jwilzewske: music theory

Showing posts with label music theory. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

With You in Mind: Some Romantic-Period ‘Directed’, Uncommissioned Chamber Works

W e should get used to the idea that tones have lives of their own, more independent of the artist’s pen in their vitality than one would dare to believe.”
— Heinrich Schenker, 1906.

E njoyed New England Conservatory faculty members’ first ‘First Monday’ concert of the season last night…

Dvořák: Terzetto in C major, Op. 74, B.148 ... Miriam Fried, Lucy Chapman, violins; Paul Biss, viola
Arensky: Trio ... Masuko Ushioda, violin; Laurence Lesser, cello; Sergey Schepkin, piano
Brahms: Quintet in G Major, Op. 111 ... Borromeo String Quartet; Kim Kashkashian, viola

T he Terzetto—with the two upper-register voices and the alto voice (viola)—is an interesting texture that leaves us wondering what the tenor/baritone voice (cello) would do had a part been written. Why did Dvořák choose this unusual orchestration—“string quartet minus one”? Well, said Laurence Lesser in his pre-concert remarks, it was because Dvořák wished to honor a violinist friend and the friend’s violin teacher, both of whom lived in the same boarding house where Dvořák himself lived at the time. Simple. Good enough reason as any!

B esides this Terzetto, there is Dvořák’s String Trio in B-flat, Op. 75a, Kodály’s Szerenád for 2 violins and viola, Op. 12, Sergei Taneyev’s Trio, Op. 21, and Frank Bridge’s Rhapsody Trio, H.176. Probably there are more, but I am traveling and not close to a conservatory library to do a decent job of looking them up. In any case, the literature in this space is not large. This repertoire for 2 violins plus viola is not performed nearly as much as it should be. (And, for that matter, the diversity-enhancing decision to compose for non-standard ensembles is not taken nearly as often as it should be either.)

T he viola’s role as an ‘outer’ (bass) voice in the Terzetto sheds light on differences (compared to violin) in viola bow-arm technic: not some violin-style (with hand, wrist, and arm predominantly above the level of the bowstick), the hand and forearm are lower and the upper arm doesn’t move so much. I sat up close, on one side of Jordan Hall to the right of center-stage, far enough to the right where Biss’s movements were not obscured by the music stand. The viola fingering in the Terzetto also presents more than the usual range of challenges, it seems to me. It was wonderful to be able to observe his technic, see his decisions, hear the results.

T he Arensky trio, written in memory of cellist Karl Davydov, was really good. Unusual timbres and textures… the Adagio (Elegia) third movement … the strings’ mutes on throughout. The ‘accessory’ thematic elements to a memorial piece lend depth and verisimilitude—a sort of ‘I remember when’. Ushioda’s touching remembrances, answered by Lesser’s (Davydov’s) inspired and atmospheric replies, modulated by Schepkin’s brilliant and sensitive arbitration/counsel. These are dramatic meditations on the death of a beloved person and, like all elegies, are poetical—with language and cadence governed by impulses of memory. The elegy form tolls departure and loss, irrevocable going-going-goneness… rapturously, ecstatically... often with more of a pastoral or more serene or idealized or sanitized aspect than the person remembered may have had in real life… which is okay and as it should be. We were touched; we are touched; we will continue to be touched.

T he Brahms piece is not elegiac except for the Adagio. It’s instead optimistic and lighthearted, but it is memoristic nonetheless, inspired by Brahms’s walks in the Vienna Prater. By rights, it’s a viola quintet, full of rich alto sonorities. The first movement, Allegro non troppo ma con brio, is in 9/8. Opens with a cello solo in G major, transitions to G minor, with excursions through various other keys before returning to G major. The second movement, the Adagio, begins with a viola solo. The main theme goes through a sort of ‘versioning’ or software refactoring—reimplementing it on different ‘platforms’ and architectures—pondering and recasting the material and, through each refactoring, discovering new dimensions in it and reaching different conclusions. The third movement, Un poco Allegretto, a cheerful minuet and trio form in 3/4, ends with a short coda. And the fourth movement, Vivace ma non troppo presto, is tremendously buoyant and vivacious. Brahms’s pen—and tones—and the Borromeos plus Ms. Kashkashian—had more vitality than one dares to believe…

Friday, May 15, 2009

Piano and Combinatorial Inspiration: Fred Rzewski

B esides his composerly skill, Rzewski is—] a granitically overpowering piano technician, capable of depositing huge boulders of sonoristic material across the keyboard without actually wrecking the instrument.”
— Nicolas Slonimsky, Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians.

T hose who have been criticizing contemporary music for lacking true melodic lines, may be consoled to learn that some composers now are very much concerned with melody. I don’t mean that they are writing romantic melodies, or popular melodies, or any other familiar kind of melodies, but they are certainly writing melodies. I heard two very good new pieces of this sort last week. One was Frederic Rzewski’s ‘Coming Together’.”
— Tom Johnson, Village Voice, 13-APR-1972.

T he piano music of Frederic Rzewski kept me company during the wee hours this morning.

[50-sec clip, David Jalbert, Fred Rzewski, ‘North American Ballads, No. 2, Which Side Are You On’, 1.6MB MP3]

F red’s music... often exhibits a chromatic background that intercalates with a diatonic contrapuntal background. Chromatic events are initiated by dyadic conflicts in the foreground—the interactions of chromatic and diatonic species. In his piano works he often manipulates a single pitch-class so as to bring about large-scale harmonic motions. Henry Burnett’s and Roy Nitzberg’s analyses resonate deeply, based on the evidence in Rzewski's writing. Which leads me to wonder whether Fred would feel that Henry’s and Roy's characterization of the compositional process rings true. My guess is yes.

I do not have the score (yet), so I rock the MP3 of Jalbert’s recording back and forth and pick off the notes, transcribe some of the figures...

H₀ + T_t I H₀ = A, for some t

where the hexachord H has a subscript denoting the order number associated with the hexachord’s first element, I is the inversion (permutation) operator, and T is the transposition operator with subscript t denoting the transposition number, any odd integer.

L acking 2s and 6s (whole-tones and tritones), the ‘6-20’ hexachord has a high degree of symmetry—and Rzewski resorts to it, maybe in part because of its mathematical/structural beauty and diverse possibilities. It [‘6-20’] is paradoxically ‘malleable/slippery’ and ‘crystalline/interlocked/solid’ at the same time. According to John Rahn’s calculations, ‘6-20’ maps into itself 3 times under transposition and 3 times under inversion: the prime form (0 1 4 5 8 9) duplicates itself under transposition at 0, 4, and 8; under inversion at 1, 4, and 9. In pitch-class content, there are only 4 distinct forms of ‘6-20’; only the whole-tone hexachord ‘6-35’ is more redundant. Under transposition or inversion it yields sets that are either completely identical or nonidentical—whence comes the slippery crystallinity of it.

S everal segments are F# minor, the Dominant of home key B minor. Patterns of transposition levels are generated either 2 semitones or multiples of 2 semitones apart—except for one, I think. The transposition levels convolve as modulo-2 multiples of semitones, in contrary motion within octaves. The distance between each transposition becomes smaller and smaller until it meets the middle of the octave, the tritone.

J albert’s account of the ‘North American Ballads’ adheres nicely to the political agenda set forth by Fred—not ‘Leftist’ so much as ‘Ethical-Humanist-Concerned-with-Justice’.

W hich side are you on’ is basically asking ‘Are you for war or against it?’ There are minimalist idioms in the middle section, with obsessive repetitions of the rhythms with slowly proliferating deviations/convergences, noted above. These reinforce the obstinacy of the political question, which demands to be answered. It won’t go away by ignoring it. But the majority of the piece is melodic, wry, playful, lyrical Rzewski.

O f course, besides these ‘North American Ballads’ (1978-9) many of Rzewski’s works over the years have been inspired by social and political themes—for example, ‘The People United Will Never Be Defeated!’; ‘Coming Together’, a setting of the letters of an inmate who was murdered at the State Prison at Attica at the time of the riots in 1971; ‘The Price of Oil’ and its questions about the legitimacy of societies’ priorities; ‘Les Moutons de Panurge’, about aggression and mutual destruction; ‘Antigone-Legend’, a meditation on principled opposition to the policies of the State; ‘Struggle’, whose text is taken from a letter written by Frederic Douglass in 1849, about the constant struggle necessary to achieve social reforms.

S tudied at Phillips Academy, Harvard and Princeton. Studied under Randall Thompson, Roger Sessions, Walter Piston, Milton Babbitt, and Luigi Dallapiccola. Professor of Composition at the Conservatoire Royal de Musique in Liège, Belgium, since 1977. Politically active always; honest as a matter of conscience and constitution. Belovèd in Boston and everywhere. Delightful sense of humor and irony, humane, wonderful teacher. I learn quite a lot before dawn, taking his music apart, putting it back together.

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Love Is Blind: Representational Art and Amative/Amatory Symbols in Chamber Music

A m•a•tive (æm´•ə•tɪ v)
adjective: disposed to love; amorous; symbolizing amorous intent.
1630–40; < ML amātīvus, equiv. to amāt(us) [ptp. of amāre to love] + -īvus –ive.

S cores of Love’, a piece by Catherine McMichael for alto saxophone, tenor voice, and piano—is a fine Valentine’s Day chamber work you may like to try. As is the case with many art songs, this piece draws attention to how music is able to ‘mean’ things—how the intertextuality between the words and the music works; how the ‘representation’ of the emotions happens, specifically, the constellation of sentiments that denote love.

[30-sec clip, Catherine McMichael, ‘Scores of Love…, Love at 20: Love Is Not All, Lynn Klock (saxophone), Jon Humphrey (tenor), 1.0MB MP3]

[30-sec clip, Catherine McMichael, ‘Scores of Love…, Love at 40: April Rain Song, Lynn Klock (saxophone), Jon Humphrey (tenor), 1.0MB MP3]

[30-sec clip, Catherine McMichael, ‘Scores of Love…, Love at 60: Send Her a Valentine, Lynn Klock (saxophone), Jon Humphrey (tenor), 1.0MB MP3]

I n some ways, this piece is in the great tradition of Robert Schumann… the ‘Spanisches Liebes-Lieder’ (Spanish Love Songs), op. 138. But with Catherine McMichael’s piece we have the three-way interaction of voice and sax and piano. The relationship of music to words is cultivated with great intimacy in each of the three movements, and there is a meta-intimacy that comes from the juxtaposition of three ‘chapters’ of life, advancing 20 years at a time (hence, the word-play of the title ‘Scores’ = spanning 20 years), represented by the texts of the three poets. The result is a kind of declamation that is propelled as much by the music as by the poetry. The colors and rhythms in the instrumental parts are not mere accompaniment—they disclose propositions of their own, on a par with the expressions of the tenor’s words—and this fact leads me to revisit my uneasiness with the question of whether and how deeply and accurately musical motifs can represent or allude to specific things.

L ove is not all: It is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain,
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
and rise and sink and rise and sink again.
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
pinned down by need and moaning for release
or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It may well be. I do not think I would.”
— Edna St. Vincent Millay, ‘Love Is Not All’ (age 20).

L et the rain kiss you
Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops
Let the rain sing you a lullaby
The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk
The rain makes running pools in the gutter
The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night
And I love the rain.”
— Langston Hughes, ‘April Rain Song’ (age 40).

S end her a valentine to say
You love her in the same old way.
Just drop the long familiar ways
And live again the old-time days
When love was new and youth was bright
And all was laughter and delight—
And treat her as you would if she
Were still the girl that used to be.

Pretend that all the years have passed
Without one cold and wintry blast;
That you are coming still to woo
Your sweetheart as you used to do.
Forget that you have walked along
The paths of life where right and wrong
And joy and grief in battle are,
And play the heart without a scar.

Be what you were when youth was fine
And send to her a valentine;
Forget the burdens and the woe
That have been given you to know
And to the wife, so fond and true,
The pledges of the past renew
‘Twill cure her life of every ill
To find that you’re her sweetheart still.”
— Edgar A. Guest, ‘Send Her a Valentine’ (age 60).

A llusions, like symbols, strengthen and localize the cognitive and emotional experience for the performer or listener. In literary theory, allusions fall under the rubric of ‘intertextuality’. Intertextuality refers to the relationships between two or more texts that refer to each other. “Intertextuality is therefore the textual exploitation of another text. It would include satire, parody, pastiche, imitatio, refacimento, reference, allusion, modeling, borrowing…” as William Rothstein has written. The synthesis or reconstruction of narratives is a fundamental part of the interpretive process and performance practice. If you’re interested, have a look at Rothstein’s ‘Analysis and the Act of Performance,’ in John Rink, ed., ‘The Practice of Performance’, pp. 217-40. An extended thread assessing these issues runs through Kendall Walton’s writings as well, which are a joy to read.

H ave a look, for comparison, at Roger Scruton’s ‘Aesthetics of Music’. After ending his sojourn in the U.S. at Boston University and repairing to his native Wiltshire English countryside, Scruton has in recent years been somewhat notorious as a conservative political philosopher and ruralist, but Scruton is also an amateur composer. “When we hear music, we do not hear sound only; we hear something in sound, something which moves with a force of its own.”

O ne might imagine from his expressions in this vein that Scruton would hold that music can be representational. After all, he says that metaphors in music are “indispensable ... because we are using them to describe something other than the material world; in particular because we are attempting to describe how the world seems, from the point of view of active imagination ... The indispensable metaphor occurs when the way the world seems depends upon an imaginative involvement with it, rather than on our ordinary cognitive goals. And this is the case when we listen to music” (p. 92). And he asserts that “We are all to some extent sentimentalists” (p. 488). But sentimentality in Scruton’s reading turns out to be a kind of defense against the postmodern world by way of ‘make-believe’ or ‘language games’. In this respect, Scruton’s view intersects with Kendall Walton’s.

W alton famously holds that all effective fictions arise from our playful use of symbols and signifiers: what Wittgenstein once called ‘language games’ or ‘language-play’. When we experience fiction, we suspend our disbelief, enter into the realm of play, and act as if the fictional world were real. Walton charts what amounts to an epistemology of fiction, a virtual world where ‘it is fictionally present’ is equivalent to ‘it is true’ in the real world.

W ollheim’s purpose in connecting ‘seeing-in’ with seeing depth in flat surfaces is not so much to clarify seeing-in as to indicate the range of cases in which it occurs. In viewing many paintings regarded as non-representational, one sees one plane or shape or line in front of another. Many of the works of such artists as Hans Hoffman, Piet Mondrian, and Mark Rothko demand ‘seeing-in’, Wollheim claims, and qualify as representational along with portraits and landscapes, although the former are not ‘figurative’ as the latter are... [Audience members] participate in what I call perceptual games of make-believe. ‘Seeing-in’ ... [is] an experience characterized by the phenomenology of twofoldness: an experience with two aspects—a ‘recognitional’ aspect and a ‘configurational’ one.”
— Kendall Walton, Marvelous Images, p. 136.

A century ago ‘Vom Musikalish-Schönen’, Eduard Hanslick argued that it’s impossible to represent emotions in music because music can’t provide enough specificity—can’t convey the specific cognitive content associated with emotions. “The feeling of hope cannot be separated from the representation of a future happy state which we compare to the present ... Love cannot be thought without the representation of a belovèd person, without desire and striving after felicity, glorification and possession of a particular object.” If music can’t represent these ideas or objects but only some ‘dynamic’ aspects of emotional life, then (according to Hanslick) it can’t be seriously representational at all.

S usanne Langer maintained this conservative view, too, in the mid-20^th Century. And, in his own way, so now, it seems, does Scruton. By contrast, Peter Kivy is an exponent of the view that music can indeed express particular emotions. [I have had in these past few days more Scrutonization than is probably healthy; I think I (and, maybe, you) can find the antidote by rereading and being re-persuaded by Kivy, just in time for Valentine’s Day.]

T he expressive character of art is connected with its role in the Entäußerung or ‘realization’ of our feelings. We encounter works of art as perfected icons of our felt potential, and we appropriate them in order to bring form, lucidity, and self-knowledge to our inner life. The human psyche is transformed by art, but only because art provides us with the expressive gestures towards which our emotions themselves lean in their search for sympathy—gestures which we seize, when we encounter them, with a sense of being carried at last to a destination that we could not reach alone...”
— Roger Scruton, Aesthetics of Music, p. 352.

T o be a proper ‘representation’, a work must ‘express specific thoughts about its subject’. To be interested in the work is to be interested in ‘understanding those thoughts.’ By ‘thoughts’, Scruton means, “the sense or content of a declarative sentence,” which can either be true or false. A representational work must generate propositions with truth-values that are accessible to and, by consensus, agreed upon by [a majority of] those who experience the work: “Representation... is essentially propositional.” N.B.: Wittgensteinian language-games, ballast even on philosophers’ social networks, positively fatal on Valentine’s Day.

P eter Kivy elegantly rebuts Scruton’s arguments that music can’t be representational. Kivy accepts Scruton’s criteria for something to be representational and for a representation to be aesthetically relevant, but disagrees that music fails to meet these criteria.

A traditional painting depicts something, and if the painting is a good one, every part of the canvas contributes to the effectiveness of the visual message that the artist is trying to convey. In traditional literature every passage has its purpose – fleshing out a character, setting the mood, developing the plot, and so on. The same is generally true of music in the European tradition: the composition is considered to be greater than the sum of its parts, a work of art in which each passage has a function that is vital to the overall plan of a work. Think of any tonal work that you know well, and imagine what it would be like if its parts, themes, transitions and so forth—were randomly rearranged. It might be interesting to see how it would turn out, but the piece would almost certainly not be as effective as a whole.”
— Stefan Kostka, Materials and Techniques of Twentieth-Century Music, p. 152.

S cores of Love’ by Catherine McMichael is a composition through which the respective contributions of the vocal text and instrumental parts to the work’s meaning can be dissected and understood, maybe more clearly or dramatically than other examples allow. Here’s an experiment for you: Have a viola perform the tenor part—preferrably while reading from the tenor part—or transposed to alto clef, but with the lyric retained below the staves for the violist to see. Better yet, use a viola d’amore—one with an anatomically correct carved head at the top of the peg box, complete with the blindfolded eyes to represent Love. See if the sense of the piece doesn’t convey substantially the same meaning as it does when the words are sung. Do you not agree that it is as fine and precisely evocative a Valentine when arranged in that way, as it would be in its original mixed trio form?

I t’s like my violin teacher periodically reminds me (odious keyboard/brass/woodwind player and erstwhile tenor that I am): “The string contact-point ... is, at best, like your vocal cords. The instrument and the bow should be your voice. You must remember to make them sing; every note must sing.” The tone quality or sound color of viola can be a wonderful substitute for the tenor voice. Your make-believe mind (the mind of your listener as well) imagines the fictional words and automatically fills in the correct representations, the accurate intertextual truths. It’s enough to know the poems that inspired the setting—that caused the music to be constructed as it is...

I have performed the piece with viola (in place of the saxophone, not the singer), and it’s just as effective. In fact, the tenor at that performance was 60. His wife was in the audience, and it was his valedictory performance ... Several people came up to me at the intermission, literally weeping, exclaiming how grateful they were that contemporary music by a living composer could still be beautiful and moving.”
— Catherine McMichael, email to CMT.

I have to pour unrequited love into bar 100 and not forget a touch of fear and loathing at bar 210.”
— Jonathan Dunsby, Performing Music: Shared Concerns, p. 24. [an interesting on-point quote, I thought; has nothing to do with McMichael’s ‘Scores of Love’, though]

Wagner, Tristan chord, unresolved je n’est sais quoi of longing