jwilzewske: marriage

Showing posts with label marriage. Show all posts

Saturday, April 28, 2012

Giya Kancheli on the [marital] virtues of revealing, accomodating

M usic, like life itself, is inconceivable without romanticism. Romanticism is a high dream of the past, present, and future—a force of invincible beauty which towers above, and conquers, the forces of ignorance, bigotry, violence, and evil.”
— Giya Kancheli.

I ’m listening to a recording of Tblisi-native composer Giya Kancheli’s 26-minute-long 1997 Piano Quartet ‘In l’istesso Tempo’ performed by Bridge Ensemble. The consistent pulse and the narrative epicness of it intrigue me. I replay it twice and the complexities and layers that I’d missed on the first listen gradually become more apparent...

G iya Kancheli’s sustained tones build in layers; melodic lines hover like chant, either offered plainly or decorated with trills and turns befitting a liturgical cantor. The mostly-smooth surface gives way to bare plucks, crackling outbursts and grand crescendos with a Romantic sense of drama... The wide-open space of his music stems more from silence than the repetitive structures of minimalism.”
— Aaron Grad, 2009.

A nephew of mine and his fiancé are getting married next month; I think about them as I listen to this ‘In l’istesso Tempo’. GoogleTranslate says ‘in l’istesso tempo’ means ‘in the same body’—which seems poetically fitting, given the line of thought that Kancheli’s piano quartet and its pulse has induced in me. This piano quartet is full of musical artifacts of a healthy intimacy... a kind of transcendence through durability, with the relationship between lovers deepening and diversifying as things change and as time passes. No [Nietzschean?] pre-conception of will-to-power with forces/personalities/resources coming together, pushing and pulling. Instead, a [Heideggerian?] will-to-dwell: mutual, enduring attention and being present for the other, present-in-body and present-in-mind.

A nd a pluralistic view of truth that does not insist on any one voice (partner) being ‘right’ and the other ‘wrong’... a kind of aletheia (ἀλήθεια).

T he Italian tempo designation ‘in l’istesso tempo’ signifies a musical passage where the speed of the underlying pulse does not change, even if the division of the beats within a bar does so. Music written this way can create an impression of stillness.”
— David Lewis.

K ancheli’s enduring pulse—affirms that love is not love that alters when it alteration finds. There is what music cognition researchers would call ‘event-salience’ in these piano quartet rhythms as-written, leading to automatic beat-induction (BI) for the listener/performer. Auto-BI, in turn, leads us to recognize nature—our bodies!—and how out of our control they are! This is no determinism or fate in which we have no choice or in which human free will plays no part; instead, just an important dimension of reality, and one that we’d do well not to ignore. By the time I’ve finished listening to this the third time, I’ve come to regard the quartet’s accomodation of meter to a pervading, faithful pulse as a romantic gesture—an inspiring acknowledgement of constancy and mutual devotion of friendship, marriage, or civil union founded on true love. No idea as to whether that was what Kancheli had in mind, but the notion is plausible, and I am grateful that the music happened to propel my thoughts in this direction. Unexpected effects like this are a big part of why any person likes music, I think.

T he nothingness of the individual, expressed in simple musical ideas, and its relationship to a more meaningful whole lie at the heart of Georgian composer Giya Kancheli’s work, often disconcerting in its profoundly sad take on modern society. The composer’s aesthetic is admirably served on this exceptional ECM disc by performers who appear to share his vision of a world afflicted by destructive turmoil.”
— Andrew Stewart, Music Week.

O ther ‘in l’istesso tempo’ pieces include Elgar’s Enigma Variations, Op. 36, v. 1; or Ginastera’s Variazioni e Toccata sopra Aurora lucis rutilat, Op. 52, vv. 3,5,6; or Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 43, vv. 1,2,3,6,9,10,14,23. I’ll plan on immersing myself in those on some future evening. Maybe they will lead me further on this path.

B y the way, Artemis String Quartett and pianist Jacques Ammon will be performing at Le Poisson Rouge in NYC on 01-MAY-2012. Their account of Kancheli’s ‘In l’istesso Tempo’ is really superb. Their performance of ‘In l’istesso Tempo’ was positioned in middle of program in last night’s concert in Kansas City and received a standing ovation—which is a pretty uncommon occurrence in mid-program in any performance in any country, you must admit.

A gain and again, with deep regret, we see how alongside obvious achievements of the civilized world we are being worn down. Our planet is being torn apart by bloodshed and antagonisms, and no creative deep is able to withstand that destructive force, which so easily strikes out the fragile means of progress. Taking very close to my heart all that is happening around me, I am trying to express in my music the state I feel in my soul, writing basically for myself, without illusions that ‘beauty will save the world,’ as Dostoyevsky said. That is why my music is more sad than happy, and is addressed more to the lone individual rather than to society. Here you won’t find appeals for striving, equality, or ‘a bright future.’ Most likely, you will find threads of sorrow caused by the imperfection of the world, which keeps disregarding the most horrendous examples in human history. My thoughts are expressed in extremely simple musical language, and I hope that the audience ... will not mistake my deliberate simplicity for what, in my opinion, is the most dangerous phenomenon: indifference.”
— Giya Kancheli.

T he biggest tragedy is to write music.”
— Giya Kancheli.

Sunday, October 30, 2011

More on Shostakovich’s Privacy: Saying-without-being-said-to-have-said, Finding-without-being-found-to-have-found

Roderigo: Tush, never tell me! I take it much unkindly that thou, Iago, who hast my purse as if the strings were thine, shouldst know of this.
Iago: ’Sblood, but you'll not hear me! If ever I did dream of such a matter, abhor me!”
— Shakespeare, Othello, I.1.1-5.

T he previous blogpost was mostly about hyperlinks as illocutionary acts, and the ways in which Shostakovich may have covered his tracks and obfuscated (some of) his meanings.

S everal readers emailed me to express surprise that several courts have ruled in the way that they have. The emailers were basically saying that the theory of knowing, responsible ‘linguistic agency’ under the law is, in their view, not only about the acts of speaking/writing but also about acts of listening/reading and could equally well be about the act of searching for content to hear or read.

I n other words, the audience members who are listening to a musical work, or searching for music to listen to—or the readers reading a blog, or entering search terms searching for content that they then click on and proceed to read—should bear [do bear] ethical and legal responsibility for their listening and searching and reading.

I n that connection, I observe an upsurge in attention to privacy, on the part of many users of search engines recently. I routinely monitor the traffic on this site, mostly with an eye to making the blog responsive to the issues and interests and concerns of the readers who spend time reading what I put up here.

I t was only three months ago CMT blog received its first hits that originated with Ixquick, DuckDuckGo, Scroogle, and StartPage. Today, visitors from around the world arrive at CMT about 5% of the time from searches initiated at one or another of those anonymized search-proxy sites.

I xquick is my favorite among these search engine anonymizer/search-proxy sites. It has earned the EuroPriSe "European Privacy Seal" for privacy and data-handling practices, is certified by CertifiedSecure and is registered with the Dutch Data Protection Authority.

T hese search engine anonymizers/search-proxies do not interfere with most SEO or site editorial practices that matter to me as a blog author—things that relate to the “what” of site content. The search engine anonymizers/search-proxies only obfuscate the “where” and the “who,” protecting the searchers’ privacy.

M y own use of anonymous search proxy sites arises less out of a concern for my own privacy than out of my need to monitor CMT pagerank in an objective way that is not biased/confounded by my own music-related online searching activity. If you are a professional musician or a faculty member of a conservatory, that objective-monitoring motivation may be true for you as well.

B ut if enhancing your online privacy is important to you and if you haven’t considered using an anonymous search proxy site until now, please give one or more of these sites a try. Resist being described [by the search-engine residue of your searches], like Käthe Kollwitz and her drawings and sculptures resist being described... as mere residue of so many [brush/pencil/pastel/chisel/key] strokes.

H ere are a couple of links for you who are, like the readers who sent me emails, astounded by the recent Canadian and Spanish court decisions...

Friday, January 28, 2011

Sociotropic Provenance of Liszt’s Mid-Career Piano Works

The santa indifferenza of Liszt is the ‘holy indifference’ advocated by St. François de Sales and other spiritual writers in the Catholic mystical tradition. And this in turn is obviously identical with the non-attachment advocated in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions... Needless to say, ‘holy indifference’ is not at all the same thing as plain, unholy indifference, and is fully compatible with intense concern for goodness, beauty, and Truth.”
— Aldous Huxley, letter, 26-OCT-1961.

Eezek a darabok példái annak, hogy a romantika korszakában hogyan tudott megszólalni egy-egy szonett, bármi is, észre a következmények. A romantikus Liszt érzékenységének köszönhetően a versek hangulata, mély mondanivalója jut el a mentálisan zavart befogadóhoz, okoz a további kárt.”

A ttended an excellent concert tonight, given by pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet in the Harriman-Jewell Series.

Liszt—Consolations, S. 172
Liszt—Années de pèlerinage, troisième année, ‘Les jeux d’eaux’, S. 163
Liszt—Venezia e Napoli, ‘Tarantella’, S. 162
Liszt—Ballade No. 2 in B minor, S. 171
Liszt—Deux légendes, S. 175
Liszt—Isolde’s Liebestod, S. 447
Liszt—Polish Songs (after Chopin), ‘Meine Freuden’ S. 480

A esthetic experience is a kind of access to psychic reality, both our own reality and the reality of others—that much is certain from hearing these pieces. Aesthetic experience and creativity not only aid our recovery from ‘bad psychological states’, they are also valuable for understanding and distinguishing internal reality and external reality. I listened to Thibaudet’s sensitive and highly-animated performances of these Liszt pieces, and as I did so I wondered more and more about the circumstances of how they were composed. Liszt’s major keys (all except S. 171) are like they have “something to prove,” no, more like there is someone whose mood they are emphatically meaning to elevate or tranquilize, like they were conceived with a particular patient and a therapeutic purpose in mind?

N ote: in recent days I’ve been working on health services research involving mental health and measures of quality and access to care for mental and behavioral conditions. This recent focus of my attention no doubt ‘primed’ me to respond to this concert in the ways that I did.

I n that regard, the importance of including ‘patient-intended’ criticisms and ‘partner-perceived’ criticisms and the parallel importance of examining gender differences in models of exchanges of criticisms between partners and depression of one or both partners—these are discussed in an excellent paper published last summer by Kristina Peterson and David Smith (link below) at the University of Notre Dame. Of course, Peterson’s and Smith’s study focused on members of the general population, not couples who are elite artists/composers/writers/celebrities.

Liszt’s illness was prefigured by depression, which was, in part situational... [He] began to drink cognac heavily and was warned to decrease his intake by his physicians. He also smoked a lot of [George Sand’s?] Havana cigars.”
— John O’Shea, 1995.

S o, gee, these pieces were written roughly in the aftermath of Liszt’s relationship with Marie d’Agoult and the recurring encounters occasioned by family events involving their children (Cosima; and until their deaths in 1859 and 1862, respectively, Daniel and Blandine) and also through Chopin—more or less between 1841-1867, from when Liszt was about 30 to 55 years old.

T his must’ve been stressful and awkward… Sociotropic process, the psychic equivalent of a semi-permeable membrane, which selectively and through passive transportation or active transportation allows some emotional ‘molecules’ to pass through the membrane but prevents others from passing. The emotional brew contained several types of dissolved ‘solute’ molecules, in a family chamber—multiple compartments now separated by thin semi-permeable membranes with pores, and sealed... (Seated in Row #2, in close proximity to the piano and Thibaudet in-charge, it is natural that one’s imagination will run wild.)

S ome small emotions crossed Liszt’s semi-permeable membrane, like small molecules cross dialysis tubing, in their attempt to reach equilibrium. Bigger emotions, bigger molecules, not so much...

Y ears of Pilgrimage’... this conceit implies a wanderer in search of truth, and, one can only imagine that the title is, in good measure, Liszt’s autobiographical reverse-osmotic self-mythologizing.

Because Marie broke with both Liszt and George Sand, she has been given a ‘bad press’ in biographies of both of those celebrities... What was the private life of a woman like this? A woman who left her great love (Liszt) after five years and returned to Paris, not to her husband who would have taken her back, nor to her family, but to an independent life... One of the first things one must ask about any independent woman in the 19th Century is: Where did the money come from; how did she support herself? ... Posterity has reproached Marie d’Agoult for not having loved Liszt’s art sufficiently to sacrifice herself to it.”
— Phyllis Stock-Morton.

O ne might question whether Liszt was really as cultured as Marie presented him in her memoirs... he quoted famous authors indiscriminately—St. Augustine, Petrarch, Montaigne, Chateaubriand, Hugo, the Bible. Although he seemed avid to read and represent himself as a reader, it is not clear that he had digested much or developed any critical abilities. Even in the springtime of their romance, Marie, always a precise thinker, criticized not only some [trashy, sophomoric] books he liked [Bande Dessinée comic strips] but also the [purple] language of his letters.”
— Phyllis Stock-Morton, p. 24.

W hether or not the Charismatic Hungarian was literally searching for Truth truth, he was surely searching for audiences receptive to his preferred, dramatic, truthy historiography—part of which we heard in these emphatic works that Jean-Yves performed. Years later, Marie, too, in her writings prevaricated, denied, revised, glossed, hid…

W hat were Liszt’s sources of support, emotionally? How lonely was it, “at the top”? How much of a mutual “nightmare” had Franz and Marie been to each other, I wonder?

M arie d’Agoult’s nightmares, especially in Italy, in Venezia e Napoli, were unrelenting. Not much is known of these—what the subjects or imagery in them were, and so on. There is only the evidence of a few letters, and even less is objectively known about the quality of Franz’s sleeping. Not much detail is known about Marie’s suicide attempts; their frequency, their seriousness, her moods and ideation in between them...

H oly extra-marital stress-diatheses! What, if any, mental health services did Liszt avail himself of during the years of these compositions? Was Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein any help at all to Liszt in the years subsequent to Liszt’s break-up with Marie, or was Carolyne instead mostly a hazard, a hindrance? Was in fact Liszt’s music-making the only ‘therapy’ he received, self-administered? Alan Walker’s books don’t have anything to say about this. But that is what I wondered, more and more, as Jean-Yves’s recital progressed...

A s for Comtesse Marie d’Agoult, what modest amount is known of her emotional condition during those years is gathered together in Phyllis Stock-Morton’s recent book (link below). Well worth your look if you’ve made it this far in reading this blog post...

N either Liszt nor d’Agoult was continuously the more forceful personality, I suppose. Both were likely self-propelled multivalent ‘causes’ and ‘effects’, both Forces of Nature to be reckoned with. There were pressures, one upon the other; interpersonal dynamic equilibria; inescapable sociotropic osmosis...

W e are grateful, of course: very grateful to have these beautiful, vivid pieces today—we who are hardly aware of what pressures and emotional costs were associated with their composition. We are grateful, too, to Jean-Yves Thibaudet for reanimating them in the way he was able to do last night with such insight and consummate skill. Through the music, we might learn something about ourselves, even if we shall never be certain of the truths between Franz Liszt and Marie d’Agoult.

J ean-Yves was born in 1961 in Lyon to a German-born mother and French father, both amateur musicians. In addition to diplomatic duties, Jean-Yves’s father taught history and geography at the University of Lyon and was a good amateur violinist. His mother, an accomplished pianist, taught German language and literature at the University.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Vadim Gluzman: Mixtures of Human Virtuoso plus Virtuosic Instrument

V adim Gluzman believes the violin has a living soul and, from the pile of performance reviews on my desk as well as from my own ears, I believe he knows something about how to give it breath.”
— Laurie Niles, Violinist.

I t has this unbelievable G string, it sounds like a del Gesu or a viola—dark, dark, dark; huge! If you think about both Glazunov and Tchaikovsky concerti, they both start on (A3) first position on the G string. Both were written for this violin.”
— Vadim Gluzman, interview with Laurie Niles, Violinist.

M y regular employment involves engineering—informatics and computer science mostly, but occasionally chemical engineering as well. Recently, I was working on a project that involved calculating percentages of different dissolved compounds to achieve an optimal net chemical reaction rate.

I began, then, to daydream about how it is that we realize when a particular instrument is especially apt for us; how we realize when a particular piece of music is apt for us; how we choose combinations of these. Sometimes we realize this when we attempt to switch and try to play on an instrument (try to dissolve into a “solution”) that is less apt for us (in which we are less “soluble”), or when we attempt to play a piece of music that is less apt for us. Sometimes, we realize this when we serendipitously find an instrument that suits us particularly well, or encounter a piece that lies well under our “hand”, on account of cognitive and biomechanics reasons that we may or may not understand or be able to explain to others.

I n principle, could these highly subjective things be objectively measured? After all, enthalpies of transfer (ΔH_tr) of electrolytes from one solvent into another solvent are routinely determined by comparing enthalpies of solution in the two solvents, where solid electrolyte is dissolved in each solvent and the heat exchange is measured. Sometimes, the reverse method is used (in which ΔH_tr is derived from enthalpy of precipitation measurements, where electrolyte that was dissolved is caused to come out of solution as a solid precipitate). Waveform (enthalpic and entropic—) analysis of back-to-back digital recordings of Vadim Gluzman moving from Nino Rota to J.S. Bach? Put musicians and instruments in giant, room-sized bomb calorimeters and measure per-minute heat flux normalized to time-average identical sound emission?

O f course, musicians and instruments and compositions are not molecules or bulk-phase ensembles of large numbers of molecules, but nonetheless the statistical mechanics of solutions—the effects and the equations that are involved in these—are suggestive of phenomena we recognize when we are mixing musicians, instruments, and compositions. It is only half-serious, my daydream…

D o the components in mixtures of performer, instrument, and composition each have a property analogous to what, in chemistry, would be called ‘fugacity’? Suppose the answer is ‘Yes’: Performers-as-solutes; instruments-as-solutes; compositions-as-solvents; concert halls, recordings, etc., as ‘vessels’ to contain the resulting solutions.

B orn in Ukraine, violinist Vadim Gluzman began playing with a remarkable fugacity at age seven. When he was 16 his family moved to Israel and he continued his studies at the Rubin Academy of Music in Tel Aviv and later with Dorothy DeLay at Juilliard. At age 19, he arrived in Dallas, where he was a participant in the New Conservatory summer music program and subsequently became a student of Arkady Fomin at Southern Methodist University. Vadim Gluzman plays the 1690 ex-Leopold Auer Stradivari on loan from the Stradivari Society of Chicago. He is currently on the faculty of Roosevelt University. Vadim’s wife, pianist Angela Yoffe, was recognized as a high-fugacity musician-in-the-making at age four. She studied in the Darzinia School of Music in Riga, the Rubin Academy of Music in Tel Aviv and the Meadows School of the Arts in Dallas. Vadim and Angela perform as infinitely-miscible co-solutes all over the world and have recorded for Koch International and Bis.

N ino Rota’s solvent, ‘Improvviso in D minor,’ provides frequent exposure of A3 and other high-fugacity notes for the ex-Leopold Auer Strad, which facilitates Angela Yoffee’s accompaniment on her Steinway with an emphatic, dark lower register and nice miking on the recording.

[50-sec clip, Vadim Gluzman and Angela Yoffe, Nino Rota, ‘Improvviso in re minore, 1947’, 1.6MB MP3]

I mprovviso in D minor was composed in 1947, for the Gianni Franciolini / Carlo Ponti film ‘d’Amanti senza amore’ [Lovers without Love], adapted from Tolstoy’s novel, ‘Kreutzer Sonata’. Inharmonious doctor (played by Rolando Dupi) impulsively marries harmony-craving pianist (played by Clara Calamai)…

T he marriage is unhappy, and a despondent Calamai attempts suicide, only to be stopped by clueless Dupi. Desperate for real companionship, Calamai makes friends with the violinist (played by Jean Servais). Dupi suspects that his wife is having an affair, but when he obtusely discusses the matter with Servais, he discovers the suspicions are groundless.

S adly, Dupi realizes this after he has already murdered his pianist-wife.

C lara Calamai was 33 and Jean Servais was 38 when they played these roles, and Nino Rota was 36 years old when he composed this film music. Gluzman’s and Yoffe’s age, speed, passion, and fearlessness are especially well-matched (1) to Rota’s gypsy conceit, including its defiant, ‘diabolical’ coda, and (2) to the robust sonic preferences of their respective instruments.

G reat solution ‘chemistry’!

A ll violin sonatas are microtonal. ;-)”
— Steve Gregoropoulos, 27-FEB-2010, FaceBook.