rhetoric is well-suited to these stories of queens and princesses. The arias ‘frame’ the dramatic recitatives, not the other way round (that is, ‘decorative’ arias, see Taruskin, p. 25).

M ost online reviews from performances on their current tour do focus, understandably, on Ms. DiDonato’s singing. But, my God, this ensemble! Gorgeous! And, my God, Sinkovsky! Prodigious!

W hat strings is Dmitry Sinkovsky playing!!? Silver-plated, copper on gut? Pirastro Eudoxa? Chorda? Sensuous with a glint, a sound that is a perfect match for DiDonato's rich mezzo-soprano voice!

T he wound G-string was common on violins in the 18th century. Beyond 1840 and already far beyond plain gut strings, composers were writing things that were, essentially, only playable with a wound G string. With modern strings, we’d lose this rich, complex sound of very thick gut strings. We’d lose the consort timbre within the violin family. We’d lose the diversity of articulation, and we’d lose subtleties of this 17th and 18th Century sonic architecture.

T o a software engineer like me, the musical score is an object-oriented ‘method’, procedural code executed on an instance of an object-class that may or may not grant all of the behaviors specified by the arguments passed to it. But Dmitry Sinkovsky and Il Complesso Barocco accomodate all args, all flavors!

T he range of Dmitry Sinkovsky’s articulation is especially interesting, because it allows him to imitate the singer’s diction, with diverse ‘consonants’ beginning each violin-syllable (or bow stroke) and diverse glottal and quasi-labial and -dental and -fricative sounds to match each of DiDonato’s vocal gestures. Through the centuries, the imitation of the human voice has always been an ardently sought goal for instrumentalists. Sinkovsky totally owns this! (He has even mastered American folk-fiddlish, jiggy “hoe-down” technic, which he improvised to humorous effect at DiDonato’s prompting for one of her encores, to the raucous delight of her hometown Kansas City audience!)

S inkovsky’s pulsatile, fluid bow-and-whole-body gestures, dance-like, match DiDonato’s operatic arms-and-whole-body gestures. Sinkovsky’s bow stroke is Transitional Period? Russian? Energized ‘non-legato’, at any rate! Because of the ‘give’ of the bowhair, the bow does not emit full sound immediately at the onset of the stroke, but only after some pressure has been exerted and some bow excursion has occurred—the momentary softness followed by a crescendo in each stroke.

H e plays fast passages with energy abounding but with still a roundness to his sound and supple articulations. A player trained in a modern, pressure-on-the-bowstick style feels immediately that baroque bow does not give the attack of a modern bow—it’s more from the wrist and fingers. But Sinkovsky’s Baroque bow attack is astonishingly sharp—more so maybe than would be achieved with a modern bow. Our jaws were agog for 2 hours in gob-smacked amazement.

A re these tempi faster than normal, or are we just glad to see you all? Was the room hot, or was it just you? :)

N ext up for these artists is Carnegie Hall tomorrow.

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Mara Gibson’s ‘Canopy’: Arboreal/Neuronal soundscape/artscape for viola, percussion, and tape

I recently had the privilege to experience a new chamber music composition by Mara Gibson at the opening of a new art exhibit in Kansas City. The work was commissioned by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Premiered in April by Michael Hall, ‘Canopy’ was inspired by ‘Ferment’, Roxy Paine’s (1966-) outdoor installation in the sculpture garden at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.

I n the 13-min composition, Gibson meditates on Paine’s conflation of neuronal dendritic architecture and treeness... the multiplicity of meanings of what we perceive in nature is called into question. We all are trees; we all are neurons now.

L arge-scale sculptures and exotic mixed-ensemble chamber music (viola-percussion-tape) aren’t commonly paired with each other. However, in this instance it is an inspired piece of programming, an account that plumbs the depths of the sculpture’s seeming desolation... a melancholy that stems from the constitutional rootedness of a ramifying, arborizing structure that is situated where it is with little prospect of changing its venue (you; the neurons that make up your brain and make you who you are; the tree). And yet the composition culminates in a radiant, nature-affirming performance that leaves the listener-viewer with more than solace—a sense of quiet optimism.

H all takes great care with the score’s myriad directions, resulting in an intensity and beauty that would delight any composer, as well as any audience. There is a brief pause/silent_stasis at about 07:00. The solo_viola/denuded_tree resumes with a soliloquy. Then, with a harrowing climax, the percussion and recorded track of the viola reappear with renewed vigor, and with the live viola layered on top of them—effecting a grieving voice of the solo viola answering its echo and the percussion more quietly, survivors against all odds! The micrometer-precise diminuendo from 11:00 to the end is perfectly realized—and we immediately appreciate why Gibson wrote it in this way.

H all’s technique is superb throughout and manages to sound like 5 different violas, by using combinations of diverse pressures on the bow, bowing near and far away from the bridge, etc.—pensive, taut, with some ‘extended’ viola techniques. Bob Beck’s recording and production values aptly serve the intimacy of this beautiful piece. Few recordings achieve such a level of detailed commitment from the artists and the recording engineer! (I am grateful, too, that Gibson has made digital recordings of ‘Canopy’ available for download on BandCamp.com.)

A nyone who has tried to devise a likeness of a tree—sculpting one as a kid in school, or, with more serious intent as an older person—will recognize how difficult it is to do well. The fractal character of the branch points and the Fibonacci-like decimation of the caliber of the branches as you go further and further out on the limbs is hard to emulate. It is so easy to end up with a ‘fail!’—a crude likeness that looks contrived, a caricature of a tree! But Paine achieves a high level of fractal verisimilitude—a tree representation with enough character-development and complexity and depth to be believable as a tree or as another living organism with moral standing. Gibson’s writing is not ‘representational’ as such, but with equal care and finesse achieves comparable moral weight and attractive, believable, attention-holding verisimilitude.

I n summary, Gibson’s sonic stimuli synergize nicely with Paine’s sculpture’s visual and haptic stimuli. I enjoyed being immersed in both of them at the same time. The visual and musical elements are independent and exciting in their own right and (in the case of Paine’s sculpture, ‘have already stood’ and--) will continue to stand ably on their own. But, together, the two works manifest a cohesion that is evident to listeners/viewers as they encounter the works simultaneously. It is a brilliant success as a tandem installation, and ‘Canopy’ is commendable as a commissioning project. Other galleries and museums should take note of this as an example they can replicate—commissioning companion chamber compositions to accompany major new acquisitions, and organizing gala première performances (with food and wine, as the Nelson did) to cultivate new membership and community involvement! No better way than this to dispel the ignorant museum stereotype of grey-hair elites!

H all is a former president of the Chicago Viola Society and a founding member of the Lake String Quartet. He has performed at numerous summer festivals, including the Grand Teton Festival, the National Orchestral Institute, Kneisel Hall Chamber Music School, and the Aspen Music Festival. Hall serves on the faculties of Illinois Wesleyan University, VanderCook College of Music, and the Chicago Academy for the Arts. He is a graduate of Ball State University, with graduate studies with Peter Kamnitzer and with the LaSalle and Tokyo String Quartets, at the University of Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, and doctoral studies with Michelle LaCourse and Scott Rawls at the UNC, Greensboro.

G ibson graduated from Bennington College and completed her PhD at SUNY Buffalo. She attended London College of Music; l’École des Beaux-Arts, Fontainebleau, France; and the International Music Institute, Darmstadt. She has received grants and honors from the American Composer’s Forum, the Banff Center, Louisiana Division of the Arts, Arts KC, Meet the Composer, the Kansas Arts Commission, the National Endowment for the Arts, the International Bass Society, ASCAP, and the John Henrick Memorial Foundation. She is also founder of the UMKC Composition Workshop for Young Composers and co-director/founder of ArtSounds, now in its seventh year. ArtSounds specializes in “immersive art-music fusion” experiences, similar in spirit to ‘Canopy’.

T he greatest hindrance in the understanding of life lies in the impossibility of accounting for it by the enumeration of its properties. It must be understood as a unity. But if the organism [tree; neural network] is a unity, in what sense are its component properties its parts? Who is it, really, and why? How does this unity arise? To what extent must it be considered a property of the organization of the organism, as opposed to a property emerging [undeliberated] from its mode of life? These questions remain open....”
— Humberto Maturana & Francisco Varela.

Friday, April 13, 2012

Jonathan Biss: Proairetic & Hermeneutic Codes In Action, Realtime Beethoven-Janáček Message-Passing Protocol

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.

Thursday, April 5, 2012

Sangam: Santoor, Bansuri, Tabla, Odissi performance in KC on Saturday

B  eautiful Syām, you have been awake all night;
  your lotus-eyes are drowsy.
Red fingernail marks are etched upon your chest
  like half-moons.
Your turban, once tied, now dangles on your head:
  your clothes are falling off, and your tilak is gone.”
  — Poem K207:P3/146:S832, quoted by A. Whitney Sanford, Singing Krishna: Sound Becomes Sight in Paramānand’s Poetry, p. 46.

T his Saturday there will be a special performance of Indian traditional music, connected with the annual Sangam festival. The 4 performers are renowned both in India and far beyond (see links below).

W hen I have written about Indian classical music several times before in this blog, I’ve mainly focused on long time-scale rhythmic and melodic patterns... some of the features that are maybe most distinctive to a Western listener. But this time when I learned of this special performance and looked forward to the possibility of attending it, I decided to learn a bit about the history and motivations of these musical forms.

W hat great fortune I had!—namely, discovering Whitney Sanford’s excellent 2009 book ‘Singing Krishna: Sound Becomes Sight in Paramānand’s Poetry’ (link below)! It is beautifully written—concise; clear; highly readable—and its detail and insightfulness serve as a tremendous help to the Western reader who wishes to understand performance practice for carnatic and other genres of Indian music, regardless whether it is extemporized or is performed in traditional ritual.

A lso covered at length are the motivations of the structure and orchestration of such music, engineered as it is so as to induce synaesthetic Scriabin-type “audio-visual/sound-heard-as-colors” transcendent experiences in the listener. Besides synaesthetic qualities in the medieval poet Paramānand’s writings and in music that is composed or improvised in a similar manner, Paramānand also propounds the unity of the One and the Many—a mystical oneness of all individuals with the Divine. The infinite and the finite are the same—homeomorphic, according to Paramānand.

T he classical Indian listener is ideally well-familiar with the ritual and with the spiritual context that it is meant to facilitate. Ideally, the listener is also equipped with powerful memories from previous participations in it—and all of those memories are ready to be triggered by the music and ambient sounds, and sights, and scents that are associated with the new year’s festival performance. There is, as Sanford’s book vividly attests, a tremendous physicality to the experience—the entire experience; the music, the dance, the imagery and colors, the scents, everything!—something I had not appreciated before, with my passive, CD/MP3 listening only. Multisensory overload, almost—aiming at achieving spiritual or mystical union.

I f you’re in Kansas City this Saturday afternoon, I hope you will be able to attend the performance and experience something mystical yourself. The performance promises to be deeply enjoyable at the very least! Links below, if you’re interested!

[Note: Praveen's music frequently employs the technique of singing into the flute (gayki style; resembling Judith Shatin's 'Fasting Heart' or George Crumb's 'Vox Balaenae' or Jethro Tull). He is also a master of thanthrakari flute style. Very cool, at least to us who play flute!]

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Morgenstern Trio: Ravel, the Amateur Mathematician

P antoum poetical form—where each subsequent line changes function to become an antecedent line in the next stanza. Ravel’s music shows a love of the musical equivalent of this, playing on in-built ambiguities between antecedent and consequent to build up large-scale forms and at the same time hold our attention by letting the ambiguities surprise us.”
— Roy Howat, 1993.

T he Morgenstern Trio (Catherine Klipfel, piano; Stefan Hempel, violin; Emanuel Wehse, cello) have a uniquely intense, incisive style, as was abundantly demonstrated in their performance of Debussy, Mozart, and Brahms in a Music Alliance Series program Friday evening.

T he trio also have a characteristic, wry sense of humor, as befits the eponymous Christian Morgenstern, a German poet who was born in 1871 and died of TB in 1914.

T he Trio’s whole performance was superb—fresh; exciting; technically flawless—no surprise, given the many prizes they have received in competitions.

B ut even their encore—the second movement of Ravel’s piano trio, entitled ‘Pantoum’—delivered more, more than one routinely expects from an ‘encore’. The piano opens with the edgy, intense first theme, and the strings respond in double octaves. The short scherzo and trio ‘A-B-A’ structure makes for a perfect encore-length morsel. But there are ironies and meta-meanings in this piece. The repetitions and surface-level structures of the piece are not as straight-forward as they seem. The structure is like a ‘spell’ cast by a witch in a folktale. The rhetoric is one not of declamation but enchantment.

R avel wrote the trio theme in a completely different metre (4/2) from the scherzo (3/4), and the two time signatures co-exist—a kind of metrical dissonance that adds a lot of drama to an otherwise ‘dèpouiller’ (‘pared-down’, to the level of a children’s fairytale) narrative.

T he ‘piano-against-strings’, ‘4/2 vs. 3/4’ meter switches with the 4/2 that is initially in the piano part later swapped as the strings go from 3/4 to 4/2 and the piano returns to 3/4. The “competing meters” metrical dissonance persists for a long, long stretch: 168 quarter notes at 192 bpm, almost a whole minute’s worth.

T he ornaments are ‘reflexive’, as if they are compulsory, happenstantial features of how the music lays under the physical hand for each instrument, and as contrasted with a fully-deliberated, polished, composerly gesture.

T he reflexive, organic sounds wash over us, and we develop a suspicion of ambient, non-human order; a sense of diabolical, out-of-control natural forces at-work; a mix of awe and wonder and foreboding.

T he tension between the different meters—the different time percepts—inducing us to switch between an ‘ensemble algorithmic level’ and an ‘individual voice level’ depending on what is more significant or more commanding of our attention—is the primary reason why this ‘Pantoum’ movement is so exciting, I believe. In the languid section between numbers 11 and 15 in the score, the trio “sound grains” are large, and the listener attends to the ensemble sound and its algorithmic metrical structure.

B ut in the emphatic pizzicato passages, our attention is absorbed in the motion of the individual string parts, and we suspend attending to the algorithmic interactions associated with the metrical dissonance.

T he metrical dissonance persists and “lurks”, though. It is still within our awareness—and we feel apprehensive about the finiteness of our attention and the risks that might come true on account of shifting our attention away from the metrical dissonance “ensemble” features and onto the individual parts, much as a child hearing a fairytale experiences apprehension as her attention is absorbed by some new story development but the wolf is without doubt still in those woods and nightfall is not long off.

O ne may say that the number of functions is extremely small whereas the number of characters is extremely large. This explains the two-fold quality of a folktale—its amazing multiformity, picturesqueness, and color... and, on the other hand, its no-less-striking uniformity—its repetition.”
— Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, p. 20.

I t captivates us—it fully absorbs us, this fairytale-like pantun of Ravel’s—all the way to its ending flourish. We are spell-bound, returned to a primitive state of wonder, feeling much like we felt as children listening to thrilling stories—ones we had never heard before—told to us by belovèd grandparent or parent. You don’t get this entrancing music experience from recordings—not really. You need to attend a “live” performance, like the especially fine one given by Morgenstern Trio Friday night!

L ass die Moleküle rasen,
was sie auch zusammenknobeln!
lass das Tüfteln, lass das Hobeln,
heilig halte die Ekstasen.

[Let race the molecules,
tossing together what compounds they may!
Let the random tinkering continue; let the atoms’ planes and dihedral angles,
Keep holy the ecstasy.]”
— Christian Morgenstern, Lass die Moleküle rasen.

[Lehmer Sieve, 1932, solving Diophantine equations]

D iophantine Pantoum where A=7, B=3

¹Lehmer sieve’s ribbon o’er Diophantine field;
²White paper slides to the tune of rods’ switches.
³Sieve sings congruences, linear aria concealed,
⁴Seeks solutions to be found in theory which, as

²White paper slides to the tune of rods’ switches,
⁵Ribbon infers nineteen B minus eight A equals one.
⁴Seeks solutions to be found in theory which, as
⁶A father’s age AB is one less than twice BA the son,

⁵Ribbon infers nineteen B minus eight A equals one.
⁷Polynomial conjecture, in Fermat’s margin centuries’ toil!
⁶A father’s age AB is one less than twice BA the son
⁸Yields seventy-three and thirty-seven, algebraically closed foil.

⁷Polynomial conjecture, in Fermat’s margin centuries’ toil!
³Sieve sings congruences, linear aria concealed,
⁸Yields seventy-three and thirty-seven, algebraically closed foil—
¹Lehmer sieve’s ribbon o’er Diophantine field.”

— DSM.

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Higher-Order Geometry: Murray Perahia and Chopin’s Polonaises

M usically, the most important consequence of the geometry is the following: since a nearly-even N-note chord occupies the same cross-section of the [metric] space as its transposition by 12/N semitones, such chords can be linked by particularly efficient voice-leading. Thus, nearly-even two-note chords are very close to their six-semitone transpositions; nearly-even three-note chords are very close to their 4- and 8-semitone transpositions; nearly-even 4-note chords are very close to their 3-, 6-, and 9-semitone transpositions and so on.”
— Dmitri Tymoczko, Geometry of Music, p. 97.

M y enjoyment of last night’s excellent concert by Murray Perahia was enhanced by paying special attention to the intervals and root-motions of the chords—especially in the Chopin pieces on the program.

A nd, while Dmitri Tymoczko’s ‘Geometry of Music’ has in the year since the book was published reaped some objections and a certain notoriety (David Headlam and Rob Schneiderman (AMS), among other commenters), I do feel that considering the quantitative and statistical properties of a musical work can help some of us to understand the work better, be moved more deeply by it, and, possibly, learn how we ourselves might compose music more successfully, or measure and figure out how something we have composed compares, for better or worse, to other beautiful and effective compositions.

F rom the score of the Polonaise Op. 26 No. 1 in C-sharp minor that Perahia performed last night, I transcribed a number of the intervals contained in the 138-bar, 414-beat-long piece. Like Tymoczko and others, I used a root-motion log-frequency representation of intervals in my array, so that distances of notes N-semitones apart are uniform in any octave. I then utilized the ‘phom’ package in the R system to examine the distribution of those intervals in topological S³ space. This relies on theory set forth by Gunnar Carlsson and coworkers at Stanford, on persistent homology. I had occasion to collaborate with Gunnar about 5 years ago on analysis of critical-care ICU timeseries data. Persistent homology computes topological invariants of filtered sequences of simplicial complexes, constructed from my transcribed Chopin Polonaise interval dataset. The relevance of this to music theoretic analysis is that conventional topological invariants are unsuitable for characterizing the geometry of music since they are simultaneously too sensitive, and too weak. They are too “weak” because of their homotopy invariance, such that the underlying harmonic/intervallic structure can be stretched in any way (as long as it is not ripped) without changing its homology groups.

L ots of additional empirical work would be needed, to accurately and adequately characterize just this one Chopin Polonaise, so beautiful and evocative as performed by Perahia. I leave that to the card-carrying music theorists. But, unlike Professor Headlam and others, I do think that such effort would be rewarded. As an amateur musician, I have no academic career in music theory to advance, no tenure review to worry about, no political axes to grind in my analysis and writing—posting this tiny, speculative blogpost as I am here, and pointing interested readers to a new open-source R package that might aid others’ endeavors.

I n summary, it is simply a deeply pleasurable thing for me, to roll up my own sleeves and bring novel empirical tools and concepts to bear and see what I can learn. And, having corresponded in years past with Dmitri Tymoczko several times by email, I truly believe that his aims and aspirations are as wholesome as this as well, not so cynical or bombastic as Schneiderman and others allege. For some of us, loving something magical like this Chopin music [or, alternatively, loving someone] means, among other things, persistently and deeply wanting and striving to comprehend it [or them], by numerical quantitative means as well as by subjective, qualitative means, that’s all.

B y the way, Gunnar Carlsson’s papers are very readable, if you care to visit the links to them below...

Saturday, March 10, 2012

Higher-Order Virtuosity: Richard Goode and Chopin’s Ballade No. 3

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.

Sunday, February 19, 2012

Konstantin Lifschitz: Collaborative Poesy of the Goldberg Variations

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.

Saturday, February 11, 2012

Konstantin Lifschitz: Ich bin’s; ich sollte zu träumen (I’m the one; it is I who should dream on this)

Konstantin Lifschitz, image ©Felix Broede

M usical ideas are such combinations of tones, rhythms, and harmonies as to demand/inspire a thoughtful treatment like the main theses of a philosophical tract. [Any non-trivial musical idea inevitably] raises a question—sets up a problem that, in the course of the piece, has to be answered, resolved, ‘carried through’. It has to be carried through however many contradictory situations are plausible; it must be developed by deducing however many inferences there may be from what it postulates; it has to be checked—has to be proved to be true, like a mathematical theorem. And all this, if you are successful, will lead to a conclusion—a ‘pronunciamento’, a fresh new certainty—a beautiful new discovery [that speaks].”
— Arnold Schoenberg, ‘Beauty and Logic in Music,’ unpublished manuscript.

T he quote above was one we saw in the Arnold Schönberg Center archives, when we visited Vienna a couple of months ago. I was reminded of this insight of Schoenberg’s during Bach’s complete two- and three-part Inventions (Sinfonias), performed by Konstantin Lifschitz last night. Interleaved Invention-Sinfonia-Invention-Sinfonia as they were, in ascending chromatic sequence (as opposed to chronologically; as opposed to rank-order by pedagogic difficulty in Wilhelm Friedemann’s Klavierbuchlein), the pieces led us in the audience to some new insights.

S ome inventions, performed by many at faster tempi, became intense meditations on color and timbre. Other ones, often performed with wider rubato variation, became motoric illustrations of individual conviction and duty. Consider the editorial suggestions of the Alfred or others’ modern editions; consider the ur-texts of Bach himself; but make up your own mind—find your own true story. Which is what Konstantin Lifschitz did for us so wonderfully and spontaneously last night.

T hese inventions began as [mere] ideas, that Bach conceived [in an improvisational, impromptu manner] and wrote as teaching tools. The complexities of the three-voice Sinfonias make the two-part Inventions seem [simple] when you play them side-by-side.”
— Cynthia Siebert, founder, Friends of Chamber Music.

I t’s a joy to hear the unfiltered account of a friend’s or lover’s dream. We feel touched and, not just ‘connected’, but also more ‘human’ for the shared experience... ‘included’, ‘alive’. We are included in the ‘action’, and we feel the curiosity and the moral duty to engage with the friend who is relating this dream to us. We sense the truth that arises from the honest synapses firing without the interpolation of an ego in the process. The purity of (absence of—) motives and the transparency count for a lot.

I st das möglich? Denkt ihr, man kann sich wirklich mit einer musikalischen Idee durch einen Traum verlieben, bzw. kann man tatsächlich träumen, verliebt sich in die musikalische Idee zu sein? Habt ihr sowas schon mal geträumt?

[Is this possible? Do you think you can really fall in love with a musical idea in a dream, or dream you can actually love to be in the musical idea? Have you dreamed something like this before?]”
— Milton Babbitt.

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Ingrid Stölzel’s Explorations of Time and Identity

A fter picking the title ‘For the Time Being,’ I realized just how often I use this expression in my daily life. When we say these words we imply that whatever state we are in or whatever action we are performing is temporary and merely a fleeting moment. In reality, of course, all states and actions are temporary, and our perception of permanence is an illusion. ‘For the Time Being’ is the newest in a series of works examining this concept of passing time.”
— Ingrid Stölzel.

I didn’t measure how long I was doing mouth-to-mouth breathing, but I remember thinking during the last several minutes that [the plight of this lifeless, transverse-presenting, APGAR-score-zero newborn] was hopeless. But I persisted [thinking that my doing so was, for the time being, at best ridiculous and, at worst, wrong or disrespectful of the natural fact]. And I was finally rewarded when Anna MacRae of Middle River, Victoria County, came to life.”
— C. Lamont MacMillan, Memoirs of a Cape Breton Doctor.

I ngrid Stölzel’s new composition for flute, soprano saxophone and piano offers great beauty for the listener, plus intriguing expressive and technical challenges for each of the performers. The flute and soprano sax parts are balanced partners, while the piano undertakes an impetuous, omniscient-narratorly, cantus firmus role, with occasional upper-register tolling that explicitly marks the passage of time.

F or the Time Being’ was a commmission by the Greenbrook Ensemble in Nashville. The work that resulted from their commission is a phenomenally beautiful and poignant addition to the trio repertoire for flute, soprano sax, and piano: a 7-min fantasie, in a Walter Piston-esque, Bohuslav Martinů-esque neoclassicist modal-chromatic idiom, symbolically-charged with repetition in both rhythm and pitch, including pedal points. The work is contrapuntal, highly chromatic.

I ts initial lyrical, light and graceful lento is seeded with contemplative rubato, becoming adagio and intermittently more animated/incisive—embodying the transitoriness/impermanence suggested by Stölzel’s remark in the blockquote above. Flute and soprano sax parts are intertwined, coalescing into close harmony and then diverging again. The work embodies an intense chromatic saturation, as contrasted with more ‘open’ diatonic style. The result is subtle: acutely self-aware but never self-absorbed.

I relistened to the Colorado State YouTube video several times (vid embedded below), capturing timings for the woodwinds. The rhythmic interplay between flute and soprano sax exhibits a fractional structure as a function of frequency that is close to a 1/f relationship, intermediate between uncorrelated ‘white’ noise and strongly-correlated Brownian noise. (An important property of 1/f timeseries structure is that it correlates logarithmically with past values. The last 3 notes, say, have equal influence on what comes next as the last 30 or the last 300.)

A nother feature of 1/f or “nearly-1/f” structure is ‘self-similarity’, which means that the smaller-scale details resemble coarser features that are higher in the hierarchy of structures that comprise the piece. Self-similarity of musical structures has fascinated composers long before fractal and multi-scale mathematics was known. For example, Bach sometimes used the same pitch contour in his fugues in the slow cantus firmus as in the fast motoric figures. So, too, with this new Ingrid Stölzel piece.

S tölzel changes meter many times in the course of the short piece. The continual shifts of meter and tempo are a most noticeable aspect of the work’s complexity, and of its perspective on personhood, self-awareness, and awareness of Time.

T he piece is constructed on a series of dyadic conflicts: episodic expansion/contraction metaphors, mainly involving the flute and soprano sax. Neither wind player can escape or circumvent these chromatic inflections, but must make believable decisions about how to use timbre/spectra to express the conflicts and their resolution. Am I azure or lavender? Was I light turquoise or dark robin’s-egg blue? Remembering/forgetting? Separating/reuniting? Living/dying?

S tölzel meditates... on the socio-historical reality of what it is to be a person, situated in Time and lacking any guarantees; on the connectedness of how we conceive of ourselves, in the context of yesterday, today, tomorrow; on our uncertainty about how much time we have (or don’t have, in the case of those of us who have a highly-uncertain and likely very-much-shortened future due to chronic, life-threatening illness). Martin Heidegger, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Paul Ricoeur are among the philosophers who explored this terrain in the 20th Century. (Links to works by other, more recent authors appear below, for your interest.)

I n other words, the trio is a delicate balance of love and horror—we create something meaningful that soon slips from our grasp; we inevitably lose our loved ones or they lose us; we cling futilely, to hopes that no longer have any reasonable basis. Life: so brutal, so unreliable. Life: the only good thing that we have, for the time being.

I n any instant the Sacred may wipe you [out] with its finger. In any instant, the bush may burst into flames, your feet may rise, or you may see a bunch of souls in a tree. In any instant you may avail yourself of the power to love your enemies; to accept failure, slander, or the grief of loss; or to endure torture.”
— Annie Dillard.

I ngrid Stölzel has written for ensembles such as newEar contemporary chamber ensemble, NOISE/San Diego New Music, California E.A.R. Unit, Adaskin String Trio, Erato Chamber Orchestra, Allegrésse, and Synchronia, among others. She is the winner of the 2010 NewMusic@ECU Festival Orchestra Composition Competition, the 2009 Cheryl A. Spector Prize, the 2007 UMKC Chamber Music Composition Competition and the 2006 PatsyLu Prize awarded by the International Alliance of Women in Music. Stölzel is a frequent guest composer and her music has been performed at music festivals and conferences including the 2011 Festival of New American Music, 2011 International Alliance of Women in Music Congress, 2011 New Music Festival X, IC[CM] 2010 International Conference on Contemporary Music in Spain, NACUSA 2010 National Conference, soundOn Festival of Modern Music, 30th Sacramento State Festival of New American Music, Oregon Bach Festivals, Ernest Bloch Festivals, Women in New Music Festival, Chamber Music Conference of the East, Otterbein Contemporary Music Festival, and Indiana State Contemporary Music Festival. Stölzel received her doctorate in composition at the University of Missouri Conservatory of Music and Dance in Kansas City, where she studied with James Mobberley, Chen Yi, and Zhou Long. She holds a Master of Music in composition from the Hartt School of Music in Hartford, Connecticut. Stölzel was a guest composer at the 30th Sacramento State Festival of New American Music. She has done artist residencies at the Ragdale Foundation and the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida.
Ingrid is a native of Germany and has lived in the U.S. for the past 20 years.

F or the Time Being’ will be performed in Kansas City in a concert by newEar Ensemble on Saturday, 11-FEB. Go, hear!

I f the muscle can feel repugnance, there is still a false move to be made;
If the mind can imagine tomorrow, there is still a defeat to remember;
As long as the self can say ‘I,’ it is impossible not to rebel;
As long as there is an accidental virtue, there is a necessary vice:
And the garden cannot exist; the miracle cannot occur.
The garden is the only place there is, but you will not find it
Until you have looked for it everywhere and found nowhere that is not a desert.
The miracle is the only thing that happens, but to you it will not be apparent
Until all events have been studied and nothing happens that you cannot explain.
And Life is the destiny you are bound to refuse until you have consented to die.”
— W.H. Auden, ‘For the Time Being’.

Aries Composers’ Festival at Colorado State University Center for the Arts, 07-NOV-2011.

B eran and others comprehend musical self-similarity as a problem of engineering. In contrast, investigations that consider its cultural significance within a certain historical tradition, are very rare (e.g. Kieran 1996, Yadegari 2004). In a brief article published in 1995, Alexander Koblyakov throws a first light on this matter, making a basic statement about the study of musical self-similarity, noticing that [in principle] ‘there is a problem[atic] situation... It is necessary to include the perception (mentality) factor in a considered phenomenon of self-similarity.’ Unfortunately, most of the literature on the subject disregards this sharp observation.” — Gabriel Pareyon, 2011.