jwilzewske: morphogenesis

Showing posts with label morphogenesis. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Mara Gibson’s ‘Canopy’: Arboreal/Neuronal soundscape/artscape for viola, percussion, and tape

I recently had the privilege to experience a new chamber music composition by Mara Gibson at the opening of a new art exhibit in Kansas City. The work was commissioned by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Premiered in April by Michael Hall, ‘Canopy’ was inspired by ‘Ferment’, Roxy Paine’s (1966-) outdoor installation in the sculpture garden at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.

I n the 13-min composition, Gibson meditates on Paine’s conflation of neuronal dendritic architecture and treeness... the multiplicity of meanings of what we perceive in nature is called into question. We all are trees; we all are neurons now.

L arge-scale sculptures and exotic mixed-ensemble chamber music (viola-percussion-tape) aren’t commonly paired with each other. However, in this instance it is an inspired piece of programming, an account that plumbs the depths of the sculpture’s seeming desolation... a melancholy that stems from the constitutional rootedness of a ramifying, arborizing structure that is situated where it is with little prospect of changing its venue (you; the neurons that make up your brain and make you who you are; the tree). And yet the composition culminates in a radiant, nature-affirming performance that leaves the listener-viewer with more than solace—a sense of quiet optimism.

H all takes great care with the score’s myriad directions, resulting in an intensity and beauty that would delight any composer, as well as any audience. There is a brief pause/silent_stasis at about 07:00. The solo_viola/denuded_tree resumes with a soliloquy. Then, with a harrowing climax, the percussion and recorded track of the viola reappear with renewed vigor, and with the live viola layered on top of them—effecting a grieving voice of the solo viola answering its echo and the percussion more quietly, survivors against all odds! The micrometer-precise diminuendo from 11:00 to the end is perfectly realized—and we immediately appreciate why Gibson wrote it in this way.

H all’s technique is superb throughout and manages to sound like 5 different violas, by using combinations of diverse pressures on the bow, bowing near and far away from the bridge, etc.—pensive, taut, with some ‘extended’ viola techniques. Bob Beck’s recording and production values aptly serve the intimacy of this beautiful piece. Few recordings achieve such a level of detailed commitment from the artists and the recording engineer! (I am grateful, too, that Gibson has made digital recordings of ‘Canopy’ available for download on BandCamp.com.)

A nyone who has tried to devise a likeness of a tree—sculpting one as a kid in school, or, with more serious intent as an older person—will recognize how difficult it is to do well. The fractal character of the branch points and the Fibonacci-like decimation of the caliber of the branches as you go further and further out on the limbs is hard to emulate. It is so easy to end up with a ‘fail!’—a crude likeness that looks contrived, a caricature of a tree! But Paine achieves a high level of fractal verisimilitude—a tree representation with enough character-development and complexity and depth to be believable as a tree or as another living organism with moral standing. Gibson’s writing is not ‘representational’ as such, but with equal care and finesse achieves comparable moral weight and attractive, believable, attention-holding verisimilitude.

I n summary, Gibson’s sonic stimuli synergize nicely with Paine’s sculpture’s visual and haptic stimuli. I enjoyed being immersed in both of them at the same time. The visual and musical elements are independent and exciting in their own right and (in the case of Paine’s sculpture, ‘have already stood’ and--) will continue to stand ably on their own. But, together, the two works manifest a cohesion that is evident to listeners/viewers as they encounter the works simultaneously. It is a brilliant success as a tandem installation, and ‘Canopy’ is commendable as a commissioning project. Other galleries and museums should take note of this as an example they can replicate—commissioning companion chamber compositions to accompany major new acquisitions, and organizing gala première performances (with food and wine, as the Nelson did) to cultivate new membership and community involvement! No better way than this to dispel the ignorant museum stereotype of grey-hair elites!

H all is a former president of the Chicago Viola Society and a founding member of the Lake String Quartet. He has performed at numerous summer festivals, including the Grand Teton Festival, the National Orchestral Institute, Kneisel Hall Chamber Music School, and the Aspen Music Festival. Hall serves on the faculties of Illinois Wesleyan University, VanderCook College of Music, and the Chicago Academy for the Arts. He is a graduate of Ball State University, with graduate studies with Peter Kamnitzer and with the LaSalle and Tokyo String Quartets, at the University of Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, and doctoral studies with Michelle LaCourse and Scott Rawls at the UNC, Greensboro.

G ibson graduated from Bennington College and completed her PhD at SUNY Buffalo. She attended London College of Music; l’École des Beaux-Arts, Fontainebleau, France; and the International Music Institute, Darmstadt. She has received grants and honors from the American Composer’s Forum, the Banff Center, Louisiana Division of the Arts, Arts KC, Meet the Composer, the Kansas Arts Commission, the National Endowment for the Arts, the International Bass Society, ASCAP, and the John Henrick Memorial Foundation. She is also founder of the UMKC Composition Workshop for Young Composers and co-director/founder of ArtSounds, now in its seventh year. ArtSounds specializes in “immersive art-music fusion” experiences, similar in spirit to ‘Canopy’.

T he greatest hindrance in the understanding of life lies in the impossibility of accounting for it by the enumeration of its properties. It must be understood as a unity. But if the organism [tree; neural network] is a unity, in what sense are its component properties its parts? Who is it, really, and why? How does this unity arise? To what extent must it be considered a property of the organization of the organism, as opposed to a property emerging [undeliberated] from its mode of life? These questions remain open....”
— Humberto Maturana & Francisco Varela.

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Christoph Maria Moosmann: Minimalism Is Relative

T he melodies themselves go from sound to sound, but the internals are empty abysses—because the notes are lacking in sonic energy. The inner space is itself empty.”
— Giacinto Scelsi.

T he ways that the organ emulates the human voice are familiar enough. But minimalist, textural compositions can lead us to re-examine what is the voice, what is the self? Exhibit “A”: Christoph Maria Moosman’s 2009 recording (link below) of pieces by Giacinto Scelsi, Arvo Pärt, and John Cage.

[50-sec clip, Christoph Maria Moosmann, Giacinto Scelsi, ‘In Nomine Lucis’, 1974, 1.6MB MP3]

T here are sudden variations in the dynamics and texture, giving a sense of suppleness and surprising vitality. The beat-frequencies of minor seconds leave impressions of quarter-tones. Frequently there appear string-like vibrato effects and pulsations within a single tone. These qualities mimic ‘vocal’ improvisations—things that piano and other instruments simply could not do. It isn’t plausible that Scelsi created these improvisations with certain ‘models’ in mind, even ‘ritual music’ of Tibetan Buddhism.

T he creation of music is an event full of differentiation and multiple transfers. The composer intuits something ungraspable, as yet not definable and gives it a sort of shape. The result, the musical score, isn’t music yet, is not audible yet. If a person is able to imagine the soundscape that is hidden in a sheet of music, to ‘hear’ in his/her mind the sound and rhythms as yet to be expressed by instruments, then that person is capable of a feat that hardly anyone can master. We are utterly dependent on mediators who transform the visible-but-not-audible sheet of music into an audible-but-not-visible music.”
— Christa Maysenhölder.

W e might naturally assume that, if Scelsi was deliberate in his improvisations, he must have had some plan or sketch or idea of what he was aiming to create. Yet this ‘In Nomine Lucis’ and other pieces lead us to suspect otherwise: the music generates itself, its own form, its own trajectory. We know that it is the product of human creative activity, but it is, despite this, more like a natural object, a stream, a branch of a tree, moving but subjectless.

A fter Scelsi’s improvisations were recorded, he typically had collaborators help him realize and notate the final product: Scelsi believed that the processes of transcription and notation were not jobs for the ‘artist’ but should be instead given over to ‘craftsmen.’ He collaborated with various trusted friends and colleagues—Roman Blood, Sergio Caferro, Alvin Curran, Frances-Marie Uitti, Vieru Tosatti, others. Third-party transcription as a fundamental part of his method: Scelsi’s compositions feel even more ‘organic’ or more distanced from the composer on account of this.

F or me, this evokes the same sort of distancing or suspense that we feel when we hear laryngectomees using electrolarynx prostheses. The pitch and timbral variations that TruTone™ and Servox™ and other digital prosthetic devices are now capable of are considerable. But their nuances are still inevitably less than the natural voice would have. The prostheses embody restrictions, road-blocks, performance risk.

A nd these features lead us to discover in the boundaries-pushing, constraints-challenging, indomitable performance under duress: new dimensions of the person—of the ‘subject’, of embodiment, of ensoulment in the living body.

A t the end of the nineteen-fifties, Giacinto Scelsi, a self-taught Italian composer and erstwhile playboy Count who had dabbled in Eastern religions and Theosophy, had the extraordinary idea of writing an entire work—the ‘Four Pieces’ for chamber orchestra—that consisted of only single tones, one for each movement. Scelsi was not the first to hit on this concept: Elliott Carter had ventured it in his ‘Eight Études and a Fantasy’ in 1950. Nor is the scheme followed literally—the instruments often bend away from the parent note, shifting by microtones, semitones, or larger intervals. But by the end of the work a paradigm shift has taken place: the Tone is all-powerful once more. Music returns to its primitive origins: melody formed from noise.”
— Alex Ross.

C hristoph Maria Moosmann was born in 1960 in Riedlingen, Germany. He studied Catholic Church Music at Freiburg Conservatory and subsequently studied for the Kapellmeister diploma in Basel and Zurich. From 1982 to 1988 he was organist at University Church in Freiburg and Artistic Dirctor of Musiktage at University of Freiburg. From 1988 to 1994 he served as organist of the City Church in Wil, Switzerland, and since 1995 he has been the principal organist of the Church Maria Frieden in Zurich-Dubendorf.

Christoph Maria Moosmann website
Moosmann C. Annum per Annum. (New Albion, 2009.)
Scelsi: Four Pieces for Orchestra, Each on a Single Note, No. 4, 1959. (at Thomas Patteson’s Acousmata blog, 25-FEB-2009)
Scelsi compositions
Scelsi catalog at Durand-Salabert-Eschig
Scelsi page at Classical.net
Scelsi page at CompositionToday
International Association of Laryngectomees
Griffin Laboratories TruTone™ and SolaTone(tm) artificial larynges
TruTone™ speech prosthesis video
Servona SERVOX™ artificial larynges
Guatterini M, Porzio M. Milloss, Busoni e Scelsi: Neoclassico Danza e Musica Nell'Italia Del Novecento. Mondadori Electa, 1992.
Martinis L, ed. Giacinto Scelsi: Sound and Music. Le parole gelate, 1981.
Rackley E. Music in the service of cosmology: Popol Vuh and Giacinto Scelsi. 3_quarks_daily, 02-MAR-2009.
Ross A. Giacinto Scelsi: The Messenger. New Yorker, 21-NOV-2005.
Sciannameo R. Remembering Scelsi. Musical Times 2001;142: 22-30.
Scelsi page at IRCAM

Saturday, May 29, 2010

Phoenix Ensemble: Feldman and Babbitt Clarinet Quintets, Security/Acquiescence, Insecurity/Dissent, Morphogenesis

R enoir said that the same color, applied by two different hands, would give us two different tones. But in music, the same note, written by two different composers, gives us the same note. When I write a B-flat, and Berio a B-flat, what you get is always B-flat. By contrast, the painter must create his medium as he works. That’s what gives his work that ‘hesitancy’—that ‘insecurity’ so crucial to painting.”
— Morton Feldman.

M usicians are used to spinning a phrase or rhythm in a certain way. There is a kind of common grammar to the musical language that we all get used to. Babbitt seems to knowingly throw a wrench in it, intentionally pulling or tugging the musicians in very uncomfortable directions. It’s frustrating, but in the end it makes you think in completely new and different ways and causes a kind of wonderful tension in the music. As scary as it was, I grew to like the feeling. I think for all of the musicians in the group, this was the most difficult piece we had ever worked on. Babbitt made himself available whenever we had specific questions about the score... In [Feldman’s] clarinet quintet, and most of his late music especially, he has a way of sustaining this beautiful world and keeping it interesting over very long stretches of time, and for some reason it works. It’s a real challenge for the musicians because there is never any technique or ‘flash’ to grab onto or hide behind. It’s just this ‘stripped-to-the-bone’ musical expression, and our ability to spin a phrase at a constant ppp.”
— Mark Lieb, interview with Robert Carl.

L isten to these excerpts:

[50-sec clip, Phoenix Ensemble, Morton Feldman, ‘Clarinet and String Quartet, m. 283’, 1983, 1.6MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Phoenix Ensemble, Milton Babbitt, ‘Clarinet Quintet, m. 1’, 1996, 1.6MB MP3]

F eldman’s quintet is like a window—a car window or a window on a train—and you can experience what goes by, what is happening outside: it is the epitome of passive observation.

B y contrast, Babbitt’s quintet is caring-but-confrontational: possibly an intense dialogue between fellow passengers who are on the train.

F eldman, instinctive; Babbitt methodical, mathematical.

B abbitt’s elegant contours—clarinet and string quartet lines thickly folded into each other at the opening, gradually becoming sparser, with reflective pockets of unaccompanied clarinet—radiate genteel yet incisive whimsy, and his pleasure at creating such delicate musical mechanisms expresses itself shamelessly.”
— Philip Clark, Gramophone, MAR-2010.

T he aim of each piece seems to be to convince the performers that they won’t be able to get it ‘right’ unless they’ve understood and accepted the composer’s point of view—even when that point of view is that you have no hope of ‘mastering’ the situation—of “winning”; of living forever; of getting your way. You can influence things while you are alive; you can initiate and change the patterns that develop; you can contribute, laugh, cry. But you are not getting out of here alive.

T he trick in the Feldman piece—with one instrument starting the bar, the next entering on the second beat, and so on until the final note is a chord made up of the motif—is to allow the textural device to do its job. ‘Let it go’ as soon as your note has been played. Otherwise, the building ‘chord’ will tie down the hand and the mind.

I f you are going to try to learn these pieces, it would be advisable to have a surgeon standing by.”
— Ludwig Rellstab (1799-1860), commenting on Chopin’s Etudes.

L aunched into the world, the compositions make their way... wild animals, just weaned. (It’s not like their composer-parent releases them with any didactic or political intention, right?)

A t this first meeting I brought John a string quartet. He looked at it a long time and then said, ‘How did you make this?’ I thought of my constant quarrels with (Stefan) Wolpe, and how just a week before, after showing a composition of mine to Milton Babbitt and answering his questions as intelligently as I could, he said to me, ‘Morton, I don’t understand a word you’re saying.’ And so, in a very weak voice I answered John, ‘I don’t know how I made it.’ The response to this was startling. John jumped up and down, and with a kind of high monkey squeal, screeched, ‘Isn’t that marvelous! Isn’t that wonderful! It’s so beautiful, and yet he doesn’t know how he made it.’ ”
— Morton Feldman, recalling his first meeting with John Cage.

Mark Lieb (clarinet), Aaron Boyd (violin), Kristi Helberg (violin), Cyrus Beroukhim (viola), Alberto Parrini (cello), on Feldman
Mark Lieb (clarinet), Aaron Boyd (violin), Alicia Edelberg (violin), Cyrus Beroukhim (viola), Bruce Wang (cello), on Babbitt

T his recording is an absorbing, totally engaging performance by Lieb and his colleagues and a superb, intimate exposition of Feldman’s and Babbitt’s ideas—about music, about life.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Canonical Form as Social Networking (Reply re: Canonical Form as Epidemic Contagion)

Y our infectious/epidemiology model may be the first theory of canonical form that says that voices engaged in canon are passive ... coerced, so to say. As though the neighboring parts had some sort of apraxia until infected. But they are not at a loss for words. They are not passive [respondents]. And you obviously do not have anything like the release of tension, which is the conclusion of normal classical music composition structure.”
— Anonymous email to CMT.

I agree with some of the emailer’s observations about the earlier CMT post: the players are not ‘passive’ or ‘inert’. Each is receptive to stimulation and, after being stimulated/infected by those around them, engages in ‘speculative’ or ‘expansive’ elaboration upon what they’ve received.

B ut I disagree about the ‘tension’ point. There’s no ‘law’ that says that all musical events must be deliberative or rational or intended. Individual players may emit sounds that have unintended [but wonderful—] consequences or inadvertent meanings. Players have a possibility for automatic or pre-conscious improvisational sonic production, which the composer can call upon if she/he wishes (think Stockhausen or Nancarrow or Tenney). There may be hyper-structural or obsessive features that are far from ‘rational’ (think Feldman or Babbitt or Cage). Stochastic/random elements don't mean that a piece defies analysis—only that the analytical approach has to change to address the content. It’s not a music theory dead-end.

I n fact, I think that the indeterminacy/stochastic elements tend to make the music more ‘listener-centric’ rather than ‘performer-centric’ or ‘text/composer-centric’. We are on ‘edge’ in part because of the greater indeterminacy/unpredictability that it has, compared to conventional forms. The indeterminacy itself is a kind of ‘structure’ or ‘form’. And, so long as the player or listener understands the relationships of the structures and mechanics of the thing—how the stochastic events and mechanisms fulfill the roles of themes and modulations in traditional music—then the thing can be comprehensible and emotionally accessible, just as any other piece of music is.

I suggest that Ferneyhough’s ‘Chûte d’Icare’ and other recent compositions that employ canonical structures actually do permit significant run-time indirection. Furthermore, I suggest that such compositions are analogous to social networking and micro-blogging service. Canonical-form compositions like these are neither more nor less coercive than contemporary Web 2.0 apps and the canonical exchanges that arise in those.

Y es, canonical forms are inherently replicative. This cuts out a lot of the ‘me-too’ chatter and dilatory utterances among the parts, by definition. But there is nonetheless a lot of within- and between-channel complexity. The entropy of the signals is high, even though the signals are canonically structured! And in the Ferneyhough—or in, say, James Tenney’s ‘Postal Pieces’—the parts have to decide whether to ‘resist’ or instead ‘give in’/’succumb’ to the neighboring canonical utterances/viruses. There is the text of the score, and then there is each performer’s free-will...

C learspace uses an unconventional, passive ‘friending’ model. Other users can assert themselves as your friends with or without requiring or permitting your active assent or declining. Your only choice is to remove them (socially awkward), when all you maybe want to do is clear up your “activity feeds” so that you don’t have to drink from such a big fire-hose of information when all those people who friended you generate activity that doesn’t interest you. Facebook and other social networking apps have active/consensual assent-or-decline friending—so filtering/throttling the fire-hose is easier. In the Facebook and other active-friending apps, reciprocal friending is expected, and friend relationships are hard to break. By contrast, in Twitter the ‘following’ relationship comes without connotations of friendship (and less hesitation about unfollowing to control your attention).

W hat would be useful would be if canonical-form compositions were written like Twitter—and offered the notion of ‘following’ a part as an alternative to ‘friending’ or passively ‘subscribing’ as in conventional canonical-form compositions. That way each performer could retain some autonomous control of her/his social filter without having to ignoring feeds or corrupting the composer’s text with individual expressions/interpretations or out-of-band [a-canonical] irruptions.

Y ou can get around this by subscribing separately to each person’s activity RSS feed, but I have found no way to easily aggregate those into a single ‘river of activity’ stream other than creating a combined folder in my feed reader. By contrast, the ‘broadcast’ nature of sound means that we automatically aggregate the acoustic feeds of the other parts around us. (With my chronic hearing loss, I just have a hard time hearing the harpsichord...)

I suppose a non-broadcast canon could be composed and performed. Actually, tape loops and other electroacoustic media are in that vein. Or we could update Tenney’s postcards, and compose a canon where each performer goes into the studio alone and lays down a single track: each person/part is entirely at liberty to listen or not listen to a headphone ‘mix’ of one or some or all of the tracks that have been recorded by other performers. Then the engineer/producer/composer do the edit and post-production. Still canonical form—only off-line!

T witter itself is a great social filter. It has ‘lower friction’ than blogging, and the 140-character limit per tweet makes it less cognitively intrusive/absorptive than blogging or RSS feeds. It’s a shared party-line, and users tend to tweet things that preserve the signal-to-noise ratio for everybody on the party-line. (If they don’t, they can be un-followed without any concern.) Like blogging, Twitter allows you to time-shift your participation (something you can’t do with IM). And like ‘Chûte d’Icare’ or ‘Postal Pieces’, it permits stochastic run-time indirection.

A bout 20% of my Twitter followers are people I know. For better and worse, the rest are a wonderfully-varied ... canonical, stochastic ... Fire-Hose...

H ow does it feel to perform ‘Chûte d’Icare’ or ‘Postal Pieces’, I wonder?

T hank you for the email, and for the privilege of exchanging ideas about these things here!

I think of ‘form’ on a larger temporal scale—as what’s called ‘content’ on a smaller scale. That old ‘form-content’ dichotomy is, to me, a spurious one, because they involve the same thing at different hierarchical levels of perception. What we take to be substance or content—say, a string quartet—is really the result of forms—formal shapes and structures at a microscopic level: particular envelopes, waveforms, and sequences of these—detailsin the signal. All ‘form’ is just the same thing at a larger level,involving spans of time over, say, five minutes or more.”
— James Tenney, interview with composer Gayle Young, 1978.

Stravinsky, ‘Threni’, virulent tenor infector and susceptible bass, minor 6th below, canonically making and breaking the score’s rules