Beiser/Harrison/YPC: Joyous Time Loops, Just Intonation

T   his is the basic premise of the Transient Glory® project: that a child’s voice is a unique instrument during that fleeting time between childhood and after-childhood... and that this instrument can tackle the most challenging and uncompromising music written for them. Children leave something behind [as they grow up and leave childhood]. I don’t know what it is, but children are able to communicate in a way we adults have forgotten how to do.”
  — Francisco Núñez, YPC, 09-MAY-2011.

T   he entirety of ‘Time Loops’ is performed using ‘just intonation’ tuning, based on whole number proportions. With ‘Time Loops’ I am demonstrating the simpler and more harmonious aspects of just intonation. As a result the tunings on the CD don’t push boundaries per se, but rather they sound clearer and more direct than the normal equal-tempered scale that is used in most Western music.”
  — Michael Harrison, 23-AUG-2012.

T he new recording ‘Time Loops’ is a superb stimulus to joy and reflection. Meditation to bring peace at this or any time of year.

I n concert performances, cellist Maya Beiser plays the lead part live accompanied by pre-recorded, digitally-processed tracks forming an auto-ensemble of many sonic layers. Multi-media artist Bill Morrison created a film for ‘Time Loops’ that incorporates archival footage and CGI images that illustrate the movement of the planets, celestial mechanics mathematically conforming to the integer ratios of the music’s just intonation. Composer Michael Harrison performs the piano part with sensitivity and feeling. Even amidst the complexity and conflict of everyday life, we rediscover here the beauty and solace that are immanent in the natural world—the patterns and harmonics of a clockwork Universe whose physics was first formalized mathematically by Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and others—and rediscover that our own homo sapiens processes are as real and natural and immutable as those.

T he last and largest-scale work on the CD, ‘Hijaz,’ was composed by Harrison for Beiser and the Young People’s Chorus of New York City under the direction of Francisco Nuñez, as well as composer and percussionist Payton MacDonald on tabla and shaker. The text combines a prayer written by Harrison with spoken South Indian rhythmic syllables, which merge with the choral textures to evoke a sense of joy and unity and transcendence—deeply fitting for this holiday season.

E specially vivid and poignant are the perspectives of the school-age voices in the choir (see blockquote above). Wise beyond their years; empowered and uplifted by the music. To me, joy is mainly what music is for, and people should, through writing and performing music, feel joyous and acquire a better ability to create more joy. This CD—the compositions and performances—is first-class evidence supporting this idea. Evidence, too, of how crucially important opportunities are for kids to learn and perform music—before adulthood overtakes them as it does us all. Not a nostalgia for a childlike simplicity, but instead a meditation on clarity, on earnestness, on wonder, on the youthful drive to penetrate the truth of things, on receptiveness to joy.

    [50-sec clip, Beiser/Harrison/YPC, ‘Hijaz’; (track 8), 2012, 1.4MB MP3]

M   y intention was to invoke a sense of pilgrimage, either to a wondrous or holy place, or, metaphorically, to a sacred place within each of us. The chorus is the soul of the journeyer... The pulsing rhythms trace our footsteps, and those of our camels, as we make our way on the path of self-discovery.”
  — Michael Harrison, 23-AUG-2012.

T he recent release of ‘Time Loops’ coincided with the first productions of Maya Beiser’s ‘ELSEWHERE: A CelloOpera,’ created by Maya with director Robert Woodruff, composers Missy Mazzoli and Eve Beglarian and writer Erin Cressida Wilson. For more information, visit www.elsewherecelloopera.com.

• Maya Beiser website
• Michael Harrison website
• Young People's Chorus of New York City website
• Beiser/Harrison/YPC. Time Loops: Music in Just Intonation. (Cantaloupe, 2012.)
• Bang On A Can 'Time Loops' page with MP3 and CD purchase options
• Hijaz, arabic: الحجاز‎ al-Ḥiǧāz, "The Barrier"
• Dolnick E. The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World. Harper, 2012.

Martin Stadtfeld: Inspired Runtime Indirection

T   he Busoni transcription is] absorbed in itself, moving round itself, decidedly turned away from the world... brooding; Beethoven-ish.”
  — Hugo Riemann.

A   lthough Bach set verses from Luther’s ‘Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland’ nine times, many of the same Advent themes run through all the settings. Subtle nuances and theological allusions point to various verses of the chorale text, and the cantatas remain a starting point for the interpretation of the organ works.”
  — Anne Leahy, in Zager, p. 95.

M artin Stadtfeld’s performance of Mendelssohn’s Klavierkonzert Nr. 1 g-Moll op. 25 with Sir Neville Marriner and Academy of St. Martin in the Fields at the Rheingau Festival was exceptional—a young man’s composition, performed with a young person’s sensibilities and energy. It simply sang!

B ut Stadtfeld’s 4’30” encore (Ferruccio Busoni’s transcription of J.S. Bach’s BWV 659 ‘Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland’) revealed a maturity and grasp of life’s setbacks and aporias: it was teleological, driving purposefully toward its goal(s) with pragmatism and propensity toward acceptance, yet with an open-heartedness/open-mindedness that still has room for hope.

S tadtfeld’s left-hand is quiet... ‘reticent’, as recommended in the performance notes in the original Breitkopf & Härtel edition of Busoni... enabling his melodic right-hand to have the terse prominence it requires. The tenuto and agogic accenting in the right-hand, in turn, conveys motives that are… pregnant.

T he expectancy was such that Stadtfeld impressed us that he himself was discovering things as he went, even though he has performed this prelude many, many times in the past... ‘sehr ausdrucksvoll mit vollem Anschlag.’ Many notes—the touch he applied to them—were, to me, like variable values in a software module that were resolved and bound at Stadtfeld’s pre-concert preparation—at ‘compile-time,’ so to say. But there were equally many that are only resolved on a moment-by-moment basis during performance (runtime). The balance between these lent a tremendous liveliness and interest and vibrancy to the performance of this beautiful Busoni transcription.

I t is, for me, analogous to the difference in software between a layered design with subroutines and an object-oriented design with event-handler methods. The terseness of the left-hand is such that Stadtfeld expresses not a human resoluteness but instead a process in Nature, something that is immutable, like mortality; not at all deterministic, but inevitable in the sense that human wishes and intentions cannot change the outcome.

I n software engineering terms, the Busoni-Bach left-hand module is a ‘wrapper’ and encapsulates the right-hand module. The left-hand ‘service’ owns a set of ‘objects’ with ‘handlers’ that share the same state. State is possible to preserve across invocations as the figures recur over the 3 pages of this transcription. It lends nicely to cooperation through message passing communication. Stadtfeld’s multiple levels of runtime indirection... reveal the extent and fate of our wishing and desiring.

E ach object has three parts: a component implementation, an export interface, and an import interface. Export and import can be modeled with runtime constructs specifically designed for component wrapping and interface adaptation, such as interception techniques for runtime resolution. The trills, for example, amount to handshake interfaces between right-hand and left-hand parts.

L iabilities of interpretations that entail generous amounts of runtime indirection include (1) variation-point management [adding and binding variants at a late moment in time implies extra work for managing and implementing variation points] and (2) predictability [a large amount of variability makes it virtually impossible to test all combinations during rehearsal]. But the merits of ‘romantic,’ liberal runtime indirection include danger, surprise, and excitement of the sort we were thrilled by on hearing Stadtfeld’s inspired performance of this Busoni-Bach ‘Nun komm’ Zugabe. A tiny encore that emotionally surpassed the gifts of the excellent, larger concerto that preceded it. Bravo!

• Martin Stadtfeld website
• Rheingau Musik Festival
• Stadtfeld M. Bach: Piano Concertos: No. 2. (Sony, 2011.)
• Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) transcription of J.S. Bach Orgelchoralvorspiel "Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland" BWV 659 (Come, Savior of the Gentiles) at Klavier-Noten.com
• Rösel P. Ferruccio Busoni: Klavierbearbeitungen Bach'scher Werke. (Berliner Klassic, 1994.)
• Vladimir Horowitz YouTube video of Busoni transcription of Bach BWV 659.
• Viktors Berstis YouTube video of Busoni transcription of Bach BWV 659.
• Brendel A. Ferruccio Busoni: Klavierbearbeitungen Bach'scher Werke. (Philips, 2006.)
• Lipatti D. Ferruccio Busoni: Klavierbearbeitungen Bach'scher Werke. (Regis, 2006.)
• Busoni F. J.S. Bach: Orgel-Choralvorspiele für Klavier, Heft 1. (Breitkopf & Härtel, 1898)
• Busoni F. J.S. Bach: Orgel-Choralvorspiele für Klavier, Heft 1. (Breitkopf & Härtel, 1898) at SheetMusicPlus.com
• Busoni F. J.S. Bach: Orgel-Choralvorspiele für Klavier page at IMSLP.org
• One More Level of Indirection at c2.com
• Cooper K, Torczon L. Engineering a Compiler. 2e. Morgan-Kaufmann, 2011.
• Goedicke M, et al. Design and implementation constructs for the development of flexible, component-oriented software architectures. In Proc 2nd Intl Symposium on Generative and Component-Based Software Engineering (GCSE’00), Erfurt, Germany, OCT-2000.
• Lienhard A. Dynamic Object Flow Analysis. Lulu, 2009. (p. 34)
• Spring J, et al. Reflexes: Abstractions for integrating highly-responsive tasks into Java applications. ACM Trans Embedded Comput Sys 2010;10(4):1-29.
• Zager D, ed. Music and Theology: Essays in Honor of Robin A. Leaver. Scarecrow, 2006.

M   athematics is the heart and soul of music … Without question the bar, the rhythm, the proportion of the parts of a musical work and so on must all be measured … Notes and other signs are only tools in music, the heart and soul is the good proportion of melody and harmony. It is ridiculous to say that mathematics is not the heart and soul of music.”
  — Johann Mattheson, 1743, ‘Neu eröffnete musikalische Bibliothek’ 2:54.

Andreas Haefliger: Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 2, Op. 19, in Sydney

W ithout doubt, there is something you are doing profoundly right in your interpretation as a soloist when a yellow Labrador retriever in Row 1 listens attentively, head raised and up on her/his elbows, throughout your Beethoven concerto performance. (I do not know whether the same holds true of cats, except possibly Siamese—a point about which Christopher O’Riley and other cat-owning pianists may be able to comment.) Labradors are kindly, good-natured, and take a lot of things in stride. As a breed, the Labrador is notable for being steady-tempered but does display impatience with human pretension in all its manifestations. If she finds your expressions burdensome, the Labrador will sigh or adjust her posture, clunking her bony forearms on the wood floor loudly. But Andreas Haefliger’s account of Beethoven’s second piano concerto was true enough, and the Labrador looked thoroughly pleased as Andreas took his bows. We were well pleased too. (The probity of the cellos was periodically a matter of some doubt, though.)

T his concerto offers many dramatic moments—some Mozartian figures; some prodigious cadenzas that Beethoven only wrote down when the piano part was published in 1809, because up until that time he used the piece as a promotional vehicle for his own career as a concert pianist and did not wish other pianists to co-opt the work or eclipse him. And in that regard the interaction in this concerto between the soloist and the ensemble has been the subject of considerable scholarly writing—some authors opining that Beethoven had not by the early date of this concerto’s birth yet mastered the composerly skills of constructing the arcs that define soloist-orchestra narrative.

B ut Haefliger takes this material and masterfully does with it what can only be viewed as authentic completion of Beethoven’s meaning and intent. He knows how to take the measure of the concertmaster and first violins behind him, and gaze at the oboes as they speak, and then deliver his own lines in a manner that the others accept as truthful—an honest account to which they must respond in-kind. The brass, characters not known for tender sensibilities, wait for the completion of Haefliger’s pianissimo figure, a deep contemplation evident in the piano’s right hand, and are made visibly more humane and introspective by it. Haefliger finishes a burst of activity, leans backward, left hand falling to his side, right hand rising in a flourish, and looks earnestly to his left at the orchestra to see what their answer will be. He imparts a magisterial, conductorly relish to the meaning; to use a cinematic or theatrical phrase, he ‘pulls focus’ beautifully onto and off of himself in a way that makes the ‘character’ of the solo part believable and engaging and which enhances the overall flow of the story, including the part of it that belongs to the ensemble to tell.

T he cadenza was full of bravado; the recitative passages, aptly confessional. When the tempo is slow enough, the shorter notes were played softer, without loss of clarity... which, as I understand, is a ‘bebung’ clavichord technique that Beethoven sometimes used in his piano writing for dramatic expressive purposes. In fact, the whole performance yesterday embodied the best qualities of excellent drama and interplay between soloist and orchestra. Bravo!

I   was consumed with sheer terror. How, how, how? How does this start? The silence lengthened, ominously. When you’re on-stage, a few seconds of silence feels like an eternity. This was considerably more than a few seconds, and I felt it pressing down on my shoulders. Finally, in panic, I had an idea: maybe if I just put my fingers up on the keyboard, they’d know what to do. I lifted my hands slowly to the keyboard. The audience was surely, by this point, deeply impressed. And, by a miracle, it worked. By themselves, on their own, my fingers found the right configuration of black and white keys, and I let them go. Before I knew it, they had jumped into the opening theme [of the third movement of Op. 19], and the orchestra soon came galloping up behind them.”
  — Leon Fleisher, p. 24.

• Andreas Haefliger website
• Focus-pulling page at Wikipedia
• Follow-focus page at Wikipedia
• Rack-focus page at Wikipedia
• Nagib L. World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism. Continuum, 2011.
• Stadler J. Pulling Focus: Intersubjective Experience, Narrative Film, and Ethics. Continuum, 2008.
• Fleisher L, Midgette A. My Nine Lives: A Musical Memoir. Anchor, 2011. (pp. 21-23 are about Fleisher’s experiences with cadenzas in Beethoven’s Cto. No. 2, Op. 19)
• Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 2, Op. 19, in B-flat score at IMSLP.org
• HotDocs 2012 (Canadian International Documentary Film Festival)
• Labrador retriever page at AKC.org
• DogTime.com
• Sydney Opera House website

Giya Kancheli on the [marital] virtues of revealing, accomodating

M  usic, like life itself, is inconceivable without romanticism. Romanticism is a high dream of the past, present, and future—a force of invincible beauty which towers above, and conquers, the forces of ignorance, bigotry, violence, and evil.”
  — Giya Kancheli.

I ’m listening to a recording of Tblisi-native composer Giya Kancheli’s 26-minute-long 1997 Piano Quartet ‘In l’istesso Tempo’ performed by Bridge Ensemble. The consistent pulse and the narrative epicness of it intrigue me. I replay it twice and the complexities and layers that I’d missed on the first listen gradually become more apparent...

G  iya Kancheli’s sustained tones build in layers; melodic lines hover like chant, either offered plainly or decorated with trills and turns befitting a liturgical cantor. The mostly-smooth surface gives way to bare plucks, crackling outbursts and grand crescendos with a Romantic sense of drama... The wide-open space of his music stems more from silence than the repetitive structures of minimalism.”
  — Aaron Grad, 2009.

A nephew of mine and his fiancé are getting married next month; I think about them as I listen to this ‘In l’istesso Tempo’. GoogleTranslate says ‘in l’istesso tempo’ means ‘in the same body’—which seems poetically fitting, given the line of thought that Kancheli’s piano quartet and its pulse has induced in me. This piano quartet is full of musical artifacts of a healthy intimacy... a kind of transcendence through durability, with the relationship between lovers deepening and diversifying as things change and as time passes. No [Nietzschean?] pre-conception of will-to-power with forces/personalities/resources coming together, pushing and pulling. Instead, a [Heideggerian?] will-to-dwell: mutual, enduring attention and being present for the other, present-in-body and present-in-mind.

A nd a pluralistic view of truth that does not insist on any one voice (partner) being ‘right’ and the other ‘wrong’... a kind of aletheia (ἀλήθεια).

T  he Italian tempo designation ‘in l’istesso tempo’ signifies a musical passage where the speed of the underlying pulse does not change, even if the division of the beats within a bar does so. Music written this way can create an impression of stillness.”
  — David Lewis.

K ancheli’s enduring pulse—affirms that love is not love that alters when it alteration finds. There is what music cognition researchers would call ‘event-salience’ in these piano quartet rhythms as-written, leading to automatic beat-induction (BI) for the listener/performer. Auto-BI, in turn, leads us to recognize nature—our bodies!—and how out of our control they are! This is no determinism or fate in which we have no choice or in which human free will plays no part; instead, just an important dimension of reality, and one that we’d do well not to ignore. By the time I’ve finished listening to this the third time, I’ve come to regard the quartet’s accomodation of meter to a pervading, faithful pulse as a romantic gesture—an inspiring acknowledgement of constancy and mutual devotion of friendship, marriage, or civil union founded on true love. No idea as to whether that was what Kancheli had in mind, but the notion is plausible, and I am grateful that the music happened to propel my thoughts in this direction. Unexpected effects like this are a big part of why any person likes music, I think.

T  he nothingness of the individual, expressed in simple musical ideas, and its relationship to a more meaningful whole lie at the heart of Georgian composer Giya Kancheli’s work, often disconcerting in its profoundly sad take on modern society. The composer’s aesthetic is admirably served on this exceptional ECM disc by performers who appear to share his vision of a world afflicted by destructive turmoil.”
  — Andrew Stewart, Music Week.

O ther ‘in l’istesso tempo’ pieces include Elgar’s Enigma Variations, Op. 36, v. 1; or Ginastera’s Variazioni e Toccata sopra Aurora lucis rutilat, Op. 52, vv. 3,5,6; or Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 43, vv. 1,2,3,6,9,10,14,23. I’ll plan on immersing myself in those on some future evening. Maybe they will lead me further on this path.

B y the way, Artemis String Quartett and pianist Jacques Ammon will be performing at Le Poisson Rouge in NYC on 01-MAY-2012. Their account of Kancheli’s ‘In l’istesso Tempo’ is really superb. Their performance of ‘In l’istesso Tempo’ was positioned in middle of program in last night’s concert in Kansas City and received a standing ovation—which is a pretty uncommon occurrence in mid-program in any performance in any country, you must admit.

A  gain and again, with deep regret, we see how alongside obvious achievements of the civilized world we are being worn down. Our planet is being torn apart by bloodshed and antagonisms, and no creative deep is able to withstand that destructive force, which so easily strikes out the fragile means of progress. Taking very close to my heart all that is happening around me, I am trying to express in my music the state I feel in my soul, writing basically for myself, without illusions that ‘beauty will save the world,’ as Dostoyevsky said. That is why my music is more sad than happy, and is addressed more to the lone individual rather than to society. Here you won’t find appeals for striving, equality, or ‘a bright future.’ Most likely, you will find threads of sorrow caused by the imperfection of the world, which keeps disregarding the most horrendous examples in human history. My thoughts are expressed in extremely simple musical language, and I hope that the audience ... will not mistake my deliberate simplicity for what, in my opinion, is the most dangerous phenomenon: indifference.”
  — Giya Kancheli.

• Giya Kancheli page at Welcome.ge
• Giya Kancheli page at IMDB.com
• Duffie B. Conversation with Giya Kancheli, 1995.
• Giya Kancheli page at Schirmer.com
• Piano Quartet ‘In l’istesso Tempo’ sheet music at Schirmer.com
• Giya Kancheli page at Sikorski.de
• Piano Quartet "In l’istesso Tempo" sheet music at Sikorski.de
• Giya Kancheli page at composers21.cocm
• Giya Kancheli page at Amazon.com
• Giya Kancheli page at theSPCO.org
• Giya Kancheli page at MusicWeb-International.com
• Music Cognition Group (MCG) at Universiteit van Amsterdam
• Honing H. Without it, no music: Beat-induction as a fundamental musical trait. Ann NY Acad Sci 2012;1252:85-91.
• MCG demo: 'Categorical rhythm perception'
• Lowenthal M. Heart to Heart, Hand in Hand, Shoulder to Shoulder: A Guide to Strengthening Intimate Relationships. BookSurge, 2009.
• Martin Heidegger on 'ἀλήθεια'
• Martin Heidegger ‘Origin of the Work of Art’ page at Wikipedia
• Sternberg R, ed. Satisfaction In Close Relationships. Guilford, 1997.
• Thomson I. Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity. Cambridge Univ, 2011.
• Wood J, Duck S, eds. Under-Studied Relationships. Sage, 1995.
• Artemis Quartett website
• Jacques Ammon page at celloproject.de
• Jacques Ammon page at DuoInterpares.com
• Jacques Ammon page at Musikhochschule Lübeck

T  he biggest tragedy is to write music.”
  — Giya Kancheli.

Sex, Lies, and Music: Schumann’s Poet-Lover Alter-Ego

D  ichterliebe’, the title chosen or accepted by Schumann for his choice of Heine’s texts, involves a double-meaning. Schumann the composer-poet found in the poems evidence that their protagonist is a poet-composer: one who is inspired by bird-song (No. 1), one whose sighs become nightingales (No. 2), one who inspires the lily to sing (No. 5), one who dreams magical fairy-music (No. 15), and one who finally buries all his songs at sea (No. 16). That persona, originally Heine’s surrogate [was embraced by Schumann as his own surrogate]... For the purposes of the poems, Heine spoke through the role of the unhappy Dichter; for the purposes of the songs, Schumann transformed that figure into a Dichter of his own.”
  — Edward T. Cone, ‘Poet’s love or composer’s love?’, in Steven Paul Scher, Chapter 10.

T he relation between Schumann and poetry is pretty revealing,” said pianist and long-time chamber music presenter Cynthia Siebert at a recent dinner party. “It is? How is it revealing and what is it that’s revealed?” I wondered. The conversation proceeded off in other directions. But my curiosity was piqued! Challenge accepted!

M usic theorist/pianist/composer Edward Cone wrote 20 years ago that Robert Schumann’s Dichter (poet) is dramatically different from Heinrich Heine’s Dichter. According to Cone, Schumann’s Dichter chooses music as the primary means of expression while words are secondary.

B ut the music depends on the other. The piano is inseparable from the vocal melody and the words. The piano persists in completing the voice’s unfinished cadences in No. 2, with the prolongation of each B. Every B, relinquished by the voice, resounds briefly before it resolves to A. The same prolongation-resolution motif appears also in No. 3.

N o. 4 has piano doubling the voice, and the two parts alternately imitate each other—a kind of counterpoint that might either suggest the complete co-dependent behavior of both, or the deliberate independence of each from the other. The rhetorical reversals [“He went to the country; to the town went she.”] are chiasmic: miniature embodiments of musical absorption of two-into-one where the two quasi-orgasmic experiences paradoxically highlight the separateness of the two at the peak of their union.

N o. 7 has voice and piano extensively doubling each other throughout—a kind of lovemaking or lovers’ dance. The voice is “on top” or leads through most of the song, but the piano is the one whose outburst at the climax has the voice in an inner or lower position.

M  ost subtle in the ‘interpenetration’ of voice and accompaniment is the very first song of the cycle, which sets the tone for all that follows. The doubling is delicately heterophonic—as when the voice, but not the piano, anticipates the resolution of a suspension; or when the piano, but not the voice, remains suspended; or when the voice, after inserting an appoggiatura, resolves a suspension. The effect is the kind of blurring that might result if the piano could pedal the vocal line, treating the voice as a strand of the piano texture [and subduing it, see m.4, image above].”
  —  Edward T. Cone, ‘Poet’s love or composer’s love?’, in Steven Paul Scher, Chapter 10.

I  look up the date and see that Dichterliebe, Op. 48, was composed in 1840, when Schumann was 30 years old, the year he and Clara at long last became married, against her father’s will. Susan Youens and others see nothing too subtle about the motivations and construction of Dichterliebe:

T  he persona sings of his tears and sighs transforming themselves into [sprouting, turgid] floral offerings and love’s nightingales in ‘Aus meinen Tränen spriessen’; he sings in hectic, [pumping] alliterative excess of ‘die Kleine, die Feine, die Reine, die Eine’ in ‘Die Rose, die Lilie, die Taube, die Sonne’; and finds that he cannot trust the beloved’s words of love in ‘Wenn ich in deine Augen seh’.’ In ‘Ich will meine Seele tauchen,’ the persona longs to submerge his soul in the lily’s chalice. That this is a sublimation of sexual imagery is evident in the post-coital sobbing in the piano at the end.”
  — Susan Youens, Carnegie Hall program notes, 2010.

T here are 14 excellent essays on music-text relationships in the multi-author volume edited by Steven Paul Scher (link below), including several that address music-text manifestations in Schumann’s compositions. Juicy bedtime reading!

• Scher S, ed. Music and Text: Critical Inquiries. Cambridge Univ, 1992 & 2006.
  
• Komar A. ‘The music of Dichterliebe: The Whole and its Parts’, in Schumann: Dichterliebe. Norton, 1971, p. 75.
  
• Dichterliebe page at Wikipedia.org
  
• Sublimation page at Wikipedia.org
  
• Adams P, ed. Art: Sublimation or Symptom. Karnac, 2003.
  
• Copjec J. Imagine There's No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation. MIT, 2003.
  
• Gay V. Freud on Sublimation: Reconsiderations. SUNY, 1992.
  
• Goebel E. Beyond Discontent: 'Sublimation' from Goethe to Lacan. Continuum, 2012.
  
• Saretsky T. Sex as a Sublimation for Tennis. Workman, 1985.
  
• Singh K. Sublimation. Totem, 1997.
  
• Webster J. On Unconscious Desire and its Sublimation. Karnac, 2011.
  
• Youens S. Heinrich Heine and the Lied. Cambridge Univ, 2007 & 2011.
  
• Susan Youens page at Univ Notre Dame Dept of Music

Jonathan Biss: Proairetic & Hermeneutic Codes In Action, Realtime Beethoven-Janáček Message-Passing Protocol

I  ’ve done all-Mozart, all-Beethoven, all-Schubert programs, but there is always the danger of a stylistic sameness, or rather a lack of confrontation between the pieces. Concerts of works of two composers are great because they still offer enough music of each to create a sense of immersion in the composers’ sonic worlds, and yet the concert becomes a dialogue between the two, which often moves in surprising directions. The question of which composers work well together (and which don’t) is particularly alchemical, and I think it is one of both similarity and difference. The success of Beethoven and Janáček as a pairing relies in part on the terrific intensity that characterizes both... The intensity may be similar, but the language is utterly different... Beethoven’s sonatas are incredibly tightly argued... Janáček, by contrast, is perhaps the greatest master of the musical non-sequitur... Beethoven and Janáček could not be more different, which makes the similarities in temperament between the two all the more fascinating.”
  — Jonathan Biss, 2012 essay.

N ot ‘non-sequiturs’ exactly. More like the worldview of peoples who have for centuries lived along a foggy seacoast and whose language now innately reflects their inability to see or predict what will loom into view in front of them from one moment to the next.

F orgetting, the renunciation of cause-and-effect and the obverse of forgiving. Beethoven afflicted with abject loss and despair (as in the Adagio of Op. 27 No. 2); Janáček surprised by optimism, welling up from where?

I just returned from Jonathan Biss’s Beethoven-Janáček recital at Kansas City’s Folly Theater (Sonata No. 5, Op. 10, No. 1; Sonata No. 14, Op. 27, No. 2; Sonata No. 26, Op. 81a; V mlhách, JW 8/22; Sonata 1.X.1905, Z Ulice, JW 8/19).

T he ‘affective’ content and contrasts of these intense works—both the composers’ affect or psychological state and intentions, and the performer’s affect—are what makes the program spellbinding—emotionally compelling to experience (confirming what Biss has written in his essays; see blockquote above)!

T here may be elements that denote a similar state of mind or parallels in terms of Beethoven’s temperament and Janáček’s temperament, as Biss says. But the orderliness and certitude of Beethoven—contrasted with the randomness and the existential acceptance of doubt and uncertainy, even the recklessness of Janáček—these features make us think about our differences, not just the differences between these composers or their respective eras.

T hese antithetical qualities—and how such personalities or such ‘stances’ that we adopt influence what happens to us in life—are constitutional, innate, inherited styles. Well, they are partly inherited and partly learned/habitual.

E very mixture, every conciliation, every passage through the barrier of our inherited and habitual style is a transgression with self-discovery.

N ot every transgression is transcendent or momentous. Some of them are ironic, trivial, or tame—much like when a belovèd pet cat trips and experiences embarrassment at its clumsiness, so out-of-character and façade-dropping. Sometimes events bring out the best in us. We appear virtuous and do and express commendable things. At other times, our undesirable qualities come out.

A nd some transgressions are outrageous or transformative. Putting these two composers next to each other makes for an intense two-way street—stylistically and emotionally. This program forces/enables the two to ‘mediate’ each other’s views and to rhetorically critique the other.

I t is as though Biss has learned from literary theorist Roland Barthes and reveals the “hermeneutic code” that governs the semantics of each of the two composers’ worldviews, the “semiotic code” of the musical motives of each, the “proairetic code” that governs the formal structure (or, for Janacek, the renunciation of cause-and-effect structure), and the “referential code”—musical abstractions and metaphors and borrowings.

T he ‘next-to-ness’ Biss creates in formulating this program conjures the main forces that drive the narrative—and that drive our own desires to listen attentively.

T he “hermeneutic code” (see links below) refers to those plot elements that raise questions on the part of the reader of a text or the viewer of a film or the listener to a program of music. For example, in the Beethoven Op. 10, we get tragedy—the anxiety becoming mourning, weeping, descending (Movement 1, Theme 1, Phrase 1) leading to violence (Movement 3, Theme 1)—which leads us to wonder about the reasons for these traumatic events. Then, in the Janáček, we get a fatalistic indifference to a world in which cause-and-effect processes break down, or in which some events can’t be prevented or explained. We need the ‘loose ends’ of the narrative ‘tied up’ in order to feel satisfied, like a good detective story—and that is what Biss does for us by the end of the concert. The entire narrative of a story like this operates via hermeneutic encoding. We witness a murder, and we enthusiastically spend the rest of the concert learning answers to the questions that were raised by the initial Beethoven scenes of violence. That is one half of how this concert program works.

P roairetic code”, on the other hand, refers to ordinary actions—those musical phrases or plot events that simply lead to yet other phrases/consequences/actions. Suspense is driven by action rather than by a reader’s or a listener’s desire to have unsolved mysteries solved. This “proairetic code” is the other half of how or why this particular concert program works—event or ‘message-passing’ between the works, in a fashion resembling what happens with remote procedure calls (RPC) and protocol buffers in software systems.

B iss’s idea of programming this seemingly-disparate-but-narratively-confrontational repertoire is really an excellent one—attractive, interest-holding, suspenseful—provoking us to reach a deeper understanding of the human condition, as well as deeper understanding of the mental states of two specific composers and of the nature of the works made to confront each other in this way. One could hardly wish for a higher form of “fun” than this. Bravo!

C  an a piano work convey a bustling ‘severalness’, or the sense of many people congregated in a social gathering, as convincingly as a chamber work? I think so — parts of Schumann’s ‘Carneval’, Mussorgsky’s ‘Marketplace at Limoges’, and Ravel’s ‘La Valse’ spring to mind as trivial examples. One tempting view is that the composer is aiming to depict the entirety of the human condition: everything is in here and, just as in the real world, the profound and the banal are constantly rubbing shoulders. I don’t think this is wrong, but the truth may go further... By presenting a unified work in which the high and the low aspects of humankind are contained together, the composer invites the listener to find these worlds contained inside each other, not merely nearby. The piano sonatas may have a touch of this ‘adjacent’ humor—the riotous trio in the second movement of opus 110, or the manic dotted-rhythm variation in opus 111.”
  — Jonathan Biss, 2012 essay.

• Jonathan Biss website
  
• Beckerman M. Janáček and His World. Princeton Univ, 2003.
  
• Beckerman M. Janáček as Theorist. Pendragon, 1994.
  
• Katz D. Janáček beyond the Borders. Univ Rochester, 2009.
  
• Tyrell J. Janacek: Years of a Life. Vol. 1. Faber & Faber, 2006.
  
• Barthes R. S/Z. Hill & Wang, 1975.
  
• Barthes R. ‘The Third Meaning’ and ‘Rasch’, in Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation. Univ California, 1985.
  
• Proairetic code page at Cyberartsweb.org
  
• Hermeneutic & Proairetic Codes page at Purdue Univ
  
• Muñoz-Calvo M, et al. New Trends in Translation and Cultural Identity. Cambridge Univ, 2008.
  
• Wałaszewkska E, et al., eds. Relevant Worlds: Current Perspectives on Language, Translation and Relevance Theory.Cambridge Univ, 2008.
  
• Andrews G. Concurrent Programming: Principles and Practice. Addison Wesley, 1991.
  
• Hansen P, ed. The Origin of Concurrent Programming: From Semaphores to Remote Procedure Calls. Springer, 2002.
  
• Hoare C. Communicating Sequential Processes. Prentice-Hall, 1985.

Higher-Order Geometry: Murray Perahia and Chopin’s Polonaises

M   usically, the most important consequence of the geometry is the following: since a nearly-even N-note chord occupies the same cross-section of the [metric] space as its transposition by 12/N semitones, such chords can be linked by particularly efficient voice-leading. Thus, nearly-even two-note chords are very close to their six-semitone transpositions; nearly-even three-note chords are very close to their 4- and 8-semitone transpositions; nearly-even 4-note chords are very close to their 3-, 6-, and 9-semitone transpositions and so on.”
  — Dmitri Tymoczko, Geometry of Music, p. 97.

M y enjoyment of last night’s excellent concert by Murray Perahia was enhanced by paying special attention to the intervals and root-motions of the chords—especially in the Chopin pieces on the program.

A nd, while Dmitri Tymoczko’s ‘Geometry of Music’ has in the year since the book was published reaped some objections and a certain notoriety (David Headlam and Rob Schneiderman (AMS), among other commenters), I do feel that considering the quantitative and statistical properties of a musical work can help some of us to understand the work better, be moved more deeply by it, and, possibly, learn how we ourselves might compose music more successfully, or measure and figure out how something we have composed compares, for better or worse, to other beautiful and effective compositions.


F rom the score of the Polonaise Op. 26 No. 1 in C-sharp minor that Perahia performed last night, I transcribed a number of the intervals contained in the 138-bar, 414-beat-long piece. Like Tymoczko and others, I used a root-motion log-frequency representation of intervals in my array, so that distances of notes N-semitones apart are uniform in any octave. I then utilized the ‘phom’ package in the R system to examine the distribution of those intervals in topological S³ space. This relies on theory set forth by Gunnar Carlsson and coworkers at Stanford, on persistent homology. I had occasion to collaborate with Gunnar about 5 years ago on analysis of critical-care ICU timeseries data. Persistent homology computes topological invariants of filtered sequences of simplicial complexes, constructed from my transcribed Chopin Polonaise interval dataset. The relevance of this to music theoretic analysis is that conventional topological invariants are unsuitable for characterizing the geometry of music since they are simultaneously too sensitive, and too weak. They are too “weak” because of their homotopy invariance, such that the underlying harmonic/intervallic structure can be stretched in any way (as long as it is not ripped) without changing its homology groups.

L ots of additional empirical work would be needed, to accurately and adequately characterize just this one Chopin Polonaise, so beautiful and evocative as performed by Perahia. I leave that to the card-carrying music theorists. But, unlike Professor Headlam and others, I do think that such effort would be rewarded. As an amateur musician, I have no academic career in music theory to advance, no tenure review to worry about, no political axes to grind in my analysis and writing—posting this tiny, speculative blogpost as I am here, and pointing interested readers to a new open-source R package that might aid others’ endeavors.

I n summary, it is simply a deeply pleasurable thing for me, to roll up my own sleeves and bring novel empirical tools and concepts to bear and see what I can learn. And, having corresponded in years past with Dmitri Tymoczko several times by email, I truly believe that his aims and aspirations are as wholesome as this as well, not so cynical or bombastic as Schneiderman and others allege. For some of us, loving something magical like this Chopin music [or, alternatively, loving someone] means, among other things, persistently and deeply wanting and striving to comprehend it [or them], by numerical quantitative means as well as by subjective, qualitative means, that’s all.

B y the way, Gunnar Carlsson’s papers are very readable, if you care to visit the links to them below...

• Murray Perahia website
  
• Harriman-Jewell Series
  
• Chopin F. Polonaises, Op. 26, score at IMSLP.org
  
• Baez J. Mathematics of music at Univ Chicago. The n-Category Cafe blog, 31-MAY-2009.
  
• Callender C, Quinn I, Tymoczko D. Generalized voice-leading spaces. Science 2008;320:346-8.
  
• Carlsson G. Topology and data. Bull Am Math Soc 2009;46:255–308.
  
• Tymoczko reply to Headlam, 2012.
  
• Milne A. Metrics for pitch collections. ICMPC 2011.
  
• Rothstein W. ‘Transformation of Cadential Formulae in the Music of Corelli and his Successors.’ In Essays from the Third International Schenker Symposium, ed. A. Cadwallader, 245–78. Georg Olms Verlag, 2006.
  
• Sanguinetti G. Chopin’s Polonaise Op. 53. Analitica 2000;1:-.
  
• Schneiderman R. Notices of AMS 2011;58:1408-9.
  
• Tausz A. Persistent Homology, R package ‘phom’ 02-NOV-2011.
  
• Tymoczko D. Three conceptions of musical distance. Manuscript, 2009.
  
• Tymoczko D. A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common Practice. Oxford Univ, 2011.
  
• Woo A. What does the space induced by this metric on R/Z look like? MathOverflow, 11-MAY-2011.
  
• Zomorodian A, Carlsson G. Computing persistent homology. Discrete Comput. Geom. 2005;33:249–74.

Higher-Order Virtuosity: Richard Goode and Chopin’s Ballade No. 3

I  n everything Chopin wrote, no matter how complex and virtuosic, that powerful simplicity is there at the core. Although he wrote some very difficult and impressive stuff, the ultimate effect of his music, I feel, should never really be to ‘impress’. But that’s exactly what the pianists we usually hear are striving to do: impress the contest judges, the critics, the public. The world we classical performers live in gives us very little room not to play big ‘show’ pieces, or make everything we play into one... Chopin’s third ballade suffers particularly from this problem. The ballades are all difficult, but No. 3 is the easiest of them—sort of like the shortest Himalaya. It seems as though all the star performers I’ve heard end up trying to make it as hard as the others, plowing through it with virtuosic flare, and thus trivializing it. [And how wonderful it is when, instead, someone like Richard Goode plays this piece with selfless transparency. –DSM]”
  — Paul Cantrell blog, In the Hands, 02-MAR-2005..

M y favorite part of Richard Goode’s performance last night in Kansas City [a program that included Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, and Chopin] was the Chopin Ballad No. 3, Op. 47. This 9-minute piece is maybe the strangest of Chopin’s four ballades, on account of its unrelenting optimism. Goode’s expressive dexterity handles the staggering complexity with seeming ease and imparts a vigor suffused with warmth... perfect for this sweet, cheerful work.

G entle A-flat 6/8-meter dolce, evoking donkeys Chopin observed in the hills of Majorca? Donkeys with jobs, but happy jobs that they enjoyed doing.

T  he technique [of musical gesture] is perhaps a musical version of what is referred to as a ‘suture’ in film theory: placing the camera in such a way that it functions as the eye of the protagonist of the film, thereby drawing us, as unwitting spectators, to become the subject of the film ourselves, since we share the same visual field and same [Majorcan] point of view.”
  —  Patrick McCreless, in Almén & Pearsall, p. 13.

W hat a narrative trajectory! What storytelling! Social media of 1841! Our minds engage, imagination runs free, and we ‘friend’ or ‘follow’ this peripatetic, vacationing Chopin voice from the beginning to the end. The feeling is physical, not just emotional; it coheres—for Goode, and for us in the audience—throughout the piece, all the way to the satisfying, happy ending. For example, the motion from C (mm. 230, 232) down to the E-flat (mm. 231, 233) suggests the subsequent plunges to the low A-flat at the end. Energy flows! We “feel” the path that we are on, anticipate things along the way, anticipate them accurately. And this experience of uncanny accuracy is part of what is pleasant and thrilling for us: in material that is this complex and unpredictable, we don’t usually experience ourselves as being so graceful or right as this. We love being unexpectedly better than we are!

U ltimately, our minds and bodies gladly go everywhere Chopin’s and Goode’s narrative aims to take us. Theirs is a higher-order virtuosity that doesn’t strive to impress. It strives only to reveal what’s True, to tell this true story. But it’s not just ‘telling’, not just a musical ‘text’. The human body is involved—fingers, arms, flesh, nerves, mortal gifts, physical mass. The higher-order virtuosity inhabiting the body averts its gaze and embodies Laws of Physics in action—beauty incarnate; a kind of transcendence—something for which we surely hadn’t planned on our Friday night out, and something for which we feel thrilled and grateful. Bravo!

V  iewed as a sign, ‘formative repetition’ refers to what is repeated: it is usually a marker of segmentation, a grammatical feature. When a figure is repeated more than once, the attention begins to be attracted by the repetition itself; instead of focusing on the repeated material only, we focus on the act of repetition as an activity signifier per se and seek a symbolic interpretation of it. It is then a sign, not of segmentation or grammar, but of connotative meaning. It evokes extra-musical associations of... emphatically [re-]emphasized speech, dancing, laughing, etc.”
  — Raymond Monelle, p. 88, quoting Lidov.

• Richard Goode page at Frank Salomon Assoc
  
• Richard Goode page at Nonesuch.com
  
• Chopin F. Ballade No. 3, Op. 47 score at IMSLP.org
  
• Agawu K. Music as Discourse: Semiotic Adventures in Romantic Music. Oxford Univ, 2008.
  
• Almén B. A Theory of Musical Narrative. Indiana Univ, 2008.
  
• Almén B, Pearsall E, eds. Approaches to Meaning in Music. Indiana Univ, 2006.
  
• DSM. Richard Goode's emergent Chopin. CMT blog, 02-OCT-2011.
  
• Hatten R. Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert. Indiana Univ, 2004.
  
• Huron D. Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation. Bradford, 2008.
  
• Monelle R. Linguistics and Semiotics in Music. Routledge, 1992.
  
• Nattiez J-J. Music and Discourse. Princeton Univ, 1990.
  
• Pearsall E. The structure of conflict: Dialectics and the play of personae in Chopin’s Op. 27, No. 2. Indiana Theory Rev 2003;24:107-27.

Konstantin Lifschitz: Collaborative Poesy of the Goldberg Variations

A  passage of music could have a ‘semantic range’ that is essentially the same as that of any word in a language, only much broader in scope—sharing the same kind of elasticity but of a much greater degree than is typical in language... Choosing whether the French overture [Var. XVI] in Bach’s Goldberg Variations connotes ‘sublime confidence’ or ‘deep despair’ is easy because the semantic fields of those expressions are so completely separate. One seems coincident with the music—and the other, far from it!”
  —  Joseph Swain, p. 55.

T  he hypothesis that syntax mediates tension—and its corollary, that if there is no sense of tension and resolution then there is no sense of syntax—do not entail that all tension is ‘syntactic’ in origin... The tension and resolution of this passage depend more on harmonic progression and meter than on the variety of rhythmic durations and texture.”
  —  Joseph Swain, p. 32.

K onstantin Lifschitz’s performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations BWV 988 last night was staggeringly beautiful, unified in conception and spiritually cohesive all the way through the Variations to the reprise of the Aria at the end.

T he left-hand/right-hand equality of voices that Lifschitz maintains is astounding—that it is biomechanically/anatomically very difficult goes without saying, but it is conceptually/expressively exceedingly difficult as well. (The intentions of the composer—and of the performer, and, now, of ourselves—are complex and tremendously varied through the course of this work. And they must emerge in the performance as fresh and totally genuine—a factor that learning and technically mastering and memorizing the musical text threaten to a degree, as anyone who has ever memorized and performed music in recital knows well...)

I  ntentionalism [in music]... not so much a coherent philosophical position but rather a kind of ‘antidote’ to hermeneutic analytic approaches that treat musical works as ‘organic matter’—in short, like vegetables—rather than as products of thinking [,feeling] people. Ideally, this means encouraging analytic results that might please composers if they were told about them... Intentionalism is meant as a heuristic device that asks that we pose the question: What might the composer have thought about this composition and its sense? It has become common practice for musicologists to invoke the warning of the Intentional Fallacy as if it were law accepted by everyone. In fact, the entire hermeneutic tradition stands opposed to this doctrinaire apologia for New Criticism, so that merely calling the quest for intentions structuring a work of art a ‘victim’ to a fallacy does not make it so.”
  — Laurence Dreyfus, p. 171.

T he interplay between the rhythmic, metric, melodic, harmonic, and textural tensions in Goldberg variation—notably in the French overture (Var. XVI)—was fascinating. When harmonic tension predominates, it “frees-up” the melodic syntax and vice versa. The realism of the multi-line, multi-voice dialogue or story-telling is enabled and augmented by the parity/equality of the hands, each tension-generating modality taking its “turn” and providing scope and opportunity for other modalities to express things freely.

L ast night our imaginations were permitted to run, taking all the “rope” they could, until close to the end near the 70-minute mark, when we realized in retrospect that the “story” explored by Bach (and Lifschitz) through all of these Variations is our very own. We had not only understood the story; we had in a palpable, true sense ‘said’ [to ourselves] the things that Bach—and Lifschitz—had just said. The story and these thoughts had come a huge distance to find us, as if meant (intended) to be found by us.

W e were inscribed by them, but we found that we, too, were, in a real sense, inscribing/authoring the thoughts. The attentiveness, the transcendent wide-awakeness that Bach has impelled us to with these Variations: like a newly-discovered, implausibly effective form of prayer. An unforgettable performance and a really wonderful evening.

A  poem as a persisting manifestation of language—and, therefore, essentially ‘dialogue’ [that can be indefinitely-extended, with unnamed or yet-to-be-named respondents]—can be a message in a ‘bottle’: sent out in the not-always-greatly-hopeful belief that somewhere and sometime it might wash up on land—on some heartland. Poems [and music] in this sense, too are ‘under way’: they are making toward something... Wirklichkeit ist nicht! Wirklichkeit will gesucht und gewonnen sein! [Reality is nothing apart from our individual construction of it. It must be sought and won!]”
  — Paul Celan.

• Konstantin Lifschitz website
  
• Goldberg Variations BWV 988 score at IMSLP
  
• Ciardi J, Williams M. How Does a Poem Mean? 2e. Houghton-Mifflin, 1975.
  
• Dreyfus L. Bach and the Patterns of Invention. Harvard Univ, 1997.
  
• Levin B. A performer's survey of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Part 1. La Folia, JAN-2007.
  
• Levin B. A performer's survey of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Part 2. La Folia, FEB-2007.
  
• Levin B. A performer's survey of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Part 3. La Folia, MAY-2007.
  
• Rosen C. ‘Bach and Handel’, in Keyboard Music, D. Matthews, ed. Parkwest, 1972, pp. 95-120.
  
• Swain J. Musical Languages. Norton, 1997.
  
• Williams P. Bach: The Goldberg Variations. Cambridge Univ, 2001.
  
• Wimsatt W, Beardsley M. ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, in The Verbal Icon, W. Wimsatt. Univ Kentucky, 1954, pp. 3-20.

I ’ve come to feel over the years that a musical work, however long it may be, ought to have basically—I was going to say ‘one tempo’ but that’s the wrong word—one ‘pulse rate’; one constant 'rhythmic reference point'. Now, obviously, there couldn’t be anything more deadly dull than to exploit one beat that goes on and on and on indefinitely. That’s what drives me up the wall about rock and about minimalism. Anyway, I would never argue in favor of an inflexible pulse. That just destroys any music. But you can take a basic pulse and divide or multiply it—not necessarily on a scale of two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, but often with far-less-obvious divisions—and make the result of those divisions or multiplications act as a subsidiary pulse for a particular movement or section of a movement... So in the case of the Goldbergs, there is in fact one pulse, which, with a few very minor modifications—mostly modifications that I think take their cue from ritards at the end of the preceding variation, something like that—one pulse that runs all the way throughout.”   — Glenn Gould, 1982 radio interview with Tim Page.

Konstantin Lifschitz: Ich bin’s; ich sollte zu träumen (I’m the one; it is I who should dream on this)

M   usical ideas are such combinations of tones, rhythms, and harmonies as to demand/inspire a thoughtful treatment like the main theses of a philosophical tract. [Any non-trivial musical idea inevitably] raises a question—sets up a problem that, in the course of the piece, has to be answered, resolved, ‘carried through’. It has to be carried through however many contradictory situations are plausible; it must be developed by deducing however many inferences there may be from what it postulates; it has to be checked—has to be proved to be true, like a mathematical theorem. And all this, if you are successful, will lead to a conclusion—a ‘pronunciamento’, a fresh new certainty—a beautiful new discovery [that speaks].”
  — Arnold Schoenberg, ‘Beauty and Logic in Music,’ unpublished manuscript.

T he quote above was one we saw in the Arnold Schönberg Center archives, when we visited Vienna a couple of months ago. I was reminded of this insight of Schoenberg’s during Bach’s complete two- and three-part Inventions (Sinfonias), performed by Konstantin Lifschitz last night. Interleaved Invention-Sinfonia-Invention-Sinfonia as they were, in ascending chromatic sequence (as opposed to chronologically; as opposed to rank-order by pedagogic difficulty in Wilhelm Friedemann’s Klavierbuchlein), the pieces led us in the audience to some new insights.

S ome inventions, performed by many at faster tempi, became intense meditations on color and timbre. Other ones, often performed with wider rubato variation, became motoric illustrations of individual conviction and duty. Consider the editorial suggestions of the Alfred or others’ modern editions; consider the ur-texts of Bach himself; but make up your own mind—find your own true story. Which is what Konstantin Lifschitz did for us so wonderfully and spontaneously last night.

T   hese inventions began as [mere] ideas, that Bach conceived [in an improvisational, impromptu manner] and wrote as teaching tools. The complexities of the three-voice Sinfonias make the two-part Inventions seem [simple] when you play them side-by-side.”
  — Cynthia Siebert, founder, Friends of Chamber Music.

I t’s a joy to hear the unfiltered account of a friend’s or lover’s dream. We feel touched and, not just ‘connected’, but also more ‘human’ for the shared experience... ‘included’, ‘alive’. We are included in the ‘action’, and we feel the curiosity and the moral duty to engage with the friend who is relating this dream to us. We sense the truth that arises from the honest synapses firing without the interpolation of an ego in the process. The purity of (absence of—) motives and the transparency count for a lot.

I   st das möglich? Denkt ihr, man kann sich wirklich mit einer musikalischen Idee durch einen Traum verlieben, bzw. kann man tatsächlich träumen, verliebt sich in die musikalische Idee zu sein? Habt ihr sowas schon mal geträumt?

[Is this possible? Do you think you can really fall in love with a musical idea in a dream, or dream you can actually love to be in the musical idea? Have you dreamed something like this before?]”
  — Milton Babbitt.

• Konstanin Lifschitz website
  
• Schoenberg A. The Musical Idea, and the Logic, Art, and Technique of its Presentation. Carpenter P, Neff S, eds. Indiana Univ, 2006, pp.395-6.
  
• Palmer W, ed. J. S. Bach: Inventions & Sinfonias. Alfred, 2004.

Ingrid Stölzel’s Explorations of Time and Identity

A   fter picking the title ‘For the Time Being,’ I realized just how often I use this expression in my daily life. When we say these words we imply that whatever state we are in or whatever action we are performing is temporary and merely a fleeting moment. In reality, of course, all states and actions are temporary, and our perception of permanence is an illusion. ‘For the Time Being’ is the newest in a series of works examining this concept of passing time.”
  — Ingrid Stölzel.

I   didn’t measure how long I was doing mouth-to-mouth breathing, but I remember thinking during the last several minutes that [the plight of this lifeless, transverse-presenting, APGAR-score-zero newborn] was hopeless. But I persisted [thinking that my doing so was, for the time being, at best ridiculous and, at worst, wrong or disrespectful of the natural fact]. And I was finally rewarded when Anna MacRae of Middle River, Victoria County, came to life.”
  — C. Lamont MacMillan, Memoirs of a Cape Breton Doctor.

I ngrid Stölzel’s new composition for flute, soprano saxophone and piano offers great beauty for the listener, plus intriguing expressive and technical challenges for each of the performers. The flute and soprano sax parts are balanced partners, while the piano undertakes an impetuous, omniscient-narratorly, cantus firmus role, with occasional upper-register tolling that explicitly marks the passage of time.

F or the Time Being’ was a commmission by the Greenbrook Ensemble in Nashville. The work that resulted from their commission is a phenomenally beautiful and poignant addition to the trio repertoire for flute, soprano sax, and piano: a 7-min fantasie, in a Walter Piston-esque, Bohuslav Martinů-esque neoclassicist modal-chromatic idiom, symbolically-charged with repetition in both rhythm and pitch, including pedal points. The work is contrapuntal, highly chromatic.

I ts initial lyrical, light and graceful lento is seeded with contemplative rubato, becoming adagio and intermittently more animated/incisive—embodying the transitoriness/impermanence suggested by Stölzel’s remark in the blockquote above. Flute and soprano sax parts are intertwined, coalescing into close harmony and then diverging again. The work embodies an intense chromatic saturation, as contrasted with more ‘open’ diatonic style. The result is subtle: acutely self-aware but never self-absorbed.

I  relistened to the Colorado State YouTube video several times (vid embedded below), capturing timings for the woodwinds. The rhythmic interplay between flute and soprano sax exhibits a fractional structure as a function of frequency that is close to a 1/f relationship, intermediate between uncorrelated ‘white’ noise and strongly-correlated Brownian noise. (An important property of 1/f timeseries structure is that it correlates logarithmically with past values. The last 3 notes, say, have equal influence on what comes next as the last 30 or the last 300.)

A nother feature of 1/f or “nearly-1/f” structure is ‘self-similarity’, which means that the smaller-scale details resemble coarser features that are higher in the hierarchy of structures that comprise the piece. Self-similarity of musical structures has fascinated composers long before fractal and multi-scale mathematics was known. For example, Bach sometimes used the same pitch contour in his fugues in the slow cantus firmus as in the fast motoric figures. So, too, with this new Ingrid Stölzel piece.

S tölzel changes meter many times in the course of the short piece. The continual shifts of meter and tempo are a most noticeable aspect of the work’s complexity, and of its perspective on personhood, self-awareness, and awareness of Time.

T he piece is constructed on a series of dyadic conflicts: episodic expansion/contraction metaphors, mainly involving the flute and soprano sax. Neither wind player can escape or circumvent these chromatic inflections, but must make believable decisions about how to use timbre/spectra to express the conflicts and their resolution. Am I azure or lavender? Was I light turquoise or dark robin’s-egg blue? Remembering/forgetting? Separating/reuniting? Living/dying?

S tölzel meditates... on the socio-historical reality of what it is to be a person, situated in Time and lacking any guarantees; on the connectedness of how we conceive of ourselves, in the context of yesterday, today, tomorrow; on our uncertainty about how much time we have (or don’t have, in the case of those of us who have a highly-uncertain and likely very-much-shortened future due to chronic, life-threatening illness). Martin Heidegger, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Paul Ricoeur are among the philosophers who explored this terrain in the 20th Century. (Links to works by other, more recent authors appear below, for your interest.)

I n other words, the trio is a delicate balance of love and horror—we create something meaningful that soon slips from our grasp; we inevitably lose our loved ones or they lose us; we cling futilely, to hopes that no longer have any reasonable basis. Life: so brutal, so unreliable. Life: the only good thing that we have, for the time being.

I   n any instant the Sacred may wipe you [out] with its finger. In any instant, the bush may burst into flames, your feet may rise, or you may see a bunch of souls in a tree. In any instant you may avail yourself of the power to love your enemies; to accept failure, slander, or the grief of loss; or to endure torture.”
  — Annie Dillard.

I ngrid Stölzel has written for ensembles such as newEar contemporary chamber ensemble, NOISE/San Diego New Music, California E.A.R. Unit, Adaskin String Trio, Erato Chamber Orchestra, Allegrésse, and Synchronia, among others. She is the winner of the 2010 NewMusic@ECU Festival Orchestra Composition Competition, the 2009 Cheryl A. Spector Prize, the 2007 UMKC Chamber Music Composition Competition and the 2006 PatsyLu Prize awarded by the International Alliance of Women in Music. Stölzel is a frequent guest composer and her music has been performed at music festivals and conferences including the 2011 Festival of New American Music, 2011 International Alliance of Women in Music Congress, 2011 New Music Festival X, IC[CM] 2010 International Conference on Contemporary Music in Spain, NACUSA 2010 National Conference, soundOn Festival of Modern Music, 30th Sacramento State Festival of New American Music, Oregon Bach Festivals, Ernest Bloch Festivals, Women in New Music Festival, Chamber Music Conference of the East, Otterbein Contemporary Music Festival, and Indiana State Contemporary Music Festival. Stölzel received her doctorate in composition at the University of Missouri Conservatory of Music and Dance in Kansas City, where she studied with James Mobberley, Chen Yi, and Zhou Long. She holds a Master of Music in composition from the Hartt School of Music in Hartford, Connecticut. Stölzel was a guest composer at the 30th Sacramento State Festival of New American Music. She has done artist residencies at the Ragdale Foundation and the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida.
Ingrid is a native of Germany and has lived in the U.S. for the past 20 years.

F or the Time Being’ will be performed in Kansas City in a concert by newEar Ensemble on Saturday, 11-FEB. Go, hear!

I   f the muscle can feel repugnance, there is still a false move to be made;
If the mind can imagine tomorrow, there is still a defeat to remember;
As long as the self can say ‘I,’ it is impossible not to rebel;
As long as there is an accidental virtue, there is a necessary vice:
And the garden cannot exist; the miracle cannot occur.
The garden is the only place there is, but you will not find it
Until you have looked for it everywhere and found nowhere that is not a desert.
The miracle is the only thing that happens, but to you it will not be apparent
Until all events have been studied and nothing happens that you cannot explain.
And Life is the destiny you are bound to refuse until you have consented to die.”
  — W.H. Auden, ‘For the Time Being’.

• Ingrid Stölzel website
  
• newEar Contemporary Music Ensemble website
  
• Greenbrook Ensemble website
  
• Auden W. For the Time Being. (1942) Modern Library, 2007, pp. 347-400.
  
• Beran J. Statistics in Musicology. Chapman & Hall/CRC, 2003.
  
• Bossart W. Borges and Philosophy: Self, Time, and Metaphysics. Lang, 2003.
  
• Dillard A. For the Time Being. Vintage, 2000.
  
• Farin I. Heidegger's Concept of Time: The First Draft of Being & Time. Athlone/Continuum, 2011.
  
• van Hysteen J, Wiebe E, eds. In Search of Self: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Personhood. Eerdmans, 2011.
  
• Ilomäki T. On the Similarity of Twelve-tone Rows. DMA Dissertation, Sibelius Academy, Helsinki, 2008, pp. 196–222.
  
• Koblyakov A. Semantic aspects of self-similarity in music. Symmetry Culture & Sci 1995;6:297–300.
  
• Leighton T. Visions of Awakening Space and Time: Dogen and the Lotus Sutra. Oxford Univ, 2008.
  
• Lewin D. A theory of segmental association in twelve-tone music. Persp New Music 1962;1:89–116.
  
• Liu J-L, Perry J, eds. Consciousness and the Self: New Essays. Cambridge Univ, 2012. [esp. Ch. 5 'Waiting for the Self' and Ch. 9 'Personhood and Consciousness']
  
• Loizou A. Time Embodiment and the Self. Avebury, 2000.
  
• Muldoon M. Tricks of Time: Bergson, Merleau-ponty And Ricoeur in Search of Time, Self and Meaning. Duquesne Univ, 2006.
  
• Pareyon G. On musical self-similarity: Intersemiosis as synecdoche and analogy. PhD dissertation, Univ Helsinki, 2011 [Acta Semiotica Fennica 2011;39(13).]
  
• Waddell N, Abe M, trs. The Heart of Dogen's Shobogenzo. SUNY, 2002.
  
• Tárogató page
  
• Tárogató at Karl Hammerschmidt & Söhne GmbH

Aries Composers’ Festival at Colorado State University Center for the Arts, 07-NOV-2011.

B   eran and others comprehend musical self-similarity as a problem of engineering. In contrast, investigations that consider its cultural significance within a certain historical tradition, are very rare (e.g. Kieran 1996, Yadegari 2004). In a brief article published in 1995, Alexander Koblyakov throws a first light on this matter, making a basic statement about the study of musical self-similarity, noticing that [in principle] ‘there is a problem[atic] situation... It is necessary to include the perception (mentality) factor in a considered phenomenon of self-similarity.’ Unfortunately, most of the literature on the subject disregards this sharp observation.”   — Gabriel Pareyon, 2011.