Martin Stadtfeld: Inspired Runtime Indirection

T   he Busoni transcription is] absorbed in itself, moving round itself, decidedly turned away from the world... brooding; Beethoven-ish.”
  — Hugo Riemann.

A   lthough Bach set verses from Luther’s ‘Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland’ nine times, many of the same Advent themes run through all the settings. Subtle nuances and theological allusions point to various verses of the chorale text, and the cantatas remain a starting point for the interpretation of the organ works.”
  — Anne Leahy, in Zager, p. 95.

M artin Stadtfeld’s performance of Mendelssohn’s Klavierkonzert Nr. 1 g-Moll op. 25 with Sir Neville Marriner and Academy of St. Martin in the Fields at the Rheingau Festival was exceptional—a young man’s composition, performed with a young person’s sensibilities and energy. It simply sang!

B ut Stadtfeld’s 4’30” encore (Ferruccio Busoni’s transcription of J.S. Bach’s BWV 659 ‘Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland’) revealed a maturity and grasp of life’s setbacks and aporias: it was teleological, driving purposefully toward its goal(s) with pragmatism and propensity toward acceptance, yet with an open-heartedness/open-mindedness that still has room for hope.

S tadtfeld’s left-hand is quiet... ‘reticent’, as recommended in the performance notes in the original Breitkopf & Härtel edition of Busoni... enabling his melodic right-hand to have the terse prominence it requires. The tenuto and agogic accenting in the right-hand, in turn, conveys motives that are… pregnant.

T he expectancy was such that Stadtfeld impressed us that he himself was discovering things as he went, even though he has performed this prelude many, many times in the past... ‘sehr ausdrucksvoll mit vollem Anschlag.’ Many notes—the touch he applied to them—were, to me, like variable values in a software module that were resolved and bound at Stadtfeld’s pre-concert preparation—at ‘compile-time,’ so to say. But there were equally many that are only resolved on a moment-by-moment basis during performance (runtime). The balance between these lent a tremendous liveliness and interest and vibrancy to the performance of this beautiful Busoni transcription.

I t is, for me, analogous to the difference in software between a layered design with subroutines and an object-oriented design with event-handler methods. The terseness of the left-hand is such that Stadtfeld expresses not a human resoluteness but instead a process in Nature, something that is immutable, like mortality; not at all deterministic, but inevitable in the sense that human wishes and intentions cannot change the outcome.

I n software engineering terms, the Busoni-Bach left-hand module is a ‘wrapper’ and encapsulates the right-hand module. The left-hand ‘service’ owns a set of ‘objects’ with ‘handlers’ that share the same state. State is possible to preserve across invocations as the figures recur over the 3 pages of this transcription. It lends nicely to cooperation through message passing communication. Stadtfeld’s multiple levels of runtime indirection... reveal the extent and fate of our wishing and desiring.

E ach object has three parts: a component implementation, an export interface, and an import interface. Export and import can be modeled with runtime constructs specifically designed for component wrapping and interface adaptation, such as interception techniques for runtime resolution. The trills, for example, amount to handshake interfaces between right-hand and left-hand parts.

L iabilities of interpretations that entail generous amounts of runtime indirection include (1) variation-point management [adding and binding variants at a late moment in time implies extra work for managing and implementing variation points] and (2) predictability [a large amount of variability makes it virtually impossible to test all combinations during rehearsal]. But the merits of ‘romantic,’ liberal runtime indirection include danger, surprise, and excitement of the sort we were thrilled by on hearing Stadtfeld’s inspired performance of this Busoni-Bach ‘Nun komm’ Zugabe. A tiny encore that emotionally surpassed the gifts of the excellent, larger concerto that preceded it. Bravo!

• Martin Stadtfeld website
• Rheingau Musik Festival
• Stadtfeld M. Bach: Piano Concertos: No. 2. (Sony, 2011.)
• Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) transcription of J.S. Bach Orgelchoralvorspiel "Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland" BWV 659 (Come, Savior of the Gentiles) at Klavier-Noten.com
• Rösel P. Ferruccio Busoni: Klavierbearbeitungen Bach'scher Werke. (Berliner Klassic, 1994.)
• Vladimir Horowitz YouTube video of Busoni transcription of Bach BWV 659.
• Viktors Berstis YouTube video of Busoni transcription of Bach BWV 659.
• Brendel A. Ferruccio Busoni: Klavierbearbeitungen Bach'scher Werke. (Philips, 2006.)
• Lipatti D. Ferruccio Busoni: Klavierbearbeitungen Bach'scher Werke. (Regis, 2006.)
• Busoni F. J.S. Bach: Orgel-Choralvorspiele für Klavier, Heft 1. (Breitkopf & Härtel, 1898)
• Busoni F. J.S. Bach: Orgel-Choralvorspiele für Klavier, Heft 1. (Breitkopf & Härtel, 1898) at SheetMusicPlus.com
• Busoni F. J.S. Bach: Orgel-Choralvorspiele für Klavier page at IMSLP.org
• One More Level of Indirection at c2.com
• Cooper K, Torczon L. Engineering a Compiler. 2e. Morgan-Kaufmann, 2011.
• Goedicke M, et al. Design and implementation constructs for the development of flexible, component-oriented software architectures. In Proc 2nd Intl Symposium on Generative and Component-Based Software Engineering (GCSE’00), Erfurt, Germany, OCT-2000.
• Lienhard A. Dynamic Object Flow Analysis. Lulu, 2009. (p. 34)
• Spring J, et al. Reflexes: Abstractions for integrating highly-responsive tasks into Java applications. ACM Trans Embedded Comput Sys 2010;10(4):1-29.
• Zager D, ed. Music and Theology: Essays in Honor of Robin A. Leaver. Scarecrow, 2006.

M   athematics is the heart and soul of music … Without question the bar, the rhythm, the proportion of the parts of a musical work and so on must all be measured … Notes and other signs are only tools in music, the heart and soul is the good proportion of melody and harmony. It is ridiculous to say that mathematics is not the heart and soul of music.”
  — Johann Mattheson, 1743, ‘Neu eröffnete musikalische Bibliothek’ 2:54.

It’s Notes All the Way Down: Salonen’s ‘Homunculus’ Quartet

I    have long been fascinated (and amused) by the arcane Spermists’ theory, who held the belief that the sperm was in fact a ‘little man’ (in Latin, an ‘homunculus’) that was placed inside a woman to grow into a child. This seemed to them to neatly explain many of the mysteries of conception. It was later pointed out that if the sperm was indeed an homunculus—identical in all aspects but size to an adult—then the homunculus must have sperm of its own, [and, in turn, the homunculus’s sperm are themselves micro-homunculi with their own micro-sperm, which, in turn, are nano-homunculi, and so on]. This led to a logical ‘reductio ad absurdum’—an endless chain or infinite regress of [uncountable trillions of] homunculi within homunculi! This was not considered by [reality-challenged] Spermists to be a fatal objection, however—insofar as it neatly explained how it was that, in the biblical Adam, all [future human beings] had sinned: the whole of humanity [and its misdeeds] ‘was already contained in Adam’s loins’.”
  —  Esa-Pekka Salonen, 2008.

I    wanted to compose a piece that would be very compact in form and duration, but still contain many different characters and textures. In other words, a little piece that behaves like a big piece... I decided to call my piece ‘Homunculus’ despite the obvious weaknesses of the spermists’ thinking, as I find the idea of a perfect little man strangely moving.”
  —  Esa-Pekka Salonen.

T he performance by the Guarneri String Quartet and the Johannes String Quartet together last night in Kansas City was amazing. The program included:

• William Bolcom: Octet
  
• Esa-Pekka Salonen: Homunculus (Johannes Quartet)
  
• Derek Bermel: Passing Through (Guarneri Quartet)
  
• Felix Mendelssohn: Octet

T imothy McDonald has a nice review in the Kansas City Star here.


T he Salonen ‘Homunculus’ quartet has many different expressions of parallelism and simultaneity in it—which is surprising, maybe, considering that the term ‘homunculus’ is ordinarily associated with concepts of hierarchy and encapsulation of things within things.


T here are rapid sixteenth-note figures and sextuplets that come in waves—liquid waves, violins spilling, viola spilling, cello spilling. The patterns evoke a sense of ‘being-as-process’, as opposed to ‘being-as-object’.

F rom the title, one might expect that Salonen had been inspired by—or is exploring—individual subjectivity: the interior experience of an individual self and the self-regard that each of us has through introspection, mapping and remembering our own history.

B ut instead Salonen’s ‘Homunculus’ suggests that a quartet is (can be) one individual-in-aggregate, or, conversely, that a single individual is (can be) a collocation of multiple selves, each of whom has its own real existence and identity.

I t’s not so much what the self ‘is’ that interests Salonen, I think, but what the self does (hears, sees, thinks, anticipates, intends, ... ) and how it does it. It’s all ‘process’. Identity has no reality except as it is enacted through acts and processes and events. ‘Homunculus’ not only asserts (abstractly) that this is so; it also defends the argument by way of quartetly examples and illustrates the cognitive and emotional range of self-as-process. ‘Homunculus’ illustrates how rapidly selfhood can be constructed/revealed—with gestures and textures that unfold over a few seconds only. Salonen’s craftsmanship here is clear, but it’s never over-worked. Organic plausibility, palpable Truth.

S ome portions of the work have ‘sectional’ writing for three parts (Vn2, Vla, Vc, say) and the fourth part (Vn1, say) is essentially autonomous, doing its own thing. Several bars/seconds elapse, and the ‘section’ has been reconstituted by a different trio (Vn1, Vn2, Vc, say) and a different one (Vla) is doing the extemporizing. The effect is vividly evocative of the ebb and flow of our normal thought-patterns—the shifting of attention amongst a variety of ideas and ‘mental sets’.

W ithin the model ‘self’ is a concept embodied in a [measurably] finite number of critical sub-units of the overall system of ‘mental sets’ that are accessible to our ordinary experiences. If there is no involvement of one or more parts of this ‘self structure’, then we feel uninvolved; our internal ‘observer’ will be felt to be not present.

S ure, the self can be ‘divided’—have a look at Jon Elster’s and others’ writings about this. But because each self exists in a set of subsystems that are totally finite, the ‘division’ can’t go on indefinitely. After a couple of hierarchical levels, ‘self’ can’t be divided further without either losing the normal sense of the word ‘self’ or division’s becoming arbitrary, unsupported by evidence from ordinary experience. There is a philosophical/aesthetic reason why Salonen wrote this for quartet and not sextet or octet or something larger. In ‘Homunculus’ we get a pretty specific statement from Salonen about how finite each of us really is...


S o there are in fact some neuropsychological models that still characterize how our minds work in terms of homunculus-like mappings and correspondences, but the encapsulations are finite—there is no infinite regress or vast hierarchical matryoshka-type nesting.

I n fact, self watching self watching self … is implausible on its face. Every day we are amazed at our forgetfulness and limited attention. Have a listen to ‘Homunculus’ in concert if you have the opportunity to do so. I think you’ll find Salonen saying (abstractly, musically) that we are each complex selves, but we are not arbitrarily or infinitely complex. (Salonen convinces me, and I take comfort in his having succeeded in this.)

O    ne of the ‘complex’ things about ‘complex’ music is its quality of refusing to present a straightforward object (as for instance in much minimal sculpture): it is always perceived in the act of underlining its own ongoing and provisional nature. It doesn’t present the illusion of not being an illusion—in large measure because of the continual problematization of the performance/interpretaton context.”
  —  Brian Ferneyhough, Responses to a Questionnaire on ‘Complexity’, 1990.

T o fully explain how we experience what we do in this piece (or any other), a theory of consciousness would have to address real-time self-knowledge, self-understanding, self-awareness, self-monitoring, and goal setting: our selves as we know and understand and experience them; our selves as they are seen by others and used as a basis for their recognizing us as us; our selves as the sense of values and personal history and memory that constitutes our own recognition of who we are.

B ut, our minds (selves) do quite a lot of processing that’s ‘parallel’, not hierarchical or serial. We walk and chew gum at the same time; we contemplate and monitor several ideas at once; we process the concurrent expressions in this Salonen quartet and observe our own spontaneous reactions as we do this.

F or whatever forms and depths the ‘division’ of the self plausibly may have, though, the extent of the division is limited to the finite resources that in fact constitute ‘self’ within the system of mental sets that constitute our psyche. And those finite resources change on a moment-by-moment timescale. For example, the tutti and sectional structures in this 12-minute Salonen quartet do not place demands on us that are as great as the parts of the composition where the voices diverge from each other. As the processes unfold, the evolving cognitive demands—for the performers and for us listeners—are not excessive, and the musical result is coherent, pleasurable, beautiful.

T he narrative arc is compelling, and the effort of the collected selves apprehending this Salonen quartet is richly rewarded. I’ll have to get ahold of a copy of the score, to get a more detailed sense of how Salonen’s design accomplishes so much in such a short piece.

F our, five, six, eight voices at a time are about my own cognitive limit, however—which stands in stark contrast to the recent maniacal, parallel-not-hierarchical IVF exploits of Octo Mom to explore far higher cardinalities and polyphonies in one household.

• Johannes String Quartet page at Frank Salomon Associates
  
• Guarneri String Quartet page at Herbert Barrett Mgt
  
• Guarneri Quartet retirement message on Arnold Steinhardt website
  
• Derek Bermel website
  
• William Bolcom and Joan Morris's website
  
• Esa-Pekka Salonen website
  
• Annas G. A French homunculus in a Tennessee court. Hastings Center Report 1989; 20:1-22.
  
• Elster J. Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality. Cambridge Univ, 1985.
  
• Elster J, ed. The Multiple Self. Cambridge Univ, 1987.
  
• Herold E. Stem Cell Wars: Inside Stories from the Frontlines. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
  
• Scott C. Stem Cell Now. Plume, 2006.
  
• Sell S, ed. Stem Cells Handbook. Humana, 2003.
  
• Stem Cells information at U.S. NIH.gov
  
• Stout D, Harris G. Obama reverses stem cell limits Bush imposed. New York Times, 07-MAR-2009.
  
• Talbot M. The Universe as hologram. [Every part of a hologram/phantasm encodes all the information possessed by the whole hologram--and so only contrast or signal intensity is enhanced by having more than just a small piece of it.]
  
• Homunculus at Bio-Medicine.org
  
• Homunculus at Principia Cybernetica
  
• Jurgen Hanggi neuroscience website (with neuro homunculi)

The Composer Vanishes: Solving the Diffusion Equation Shows that Adès’s ‘Arcadiana’ is Really a Quintet with a Fifth Un-voiced ‘Phantom’ Part

B   oth form and content in Adès’s music depend upon the multivalent conjunctions that may be derived from relatively elemental forms of continuity… Analyses of ‘Arcadiana’ illustrate the paradoxical nature of postmodern musical time, in which a narrative linear interpretation may emerge from the higher-level perception of locally-concurrent periodicities and trends… Rhythmic analysis entails identifying projections of duration and pitch, as well as processes of timbre and dynamics… In some cases, these interactions are mutually reinforcing; in others, they may embody reorientation or conflict, not to mention ironic deception.”
  —  John Roeder, Music Analysis 2006; 25:121-54.

A    dès’s music merits special attention because of the consistency with which it employs elemental continuities, and because of the variety of temporalities that the composer derives from them... Continuity [is] defined as an association between two percepts, formed when the second realises a mental projection that was made as part of the first. Generally, continuity manifests itself in sequences of successive pitches, or in series of pitch percepts that are not literally successive... It may also subsist in more abstract projections and realisations of duration...”
  —  John Roeder, p. 122.

T he Jupiter String Quartet delivered a wonderful account of Thomas Adès’s String Quartet Op. 12, ‘Arcadiana’ (Venezia notturna; Das klinget so herrlich, das klinget so schön; Auf dem Wasser zu singen; Et... (tango mortale); L’embarquenment; O, Albion; Lethe) [1994] in Kansas City on Friday night in the Friends of Chamber Music 2008-2009 series—this in a program that also included Mendelssohn’s String Quartet in A minor, Op. 13, and Beethoven’s String Quartet in E minor, Op. 59, No. 2.

• Nelson Lee and Meg Freivogel, violins
  
• Liz Freivogel, viola
  
• Daniel McDonough, cello

I n 2008, the Jupiter String Quartet received the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant, and in 2007 the Quartet won the Cleveland Quartet Award from Chamber Music America. This year is the final year in the Jupiters’ three-year residency with Lincoln Center’s ‘Chamber Music Society Two’. From 2004 to 2006, the Quartet was enrolled in the Professional String Quartet Training Program at New England Conservatory, earning Master of Music degrees in Chamber Music.

A dès wrote his first and, to date, only string quartet in 1994, under commission from Endellion Quartet in the U.K. The work is highly regarded by both performers and by theorists, and has been the subject of several important published analyses. The first several bars of the third movement (‘Auf dem Wasser zu singen’ [To be sung on the water]) are especially amenable to a kind of analysis that I think can shed light on the theme of the whole work—‘vanishing’ and mortality. That is what this post is about...

F ranz Schubert’s ‘Auf dem Wasser zu singen’ D. 774 (1823) is a setting of Friedrich Leopold Graf zu Stolberg-Stolberg’s poem, written in 1782—which Adès took as an inspiration/calibration for this third movement.

M    itten im Schimmer der spiegelnden Wellen
Gleitet, wie Schwäne, der wankende Kahn:
Ach, auf der Freude sanftschimmernden Wellen
Gleitet die Seele dahin wie der Kahn;
Denn von dem Himmel herab auf die Wellen
Tanzet das Abendrot rund um den Kahn.

Über den Wipfeln des westlichen Haines
Winket uns freundlich der rötliche Schein;
Unter den Zweigen des östlichen Haines
Säuselt der Kalmus im rötlichen Schein;
Freude des Himmels und Ruhe des Haines
Atmet die Seel im errötenden Schein.

Ach, es entschwindet mit tauigem Flügel
Mir auf den wiegenden Wellen die Zeit;
Morgen entschwinde mit schimmerndem Flügel—
Wieder wie gestern und heute die Zeit—
Bis ich auf höherem strahlendem Flügel
Selber entschwinde der wechselnden Zeit.

[Amid the glimmer of sparkling waves,
The bobbing boat glides like a swan:
Ah, the soul glides onward like the boat,
On shimmering, gleaming waves of joy;
For the sunset glow, shining down from heaven
Upon the waves, dances all ‘round the boat.

The rosy light winks at us
From above the treetops of the western wood;
Beneath the branches of the eastern wood,
The reeds whisper in the light—
In the reddening glow, the soul breathes
The joy of heaven, the peace of the grove.

Ah, alas, Time itself vanishes on dewy wings and I with It,
Into the weighty cradle of the waves.
Tomorrow, Time will fly away on glistening wings—
As it did today and yesterday and the day before—
Until I myself fly away from Time’s inconstancy
On yet loftier, more radiant wings.] ”
  —  Friedrich Leopold Graf zu Stolberg-Stolberg, ‘Auf dem Wasser zu singen’ [To be sung on the Water], 1782.

H ow does this piece work? What makes ‘Arcadiana’ ‘tick’? I look first at my rhythm metrics... These are not Fibonacci series... Ah, this quartet feels like a diffusion problem! Analytical solutions to heat- and mass-transfer problems reduce to solving partial differential equations (PDEs)—in this case, the so-called ‘heat equation’, treating the medium as a homogeneous solid under appropriate initial and boundary conditions. Hypothetically, the IC and BC can include convective and radiative interactions with the environment, but in the present example of Adès’s ‘Arcadiana’ I ignore convection and radiation possibilities.

M any analytical solutions of the heat equation refer just to the simple one-dimensional situation, with a ‘heat capacity’ c, a ‘diffusion coefficient’ k, and a ‘loss term’, φ, to account for dissipation of energy as diffusion proceeds.


T he Endellion Quartet recording of ‘Arcadiana’ is the only one currently available. But, obviously, it is not possible to separate the four parts in the stereo channels. So I transcribed each part into Finale®, played each track individually, ripped myself MP3s from those, converted to WAV files, and began examining entropy as a function of time using FAWAV® and MATLAB®’s signal-processing toolbox.


T he results surprise even me. Using Crank-Nicholson finite-difference math to solve the 1-dimensional diffusion equation for propagation of entropy S(t), I find that the entropy pulse in the viola part diffuses to the cello, which appears to be sitting a “virtual 1,600 msec” away. Then the same entropy pulse appears, diffusing to the vn2 part with a smaller peak amplitude and more spread-out, consistent with a non-zero ‘dissipation’ within the expressive ‘medium’ constituted by the music. The vn2 appears to be located, according to the Crank-Nicholson solution of the diffusion equation, at a distance of about 2,100 msec from the cello. Further downstream, vn1 experiences the diffusing entropy pulse, at a virtual distance 1,200 msec away from vn2.

A   dès often combines such elemental durational and pitch continuities within a single stream so that their realised projections are made to reinforce one another ... a series of regularly increasing and descending pitch-intervals unfolds [in ‘Arcadiana’, iii] within a sequence of regularly decreasing durations.”
  —  John Roeder, p. 126.

T   he effects of harmonic confluence may lead to a blurring of streams, and thus to a clear sense of temporal interaction, not merely co-operation. Example 11a renotates and simplifies the first eight bars of the third movement of ‘Arcadiana’ in order to foreground the two streams of activity which characterise this passage. In the pizzicato stream, the instruments alternate transpositions of the accelerating expanding-interval motive... The registral and transformational termination of the motive’s accelerating free-fall imparts a frustrated potential energy to its final interval that finds only tentative release in the contrasting tremolos of hexatonically stacked perfect fifths...”
  —  John Roeder, p. 141.

T hese results by themselves were fascinating to me. But then I got to thinking. Who is the ‘source’? The patterns account for the palpable, organically-sensible relative locations of four performers experiencing an entropy wave. But where is the entity who emitted this entropy wave? Can we use the PDE solution to impute where that ‘phantom’ source is ‘located’ with respect to the 1-D positions of the other players? (Click on the jpeg below to download the Excel spreadsheet with the C-N results in it.)


A nd the answer is, ‘Yes’! If we take the ‘source’ of the entropy wave to be the composer in-absentia, then the diffusion equation says that that invisible, inaudible phantom is located about 3,200 msec upstream of the viola (jpeg at top of this CMT post). This piece is a quasi-quintet where the fifth player is absent!

A ctually, encouraged by the preliminary findings above today I’ve begun to do more calculations from other sections of this movement. And it appears that not only do the four string parts move around with respect to each other, as evidenced by the diffusion of entropy pulses propagating between and amongst them, so too does the phantom of Adès move, hovering at times very nearby one part and at other times watching the quartet at what is apparently a great distance.



J ohn Roeder’s wonderful 2006 article in the journal Music Analysis—on coordinated continuities in Adès—is a great contribution to our understanding, illuminating a number of the features and mechanics of what Adès is doing. But I think what we have here (in entropy-diffusion evidence) is far deeper and far more symbolic (of Adès’s theme of mortality and vanishing) than Roeder and others have thus far recognized. What Adès has constructed here is nothing less than a statistical physics ‘diffusion chamber’ in which the four living performers together create an acoustic entropy field that strongly implies the existence/presence of the music’s creator. We are each familiar with the diffusion of a solute like sugar as it dissolves in a cup of tea; we are each familiar with the diffusion of heat by conduction through the cup from the hot inside to the surface that we hold in our hand. And the diffusive/dissipative effects that Adès has crafted here also strike the performer/listener as intuitively, empirically, palpably familiar. The fact that we can quantitatively model them and analyze them with pretty fancy math tools does not in any way diminish the fact that the underlying cognitive physics that Adès is using is utterly elemental, utterly organic.

A rcadiana’ is very difficult to play, yes. But when played well, the quartet evokes a physical reality that belies the technical difficulty. The very memory and spirit of the person who is absent are reanimated by the performers. We sense Adès’s presence through the implied [silent] fifth voice that is the source of the entropy waves that percolate throughout the other four parts. I find this deeply beautiful, as I hope you do as well. Thank you, Thomas! Thank you, Jupiters!

W   e are particularly fond of the ‘Arcadiana’ quartet. We wish Thomas would get busy and write more quartets.”
  — Daniel McDonough, Jupiter String Quartet, 20-FEB-2009, remark over supper.

• Jupiter Quartet website
  
• Jupiter Quartet performance in Kansas City (Friends of Chamber Music), 20-FEB-2009
  
• Thomas Adès at Wikipedia
  
• Thomas Adès page at IMG Artists
  
• Thomas Adès page at EMI
  
• Roeder J. Co-operating continuities in the music of Thomas Adès. Music Analysis 2006; 25:121-54.
  
• John Roeder, Professor of Music Theory, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
  
• DSM. Sofia Gubaidulina’s mathematics of physical and religious time. [Fibonacci] CMT blog, 05-NOV-2008.
  
• DSM. Spiccato perfection: Formosa Quartet [Fibonacci] CMT blog, 01-FEB-2009.
  
• Thomas Adès: Living Toys. (Angel, 2002.) [Arcadiana, for string quartet, Op. 12; performed by Endellion String Quartet]
  
• Bernatz R. Finite Analytic Method in Flows and Heat Transfer. CRC, 2000.
  
• Brebbia C, Wrobel L, eds. Computational Modelling of Free and Moving Boundary Problems. de Gruyter, 1991.
  
• Carslaw H, Jaeger J. Conduction of Heat in Solids. 2e. Oxford Univ, 1986.
  
• Chakrabarti S, Brebbia C, BaumJ, Giltrud M, eds. Fluid Structure Interaction and Moving Boundary Problems IV. WIT, 2007.
  
• Cheng X, Hardt J, Walker J. Time-frequency analysis of musical rhythm. Univ Wisconsin Eau Claire, 2008.
  
• Crank J. Free- and Moving-Boundary Problems. Oxford Univ, 1987.
  
• Duffy D. Finite Difference Methods in Financial Engineering: A Partial Differential Equation Approach. Wiley, 2006.
• Eriksson K, Estep D, Hansbo P, Johnson C. Computational Differential Equations. 2e. Cambridge Univ, 1996.
  
• Gupta S. The Classical Stefan Problem: Basic Concepts, Modelling and Analysis. JAI, 2003.
  
• Kakac S, Yener Y. Heat Conduction. 2e. Taylor & Francis, 2008.
  
• Logan B. Environmental Transport Processes. Wiley, 1998.
  
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• Muir K. Analyzing musical rhythm. SUNY Genesee / Univ Wisconsin Eau Claire, 2008.
  
• Pickens J, Iliopoulos C. Markov random fields and maximum-entropy modeling for music information retrieval. ISMIR proceedings, 2005. [1MB pdf]
  
• Schulmerich M. Real Options Valuation: The Importance of Interest Rate Modelling in Theory and Practice. Springer, 2005.
  
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• Simon S. Measuring information in jazz improvisation. (melodic entropy; rhythmic entropy; harmonic entropy) PhD dissertation, Univ South Florida, 2005. [1MB pdf]
  
• Walker J. A Primer on Wavelets and their Scientific Applications. 2e. CRC, 2008.
  
• Walker J. FAWAV Fourier-Wavelet signal processing software, Univ Wisconsin Eau Claire, 2008.
  
• Holistic Numerical Methods Institute, Univ South Florida.

Lisa Gerrard’s Chamber Music: Tribal World-Music, Wordless Ambient Hymns

W   hat the music I love expresses to me is not thought too indefinite to put into words but, on the contrary, too definite.”
  —  Felix Mendelssohn, letter to Marc-André Souchay, 15-OCT-1842.

W   hen you make strange music like we do, there aren’t many people with whom you can talk about it. When [Lisa Gerrard] says, ‘Music is sacred,’ try to explain that to a ‘normal’ human being.”
  —  Klaus Schulze, Farscape.

Lisa Gerrard, born in Melbourne in 1961, is a musician, singer and composer who was a co-founder of the group ‘Dead Can Dance’ with former music partner Brendan Perry. Gerrard’s versatile vocal range (contralto to mezzo-soprano) and song-writing are what she’s best known for, but she also provides instrumentals on many of her recordings, most frequently playing yangqin (Chinese hammered dulcimer). Since the break-up of ‘Dead Can Dance’ she has been doing solo work plus selective collaboration—for most of the past ten years. Gerrard received a Golden Globe award and an Academy Award nomination for the score for the 2000 film ‘Gladiator’, her collaboration with Hans Zimmer. Her soundtrack for the 2003 film ‘Whalerider’ was also widely acclaimed.

The release (about 2 months ago) of her wonderful new CD ‘FarScape’—ethereal original space-music chamber compositions, accompanied by German keyboardist Klaus Schulze—led me to recently revisit her work.


But, in fact, it was a series of emails yesterday in response to the previous two CMT blog posts about watery, atmospheric character pieces—Debussy’s Arabesque No. 1 and Saint-Saëns’s, Carnival of the Animals VII, ‘Aquarium’—that caused me to key up Gerrard’s cover of the larghetto aria in Handel’s opera ‘Serse’, from Gerrard’s 1995 CD ‘The Mirror Pool’.


    [50-sec clip, Lisa Gerrard and John Bonnar, George Friderick Handel, Serse (Xerxes) HWV 40 [1738], ‘Larghetto’ aria [‘Largo’], 1.2MB MP3]

L isa has an incredible voice. She can go down so low! When I ask her ‘Where do you get this from?’ she tells me about [Tuvan throat singers]. She can sing two voices at the same time using her belly and the overtones using chest voice.”
  —  Klaus Schulze, Farscape.

Chamber works on that recording were arranged by John Bonnar and performed by members of the Victorian Philharmonic Orchestra in Melbourne.

Having now immersed myself in that disc, how could I not notice/remember ‘Sanvean’!


    [50-sec clip, Lisa Gerrard and members of Victoria Phil, Andrew Claxton, ‘Sanvean’, 1.2MB MP3]


Sanvean’, composed in 1993 by Andrew Claxton, has been used on many film soundtracks, and between 1998 and 2003 served as theme music for the U.K. NHS MMR immunization campaign. Over the past 15 years it is increasingly frequently used for weddings, funerals and other ceremonies. Soprano Sarah Brightman recorded ‘Sanvean’ with the London Symphony Orchestra early in 2008. Have a listen to a clip from that…


    [50-sec clip, Sarah Brightman and members of LSO, Andrew Claxton, ‘Sanvean’, 1.2MB MP3]

The main point of my posting this today is to share with you my delight at ‘re-discovering’ how much I had enjoyed Lisa and her DCD and earlier solo work—in the belief that you, too, may like being reminded of Lisa Gerrard and enjoy revisiting these things as well.

But secondary reasons for posting are:

1. to draw your attention to the new 2-disc recording of Lisa with Klaus Schulze;
   
2. to provide a link (below) to Andrew Claxton and point to Brightman and others who are doing ‘covers’ of his classical vocal writing;
   
3. to suggest that these miniatures might be intriguing to insert into your own ensemble’s programs, or to use as encore material;
   
4. to initiate a thread on extended/exotic singing technique (including overtone-singing, wordless singing, countertenor, etc.);
   
5. to remind us that authenticity is what really matters, and that the Truly Authentic is sometimes Exotic/Esoteric/Extreme; and
   
6. to continue the previous CMT thread on ‘atmospheric’ chamber music, in response to those of you who emailed me about this topic.

A common piece of advice given to performers has tended to be along the lines of ‘make the piece your own.’ This is similar to the notion of Eigentlichkeit in Heidegger. To be eigentlich for Heidegger is not simply to be authentic but to ‘be yourself’. In one sense, both of these bits of advice (‘make it your own’ and ‘be yourself’) are perfectly sensible and even desirable. But one of the difficulties that performers have in approaching a piece of music that is unfamiliar is that it is difficult to ‘feel at home’ with the piece... When Heidegger says that ‘understanding is either authentic, arising out of one’s own Self as such, or inauthentic,’ it is hard to distinguish this sense of authenticity from Kant’s account of autonomy. In both cases, the Self is not merely supposed to be the principal but the sole determining factor.”
  —  Bruce Benson, Improvisation of Musical Dialogue, p. 165.

The beauty and expressiveness of Lisa Gerrard’s voice—particularly with the wordless, ambient, hymn-like pieces—are unique in the corpus of vocal chamber music. Regarding #5 above, the wordlessness defamiliarizes us and, consequently, our ordinary linguistic habits for understanding vocal music are put on holiday. The timbral changes associated with wordfulness are all there, the gestural semantic representations are there, but not the veneer of words. We perceive the meaning, but with only pre-verbal, timbral, and gestural syntax elements! We are treated to different sources of interpretation—the ordinary surface of word-processes stripped away, the once-subliminal becomes the new liminal.

Those of us who use Finale® or other programs for our composing have of course the routine experience of the sampled-waveform libraries of ‘ahhs’ and other vowels, for the instant playback of the pieces we work on. So the textures of wordless voices that regular people so seldom hear—we hear synthetic incarnations of these every day, and they ‘grow’ on us.

L isa had only two conditions: huge reverb spaces and no headphones. Now, I’m a lover of reverb, but this was almost a bit too much even for me.”
  —  Klaus Schulze, Farscape.

However, to hear live performances and recordings like Lisa’s: this is distinctly unusual. And highly authentic! Not many chamber music presenters organize programs of ‘wordless’ vocal material; not many chamber ensembles with singers offer ‘wordless’ repertoire. But there is no reason why that situation should not change. For its novelty and exoticness, it’s plausible that there would be an eager market for this...

W   e had recorded about five hours of music straight without any breaks… Lisa sang everything only once. There were only maybe two minutes that could not be used. She only said, ‘Well, at 10:22 on that one track you must cut about 30 seconds, as the intonation there was not precise.’ When Lisa works, she is completely captured in her own world.”
  —  Klaus Schulze, Farscape.

Tell you what: I will begin to assemble a list of wordless vocal music and put it up on CMT... Shostakovich’s ‘Songs on Verses by Dolmatovsky’ (for voice, wordless chorus & piano) Op. 86 comes to mind. Not instrumental ‘Lieder ohne Worte’ (Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words, [Opp. 19,30,38,53,62,67,85,102; 1830-1845]) but vocal music that is wordless. Charles Alkan, Anton Rubinstein, Ignaz Moscheles, Edvard Grieg? John Gibson’s ‘Judith and Holofernes’? Chaya Czernowin’s ‘Pnima... ins Innere’? Wolfgang Rihm’s ‘Donaueschinger Musiktage 2006 Etudes’? Other ‘New Music’ vocal compositions that are wordless lieder? Please feel free to email me or add a comment below if there are some wordless vocal chamber music pieces that you especially admire.

And we will then have more words on ‘wordless’ repertoire.

Thank you, Lisa and Klaus, for this nice new ‘FarScape’ and for your earlier atmospherics and spontaneity, which continue to please and inspire after all this time.

S pontaneity matters a lot. Many people think good music has to do with sweat and hard work, which must be continual and last for months. My opinion, however, is that if this is the case the music is [sure to be] bad.”
  —  Klaus Schulze, Farscape.

• Lisa Gerrard website
  
• Lisa Gerrard page at 4AD Records
  
• Maisey J. An enchanting evening with DeadCanDance’s Lisa Gerrard. VEER, AUG/SEP-1995.
  
• Klaus Schulze website
  
• Andrew Claxton, Director, Oxford School of Music
  
• Sarah Brightman website
  
• Handel’s Serse at Wikipedia
  
• Bruce Ellis Benson page at Wheaton College
  
• Overtone Singing page at Wikipedia
  
• Gerrard L, Schulze K. FarScape. (4AD, 2008.)
  
• Gerrard L. The Mirror Pool. (4AD, 1995.)
  
• Brightman S & LSO. Symphony. (Manhattan, 2008.)
  
• Benson B. The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue: A Phenomenology of Music. Cambridge Unv, 2003.
  
• Kivy P. Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance. Cornell Univ, 1998.