Chen Yi: Design as Narration, Narrative as Totem

T    he quest for music that elevates the mind is an essential part of the mainstream of Chinese music. Over 8,000 years of the Chinese musical civilization, all types of influences have been experienced... These include the adoption and jettisoning—of various temperament systems, of a wide range of formal designs, and of wide ranges of acoustics. Global consumerism, however, is one influenc it had never encountered [before the 20^th Century.”
  —  Sin-Yan Shen, Chinese Music in the 20th Century, p.189.

T    o my mind, the origin of music should not be sought in linguistic communication. Of course, the drum and song have long been carriers of linguistic meaning. But there is no convincing theory of music as language. The attempts that have been made in that direction are no more than camouflages for a kind of naturalism or the most mundane kind of pedantry. The musical message has no meaning, even if one artificially assigns a (necessarily rudimentary) signification to certain sounds, a move that is almost always associated with a hierarchical discourse.”
  —  Jacques Attali, Noise, p. 25.

I    t is true that I use compositional techniques from all of the cultures I have experienced and all the teachers I have learned from—Russian, French, German, Chinese, American. I do adapt Western classical techniques to express Chinese [sensibilities] and so on. ‘From the Path of Beauty’ does take Chinese folk songs as its primary material, but it [secondarily/indirectly] generates ideas that are universal. Music is, I think, a universal language.”
  —  Chen Yi, 17-JAN-2009, Friends of Chamber Music Concert.

I suppose that the main controversy has perennially been not whether music may evoke substantially the same emotions in all listeners/performers, but rather whether music can express propositions or specific questions or perform other representational linguistic functions that are associated with other textual or oral languages. In other words, the idea that musical gestures and harmonic colors and rhythmic textures can serve as signs and symbols that carry subjective emotional meaning is not tremendously controversial. But whether it can do more than this still is a source of disagreement.



T he performance at Friends of Chamber Music last night by Shanghai Quartet and Chanticleer, of Chen Yi’s ‘From the Path of Beauty’ for mixed ensemble was a good opportunity to revisit that topic. The performance was flawless, extraordinarily beautiful. The balance between the voices and the strings (who often were played with mutes on) was exceptionally good.


T he 7 movements of this piece include one a capella portion, one movement for string quartet alone, and the remaining 5 with the combined, mixed ensemble. The vocal parts have accompanying Chinese poems; however, the syllables did not signify anything to us who do not speak Chinese, and it was not clear whether the parts were wordless vocalizes or actual texts of poems.

• The Bronze Taotie (Shang Dynasty, 1600 – 1100 BCE; choir)
  
• The Dancing Ink (Tang Dynasty, 618 – 907 CE)
  
• The Ancient Totems
  
• The Rhymed Poems (Song Dynasty, 960 – 1279 CE; str qt)
  
• The Clay Figurines (Han Dynasty, 206 BCE – 220 CE)
  
• The Secluded Melody (Six Dynasties, 497 – 590 CE)
  
• The Village Band

T he punctuation and textures of the vocal parts and the string parts closely resembled each other through much of the work—pizzicatos, glissandos, melismata, and so on. On account of this, the ‘discursive’ quality of the interaction between the voices and the instruments was even more prominent than it otherwise would have been.

T he third movement is entitle ‘Totems’, but, to me, the entire piece felt ‘totemic’, mantra-like, invocative, monumental. Totems, after all, are mnemonics—conveniences for social identification, invocation, and attachment. ‘From the Path of Beauty’ is like an elaborate ‘pole’ of totemic figures, stacked one after the other. There is no hierarchy; no particular ‘arc’ to the 7 movements—with the exception that the seventh and last one does feel like it is approaching a conclusion. The rest appear, one by one, in a sequence that seems like it is pretty malleable/flexible; each leaves its impression, conveys what it has to say, be it humorous or meditative or celebratory, and gives way to the next.

T he concept of mantra goes back to the pre-Vedic and early Buddhist traditions and to the primitive cults of magic, animism—and totemism. It has since been a continuing element one way or another in the religious traditions of the world and traces of it pervade to this day among the most modern of them. Practitioners of those believe that mantras have power over the deity and can make it confer the desired benefit. Is this piece, commissioned by Chanticleer, informed by a commission specification that aims at historical survey [of Chinese musical/poetical idioms], or is it instead Chen Yi’s invention as Chinese diaspora/teacher?

G urmantras, mantras imparted by gurus or teachers, are made meaningful by be whispered into the ear of the disciple by the guru. We disciples [in the audience; on the stage] repeat Chen Yi’s gurmantra … to achieve enlightenment.

T here are parts of ‘From the Path of Beauty’ that are luxuriant (esp. mvt. #6), but there are other parts that are arid, desolate, ascetic. In the Buddhist form of asceticism, there is no metaphysical dualism of God and the world, or of soul and the body. Phenomenal existence is viewed as characterized by suffering, impermanence and not-self. The aim of ascetic culture is to go beyond this sphere of conditioned phenomena. The keynote of the ascetic culture of Chen Yi is moderation; self-mortification is rejected altogether. Singers, string players, and audience members can simultaneously appreciate ascetic beauty and enjoyment.

T he community created in the space of the piece is not one of any essentialist definition of ‘chineseness’—taking Chen Yi’s introductory words about ‘universal language’ and assimilating compositional gestures from all over the world, I sense that this is as much an embodiment of diaspora culture as it is a celebration of Chinese music history.

S till, the practice of composing is presently something much more counter-cultural than other public acts, and the community created in Chen Yi’s composition is a quintessential exposition of cultural inversions, turning taboos into totems. Conspiratorial counter-tenors!

I t raises up the space of the ensemble to the realization of the China of the dream of racial and gender and class inclusion.

S yntactic music, notation-centric, rich with norms, expectations, surprises, tensions and resolutions, repetitions. Middleton (p.145ff) once wrote about this, as did Gilles Deleuze in Difference and Repetition (1994). Difference is the distance moved from a repeat and a repeat being the smallest difference. Difference is quantitative and qualitative — how far different and what type of difference.

C hen Yi’s movements are variations on classical form, revealing highly individual choices of tonal planning, melodic repetition, digression and reminiscence. Her techniques enable her to undertake compositional strategies quite different from the models of her contemporaries. Her construction is taut, and her subjects exhibit sharp polarities. A detailed account of digressions and reminiscences at different hierarchical levels in composing can be found in Lewin (1986).

S uch gestures of ‘poeticizing sound’ inflect the tonal design and expressive action of the songs—her primary folk song materials—and their repetitions. The ‘modus operandi’ of disjunct keys by side-slipping to a remote tonal area in the songs—the ambiguities of the modulations up a half-step; the choral dissonances—is not only replayed in the 7 movements of the suite, but is recontextualized within the paradigm of its overall form. It appears as a series of tonal digressions that delays the subsequent subjects on the large-scale. The tonal path shifts unexpectedly and repeatedly, via interrupted cadences, into other keys. The expressive effect is one of ‘remoteness’ and ‘out-of-timeness’—very apropos in view of the Dynasties theme. This is of course not unknown in Western canon—for example in Schubert.

T    he year the mercury drops to the bottom line.
How I miss that year—
My wool jacket at the pawnshop,
Doors and windows sealed tight by a snowstorm.
Thenceforth even good friends were like
Mercury, dropping
To zero.”
  —  Zhen Chouyu, Thinking of a Friend at Year’s End.

• Chen Yi page at UMKC Conservatory
  
• Chanticleer website
  
• Shanghai Quartet website
  
• Society for Asian Music
  
• Central Conservatory of Music, Beijing
  
• CUHK Music Dept
  
• Modern Chinese Poetry Research Institute
  
• Journal of Music in China. Editor: Zhou Qinru. Published twice a year in Los Angeles. website (http://www.MusicInChina.org) seems to be defunct.
  
• de Andrade M. Poesias completas. Univ de São Paulo, 1987. (totemic poetics as a feature of writings by diasporic/displaced people)
  
• Attali J. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Univ Minnesota, 1985.
  
• Cobussen M. Deconstruction in Music.
  
• Deleuze G. Difference and Repetition. Columbia Univ, 1995.
  
• Freud S. Totem & Taboo. Routledge, 2001 (1913).
  
• Jiayan Mi. Self-fashioning And Reflexive Modernity In Modern Chinese Poetry, 1919-1949. Mellen, 2004.
  
• Lerdahl F. Cognitive constraints on compositional systems. Contemp Mus Rev 1992; 6:97-121.
  
• Lewin D. Studies in Music with Text. Oxford Univ, 2006.
  
• Lewin D. Music, theory, phenomenology, and modes of perception. Music Perception 1986; 3:327-92.
  
• Liu C-C. A Critical History of New Music in China. Chinese Univ, 2009.
  
• Rees H, ed. Lives in Chinese Music. Univ Illinois, 2009.
  
• Sin-Yan Shen. Chinese Music in the 20th Century. Chinese Music Society, 2001.
  
• Yeh M, ed. & tr. Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry. Yale, 1994.

Dallapiccola on Children’s Rights and Duties: Quaderno di Annalibera

Luigi Dallapiccola was was 48 years old when Quaderno was composed, nominally as a gift for the eponymous Annalibera, his daughter, on the occasion of her eighth birthday. [Annalibera Dallapiccola was born on the day of the liberation of Italy, whence the ‘libera’. Prof. Annalibera Dallapiccola is now a scholar in Asian and Indian art and is an Honorary Professor of Fine Arts at University of Pennsylvania and the University of Edinburgh. Formerly she was Professor of Art History, South Asian Institute, Heidelberg University.] The Quaderno is composed of eleven variations on a twelve-tone sequence based on the name B-A-C-H (the pitches B-flat, A, C, and B).

Surely we can wonder whether Luigi meant Quaderno as a veiled criticism of government: projecting children as analogous to the general public (under Mussolini, or under subsequent regimes). After all, other of Luigi’s compositions were famously political.

But there is plenty of evidence that we should take Quaderno at face value—as a collection of etudes addressed by father to daughter. For one thing, the title ‘Quaderno’ recalls Johann Sebastian Bach’s ‘Notebook’ for his daughter, Anna Magdalena. Other correspondences include Dallapiccola’s recapitulation of Bach’s contrapunctus subtitles for movements in strict canon, as in Art of the Fugue.

Quaderno’s movement titles are (in English) as follows:

• Symbol;
  
• Accents;
  
• First Counterpoint;
  
• Lines;
  
• Second Counterpoint (Canon in contrary motion);
  
• Friezes;
  
• Andantino amoroso and Third Counterpoint (Canon cancrizans);
  
• Rhythms;
  
• Colors;
  
• Shadows; and
  
• Quatrain.

These movements are lovingly didactic in a fatherly way—their names and their playful, thematically-expansive musical content are difficult to construe as covert political polemic.

Some 15 years ago David Lewin published a detailed transformational analysis of the Simbolo movement. Simbolo is marked ‘Quasi lento, misterioso’ and fully lives up to the misterioso. Regarding Simbolo, Lewin said: “The group [of transformations] is not a list of immediate aural intuitions or intentions ... Rather than trying to make our transformations denote phenomenological presences in a blow-by-blow narrative, we can more comfortably regard them as ways of structuring an abstract space ... through which the piece moves” (Lewin, p. 34).

If Dallapiccola wrote that the tone row in Simbolo isn’t meant to be perceptible to the listener, then we should take him at his word. He was, at the ripe age of 48, in a period of rapid change and learning—we hear plenty of discovery and exploratory gestures in these ‘etudes’. We can also readily conceive of what the intense, inquisitive Annalibera may have been like at that age—and imagine the motives that may have been at work in the father, trying to create something beautiful and highly symbolic ‘for her’, to be hers. It is one hell of a birthday gift. And, as things go in the Age of Reason—late in childhood and before the onset of adolescence—it was the perfect time for Luigi to make such a gesture. Misterioso—one of the duties of a composer (of a musician; of any artist) is to trade on the novel and non-obvious. Il Luigi ci istruisce così!

There is no reason why music theorists should give undue emphasis to tone-row or other serial compositional methods—giving priority to the ‘system’ seriously mis-represents the compositional process. It does violence to the music and dishonor to the composer! Dallapiccola especially was no slave to the [twelve-tone, serialist] ‘system’.

Even in Quaderno where a tone-row is perceptible, it does not dominate. As the canon or other variations progress, the role of the tone-row becomes less and less clear. Or, more accurately, the force of the ‘system’—the thematic mechanics—begins to cope with the accretion of other equally-legitimate guiding principles, other thematic genera. How like a Bach fugue this is! Once a theme is developed, it is absorbed into layers upon layers, variation upon variation. Futile to analyze a fugue by exhaustively identifying subject, counter-subject, and so on! Dried insects preserved in an entomologist’s collection have more fidelity to nature than this!

Based on the evidence we see in Quaderno, I don’t believe Dallapiccola relied on twelve-tone rows compulsively. There are so many other factors, that present themselves to the ear, that should inform a faithful analysis true to Dallapiccola’s motives and intentions. Above all, analysis should enlighten the performer and the listener.

So my speculation is this: Luigi Dallapiccola created Quaderno not only as a special gift, but also as a way of memorializing his sentiment(ality) about childhood. He was concerned about children as well as other members of society, both before the war and in the post-War period. A highly private man, he maintained a traditional idea that what went on in the family was nobody’s business, least of all government’s. But he was not a traditionalist as concerns the rights and duties of children, from what we can tell in his writings. Poverty and social exclusion may be resistant to solution by public means, but that simply implies that individual families must redouble their efforts. Children, too, have moral standing and therefore have duties commensurate with their rights. The childhood privilege of engaging in fanciful, creative and artistic pursuits carries with it, for example, an obligation to exert effort in good faith, to pay attention—for the children to avail themselves of the opportunities that the parents set before them.

If there is a better way to talk about this than through the notions of ethics and children’s rights, perhaps Luigi Dallapiccola knew such a way. The embarrassingly prevalent and pernicious (U.S.?) ideology—which insists that parents should be like gods to their children and that children are basically property, in a status of utter subjection to the will of the parents; and which defers to some distant time in adolescence any accountability by children for their acts—surely had no place in Luigi’s world-view.

Of course under U.N. and E.U. resolutions, children are emphatically not property, but they are nonetheless ‘extensions’ of the parents’ identities. Emotionally and biologically, this is natural. And, legally, this is true as well. Children progressively acquire autonomy or sovereignty—increasing rights, commensurate with increasing responsibilities and abilities. They discover and progressively grow beyond the parents’ identities. Quaderno is a gentle exhortation, by Luigi to Annalibera, to have serious fun in this process—of finding her own identity, of finding her own voice, of finding the good in the world and in other individuals and other cultures.

In summary, children are by nature ‘becoming’, not yet arrived into the fullness of identity. Of course, all of us are all always still ‘becoming’ no matter how old we may be, but children are more so. To Luigi Dallapiccola, children were persons to be taken seriously, as subjects with moral standing who have complex and evolving interests that merit public concern and complex and evolving duties that require the attention of the children as well as the attention of their parents and of society. Etudes are at this boundary: they are emblems of the social duty to give (parents’ and society’s duty of care), and they are emblems of a complementary duty to receive (the child’s duty of care). In a way, Quaderno is a meditation on ‘children as children’ and ‘parents as parents’ instead of as proto-adults and gods, respectively.

• Art History Dept., School of Fine Arts, Univ of Edinburgh
  
• Nolan C. Thoughts on Klumpenhouwer Networks and Mathematical Models: The Synergy of Sets and Graphs. MTO 2007: 13(3).
  
• BBC. Neglected Genius: Luigi Dallapiccola. BBC Radio3, 2006.
  
• Dallapiccola page at Wikipedia.org
  
• Dallapiccola page at CompositionToday.com
  
• Quaderno Musicale di Annalibera sheet music at Hutchins & Rea.
  
• Alegant B, Levey J. Octatonicism in Luigi Dallapiccola’s Twelve-Note Music. Music Analysis 2006; 25:39-87.
  
• Archard D. Children: Rights and Childhood. Routledge, 2004.
  
• Archard D, Macleod C, eds. The Moral and Political Status of Children. Oxford Univ, 2002.
  
• Earle B. Dallapiccola’s Early Synthesis. Music Analysis 2006; 25:3-38.
  
• Ensemble Dissonanzen. Musica da camera: Dallapiccola. (Mode, 2005.)
  
• Fearn R. The Music of Luigi Dallapiccola. Univ Rochester, 2005.
  
• Fernando J, ed. Children's Rights. Sage, 2001.
  
• Forte A. The Structure of Atonal Music. Yale Univ, 1977.
  
• Kohlberg L, Gilligan C. ‘The adolescent as philosopher: The discovery of self in a post-conventional world,’ in Mosher R, ed. Adolescents’ Development and Education. McCutchan, 1979, p. 76-9.
  
• Lester J. Analytic Approaches to Twentieth-Century Music. Norton, 1989.
  
• Lewin D. Musical Form and Transformation: Four Analytic Essays. Yale Univ, 1993 and 2007.
  
• Monetti M. Quaderno Musicale di Annalibera. (ASV, 1998.)
  
• O’Neill T, Zinga D, eds. Childrens Rights: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Participation and Protection. Univ Toronto, 2008.
  
• Perle G. Serial Composition and Atonality: An Introduction to the Music of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. 6e. Univ California, 1991.
  
• Straus J. Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory. 3e. Prentice-Hall, 2004.
  
• Center for Practical Bioethics.org page on Pediatric Palliative Care and children’s rights
  
• Vijayanagara Research Project website

Freund: Yet Another Partita Compiler (YAPC), Refactorings Noch Nach Bach

    [50-sec clip, Don Freund, Sonapartita, Adagio, Daniel Rubenstein & Muhiddin Dürrüoglu-Demiriz, 1.3MB MP3]

    [50-sec clip, Don Freund, Sonapartita, Passepied, Daniel Rubenstein & Muhiddin Dürrüoglu-Demiriz, 1.3MB MP3]

    [46-sec clip, Don Freund, Sonapartita, Presto, Daniel Rubenstein & Muhiddin Dürrüoglu-Demiriz, 1.1MB MP3]

    [50-sec clip, Don Freund, Sonapartita, Siciliano, Daniel Rubenstein & Muhiddin Dürrüoglu-Demiriz, 1.3MB MP3]

This exciting and beautiful piece contains extensive musical references to Bach, and other modern composers like Lukas Foss and Stravinsky. The title alludes to ‘Nach Bach’, a harpsichord piece by Georges Rochberg. The ‘Noch Nach’ is ‘Yet Another, After Bach’. For example, the third movement (Presto) replicates the violin part of the final movement of J.S. Bach’s G minor Sonata but has Freund’s imaginative piano part interacting in curious ‘noch nach’ ways with the violin.


Besides Rubenstein’s and Demiriz’s superb and sympathetic performance of it, the Freund work is interesting on multiple levels as relates to compositional methods and musical analysis.


The structures of the Bach sonatas and partitas that this ‘sonapartita’ mimics can be cast in computational form—using humdrum, for example. And, although I do not know whether Freund used a computer software to help generate this composition algorithmically, it’s possible to see from his finished result how a series of Java constructors and ‘refactoring’ transformations could be written to do so. Freund’s german title for this piece ‘Noch Nach Bach’ reminds me, in fact, of the old Stephen Johnson AT&T Bell Labs compiler generator utility, YACC (Yet Another Compiler Compiler), part of the original UNIX operating system.


An early decision in writing a compiler is whether the language will be treated in terms of patterns of characters (individual notes) or as patterns of tokens (horizontal motifs and vertical clusters). How do you create a compiler to generate the result you want/expect? We use refactorings such as safe rename and move refactorings, plus advanced refactorings like ‘ExtractMethod’ or ‘ExtractSuperclass’—or in a music composition application, we would use more complicated refactorings to be performed across large spans of each movement such as ‘ApplyMotifSupertype’ or ‘InferTypeArguments’ or ‘GeneratePartitaCounterpoint’.


The refactoring performed on the method A#partita() above first searches for all method invocations to partita. The only occurrence can be found in the constructor of class B. The Freund refactoring inserts the new indirection method indirection(A), which delegates to the original bach partita method. The partita-generating method invocation to partita in constructor B() is redirected to call the new indirection method. This object-oriented refactoring program amounts to a transformational network compiler—in this case, one that automatically composes partitas mimicking the patterns represented in Bach.

David Lewin’s wonderful book covers ‘transformational network’ theory from the point of view of post-composition analysis, not from the point of view of algorithmic composition. Of course, Klumpenhouwer, Lambert, Stoecker, Headlam, Rahn, and Mazzola and many other musicologists have productively applied transformational nets in analyzing music and for music information retrieval (MIR).

To date, though, software composition tools and ‘compiler compilers’ to create composition tools that can generate music that faithfully emulates design and orchestration patterns in established idioms (like Bach’s) have lagged behind. But Eclipse and other platforms for creating compilers and ‘compiler compilers’ have gotten significantly better and easier to use over the past 5 years or so. It is now far more feasible to create decent software-based composition tools than it was just a few years ago.

That side-steps the question of whether using such a tool—even as an ‘assistant’—violates aesthetic principles you hold dear. For my part, I would use such tools, provided their musicality was acceptable. After all, I use ProEngineer™ CAD/CAE software for the engineering that I do in my day-job. I use AdobeIllustrator™ and other computer-assisted art software for graphic art that I create. Those are not ‘crutches’ that in any way replace or undermine the integrity of my role as a designer. Why wouldn’t I happily use a good software composition tool? But the ‘compose’ widget in Finale and the GenJam applet for jazz improvisation aren’t that helpful. And the computational challenges are so daunting that I won’t hold my breath. Twenty years ago, William Schottstaedt worked on software-based counterpoint voice-leading and, since then, most people have used Markov-chain or other stochastic algorithms. These all focus on ‘small-scale’ decisions—Markov is, after all, a nearest-neighbor algorithm for generating a set of choices from which to choose. Schottstaedt used a best-first search algorithm to select a preferred candidate at each step. More recently, genetic-algorithm and simulated-annealing techniques are being used. But none of them is yet, so far as I know, very satisfactory. And none of them has an effective ‘scope’ that extends beyond about a 10-note or 12-note phrase. If there are 10 notes and, say, just 16 ways of moving from one note to the next in a given part or voice, then a phrase of a mere 10 notes begets 16¹⁰ possibilities—a combinatoric explosion, even for just one part and just one 10-note phrase. So, if a partita compiler compiler is going to succeed within the memory constraints on currently-available systems (even with 64-bit machines and terabytes of main memory and pagefile store), it will clearly have to go back to Fux’s ‘Gradus ad Parnassum’ or other rule-based processes to generate choices and to supervise polyphonic orchestration. Algorithms to predict the weather or earthquakes have better odds!

I  wonder whether Freund was thinking about YACC when he chose his title. I wonder whether he used any computational tools in creating this nice composition.

• Don Freund page at Univ Indiana
  
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