Showing posts with label literary theory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label literary theory. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 4, 2007

Martinů’s Small Pieces: Dessert Pairings?

Ensemble Villa Musica CD
F rom the stone parapet which encircled the tower just under their windows the Martinů family looked out, from one year’s end to another, upon a considerable expanse of the surrounding countryside. Martinů’s father was responsible for the belfry as a watchtower along with his bell ringing duties. Polička had been destroyed by fire and the tower had in part been built to overlook the whole community. There were blue woods on the horizon—peaceful woods, friendly rather than romantic; and the pure white vista of winter, when for four long months the ground was covered with snow; and a kaleidoscope of tiny fields, cultivated with neatness and love by the small Czech farmers. From his earliest age, Bohuslav never tired of peering through the star-shaped apertures with which the parapet was decorated and of running from one to another to discover new views of the world below, all framed by these openings… To Bohuslav, it often seemed as though the change of the seasons—the arrival of spring, the summer storms, with their lightning and thunder, the autumn winds, and the winter snows—reached him at first hand, direct from heaven, before the little antlike people on the earth below received them.”
  — Milos Safranek, 1946.

CMT: Notwithstanding our recent discussions about Parker Quartet and Chiara Quartet playing in bars and clubs, it’s normally sacrilege to suggest ‘doing’ anything concurrent with listening to chamber music. The unamplified instruments’ sounds are so delicate and the compositions’ textures are so nuanced that any avoidable rustling or ambient noise detracts significantly from fully apprehending the music’s meaning or registering its full impact. The visual distraction of motion by audience members also tends to mar the experience. But then again, some pieces are punchy enough to stand up to a modest amount of acoustic or visual competition.

DSM: I recently heard Ensemble Villa Musica’s new disc and thought the same thing. In fact, I was enjoying listening to it over dessert and coffee, and I thought that, just as there are recipes that are compatible with fine wines, there must be recipes that could be thoughtfully ‘paired’ with certain kinds of chamber music.

Ensemble Villa Musica
CMT: Martinů’s ballet, La Revue de cuisine (The Kitchen Revue), jazz-ballet in 1 act (1927) might be a ‘literal’ example of that. As you know, it’s a quintet or sextet (clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, cello, piano, and violin), premiered in November 1927 in Prague. The ballet is in ten movements: Prologue (Allegretto), Introduction (Tempo de marche), Danse du moulinet autour du caudron (Poco meno), Danse du chaudron et du couvercle (Allegro), Tango (Danse d’amour, Lento), Duel (Poco a poco allegro.), Entracte (Lamentation du chaudron. Allegro moderato), Marche funèbre (Adagio), Danse radieuse (Tempo di marche), and Fin du drame (Allegretto). The suite is in four movements: Prologue, Tango, Charleston, and Finale. The score for the suite was published in Paris shortly after its premier. The full score for the ballet was discovered in the early 1990s in the archives of the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel and published in 2004. In 1925-6, Martinů wrote a jocular introduction called Pokušení svatoušká hrnec (Temptation of the Saintly Pot), which he later scored under the revised title La Revue de cuisine. The dancers play a variety of cooking utensils, enacting a pastiche of kitchen life. The marriage of Pot and Lid is in danger of being broken up by flirtatious Twirling Stick. Dishcloth tries to seduce Lid but is challenged to a duel by Broom. Pot gets over her infatuation with Twirling Stick and wants to get back with Lid, but Lid’s gone. Suddenly an enormous foot appears from the wings and kicks Lid back on stage. Pot and Lid kiss and make up and, promiscuous as ever, Twirling Stick goes off with Dishcloth.

DSM: The music of ‘La revue de cuisine’ involves polyrhythm time-signature sequences. For example, the Finale involves an opening piano solo marked ‘Tempo di marcia’. This switches between 2/4, 3/8 and 4/8 in an unpredictable but organic/natural way, generating the desired jazz-like rhythms. Other jazz influences are found in the orchestration: the piano harmonies and dissonances, the muted jazz trumpet, and the pizzicato cello, which resembles double bass jazz technique: clearly, a progressive piece of music that links early- and mid-twentieth-century music.

CMT: It’s spikey, yet lightweight . . . And the mindset of the listener matters quite a lot, with regard to the matching the demands of the music with the cognitive investment of the listener. For example, I would play only one or two of these movements at a time. The dessert-time experience felt very appropriate. I don’t feel compelled to listen to all ten consecutively. The same is true of my reactions to other of Martinů’s small pieces. I could imagine pairing them with a quiet, intimate dessert for two, with coffee and a cognac.

Martinů’s Delicious Trios:
  • Piano Trio in d minor (Violin, Cello, and Piano)
  • 5 kurze Stücke (five short pieces) for Piano Trio (Violin, Cello and Piano)
  • Bergerettes for Piano Trio
  • Grand Trio No. 3 (for Violin, Cello and Piano)
  • Trio for Flute, Violin, and Piano (1937)
  • Trio for Flute, Cello, and Piano (1944)

DSM: This Ensemble Villa Musica disc is a spacious yet well-focused recording. Nice production values, well-engineered. And I think you are right about Martinů’s small pieces’ admitting a detached, observerly stance as a listener. I don’t think Martinů would be upset at all about that. In fact, such a stance seems highly consistent with Martinů’s own observer-like relation to the world around him (quote from Safranek’s biography, above), at a distance—whether from the bell tower of his youth, or from a sidewalk café in Paris. To analyze his work in terms of literary theory instead of music theory, I suppose you could regard Martinů’s small pieces as manifesting a composerly ‘omniscient narrator’ voice. The author of such stories wouldn’t begrudge the reader a dessert or cognac!




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Sunday, February 25, 2007

Glagolitic Ekphrasis and Melisma in Tondal

Dialogos, Vision of Tondal
DSM: Dialogos uses such—What would we say?—onomatopoetical sounds. If Tondal’s spirit is leaving his body, then what better way to represent that movement than by the splitting of vocal lines—the divergence from unison to close harmonies and dissonances, diminished seconds, and so on—and the re-convergence of those lines back into unison! The whole thing is melismatic (that is, many notes per syllable of text)! The extended, braided melismas distort our sense of time! A fantastic effect!

CMT: Yes. In Tondal, all six of the Dialogos members’ voices execute extensive melismas—sometimes in the upper range to express aspiration or anxiety or other emotions; sometimes low in their vocal range to express a pensive rumble. I think that long melismas are such a vivid musical rendering of the self, of the spirit. Incidentally, Bach often does this on the word ‘geistlich,’ and he even works in some irony in his choral settings—for example, when the alto sings the chorale while the soprano and tenor parts accompany—in his Cantatas and in his smaller works (Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied; Komm, Jesu, komm; Lobet den Herrn; Jesu, meine Freude; and Fürchte dich nicht). The singers bid farewell to life’s vices and passions to gain eternal life, and you would expect Bach to emphasize the joy and eagerness of those expecting salvation. But instead the musical figure of the soprano voices—the way in which they reluctantly release their held notes down a half step—clearly represents regret and doubt. You hear a predominating sorrow—an aporia. Much of Dialogos’ account of Tondal’s Vision is like this—these aporietic melismas!

DSM: Buelow notes Bach’s use of melismatic gestures, which he says are “contradictory to all Baroque theory of recitative.” But maybe Bach was harking back to an early tradition. Not only poets may respond to a work of visual art with a creative act in their own medium, transposing the style and structure, the message and metaphors from the visual to the verbal. Composers routinely engage in interartistic transfers like this. Although the musical medium is reputedly abstract, composers, just like poets, can respond in many different ways to a visual representation. They transpose structure and content. They interpret or play with some of the suggestive elements of the original image. This is basically the musical equivalent of what literary theorists call ‘ekphrasis’. Central questions concern the definition of musical ekphrasis in relation to music’s ability to represent extramusical realities or narratives—to relate to reality by way of musical mimesis or symbolic reference.

CMT: You know, listeners don’t have unbounded capacity to track multiple concurrent lines of sound. David Huron found that as the number of concurrent voices in a polyphonic texture increases, expert listeners are both slower to recognize the addition of new voices, and more prone to underestimate the number of voices present. Here is Huron’s plot of experimental data from five expert musicians. This shows voice-tracking errors while listening to polyphonic music. The data show that when listening to polyphonic textures employing relatively homogeneous timbres, tracking confusions are common when more than three voices are present.

David Huron
DSM: The solid columns show mean estimation errors for polyphonic textures of varying textural densities; the shaded columns indicate mean error rates for single-voice entries. For polyphonic textures employing relatively homogeneous timbres, the accuracy of identifying the number of concurrent voices drops markedly at the point where a three-voice texture is augmented to four voices. Beyond three voices, tracking confusions are commonplace. In a study of isolated chords, Parncutt (1993) found similar results. When asked to count the number of tones in chords constructed using tones with octave-spaced partials (Shepard tones), Parncutt found that listeners make significant errors (underestimation) once the number of chromas exceeds three.

CMT: Limitations in the perception of auditory numerosity may be symptomatic of a broader perceptual limitation, since the results of these studies parallel the results of similar studies in vision. Using a dishabituation paradigm, Strauss and Curtis showed that performance degrades when discriminating three from four items, and reaches chance performance when discriminating four from five items. The work of Strauss and Curtis is especially significant since pre-verbal infants can be expected to possess no explicit knowledge of counting. This implies that the perceptual confusion arising for visual and auditory fields containing more than three items is a low-level constraint that is not mediated by cognitive skills in counting.

DSM: These results are consistent with reports of musical experience offered by musicians themselves including composer Paul Hindemith. It strikes me that this is much like the close harmonies and complex dissonances of barbershop quartet singing. Your mind naturally follows and anticipates the divergences and convergences. In fact, that is a major source of the power and charm of such music—the textural complexities.

CMT: Dialogos compounds this further when they circle themselves on the stage. The choral effect is as though the dissonances are massed—one single aggregate collective spirit, despite the continued multi-vocality of it. Then the antiphonal qualities are restored when they disperse from the circle and distribute themselves across the stage—the individualistic contrast is especially apparent when they are performing in a large cathedral, with all of the reverberations that are characteristic of a church.

David Huron
DSM: Temperley addresses a fundamental question about music cognition: how do we extract basic kinds of musical information, such as meter, phrase structure, counterpoint, pitch spelling, harmony, and key from music as we hear it? Taking a computational approach, Temperley develops models for generating these aspects of musical structure. The models he proposes are based on preference rules, which are criteria for evaluating a possible structural analysis of a piece of music. A preference rule system evaluates many possible interpretations and chooses the one that best satisfies the rules.

CMT: Temperley has addressed some of this in his book, as has Taruskin in his. There is the ontology of musical structure: meter, phrase structure, contrapuntal structure, harmony, and key, as well as pitch spelling (the labeling of pitch events with spellings such as A-flat or G-sharp). Musical structures are inferred, but there is also musical ambiguity, “look-back” retrospective revision of our concepts as we continue listening, and sweet anticipation—‘expectation’ in Huron’s sense. Dialogos is masterful in interweaving all of these to make their performances powerfully evocative!




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