jwilzewske: narratology

Showing posts with label narratology. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Jo van den Booren Chamber Music for Films: Musical Narrator, ‘Third-Person-Limited’

T here are three ways to play the drama: (1) you can play through a scene, establishing a mood that will ignore specific moments of greater or lesser intensity; (2) you can phrase a scene, carefully acknowledging both obvious and subtle shifts in emotional tone and dramatic content; and (3) you can hit the action, accenting specific moments in the drama with the music... ‘Playing through’ is really the earliest film scoring technique, dating back to the pre-sound era of silent movies. In those days the local pianist selected different pieces of music for each dramatic section and simply played through each scene until the next section.”
— Fred Karlin & Rayburn Wright, p. 238.

S hortly before Patelson’s closed last year, I was in there rummaging through what was left on the shelves. I found a copy of a peculiar score for brass quintet, entitled ‘Potpourri’, by the [now 75 year-old--] Dutch composer Jo van den Booren. This 10-minute piece is filled with surprising dynamics and exchanges between the players. The rapidly changing polymeter time signatures tell a story—mystery! a thriller!

W hat a fantastic find! I had never encountered any of van den Booren’s music before. I began to explore, to see what recordings of his works might be available. Sadly, the result was meager. But he has received a number of awards in Europe; his compositions in Donemus’s catalog number more than 200...

R eally marvelous, van den Booren’s sense of timing and suspense—in the brass quintet, and in other of his music. Not surprising, then, that he has done scores for films, including chamber ensemble works to accompany old silent films—his 1985 score for the 1928 silent ‘La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc’, directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer and starring Maria Falconetti, is highly regarded...

W e get natural competition between the visual gestures and actions in the silent film. By contrast, in contemporary films sound-effects compete with the music. But in silent films the sound-effects are implied by the on-screen action and, to some extent, by the sub-titles. Visual effects as surrogates for sound-effects. Sometimes, the musician(s) ‘tread water’ before the cinematic effect; at other times, they come smacking in with something ‘new’ right after the visual effect...

T rumpet-led ostinato ‘processional’ music; tuba-instigated ‘introspective’ music; trombone gone wild...

V an den Booren considers each scene as though it were a philosophical question, to be considered from multiple angles. This adds to the character development and serves as a stimulus for the viewer to engage her/his imagination. As such, van den Booren is a wonderful teacher to learn from. The composer, acting as an impromptu companion to the viewer, should regale the viewer with honest musical remarks. The viewer sees the wheels inside your head working; you are a kind of narrator, third-person, ‘limited’. Your remarks are not ‘inexplicable’; they are spontaneous but explicable. Most of the time, your remarks are friendly; but sometimes you can be difficult...

B efore you phrase a scene you’ll need to select a tempo and rough-in the cue, putting correct timings at the top of every bar or two... consider adjusting the tempo slightly to accomodate any ‘hits’ that need to be precise. Compose your thematic material for the scene, or, if you already have the material, play it against the video without trying to fit it exactly to the scene. Place the thematic material roughly where you would like it to play. This may leave silent bars on one or both sides of the thematic statements, which you can fill in later. Now shift the material slightly and try playing it in several different places. When its location seems most compatible to your music in terms of your selected ‘hits’ or phrase-timings, lock it in. Use the SMPTE timecode to identify the start coordinate... Adding a soft string-pad under the theme as the heroine turns and says, ‘I love you,’ can be enhancing to the scene without disturbing the flow of the music.”
— Fred Karlin & Rayburn Wright, p. 307.

Saturday, January 30, 2010

Quatuor Ebène Play as Though They Were a Fifth Person, or an Entire World

S ie spielen, als ob sie eine fünfte Person wurden.” [The quartet plays as though they were a fifth person.]
— Ensemble—Magazin für Kammermusik, JUN-2007.

O r, alternatively, when I listen to Quatuor Ebène perform Debussy’s String Quartet in G minor, it makes me think that they play as though the quartet were not a human person at all but instead were Nature herself.

Debussy, Op. 10, III, ‘Andantino’, mm. 16-19

[50-sec clip, Quatuor Ebène, Debussy, String Quartet in G minor, Op. 10, III, ‘Andantino’, mm. 16-27, 1.6MB MP3]

T he quartet’s love of jazz and affinity for an immersive aesthetic is partly what I mean. They untangle this piece and make it far more ‘declarative’ [in the sense that a software developer would use that word; ] than ‘procedural.’

Debussy, Op. 10, III, ‘Andantino’, mm. 29-36

[40-sec clip, Quatuor Ebène, Debussy, String Quartet in G minor, Op. 10, III, ‘Andantino’, mm. 28-40, 1.1MB MP3]

T hey impart the impression that old works were somehow composed yesterday. To call it spontaneity would under-call it for what it is, or—worse—invoke again the idea of conversation, which it is not. Freshly fallen rain is more what I have in mind...

Debussy, Op. 10, III, ‘Andantino’, mm. 49-53

[40-sec clip, Quatuor Ebène, Debussy, String Quartet in G minor, Op. 10, III, ‘Andantino’, mm. 41-54, 1.1MB MP3]

S ome years ago Naomi Cumming discussed “syntactic frames,” such as phrase endings, with regard to how they affect us listeners/performers (link below). And frames are the salient feature of the musical structure of this Op. 10—salient feature of what Debussy wrote, and of what the Ebènes play here.

T he Ebènes do not, though, ask questions [of each other, as they are performing the work] about how Op. 10’s frames are declared in the first place, nor how instantiations of frames classes make Op. 10’s musical structures function as an “app.”

Debussy, Op. 10, III, ‘Andantino’, mm. 64-67

[40-sec clip, Quatuor Ebène, Debussy, String Quartet in G minor, Op. 10, III, ‘Andantino’, mm. 55-69, 1.1MB MP3]

F or Kant and for critics whose aesthetics and methods are descended from Kant (like Edward Cone) the “app” is the embodiment of “beautiful form.”

K ant’s view was that “beautiful form” is ideally intention-free: it shows nothing, represents nothing, it encapsulates everything; it is the “play of sensations in time,” whose internal “design [datastructure] constitute[s] the object of the judgment of taste”.

S ilence can be a musical frame, just as a datastructure in a computer’s memory that has been initialized to all zeros can be a frame. Part of what is going on in mm. 41 to 60 of the third movement of Op. 10 is the non-discursive, declarative independence of the parts, which nonetheless function as a whole. Like a flock of birds flying in formation.

T he border of the music feels “absorptive”—it captures and dispels the energy of the quartet’s preceding sounds.

F or Edward Cone, frames are the constructors/destructors of musical worlds, fictive or real ones. It is not that each world has nothing to say and nothing to see. Instead, it is simply the case that each is an environment that is intention-free, proposition-free, primeval (see Cone 1966, p. 16, link below).

E ach remains unchanged as a result of actions or events or temporal processes that transpire within it.

R esembling the way in which the programs and datastructures that comprise a computer’s operating system are primeval (links below)? Anyhow, this is what Quatuor Ebène’s account of Debussy’s Op. 10 feels like to me. Organic, primeval—‘ambient’ even—not ‘discursive’ like most string quartets are discursive. This was a new idea for me this week; maybe not new or revolutionary for you, but new at least for me.

Pierre Colombet, violin
Gabriel Le Magadure, violin
Mathieu Herzog, viola
Raphaël Merlin, cello

Q uatuor Ebène has studied extensively with the Ysäye Quartet, with Gábor Takács, and with Eberhard Feltz and György Kurtág. The Ebènes won in 2004 the ARD international competition in Munich and the Forberg-Schneider Foundation’s Belmont Prize in 2005.

T hey are performing in the U.S. and Canada during February. Somehow I must arrange to be in one of those cities on the same date as Quatuor Ebène is! Drive to experience more intention-free primeval newness...

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Lera Auerbach: Non cetera desunt (The ‘Rest’ of the Story is Not Missing)

E ach of the piece’s eight short movements also carries a Latin title, taken from Ovid, Horace and others, but the relevance of those is neither obvious nor especially important. (According to her program notes, Auerbach is reluctant on principle to say anything concrete about the music or its subject matter, although she’s perfectly happy to spend many, many paragraphs telling listeners [stories] about her reticence.)”
— Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle, 21-MAR-2009.

A ll theorizing is a form of world-creation and, as such, is ineluctably ‘fictive’. But this does not mean that all modes of imagining tend toward ‘creative possibility’... Fictive forms of thought that efface, negate, and forget their [possibilistic] power in favor of authoritative and, thus, ‘legislative’ and programmatic power.”
— Susan McManus, p. 19.

S ometimes what you want most to hear is a story, well-told. If that is the chamber music craving you are having, you could not do better than to listen to, or play, a piece by Lera Auerbach. The imagery of pianist-poet-composer Lera Auerbach is varied, pluralistic—possessed of multiple ‘facets’ or points of view and simultaneously supportive of two or more of them at a time.

[50-sec clip, Ksenia Nosikova, Lera Auerbach, Images No. 5, ‘Old Photograph from the Grandparent’s Childhood’, 1.6MB MP3]

B ut that doesn’t mean that Auerbach is a ‘relativist’: some facets or perspectives are more valued or legitimate or commendable than others, and Auerbach provides numerous reasons and musical ‘arguments’ setting forth her own feelings and evolving interpretations.

H er music affords the listener or performer considerable ‘latitude’. But she persuades her performers/audience to her point of view by creating a series of imaginative, fictional roles that she invites us to inhabit. Her composing in some ways resembles the storytelling of highly political authors … an Austen; a Dickens; or a Chekhov or a Dostoevsky, say.

I n that connection, political art is, I believe, most efficacious, not when it advances abstract principles, but when it instead alters listeners’ understanding of their own past and future. Is this a feature of Auerbach’s writing? I think so. The composer creates an account of History or of Time itself—ideally, the ‘center’ of (and not merely an ‘ornament’ of) an account of human nature and politics. We hear it—or play it—and recognize the broad, generalized validity and depth of what has been said. ‘Images from Childhood’, for example—or ‘24 Preludes’—are miniatures, but they are not ‘bon bons’.

S o Lera Auerbach’s politics permeate her compositions and performances, seeking not so much to reform our ethics as to reshape our memories. Lera’s work positions narrative in politics, or narrative as a way of doing politics. It insists on a broad connection between political identity and narrative. I do not know whether major figures in the history of political thought—Locke, Hegel, Marx—have a bearing on Lera’s methods or motivations. But Lera argues that each composition rewrites the past in an explicit attempt to direct the future. It is a ‘redemptive’ approach to the past, insofar as it places responsibility on human freedom and action in the present. How do I retrieve my childhood memories of the scary family photo albums, with the ancient sepia-tint monochrome images of early 20th-Century Evanstas and Østensos and Andersons and Thiedes?

S he confronts the epistemological dilemma of what things we can know and how we can know them. Auerbach closely regulates her musical ‘stories’—defining, expanding, reiterating, delineating them, bar-by-bar, phrase-by-phrase. She grants permission to us performers and listeners, but her cues are so numerous as to make the remit kind of superfluous. Her demonstrativeness and transparent intelligibility are something like ... Prokofiev’s?

A nd what about ‘Cetera desunt’ [Latin: ‘the rest is missing’]? This title is maybe an ironic joke? This string quartet is not in any respect ‘incomplete’, nor is the sense it conveys tremendously open-ended.

T here are characters, plots, themes, etc.—and Lera’s ‘vocabulary of affect’ is positively ‘narratorly’ and fastidious throughout. The pacing in this, as in other of her compositions, is characteristically narrative. No, the ‘rest’ is not missing. It is all here—right in your mind; right where Lera put it.

Petersen Quartett, Lera Auerbach, ‘Cetera desunt’

W onderful music to immerse yourself in! Be sure to hear her ‘Cetera desunt’ performed by RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet on Wednesday 01-JUL at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival and Lera’s account of Mussorgsky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’, if you are able to attend.

Saucius ille tamen ‘fer opem. matertera dixit	Wounded, he cries out
‘Autonoe! moveant animos Actaeonis umbrae!’	‘Help, Aunt Autonoe! Save your kin, Actaeon!’
Illa, quis Actaeon, nescit dextramque precantis	But who is this Actaeon? How would she know?
abstulit, Inoo lacerata est altera raptu.	She tears off his right arm, and Ino, enraptured, savages the left.
Non habet infelix, quae matri bracchia tendat,	He has no arms to reach out to his mother, poor sod,
trunca sed ostendens deiectis vulnera membris	but shows her his torso with its missing limbs and cries out
‘Adspice, mater!’	‘Mom, look!’

—Ovid, Metamorphoses Bk 3

Deucalion lacrimis ita Pyrrham adfatur obortis...	Deucalion tearfully perceived the emptiness and desolation...
‘Si sine me tatis erepta fuisses, nunc animus, miseranda foret?’	‘How would you feel had Fate taken you away without me?’
‘Quo sola timorem ferre modo posses?’	‘How would you bear this terror all alone?’

—Ovid, Metamorphoses Bk 1