jwilzewske: olympics

Showing posts with label olympics. Show all posts

Friday, August 22, 2008

Recombinant Urbanism of Chou Wen-Chung

O ne must search beyond the procedures of a musical practice, discern its original aesthetic commitments, and trace how its tradition has evolved. If one is blessed with a cross-cultural heritage, one must then regard it as a privilege and obligation to commit oneself to the search in both practices.”
— Chou Wen-chung.

The Olympics-related immersion in all things Chinese has been welcome. While commuting to and from work this week I have continued to listen and re-listen to the pieces on the Ying Quartet’s new Dim Sum CD. While the acoustics of a car’s interior are far from ideal for listening to such delicate music, there is a certain poetic rightness in hearing deeply ‘architectural’ compositions while driving through urban spaces, amongst urban traffic and urban pedestrians.

Especially the Chou pieces. With divisi violins and viola on an inner part and cello on a bass line, the balance is critical. The textures imply enclosedness of human spaces, proximity to other individuals, pathways between individuals, purposeful busy-ness of individuals, storeys of office buildings filled with people interacting and not interacting, and contrasts with the non-enclosedness of natural spaces upon which the human spaces abut.

Chou has ‘wiggling’ pitch-bending figures that have a psychological effect of drawing attention to the large amount of pitch-space (or, conversely, the lack of it) that’s available for the part(s) to move in. Some parts wiggle more, and arrogate more space to themselves. Other parts wiggle less, either by choice or because of constraints that arise because of the other wiggling selves.

The voice-leading in the Chou pieces sometimes produces overlapping ascents and descents. There is a consequent ambiguity to the ear, as each voice progresses into and amongst the other voices. What time and what culture, exactly, is this ‘Larghetto nostalgico’ nostalgic for? Is it a hindsighted nostalgia, or was this composition instead premonitory (‘future nostalgia’) for a time and culture that has now arrived?

Voice-leading, overlapping and non-overlapping

The process for Chou’s ‘fusion’ or, as he calls it, ‘re-merger’ of the musics of the East and the West is one of transformation and recombination—a recombinant urbanism. The orchestration and pitch organization of Chou’s string quartet writing involve recombinant Chinese pentatonic and modal structures and Western chromaticism.

We get segmentations of the octave into polysemous ‘cells’, juxtaposed intervals evoking the ‘yin-yang’ dualism that some of Chou’s essays and scholarly articles refer to.

Chou’s melodic phrases are less melodies than a kind of ambience... Are these really characteristic of traditional Chinese music, or are they Chou confabulating a world that never was? I stop at a stop-light and a crowd of people walks in front of my car in the cross-walk. From the harried looks on their faces, they look like they badly need the excellent story-telling of Chou Wen-chung. The ambience of melodies-that-are-not-melodies would do them good.

In order to convey the sonic and instrumental impressions he intends to create, sometimes Chou appends a number of terms such as ‘crystal,’ ‘liquid,’ ‘water burbling,’ ‘leaves rustling,’ ‘whistling’, and ‘air moving’ to his scores. Atoms form molecules, molecules condense into bulk phases of matter, like liquids or solids or gases. Clumps of matter merge and re-merge. People likewise. This is the collectivistic, sonic, social-natural world according to Chou Wen-chung.

Chou-esque ‘re-merging’ of droplet individuals into collective pool

I am concerned with single tones as musical entities, each endowed with nature by its own acoustic attributes and expressive potential. It is these microcosmic entities in a continual and multi-leveled transformation and interaction that produce the coherent flow of sonic events that we call a composition.”
— Chou Wen-chung.

Chou creates a mysterious atmosphere that depicts the “veiled and fractured impression of an ancient city.” Here is a clip, to illustrate the texture and atmospherics that I am describing above:

[50-sec clip, Ying Quartet, Chou Wen-Chung, Larghetto Nostalgico, 1.4MB MP3]

And here is another clip:

[50-sec clip, Ying Quartet, Chou Wen-Chung, Leggeriezza, 1.4MB MP3]

What we get is Chou’s essay on recombinant cultural patterns: reinterpretations of traditional living and of new ways of living in the new China. The voice-leading suggests an ‘anthroposphere’ in which people now live in extensively 3-dimensional spaces, almost like fish or birds have done since time immemorial. The ‘architecture’ of his music evokes a ‘hyperarchitecture’ of public and private space—revealing simultaneous increases in the density of the urban fabric by allowing bigger and higher structures and decreases in the density by enforced public (common) space. Chou carves holes in the existing urban fabrics, by digging underground or swooping to above-ground elevations. He extends the conventional boundaries of the built fabrics. The public plane is extended both above-ground and below-ground—creating a public piano nobile (ground-floor atrium or mall or commons) bringing the public into these spaces by operations on the z-axis (pitch excursions)—he creates new qualitative spatial ‘volumes’.

As I have listened and listened to these pieces, I begin to recognize the importance of spaces that are indeterminate—in-between spaces; left-behind previous motifs and developments; anticipated new motifs and developments only hinted at; unintentional motifs whose future or endorsement (by Chou) is unclear. I think of myself as residing in the virtual spaces that Chou creates (and the Yings re-create); these are beautiful places I would want to live. This is an ethical, thoughtful, recombinant urban society in which anyone would like to be a member, no matter how tenuous or indeterminate our status and rights and future might be. To say our future is indeterminate is, after all, only to confess what has been true for humans always. Please give this Ying Quartet CD a listen if you have not already done so. I am sure you will like it.

Chou Wen-chung was born in Yantai and emigrated in 1946 to the U.S. to train with Edgard Varèse. Chou is noted especially for his trans-cultural East-West idioms, with respect for both cultures. His admiration for the art of calligraphy parallels his sense of music’s textual and architectural aspects. He is Fritz Reiner Professor Emeritus of Musical Composition at Columbia University, where he is also Director of the Center for U.S.-China Arts Exchange. Over the years Chou’s engaging teaching style, combined with his brilliant and infectious enthusiasm, have given impetus to many, many students. For example, composers Zhou Long, Chen Yi, Tan Dun, Chinary Ung, Ge Gan-ru, Bright Sheng, and Jing Jing Luo all received part of their training under Chou.

T he architectural approach offered by Jencks’s postmodernism did indeed seduce many architects, as it provided a sense of liberation against modernism’s over-coded design process, its formalism, austerity, and rationality... However, most postmodern projects deteriorated into theme-parkism... The demise of Jencks’s postmodernism has provided new intellectual space for the repositioning of [architectural] theories, particularly those generated with Europe—such as second-modernism, hyper-modernism, and super-modernism. These can now be viewed in the context of the emergence of increasingly important discourses... particularly in the dynamic cities of the East Asian region.”
— William Lim, Asian Ethical Urbanism, pp. 69-70.

Thursday, August 14, 2008

One World, Different Dreams: Olympian Virtuosity and Performance Psychology

T he [Dürer Melancolia I] engraving is auto-reflective; it presents the creative person confronting the limitations of his/her art.”
— Henry Majewski, Brown University.

T he Melancolia engraving thus seems to articulate a pivotal moment in the cultural history of subjectivity. Where the Middle Ages substantialized inwardness as [evidence of] the deadly sin of acedia [moral sloth], the Renaissance abstracted inwardness as an inherent quality of creative genius and valorized its effects in the originality of the artist, whose works are wholly his own.”
— Joseph Leo Koerner, Courtauld Institute of Art.

About 500 years ago, Albrecht Dürer began making pictures of people. The more Dürer studied human beauty, the more he felt stymied by it: ‘Beauty: I cannot know what it is; it is dependent on so many things.’ His work entitled ‘Melancholy’ is ambivalent, not about beauty but about the outcome of human striving for material achievement and perfection.

Or, maybe more accurately, the engraving asserts that striving and mastering and winning are not sufficient to insure a meaningful life and happiness.

The figure has wings, denoting the power to do super-human things. From her belt hang keys and a money bag, symbolizing power and wealth. She is surrounded by measuring instruments, to evaluate performance and plan future designs and accomplishments. She has at her disposal a panel of ‘magic’ numbers (gematria-like or sudoku-like, they add up to 34 in all directions). At her feet are engineering tools that offer mastery over the physical world. And yet the figure is alone, melancholic. This engraving is one of the most enigmatic pieces in art history, with an extensive literature surrounding its interpretation.

This Dürer engraving is not about recovering from defeat or depression—to a restored state of ‘normal’. The piece is about finding the elusive meaning and value that one is striving for, from a position of Olympian mastery and elite-level virtuosity.

There are a variety of ‘psychology of sport’ texts that offer insights on this (see links below) that are as relevant and useful to classical musicians as they are to elite athletes. Roland Carlstedt’s book summarizes a number of intriguing monitoring techniques and results in the sports-medicine cardiac electrophysiology research literature—for example, quantitative short-term heart rate variability and heart rate decrease prior to commencing a difficult passage (see pp. 115ff)—that could be used for selecting and training top musicians, just as they are used for selecting and training top athletes.

T he Olympics are as much about politics as they are about sport, notwithstanding frequent calls not to ‘politicize’ the Olympics that come from top officials of the International Olympic Committee, the Beijing Games’ hosts and even a U.S. administration that has faced growing criticism for President Bush’s early commitment to attend the opening ceremonies. China’s leaders’ … official narrative also includes a very different, strongly nationalist strand—one that risks, and with the torch relay has produced, friction abroad.”
— Jacques deLisle, Owning the Olympics.

In competitive games, one player (or team) seeks to outperform another by undertaking various physical and communicative and psychological moves—not unlike conversations. Games have distinct ‘narrative’ structures, analogous in many cases to the narrative structure of myths. That are enacted by each participant to express the ‘self’ that the participant wishes to be and to project its associated emotions. These plays of the self enable each participant to seek heroic moments. Going beyond the myth-making that may be achieved by individuals, it’s clear that performance has different meanings in different societies, as means of promoting specific ideologies of a society and social ideals. Virtuosic music performance and virtuosic athletic performance are similar in this respect.

B ecause of the centrality of China and narratives of China in the global and domestic imagination, the stakes in producing and controlling the stories produced through the Beijing Olympics have been great. Through this, the event has become something of a watershed for altering perceptions and engendering change.”
— Monroe Price, Owning the Olympics.

Games, unlike other narrative idioms, are unique in providing a context where the emotions associated with winning or losing happen in quick succession—each moment leads to a climax. Each individual player engages others emotionally and cognitively. But, although the engagement temporarily offsets any sense of ‘aloneness’ in the world, the context is still one of continual, relentless loneliness in the striving to be best, striving to be good enough to remain on the team, among the elite.

Each individual athlete/musician performer anticipates the future and faces not only the prospect of sudden reward but also the prospect of sudden disappointment if the events do not turn out well.

Each individual athlete/musician performer also feels the weight of duties that world-class prowess entails—duties that inhere in the lucky endowment of the individual with extraordinary abilities; duties that arise from the investments and sacrifices that others have made toward that individual’s long training, to successfully reach and sustain the elite level of performance.

T he commonalities in the presentational rhetoric of the Beijing and London [Olympics] bids are striking. The [U.K.] video ‘Full Moon’ (2005), was divided into three parts, the first and the third entitled ‘Inspiration,’ and the middle section comprising Tony Blair’s address to the IOC... The voiceover stressed the nobility and potentially heroic aspiration of the athlete in the familiar tones of Lord of the Rings mega-star Sir Ian McKellan. His voice was framed against an original score that blended the elegiac feel of English classical music with a Vangelis-style sound redolent of the ‘Chariots of Fire’ anthem that has come to embody the theme of heroic human striving... ‘Choose London and inspire young people everywhere to choose Olympic sport!’ There is a marked consistency of the messages transmitted [by Beijing and by London]: youth, aspiration, and the future are at the center of the frame. Prominently absent from both is the actual fact of Olympic finances... If there is a convergence between the aims and values of Olympism and those of contemporary capitalism, then these are at most a subtext in the representational devices and strategies of aspiring Olympic hosts.”
— Alan Tomlinson, Owning the Olympics.

Look once more at Dürer’s brooding figure, posed in an attitude of frustration, with a downward gaze. Isn’t each individual Olympic athlete and each individual classical music artist also like Dürer’s melancholic alchemist, searching for the elusive Stone—a seeker after power and wisdom and social acclaim, endowed with extraordinary abilities, but also heavily weighed down by duties? Isn’t this a mood not so much of temporary defeat as of existential pain and duty-boundness? The atmosphere of incomplete personhood and diminished freedom is intensified by the tolling bell and the anorexic, indolent dog. Despite the keys and the magic numbers and the light-giving lamp, and notwithstanding the fact that knowledge and victory do come, full-fledged freedom and fulfillment are nowhere in sight. The weight of the obligations and expectations is enormous. The discipline and asceticism that elite performers exert in order to achieve what they do comes at this terrific price, personally and socially.

W hat is Below is like that which is Above; and what is Above is like that which is Below, to accomplish the miracles of One Thing.”
— The Second Precept of Alchemy, the Emerald Tablet; symbolized by the rolling sphere, hoop, or grindstone in Dürer’s Melancolia I.

Healthy sports psychology for serious athletes and healthy performance psychology for serious musicians are both fundamentally concerned with coping with these chronic, pervasive tensions. For whatever interest they may have for you in your own musicianship and coping, here are a few useful books (links below).

Olympic Village, 05-AUG-2008, Photo: Zhang Guojun, Xinhua

T his is modern China. It is not what we imagined it would be when Richard Nixon wrote forty years ago that we should not leave China ‘forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates, and threaten its neighbors,’ and started us down the path of engagement. When we wondered all these years whether China would modernize or not, Westernize or not, become civilized or not, we were asking the wrong questions, making the wrong distinctions. What we got instead is a China that is both proud and resentful; open and closed; like us—yet not at all like us.”
— Andrew Nathan, Medals & Rights, The New Republic.