jwilzewske: laser

Showing posts with label laser. Show all posts

Friday, June 3, 2011

Just returned to U.S. from several weeks in China, inspired by the possibilities

S oft power is derived from both state and society. Savvy states are able to harness the creativity and vibrancy of their societies for soft power purposes while understanding that it is civil society’s independence from the state that contains the real persuasive power. When authoritarian states deny the global public the ability to directly access their domestic civil society, they are potentially depriving themselves of a key soft power asset in the information age.”
— Shanthi Kalathil, ISD Working Papers in New Diplomacy, MAY-2011.

I ’ve just returned from several weeks in China—a wonderful, profoundly stimulating experience. I attended chamber music performances in Beijing, including a delightful concert at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (“The Egg”) by pianist Igor Levit and three of his colleagues (Evgenia Rubinova, Michail Lifits, Herbert Schuch).

U nfortunately, due to Chinese government policy Google Blogger, Twitter, and Facebook are all blocked in the PRC, which is why I have posted no blogs or tweets in recent weeks. (Did not try to use a proxy-server. Hotel ISPs were dodgy enough as it was...)

T here were interesting ‘audience compliance enforcement’ practices in China that we would never see in the West. For example, the concert hall staff aim red ‘marksman’/gun-sight-type lasers on the heads and backs of audience members who make noise or who move or try to take a forbidden photo during a performance. Everyone in the audience sees the bright red dot ‘painted’ on the body part of the offender. We don’t see that kind of enforcement of etiquette in the U.S. or Europe, that’s for sure. But the effectiveness of the social censure by the other audience members who are seated near the ‘offender’ is total and nearly instantaneous. From a performer’s perspective, this is kind of cool—especially when the behavior is disruptive and selfish on the part of the person doing the picture-taking or recording or moving-around.

I gor Levit gave a fantastic left-hand-only rendering of BWV 971 (among other things). I asked him and he says the transcription was Brahms’s, published by Breitkopf & Hartel, but I look in Breitkopf catalog and do not see it... I will have to buy a copy of their EB-6018 to look... maybe it is in there and only the Breitkopf pdf file online is in error. There are lots of LH transcriptions of BWV 1004 Chaconne, BWV 1006, BWV 1002, BWV 1031, and so on. I so far do not find the LH tr. of 971...

T he unlikely LH as proponent of subject, object, everything: this reveals new dimensions in, and sheds new light on, a piece I thought I understood. The RH stands by like a watchful parent, saying nothing.

L eon Fleisher and others have had dystonia or other reasons to pursue such literature, but here in China I hear Igor Levit and learn new things. Some might consider one such piece in an otherwise normal program to be a ‘novelty’ or ‘gimmick’, but it was not. Absolutely masterful.

I visited hospitals—crowded but fastidiously clean and well-run—so many things different from the West, but so many things the same. Visited the Central Conservatory where Chen Yi and Zhou Long and others trained. Oh, the food! The friendly, gracious Chinese people!

S o China blazes this prodigious, distinctive, iconoclastic path—many paths, actually, reflecting mixtures of Han Chinese plus 55 minority groups: regional, metropolitan and rural—always diverging from the West, because why? Because what is distinctly Chinese embodies the belovèd “national circumstances” and reinforces the honorable “Chinese characteristics”, or guoqing (国情). That is why... that is why this Chinese ‘autopoietic’ tendency is self-sustaining. It is a little like Richard Dawkins’s ‘Selfish Gene’ on a large social scale. Based on my 3-week exposure, I think it’s not a deliberated process and not a politically-coerced one. Instead, it feels organic, inevitable. So many people, who mostly seem so happy, so long as the ‘boom’ lasts! I can hardly wait for the chance to return...

Brahms transcription of the Bach Chaconne of Violin partita BWV 1004 for the left-hand (Peters)
Brahms transcription of Italian Concerto (Clavier-Ubung II) for the left-hand (Breitkopf)
Joseffy Violin partita BWV 1006 transcription for the left-hand
Kistler-Liebendorfer Choralvorspiel BWV 711, violin sonata BWV 1001, violin partita BWV 1006, orchestra suite No. 1 BWV 1066, orch suite No. 3 BWV 1068, musical offering canon BWV 1079... transcription for the left-hand
Philipp violin partita BWV 1002, violin partita BWV 1004 transcription for the left-hand
Raff Violin partita No. 2 BWV 1004 Chaconne transcription for the left-hand
Sitsky Violin partita No. 2 BWV 1004 Chaconne transcription for the left-hand
Sosa Chromatische Fantasie und Fuge BWV 903 transcription for the left-hand
Sosa Invention B-Dur BWV 785 transcription for the left-hand
Wittgenstein Violin partita No. 2 BWV 1004 Chaconne transcription for the left-hand
Wittgenstein Schule für die linke Hand III/2: Präludium c-Moll transcription for the left-hand
Wittgenstein Siciliano aus der Flötensonate Es-Dur BWV 1031 transcription for the left-hand

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Ton Koopman: C.P.E. Bach, Improvisation, and a License to Imagine

T he very difficulty of this music could be seen as a mark both of its sublimity and of its visionary modernity.”
— Annette Richards, p. 153.

T o better understand ... conventional form not only drives perception and expectation, it promotes coherence. ... C.P.E. Bach could play with the audience’s expectations to heighten their sense of drama. ... C.P.E. Bach’s affective musical discourses involved many contrasting rhetorical materials such as exclamation, interjection, suspension, interruption, affirmation, and negation. Through the dramatic use of these semiotic guides, situating them within the framework of the rhetorical model, as well as associating these ideas with congruent key affects, C.P.E. Bach produced organized, coherent, musical arguments that were imbued with content and effected communication.”
— Damian Espinosa, MTO 10(3), 2004.

T he SPCO’s performance last Sunday with Ton Koopman and his wife, Tini Mathot, was an inspired tour de force.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach - Concerto in F for Two Harpsichords, Wq. 46
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach - Sinfonia in G, Wq. 183, No. 4.
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach - Sinfonia in D, Wq. 183, No. 1.
Johann Sebastian Bach - Sinfonia from Cantata No. 42.
Georg Philipp Telemann - Tafelmusik III Suite

C hoices of tempi and pauses in the C.P.E. Bach Wq. 183 Sinfonias stylistic narrative were dramatic but not extreme. These are all highly melodic works that require great sensitivity to the lyrical contours and cues regarding expressions’ prominence, and the SPCO and Koopman rendered these with beautiful mastery.

Y es, the accompaniment’s “single lines, stabbing chords and pauses avoid covering up the delicate harpsichord sonorities” [Aaron Grad, program notes]. But, far more significant, the extemporaneous pauses—and interrupting the rhythmically cohesive fast movements with fantasy-like slow movements—impart an exuberant, expansive, improvisatory quality to each of these pieces—aided and abetted by Koopman’s enthusiastic conducting. This seems to grant us permission to apply looser, improvisatory paradigms to our listening. The ‘Allegro assai-Andante-Presto’ and ‘Allegro di molto-Largo-Presto’ best characterize how we feel the movements’ form and intent, reminiscent of ‘extroversive semiosis’ which involves the progress of variations in communicating meaning (Agawu 1991, see link below).

M oreover, some physical correlates of ‘prominence’ are duration, pitch movement, loudness, and timbre contrast (see Patel, p. 118). The loudness changes and timbral changes that occur with ‘releases’—with the decay and reverberation of the notes that the players have just released—are correlates that C.P.E. Bach uses to great advantage in these pieces. There are back-beat emphases in the Allegro assai in Wq. 183 No. 4 that are strong correlates of ‘prominence’ as well.

T he Concerto in F for two harpsichords Wq. 46 is likewise comprised of three movements, ‘Allegro-Largo-Allegro assai’, the same fast-slow-fast pattern of the Sinfonias. The harpsichord parts require phenomenal technical virtuosity, with really fast passages in the outer movements. Koopman’s and Mathot’s execution of these was flawless and successfully communicated to the audience in the acoustically-excellent, modest-sized 1,100-seat Ted Mann Concert Hall on the University of Minnesota’s main campus West Bank.

C .P.E.’s dramatic and rhetorical devices include some features that, to me, resemble ‘time compression’ or ‘time focusing’ in laser systems—the interaction between an amplifier and a saturable nonlinear absorber results in pulse compression and intensification of harmonics in lasers (see Akhmanov Fig. 1-3, reproduced below). For example, the triplet figures (and 3x2 sextuplets) in the Allegro and Presto movements of the Sinfonias played against and coherently sync-ed with notes of longer duration yield a steeper pulse—a sonic contour with steeper loudness waveform—in much the same way as would be the case in a laser system. (I have no idea whether others have considered this before, but I swear it would be a common and natural reverie for any optical engineer or laser designer attending a Ton Koopman interpretation of C.P.E. Bach to have. Seldom confessed out-loud, this sort of conniption and trans-discipline serendipity is contributory to why we engineers and scientists love attending live chamber music performances.)

M y delight and wonderment at these features make me entirely ready to believe that C.P.E.’s writing anticipated modernity and postmodernity by 200 or 250 years—anticipated not only laser physics but, gee, flexible, disintermediated capitalism of mobile rather than fixed capital; anticipated the victory of agility over power, of transnationalism over nationalism, of instantaneity over duration, of software over hardware, of services over products, of consumption over production; anticipated the supremacy of Now over the Past or the Future. Maybe even a Tardis. So dramatic and radical are these C.P.E. Bach pieces that all sorts of things seem plausible.

D oes [Emanuel] Bach stand between the times? [Baroque and Classical] No, he is his own time.”
— Ludger Rémy, harpsichord, liner notes to C.P.E. Bach: Harpsichord Concertos Wq. 30, 37, & 38, CPO, 1995, p. 18.

T hese C.P.E Bach pieces—so vivid and dramatic as they are when interpreted by Koopman—also remind me of the ‘unmediatedness’ of photographs—so ‘unproblematic’ for modernists insofar as the photographer’s intent, the photograph, and the viewer’s experience of the photograph are assumed to cohere with each other, the meaning is assumed to be self-evident, and “unlike other cultural texts, even the simplest among us can read a photograph” [Lutz & Collins 1993; p. 28]. C.P.E.’s Sinfonias as acoustic holograms?

I n short, SPCO and Koopman and Mathot succeeded in diverting and inspiring us, in ways that we had no reason to expect or hope for. We came; we listened; we innovated—and went home very, very happy.

N ote/Update, 03-MAR-2011. Some readers emailed me to say that I must be joking, when I suggested the bit about acoustical lasers above. But no! I was entirely serious! Can chamber orchestras performing in chambers “lase” acoustically? Yes! I witnessed it in U of M Ted Mann Hall last Sunday. Ton Koopman and SPCO acoustically lased in the frequency range 0.1 Hz to 10 Hz... several decades lower than test-tube thermoacoustic lasers (see videos, links below). To have composed these peculiar pieces in the way he did, C.P.E. Bach almost certainly grasped this, even if he didn’t have a word like ‘lase’ to name what he was doing. The repetition of it in the Sinfonias is too ‘deliberate’, I think, for Bach to not have known what he was doing! The acoustic laser action is not stable, on account of the irregular shape of the chamber and the varied reflections/absorptions from the Ted Mann Hall’s walls and ceiling and surfaces below. Indeed, the intermittency/instability of the effect adds tremendously to the drama and emotional impact of the pieces. And the lasing is supported not at one frequency only but intermittently at several, also owing to the irregular shape of the enclosure. Chamber orchestra = polychromatic acoustic laser! Listen harder! You will hear it, too!

YouTube video #1
YouTube video #2
YouTube video #3
YouTube video #4

Some things to read, about acoustic lasers:
Item #1
Item #2
Item #3
Item #4
Item #5

What a novel compositional device, C.P.E.! Make the chamber ensemble ‘lase’!

T he Enlightenment exemplified intellectual changes of early modern time-space compression, including the Copernican revolution and perspectival painting. These changes were important moments in the scalar jump from the city-state to the nation-state, the most important social and political unit of the modern era, homogenizing local cutures and economies...”
— Barney Warf, p. 12.

N ever in history has distance meant less... Figuratively, we ‘use up’ places and then dispose of them.”
— Alvin Toffler, p. 75.