jwilzewske: photography

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Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Ton Koopman: C.P.E. Bach, Improvisation, and a License to Imagine

T he very difficulty of this music could be seen as a mark both of its sublimity and of its visionary modernity.”
— Annette Richards, p. 153.

T o better understand ... conventional form not only drives perception and expectation, it promotes coherence. ... C.P.E. Bach could play with the audience’s expectations to heighten their sense of drama. ... C.P.E. Bach’s affective musical discourses involved many contrasting rhetorical materials such as exclamation, interjection, suspension, interruption, affirmation, and negation. Through the dramatic use of these semiotic guides, situating them within the framework of the rhetorical model, as well as associating these ideas with congruent key affects, C.P.E. Bach produced organized, coherent, musical arguments that were imbued with content and effected communication.”
— Damian Espinosa, MTO 10(3), 2004.

T he SPCO’s performance last Sunday with Ton Koopman and his wife, Tini Mathot, was an inspired tour de force.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach - Concerto in F for Two Harpsichords, Wq. 46
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach - Sinfonia in G, Wq. 183, No. 4.
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach - Sinfonia in D, Wq. 183, No. 1.
Johann Sebastian Bach - Sinfonia from Cantata No. 42.
Georg Philipp Telemann - Tafelmusik III Suite

C hoices of tempi and pauses in the C.P.E. Bach Wq. 183 Sinfonias stylistic narrative were dramatic but not extreme. These are all highly melodic works that require great sensitivity to the lyrical contours and cues regarding expressions’ prominence, and the SPCO and Koopman rendered these with beautiful mastery.

Y es, the accompaniment’s “single lines, stabbing chords and pauses avoid covering up the delicate harpsichord sonorities” [Aaron Grad, program notes]. But, far more significant, the extemporaneous pauses—and interrupting the rhythmically cohesive fast movements with fantasy-like slow movements—impart an exuberant, expansive, improvisatory quality to each of these pieces—aided and abetted by Koopman’s enthusiastic conducting. This seems to grant us permission to apply looser, improvisatory paradigms to our listening. The ‘Allegro assai-Andante-Presto’ and ‘Allegro di molto-Largo-Presto’ best characterize how we feel the movements’ form and intent, reminiscent of ‘extroversive semiosis’ which involves the progress of variations in communicating meaning (Agawu 1991, see link below).

M oreover, some physical correlates of ‘prominence’ are duration, pitch movement, loudness, and timbre contrast (see Patel, p. 118). The loudness changes and timbral changes that occur with ‘releases’—with the decay and reverberation of the notes that the players have just released—are correlates that C.P.E. Bach uses to great advantage in these pieces. There are back-beat emphases in the Allegro assai in Wq. 183 No. 4 that are strong correlates of ‘prominence’ as well.

T he Concerto in F for two harpsichords Wq. 46 is likewise comprised of three movements, ‘Allegro-Largo-Allegro assai’, the same fast-slow-fast pattern of the Sinfonias. The harpsichord parts require phenomenal technical virtuosity, with really fast passages in the outer movements. Koopman’s and Mathot’s execution of these was flawless and successfully communicated to the audience in the acoustically-excellent, modest-sized 1,100-seat Ted Mann Concert Hall on the University of Minnesota’s main campus West Bank.

C .P.E.’s dramatic and rhetorical devices include some features that, to me, resemble ‘time compression’ or ‘time focusing’ in laser systems—the interaction between an amplifier and a saturable nonlinear absorber results in pulse compression and intensification of harmonics in lasers (see Akhmanov Fig. 1-3, reproduced below). For example, the triplet figures (and 3x2 sextuplets) in the Allegro and Presto movements of the Sinfonias played against and coherently sync-ed with notes of longer duration yield a steeper pulse—a sonic contour with steeper loudness waveform—in much the same way as would be the case in a laser system. (I have no idea whether others have considered this before, but I swear it would be a common and natural reverie for any optical engineer or laser designer attending a Ton Koopman interpretation of C.P.E. Bach to have. Seldom confessed out-loud, this sort of conniption and trans-discipline serendipity is contributory to why we engineers and scientists love attending live chamber music performances.)

M y delight and wonderment at these features make me entirely ready to believe that C.P.E.’s writing anticipated modernity and postmodernity by 200 or 250 years—anticipated not only laser physics but, gee, flexible, disintermediated capitalism of mobile rather than fixed capital; anticipated the victory of agility over power, of transnationalism over nationalism, of instantaneity over duration, of software over hardware, of services over products, of consumption over production; anticipated the supremacy of Now over the Past or the Future. Maybe even a Tardis. So dramatic and radical are these C.P.E. Bach pieces that all sorts of things seem plausible.

D oes [Emanuel] Bach stand between the times? [Baroque and Classical] No, he is his own time.”
— Ludger Rémy, harpsichord, liner notes to C.P.E. Bach: Harpsichord Concertos Wq. 30, 37, & 38, CPO, 1995, p. 18.

T hese C.P.E Bach pieces—so vivid and dramatic as they are when interpreted by Koopman—also remind me of the ‘unmediatedness’ of photographs—so ‘unproblematic’ for modernists insofar as the photographer’s intent, the photograph, and the viewer’s experience of the photograph are assumed to cohere with each other, the meaning is assumed to be self-evident, and “unlike other cultural texts, even the simplest among us can read a photograph” [Lutz & Collins 1993; p. 28]. C.P.E.’s Sinfonias as acoustic holograms?

I n short, SPCO and Koopman and Mathot succeeded in diverting and inspiring us, in ways that we had no reason to expect or hope for. We came; we listened; we innovated—and went home very, very happy.

N ote/Update, 03-MAR-2011. Some readers emailed me to say that I must be joking, when I suggested the bit about acoustical lasers above. But no! I was entirely serious! Can chamber orchestras performing in chambers “lase” acoustically? Yes! I witnessed it in U of M Ted Mann Hall last Sunday. Ton Koopman and SPCO acoustically lased in the frequency range 0.1 Hz to 10 Hz... several decades lower than test-tube thermoacoustic lasers (see videos, links below). To have composed these peculiar pieces in the way he did, C.P.E. Bach almost certainly grasped this, even if he didn’t have a word like ‘lase’ to name what he was doing. The repetition of it in the Sinfonias is too ‘deliberate’, I think, for Bach to not have known what he was doing! The acoustic laser action is not stable, on account of the irregular shape of the chamber and the varied reflections/absorptions from the Ted Mann Hall’s walls and ceiling and surfaces below. Indeed, the intermittency/instability of the effect adds tremendously to the drama and emotional impact of the pieces. And the lasing is supported not at one frequency only but intermittently at several, also owing to the irregular shape of the enclosure. Chamber orchestra = polychromatic acoustic laser! Listen harder! You will hear it, too!

YouTube video #1
YouTube video #2
YouTube video #3
YouTube video #4

Some things to read, about acoustic lasers:
Item #1
Item #2
Item #3
Item #4
Item #5

What a novel compositional device, C.P.E.! Make the chamber ensemble ‘lase’!

T he Enlightenment exemplified intellectual changes of early modern time-space compression, including the Copernican revolution and perspectival painting. These changes were important moments in the scalar jump from the city-state to the nation-state, the most important social and political unit of the modern era, homogenizing local cutures and economies...”
— Barney Warf, p. 12.

N ever in history has distance meant less... Figuratively, we ‘use up’ places and then dispose of them.”
— Alvin Toffler, p. 75.

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Dr. Atomic: John Adams’s Photographer’s Gaze

It is useful to think of chamber music as ] a narrow deep area between the novel and film.”
— Lewis Baltz.

There was a time when we thought it was enough just to photograph objects at eye level, standing with both feet on the ground. But then we began to move around, to climb mountains, to fly in space, to go to the bottom of the sea—and to document what was there and our responses to what was there. John Adams’s compositional ‘concision’ is tremendous—he is able to imply so much with so few notes, with so few compositional gestures! He is not satisfied with things apprehended at eye level.

Adams’s opera, Dr. Atomic, is nominally about the history of J. Robert Oppenheimer and others who participated in the Manhattan Project in the 1940s, to create the atomic bomb. But the text fragments that were incorporated into the opera or adapted to become part of its libretto offer close-ups so extreme as to become abstract—studies of textures, microscopic studies of the ethos of the period. In places, it’s as though we have waveform-sampled, electroacoustic still-lives of Oppenheimer and colleagues. The opera is painterly—or, more accurately I think, photographerly.

The images affect us on the physical level, the depictive level, the mythic level. The setting of a John Donne sonnet is made to sound archaic by Adams’s choice of a slow, solemn D minor chaconne. All the typical 17th-century ingredients of a breakfast still-life painting are here. On the left is a large römer, a green wine glass with prunts on the stem. Next to it is a salt cellar with a Chinese porcelain dish on top. It contains capers, which go well with fish. The still-life is subdued in color—only the yellow of the lemon grabs the eye. Delightful details, such as the curling lemon peel and pewter plates jutting out from the table, divert our attention. Dr. Atomic has still-life compositional qualities like these.

R eality has started to be understood as a type of writing—one that can be decoded [through photographs]… Photographs are not so much an instrument of memory as an invention of it, a replacement for it.”
— Susan Sontag, On Photography.

This type of still-life is sometimes called a ‘vanitas painting’, in which arrangements of fruit and flowers, or lavish banquet tables with fine silver and crystal, are accompanied by symbolic reminders of mortality. A skull, an hourglass or pocket watch, a candle burning down, a book with pages turning, serve as a moralizing message on how short life is. Look! The fruits and flowers themselves are starting to spoil and droop. Look! The boy comes to get a glass of milk from the nanny! Look! The bomb!

D r. Atomic came out very fluidly, and largely without my analyzing it [in the process of composing it]. [Don’t] make the mistake of walking through the kitchen to get to the restroom—and come back having lost your appetite. [Don’t] look in my kitchen here, but for the moment just enjoy what’s on the plate.”
— John Adams, in interview with Thomas May, FEB-2005, p. 233.

Interplay among the levels of experience that Adams devises for us is what creates tension and meaning in this opera. The collapsing of depth, foreshortening of events, telescoping of time by way of the festinating micro-marches that Oppy and Groves make together across the stage—these create new relationships; they don’t just reveal and characterize existing historical ones.

Some of the moral or ethical implication of Dr. Atomic is diminished by the libretto’s obsessing over trivial and self-absorbed dialogue of the scientists and military characters. But this, too, is a choice on Adams’s and Sellars’s part. Possibly their intent is to portray the Americans’ inhumanity and hubris even more brutally, by downplaying the characters’ attention to the destructive implications and casualties that the bomb will have. But the effect of this choice—minimizing the characters’ attention—also tends to reduce our own.

Dr. Atomic, ‘Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God

General Groves’s candy-bar eating and weight management issues—his recitative about the 200-calorie brownies and three pieces of chocolate cake—are maybe genuine historical artifacts, but their inclusion here is conspicuous for the vacuousness and/or sociopathy they imply.

Kitty Oppenheimer spends the majority of the second half of the opera on center stage, passed out in her chair from consuming too much scotch whiskey. This, too, may be historically accurate. But the choice to have one character inert and stationary—whether due to psychological strain or moral incontinence or some other cause—is a curious one for the composer and librettist to make.

T he photographer can identify with the circumstances. Choosing is the final, essential act of creativity. If, as Poincaré suggests, the subconscious brings up ideas in pairs or in crowds, then it is up to us to choose what makes sense to us. If, as he suggests, this bringing into consciousness is directed by an aesthetic force, the best one can do is not undo it but take it as it is... What I call imagination is simply that active link between intuition and rationality.”
— David Travis, p.77.

Dr. Atomic is a work that can hold special significance to people of a certain age, say, those who are today 55 years and older and who have a clear personal recollection of the milieu of the 1950s or of the 1940s. Adams and Sellars take imagery and texts from that period and make them more complex and multi-layered by injecting them into this latter-day composition. Although in many ways the historicism of the quoted texts and images makes them ‘stay the same’, the farther we go in this process the more different they become and the more intriguing the results are—and the more those results play to our imagination and compound the complexity. There’s a ‘fractal’ quality of memory that Adams evokes in us—and we’re led to recognize a mathematically recursive quality of our memory—led to recognize the inherently, unavoidably ‘revisionist’ nature of our human cognitive process. Our minds continually re-contextualize everything! We cannot help it!

V ertov is right. The task of cinema and of the camera is not to imitate the human eye, but to see and record what the human eye normally does not see. The cinema and photo-eye can show us things from unexpected viewpoints and in unusual configurations, and we should exploit this possibility.”
— Ossip Brik, in Wells, p. 90.

This opera is chock-full of implication—open-ended imagery that empowers the audience to enter into constructing individualized meanings. Adams is aiding and abetting curiosity and conjecture. This is not mere ‘optical’ fidelity—a claim to correctly transcribe visual appearances (‘It happened, and it looked this way.’). It’s emotional fidelity—accurate, in part, because we’re engaged by Adams in actively generating its truth. That said, this is not an opera for anyone incurious—anyone who’s unprepared to be engaged and unwilling to be actively implicated.

The sparseness of the set, its raising and lowering mountains-scrim and bomb and gantry/scaffolds, and the repetitiousness of the choreographed movements all present challenges to audience members who are expecting activity on-stage to have a purpose, advance the story, or make a point. In many ways, the point seems to be the utter lack of a point—the absurdity of the process of making the bomb, the impersonal and unstoppable momentum that the process has when it is underway, the existential horror that that zombie-like activity has.

Unexpectedly, the imagery in the Dr. Atomic production was reminiscent of the Pieter Ombregt XYZ photographs I had seen earlier in the day, at the Columbia College Chicago exhibit at the Water Tower on Michigan Ave.

Angular, inhuman geometry and architecture. Harsh, inhuman light bathing depersonalized human figures as morally impoverished objects, not subjects. Entering and exiting doors and apertures, to fulfill purposes unknown or no purpose at all.

Found Art’ can be the epitome of a consumptive, exploitative capitalistic political economy. But this opera is not ‘Found Art’. It’s not shameless appropriation and naked, direct presentation of historical texts set to music. Instead, it creates new connections, creates an aura—empowers us to find these connections, discover our own aura. The aura may be ugly and disheartening, though. The quiet recorded Japanese voices that percolate down on us from the balconies as we wait for the bomb test detonation in the final 5 minutes of Dr. Atomic are terrible reminders of how needless, how cruel, and how avoidable the deployment of these weapons was. There is no catharsis here. And it is difficult to applaud afterward. Dr. Atomic might be best done with instructions to the audience to exit the theater silently, to go home and meditate on how to make amends and how to be better human beings.

I have never attempted to squelch the kind of energies inherent in my music in order to avoid a catharsis or ‘crisis’ or climax. I don’t view my expressive world as teleological. Rather, I try to allow what’s latent in the material to flower naturally. I think a lot of being a good composer is like being a good gardener. You have to know when to wter something, to cultivate it, and also when something needs judicious pruning.”
— John Adams, in interview with Thomas May, FEB-2005, p. 28.

Adams is—in this opera and in other of his work—a specialist in creating quasi-historical scenic wonderment for the audience. It’s as though, say, he (re-)introduces the mid-Century concept of phosphorescence, as it was before the era of television and fluorescent lights—before the wide public experience of phosphors and phosphorescence had expunged the cultural remembrance of what ‘phosphorescence’ had been in the literary age that went before.

T he concept of revelation—one hears, one does not seek; one accepts, one does not ask who gives... Everything happens involuntarily but, as in a gale of a feeling of freedom... The involuntariness of image and metaphor is strangest of all: one no longer has any notion of what is an image or a metaphor... It actually seems as if the things themselves approached and offered themselves as metaphors.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.

Adams’s detached, clinical observation—leads him to compose still-lives of these carefully selected and edited ‘found’ objects. His material and inspiration lead him to construct views through barn doors and beyond relay-racks filled with arrays of meters and glowing pilot-lights, to mountains and prairie grass and historical people outside. It is very much in the aesthetic realm between the novel and the film, as photographer Lewis Baltz once said. Very much like the objectification that happens in the Ombregt photographs.

Adams’s wife, Deborah O’Grady, is a photographer. I wonder whether she sees photographerly influences in his work, with regard to John’s compositions and compositional techniques. I wonder if harmonious ways of seeing are part of what brought them together.

Truth in photography may involve some degree of verisimilitude to the objects seen, but the primary reference shifts from object to subject. Truth now refers not to accurate representation of the objects but rather to accurate representation of the artist’s response or interpretation of the object. Truth now means fidelity to the subjective experience, of the artist and the viewer.”
— Jerry Thompson, p.22.

Music Hall, Madison Ave, Szarkowski, 1943