jwilzewske: modernism

Showing posts with label modernism. Show all posts

Sunday, March 11, 2012

Savvy Musicianship: Marti Epstein’s ‘Troubled Queen’

W hen I am painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. It is only after a sort of ‘get acquainted’ period that I see [in the painting-in-progress] what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I just try to let it come through.”
— Jackson Pollock.

H ave a listen to Marti Epstein’s new composition, ‘Troubled Queen’:

I t’s a 21-minute piece for mixed ensemble consisting of flute, bass clarinet, trombone, 2 violins, viola, cello, piano, and percussion—commissioned by the Callithumpian Consort, and premièred on 19-DEC-2011 at New England Conservatory in Boston.

B rooding, dark, and pulsatile... inspired by Jackson Pollock’s brooding, dark, pulsatile 1945 painting of the same name, one of the holdings of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

C allithumpian Consort was founded by Stephen Drury in the 1990s and is dedicated to the proposition that music should be, and is, an ‘experience’. The ensemble is deeply committed to supporting new music. Besides frequent performances of new music, Callithumpian also seeks to foster a vibrant and financially sustainable environment for composers and composing, and has commissioned many compositions over the past 15 years.

I would say that the composition students here are not composing jazz. Specifically, they’re not composing commercial music; they’re not composing ‘jingles’. They may be composing film music, because we have a lot of dual majors. They’re usually composing music that’s artistically interesting and specifically for the concert hall... To graduate [from Berklee], students have to have a portfolio of pieces and—very important—they have to have a certain number of these pieces performed. Because one of the aspects of a composer’s training is, how do you get people to play your music? So we try to get them to start doing that right away.”
— Marti Epstein.

I hope her composition students had a chance to attend the première. Epstein leads by example. She doesn’t play musical ‘hardball’ with the listener or with the performers but instead pitches balls that are hittable, ‘accessible’. Not predictable or ‘easy’ pitches, surely. But captivating; natural; intuitive; emotionally moving and ‘fair’, not off-putting. This new ‘Troubled Queen’ is emblematic of the practical philosophy Epstein expresses in her remarks on Berklee’s website (quote above).

W hen I’m asked the inevitable question ‘What kind of music do you write?,’ I am always embarrassingly at a loss for words. Musicians want to know details of my harmonic language: is my music tonal or atonal? Nonmusicians often ask nervously if it sounds ‘modern’. Here’s the best way I can describe it: it is neither tonal nor atonal; I adhere to no preexisting method of pitch or harmony organization. I am more interested in the use of sounds as organizing musical materials than I am in melody or harmonic relationships. I also do not believe that atonality even truly exists; the term was an attempt to describe the music that broke away from Common Practice Tonality... My music is generally slow-paced. I always tell people that ‘You can take the girl out of Nebraska, but you can’t take the Nebraska out of the girl.’ The wide-open spaces that I experienced as a child, not so much in my living environment, but in the many car trips we took to Colorado to see my grandparents, were—and are—an integral part of my artistic psyche... I love living in the East, but I long for the space and expanse of the place in my childhood memories. I feel like my music is an expression of that longing.”
— Marti Epstein.

L ike the Pollock painting for which the piece is named, Epstein’s ‘Troubled Queen’ ably evokes/represents psychiatric illness-as-storm—these looming clouds; this mixture of scary unrealness and can’t-look-away awe; these oppressive feelings that elude attempts to control them. This dark-grey, nightmarish 4-bpm thunder and lightning—or is it a deranged heartbeat? [bradycardic between 07:09 to 09:01, becoming asystolic at 20:30]

T he self-doubts, the dread and anxiety, the fractured esteem: are these contributing ‘causes’ or triggers of depression, or are they merely some associated ‘effects’ or symptoms of the condition? Chaotic arpeggios in the piano part; strokes of blue and green and yellow in the winds and strings and percussion—random sonic hail pelting us unbidden, as if formed by Pollockian flicking: flung up into the air, falling now under the unstoppable force of gravity. Callithumpian Consort members’ playing is sensitive and inspired in capturing this ‘Nature is not kind’ harshness...

G othic interiority. Obscure totems; we’re not sure what they mean or how we got here.
Reduction of life to crashing, heaviness. Primitive glare, no escape.

T he interleaved string, woodwind, and brass passages around 14:00-15:00 are especially poignant, and contribute yet more evidence demonstrating the ‘organic’/biologic origins of depression, disabusing the listener of any misconception he/she might have held regarding the depressed person’s responsibility to ‘prevent’ the condition or exercise more self-control and simply ‘Get better!’ under his/her own steam.

W hat’s more, the 21-minute timescale of this piece offers enough latitude to explore the wide range of colors and cognitive states that characterize moderate-to-severe clinical depression. In other words, this is the sort of subject that demands considerable scope; a ‘miniature’ would not be right at all, and would at best be pastiche, unless it were a cue in a film score, subject to constraints of the script and action. Fully developed in this 21-minute work, the character/subject becomes very real. The suffering/horror this depressed protagonist experiences is fully animated and convincing, and, through the performance, we can’t help but care about this person and about the plight of other such people in society. In summary, this new Marti Epstein composition is a beautiful work: it illustrates not only wonderful artistry and craftsmanship, but also conveys the political and social savvy that ‘the arts’ (artists/musicians, and the supporters who finance them and commission works from them) can have, to bring about wider and deeper appreciation for socially/clinically important issues and provoke concord and action to make things better.

E very so often, a painter has to ‘destroy’ painting. Picasso did it; Pollock; numerous others, too. And every so often, a composer has to destroy composing. Here, Epstein smashes conventional ideas of a composition—as John Cage and many others have done. But this ‘Troubled Queen’ is very clearly a composition—and a very beautiful, moving one at that.

Monday, November 21, 2011

Káťa Kabanová’s Admission-against-Interest: Janáček’s Kabanicha as ‘Cyberbully’

T he avant-garde lies surely in the fact that it does not presuppose the spontaneous social order to which Janáček constantly returns us; it is not addressed to a community but to the individual, who experiences through the music the alienation that reigns in his heart... This is a music which was not derived from the community portrayed in it: it was an attempt to create that community as a musical idea. And that, in part, is why it is so inpsiring... [we] hear in this music the working out of an ideal... an ideal of human community.”
— Roger Scruton, quoted in Whittall, p. 37.

O per erzählt vom Untergang einer jungen Frau, die zum einen an ihrer außerehelichen Liebe und der daraus resultierenden Angst vor Höllenstrafe, zum anderen an der Kälte und Heuchelei der Gesellschaft zerbricht.
[Opera about the downfall of a young woman who under duress confesses her extra-marital love affair—her admission due partly to fear of eternal damnation in Hell, and due also to the alienating hypocrisy of family and society.”
— Wiener Staatsoper program notes.

T he Leoš Janáček opera Káťa Kabanová at the Wien Staatsoper is a beautiful, intimate production. Lots of great “chamber-ensemble-within-orchestra” playing: the textures and dramatic timbre changes and “sectional” orchestrations are so varied!

F or a work that was composed in 1919-21, this has a lot of "contemporary" qualities to it. I had not expected it would resemble ‘Intervention’ or other reality television.

T he lead part (Káťa Kabanová, sung by Janice Watson) was compellingly performed, with a most convincing devolution from admission of infidelity to suicidality.

Janice Watson - Katja
Klaus Florian Vogt - Boris
Deborah Polaski - Kabanicha
Marian Talaba - Tichon
Wolfgang Bankl - Dikoj
Gergely Németi - Kudrjas
Stephanie Houtzeel - Varvara
Marcus Pelz - Kuligin
Alisa Kolosova - Glasa
Donna Ellen - Feklusa
N. N. - Eine Frau

T he intimidating, icy-cold Mother-in-Law-from-Hell (Kabanicha, sung by Deborah Polaski) reminded me of nothing so much as the situation several years ago in the real-life suicide of young Megan Meier subsequent to transgenerational cyberbullying by Mrs. Lori Drew. A tremendous amount of her aggression is projected “virtually,” by putting words in her son's mouth, making him say mean and manipulative things, or making it appear that her feelings and thoughts are really his.

L ike so many contemporary online behaviors, the Ostrovsky story on which this opera is based endorses the value of passion as a medium of truth and authentic identity. When that person—that identity—is persistently reproached, rejected, subordinated, and intimidated, a dark, deep depression sets in. Life seems unworth living. Katja feels lonely, helpless, convinced that nothing will ever change.

A nd Kabanicha the mother-in-law, like so many bullies, has profoundly low self-esteem and is even more unhappy than she makes her victims. She is evil, but more depressed and revealing of the meanness that can come from depression than simply evil per se.

T his is not pre-revolutionary Russian nor Soviet-era cynicism, nor even a criticism of the Church and its punitive tendencies in situations of marital infidelity. If anything, this is a straightforward indictment of dysfunctional family and community culture of 20th-Century modernity… evoked by the Art Deco metropolitan sets.

J anáček’s music is so inflected by the rhythm of the Czech language, whether performed in English or German or other languages. I try to keep up simultaneously, alternating between the English and German, on the small LCD text displays attached to the seatbacks in front of us.

I think that in the music and in the text the opera does not try to explain itself but presents a situation which, on the surface, is very simple. The surface is what is primary. The mystery is already on the surface. In the text and music this is allowed to resonate. For me a work is like peeling an onion. You take a layer off, then another layer, then another and so forth, until you get almost nothing... All my work is choreographed, so I can do initial blocking and choreography with stand-ins and it is notated. This makes it much easier for me to teach the choreography to the singers. Western singers for the most part have no training in movement and dance. This way of working makes it easier for me to show the choreography to the singers.” — Robert Wilson, Prague, 2002 production of Káťa Kabanová.

I n the ending after Katja has hurled herself into the river, we hear the mordent/turn theme played by a trumpet. The river is something like the chorus in a Greek tragedy. The opera ends with a majestic and dignified presentation on choir and orchestra thundering out—and then lights out to black. Wonderful symbolism. Beautiful production, set design, and lighting. Superb singing and acting, and gorgeous orchestra.

L eave it to follow from what you are reading now: a different situation from the present one; a pattern of activity from different from the historical and psychological contexts where your reading is done in the Here and Now... Here and Now, the [opportune] place for engaging other impassioned unions and charged connections amongst us. Imagine a future where you connect like this exclusively, with the greatest fortune and unprecedented speed.].” — Wiener Staatsoper screen.

Saturday, January 15, 2011

James Mulcro Drew and the Creation of Meaning

James Mulcro Drew, photo ©2005 by Kelly Drew Baskett

S ome years, ago I addressed an audience at an International Webern Society Festival ... The point of my talk was that although Anton Webern was a renowned master, his influence created a ‘dead end’ for countless academic composers who didn’t really know earlier traditions very well, let alone understand Webern’s immense steps. The ability to count to 12 was of no value whatsoever. That was not where the Music was... I was designated a controversial speaker, but no one disagreed with my assessment, as far as I know. When I finished my talk, there was total silence—until George Rochberg yelled out, ‘I think they believe you, Jimmy.’ Organization alone is not a sufficient condition to create a symphony or a painting or any kind of Art work. Somewhere behind the resonating shapes, textures and temporal connections, exists the Music. The task of any artist is to find something that has personal meaning, something to Believe in—that’s the beginning. This has nothing to do with style. It has to do with flashes of light and with contemplation.”
— James Mulcro Drew, Intention in the Arts, 2009.

A fter God was assumed to be dead and no one any longer seemed to be in control, the new twentieth century, with the bang of World War I, was well on its way to what was soon to be a series of disastrous human errors. Certainly it is common for both individuals and nations to engage in competitive rhetoric of a political or artistic nature, but the breakdown, instead of the strengthening, of values that occurred in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an age of spiritual disinheritance, was a collapse characterized by a kind of tittering hysteria... But, to confuse matters even further, the same general philosophy somehow managed to be understood, by many, as representing a ‘modern’ point of view and, therefore, sowing the seeds that equate ‘modern’ with the idea of ‘meaningless.’ The modernness of Monteverdi was not based upon meaninglessness, nor are the black paintings of Ad Reinhardt ‘meaningless.’ Meaningless needs no explanation, but the term ‘modern’ is another matter. Modern is anything that makes us feel new or renewed... As Eliot pointed out, ‘I can make nothing with nothing.’ Art, however, is dangerous—dangerous because, if its subject matter is crucial, it will reflect a doctrine of moral values and therefore will pose a threat to other ideologies. The moral and ethical battle in Art continues. The existential crisis, to quote Lloyd Rodgers, is yours.”
— James Drew, liner notes for Mirecourt Commissions CD, 1978.

J ames Mulcro Drew, beloved contemporary composer, died on 23-DEC-2010, aged 81, following a brief illness. He studied with Wallingford Riegger and Edgard Varèse and subsequently taught at Northwestern University, Yale University, UCLA, Cal State, and other institutions. He performed with and co-founded several musical groups, including Crossfire Mission Orchestra in the 1960s in New Haven, Connecticut. Drew combined superb technique and earnestness with humor and insight, to create a variety of original works that will last.

D rew’s style included subtle tonality and voice-leading, along with innovative figures that are challenging and, at the same time, illuminating to play. His contributions and honesty are perhaps most vividly remembered by his students, who experienced Drew’s energetic pedagogy first-hand. His enthusiasm was absolutely remarkable. Music was not a ‘subject’ to be ‘taught’; teaching music was something you did, in an up-close participative way. Nowhere to hide, you must own who you are.

I n a way, Drew’s prescience—his gravitation toward unusual topics and his investment of tremendous personal energy in them, years before other of his colleagues could grasp the point of it and decades before the topics grew to be popular—and his deep interest in Nature and in physics were characteristic features of his personality, ones that propelled the fascination that he held for many of his friends. The compositions of ‘Animating Degree Zero’ (link below) were manifestations of those life-long tendencies.

I n this respect, Drew was not unlike one of my old teachers, Rufus Lumry, a physical chemist at University of Minnesota, who intuited the importance of ionic liquids back in the late 1970s, long before the subject changed from a small, academic curiosity into a vibrant and popular industry.

E ven in his later years, Drew kept pace with the fast-moving areas his innovations had helped to create. With such prodigious activity comes a lot of fatigue and a lot of hype. But with it too comes a peculiar, memorable, enviable brand of perpetual youth. He will be greatly missed.

I nsisting that the meaningfulness of a work of art depends on its having been created exposes us to an objection: Surely, it may be suggested, the meaningfulness of a work of art can only depend on its having been created if what is there to be understood is the reason why it has been created as it is. That is, we will be driven to suppose that the meaning of a work of art is to be explained (1) by explaining the intentions of the artist or (2) by explaining the historical circumstances which gave rise to the work, and which the work may be understood to express. It may be very useful for understanding the life and mind of the artist to work out her intentions, and it may be important for understanding the history of a period to understand what is shown in a work about the circumstances of its production, but neither of these things—the objection goes—is understanding the work of art itself. As it happens, [to a degree] I agree with the objector... [but] the crucial point is that, at the time of the creation of any given work of art, there are properties of the medium which are there independently of the intentions and beliefs of the would-be creator.”
— Michael Morris, Doing Justice to Musical Works, in Philosophers on Music, 2010, p. 67.

Sunday, April 5, 2009

James Mulcro Drew, Chamber Music at Extreme Temperatures

James Drew, amid instruments made by sculptor Lin Emery

T he work’s timeless quality draws attention to a spatial world not unlike the movement within an Alexander Calder mobile, or parallel forms found in Asian court music ... a protest against the flow of musically-experienced time, rather than a space-drama imaginatively constructed from one fragment of a micromusical idea.”
— James Drew, program notes, Manhattan School of Music, 1970.

I aspire to incorporate spiritual immensities in my music through masses of sound which intensifies by the process of refraction or blurring, while allowing submerged melodic lines to appear and disappear. It’s like painting with a very large brush. Like those old fresco guys—or like Asian calligraphy on a massive scale—even with one tone. You know ... like a big swipe with a very loaded brush.”
— James Mulcro Drew.

I n thermodynamics, an adiabatic process is any thermodynamic process in which no heat is transferred to or from the surrounding space. The term ‘adiabatic’ literally means impassable, coming from the Greek roots ἀ- (‘not’), διὰ- (‘through’), and βαῖνειν ("to pass"). It means a total absence of heat transfer.

A t temperatures near 0°K, nearly all molecular motion ceases and the entropy change ΔS = 0 for any adiabatic process. Pure substances can (ideally) form perfect crystals as T→0.

Entropy change, adiabatic process, in the limit at absolute zero

[50-sec clip, Drew et al., Animating Degree Zero, ‘Animating’, 1.6MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Drew et al., Animating Degree Zero, ’12 Centers Breathing’, 1.6MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Drew et al., Animating Degree Zero, ‘Solemn Acts in Rain’, 1.6MB MP3]

I n this wonderful recording we have members of the Barton Workshop performing several works that James Drew composed between 2001 and 2005.

A t very low temperatures in the vicinity of absolute zero, matter exhibits many unusual properties including superconductivity, superfluidity, and Bose-Einstein condensates.

A t [musical] temperatures close to absolute zero, quantum [musical] particles begin taking on new ‘collective’ properties. Delinquent waves begin to act in concert. At low temperatures where everything occurs in slow-motion, the true nature of the most basic constituents of the ensemble are revealed. I wonder whether it could be measured... wonder whether quantum phenomena like the ‘observer effect’ occurs outside the subatomic world, in the world of macroscopic processes like human beings playing and listening to music. According to the second law of thermodynamics, all physical processes in the Universe can naturally flow only from a state of greater energy to lesser energy.

T hrow a stone into a lake, and the ripples it makes eventually die out. My cup of hot coffee can [left by itself in a setting where the ambient temperature is lower than the coffee] only get cooler, not hotter.

B ut near absolute zero the particles comprising an object behave differently. Although the ensemble ‘atoms’ are still part of a ‘gas’, they behave more like atoms of a metal—like one smeared-out single entity, similar to experiments with rubidium gas by Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman at the University of Colorado Boulder in 1995, for which they won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2001. The James Drew expressions form what I think is a musical equivalent to a Bose-Einstein condensate—a peculiar property of atoms slowing down so much that they are zen-like, almost at rest.

T he sonic attributes that I’m referring to can be heard in each of the compositions on this disc... the ‘direct sound duration’ of each note, as contrasted with indirect sounds and their durations and decay. Listen to the sympathetic resonance between notes and the quadratic effect, especially in the piano part [when applicable].

I n the piano, a very high soundboard Q-factor shortens high frequencies’ durations. The piano’s soundboard mechanical impedance affects the global sound duration of the instrument, and, for the instrument performed and recorded on this disc, the high impedance yields longer-duration sounds, slower decays. The tones ‘blossom’ after the initial attack, and sympathetic resonances bring the ensemble of waves in-line. Electron-cloud-like, metallic.

O n hard [piano key; viola; etc.] attacks, the nonlinear part of the string response increases, producing frequencies with twice the values of the normal ones. The quadratic effect influences the loudness of this nonlinear response, and, when the score has such low entropy [close to musical absolute zero], the nonlinearities are very prominent—and are probably related to the superfluid Bose-Einstein condensate-like quality of the collective, coalescing, long-range musical effects that are created here. Similarities to quantum software algorithms (see writings by Matt Hastings at LANL, and others), in terms of process and in terms of how you go about measuring statistical physics properties of music like this...

D rew was born in 1929 and studied with Wallingford Riegger and Edgard Varèse. He taught at Northwestern University, Yale University, UCLA, Cal State, and other institutions. He has performed with and co-founded several musical groups, including the Crossfire Mission Orchestra in the late 1960s in New Haven (radical performances, often behind barbed wire), the Mysterious Traveling Cabaret, the American Music Theater in California, the Blast Opera Theater. In his quasi-retirement he has undertaken concerts and arts education work with the Grey Wolf Project. Barton ‘Zero’ disk is simply excellent.