jwilzewske: power

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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.

Saturday, March 29, 2008

SR: Chamber Musicians Plugged and Unplugged

Ahnert & Steffen book, Berlin concerthall

O ur string quartet is planning to acquire some sound reinforcement (SR) gear, to enable us to better control the sound levels and acoustics in some of the venues where we perform. I feel like the sales guys are genuinely trying to help us, but the fact that we’re classical musicians leads them to try to recommend all sorts of exotic things that they think would please us, like really low total harmonic distortion (THD) specs and so on. Invariably, these seem to us to be over-spec’ed and over-priced. We’re a classical string quartet and, yes, of course the SR requirements are different from what they’d sell to a rock band or to a symphony. But this is after all just a commercial sound system, right? Aren’t there engineering equations that determine what’s really necessary? I feel like the fact that we are acoustic musicians and classically trained and somewhat finicky ... brings out the worst ad hocness in the salesmen’s nature.”
— Anonymous.

I wrap a piece of masking tape around the top three strings (most violinists don’t seem to mind) and clip the mic with a windscreen on the high side between the bridge and tailpiece to that tape.”
— Brian Frost, 15-MAR-2007, SR Forum.

W here precisely do you wrap that tape? I have one young charge who is the keeper of an incalculably expensive Guarneri. I may not touch it.”
— Tony Tissot, 15-MAR-2007, SR Forum.

I f you have four condenser mikes, just position one each on a tall boom above each violin and the viola and another in front of the cello on a short stand with a boom. If the quartet has decent instruments you do not need to have the mikes right on top of the instruments. A distance instrument-to-mike of 25 to 50 cm usually works for me. If you don’t have four condensers, use a dynamic on the cello. If you don’t have three but do have two, try one over the mid-point between the two violins, and one on the viola. "Open up the gain" on the violin pair 3 to 6 dB more than the viola mic.”
— Lee Brenkman, 24-FEB-2007, SR Forum.

It does seem that there’s a shortage of reliable guidance for sound engineering for small classical ensembles. Yes, there’s plenty of information on SR for symphonies, and there are quite a few acoustics engineering and architect firms out there that take on those large and well-paying civic projects. But there are not many resources that have detailed information or services for string quartets or other small groups. Some links provided below may be of interest, though.

Ahnert & Steffen book, Fig. 3.14, required/available peak SPL, as a function of ratio of room volume to reverb time; “symphony” is approx. 10 W curve [conductor’s podium], “string quartet” is approx. 0.1 W curve

It is true that commercial sound work for a full symphony orchestra in an air-conditioned hall imposes fewer demands on an SR system than a commercial sound system for a small ensemble. After all, the peak sound pressure levels (SPL) for an orchestral fortissimo at the conductor’s podium are equivalent to 10 W of power or higher. A single violin’s peak SPL is less than 1/100th of that.

Carnegie Hall, Stern Auditorium, Yamaha PM1D mixer

Let’s assume that your SR loudspeakers can deliver a level L_p = 110 dB at the ears of listener who is at the furthest distance from the stage—equivalent to the fortissimo for a full orchestra at the conductor’s podium. If the diffuse ambient noise level from a typical concert hall’s air-conditioning system is 32 dB at such a listener’s seat, then L_pdiff = L_p2 – L_p1 = (110 – 32) = 78 dB. If you add 6 dB to avoid undesired addition of levels, you get 84 dB. So you calculate that the THD target for the hall and those peak SPLs is 100 x 10 ^{( -84 / 20 )} = 0.006%. You can confer with an acoustics engineer or a sound designer at an architect firm for a more expert and precise answer than the crude suggestion I’m making here, but you can imagine from the calculation above that you probably won’t be needing amplifier gear whose THD specs are better than about 0.01%.

If the air-handling HVAC is turned off, though, and if the audience is really attentive and really quiet and if there’s zero street noise coming in through the concert hall walls and roof, then the diffuse ambient noise level will typically be closer to about 18 dB instead of 32 dB, in which case L_pdiff = 92 dB, or, with an extra margin of 6 dB, make that 98 dB. With that you get is 100 x 10 ^{( -98 / 20 )} = 0.001% THD, about an order of magnitude better than the figure we calculated before. So you naturally wonder whether a sound system could be that good, to take advantage of such a quiet space to provide those dynamics, with a sound so clean that it’s indistinguishable from unreinforced acoustics.

Part of the answer to this question is that you need to think about every element in the audio chain—from the mics, to mixer, to amplifiers, to loudspeakers. The loudspeakers that are available for practical SR systems are, at best, not better than about 1% THD. And, in general, carefully thought-out designs for contemporary commercial sound work (including symphonic venues) have THD around 0.8%. And a THD of 0.8% represents 20 log₁₀ (0.8 / 100) = –42 dB in terms of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).

For a harmonic to equal this amplitude, you’d have 42 + 32 = 74 dB with the air conditioning “on”, or 42 + 18 = 60 dB with the air conditioning “off”.

Stark book, Fig 3.3, typical Sound Pressure Levels (SPL), in decibels

In other words, if you’re buying SR gear with fabulously better THD specs (lower than, say, 0.8%) then you wouldn’t actually be deriving any benefit from those specs unless (a) your venues are tremendously quiet and (b) the musical passages include delicate pianissimos below 70 dB SPL.

Incidentally, one of the venues where I’ve witnessed heavy-duty SR and mixing gear deployed pretty unsuccessfully was the Oude Muziek Festival in Utrecht in 2007. The Sampson-Bezuidenhout concert was held in the CentralStudios facility, in Studio-1. There were about 3,000 persons packed into that cavernous 1,000 m² (volume = 10,000 m³) hall, which is about twice as deep as it is wide. The miking of the performers was scanty. The reverb from front-of-house to rear was far too large, and the delays and phasing of the reinforcement loudspeaker arrays were wrong. Much of the ensemble’s sound was never captured by the mics and what was captured was piped and amplified in such a way that confusing delayed reflections arrived at your ears hundreds of milliseconds after the reinforced sound. The vocal parts tolerated this somewhat better than Kristian Bezuidenhout’s fortepiano.

Ahnert & Steffen book, Fig. 3.14, required loudspeaker power, as a function of level difference L - Lk in dB and distance from source to listener in m; design for ‘L – Lk = 0 dB’ curve

According to Ahnert’s and Frank’s book (p. 285) the required amp power in Watts is a function of the ratio of the volume of the room and the mean reverberation time:

P = 0.10 x V / T,

where V is in m³ and T is in sec. (See also top graph, above, the one at the very top of this post.)

Ahnert & Steffen book, Fig. 3.15, reverb required (in seconds, referenced to 500 Hz) by volume of room (in m3); “chamber music” is curve 3, curve 2 is “symphony”, curve 1 is “organ”; CentralStudios should’ve been SR-tuned to 2.0 sec according to this …

CentralStudios’ equipment has the requisite power. But on this occasion the power available was under-utilized. Possibly the sound-check with the empty hall was not subsequently amended when the hall filled with people.

Central Studios, Sampson & Bezuidenhout concert, Oude Muziek Utrecht 2007

Even in Row 11 where I sat, the sound was weak—it was difficult to hear the direct sound from the performers on-stage, and it was difficult to make sense of the disparate SR and reflected sounds impinging on us from further to the rear.

Central Studios, Utrecht, Studio 2, setup for refreshments at interval

Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Bronfman and Everest: Balakirev’s and Ravel’s Virtuosic Fantasies

In the U.S. the new season of DiscoveryChannel’s documentary, ‘Everest: Beyond the Limit’, is currently being broadcast as an ongoing series of television programs. Each episode shows climbers—young and old ones, highly-skilled ones and relative novices—risking their lives trying to reach the summit of Everest. Not surprisingly, the drama revolves around the steepest, riskiest, most hostile parts of the climb. We viewers feel a [morbid?] fascination with the ever-present possibility of catastrophe—a fascination equal to the admiration we feel for the climbers’ endurance and achievements and successes. The spectacle of the natural beauty that’s connected with the pursuit captivates us, too, as does the diversity of humankind when (self-) driven to these extremes——when (self-) driven to accept such suffering and risk, in pursuit of an extreme, world-class goal.

‘Summits’ of a different kind—musical comparables to Everest—are in store when pianist Yefim Bronfman performs on Friday evening in the Kansas City Friends of Chamber Music Master Pianists Series. The program includes Balakirev’s ‘Islamey’ and Ravel’s ‘Gaspard de la nuit’, among other works. The program requires a capacity to play these technically demanding works—prodigious athleticism—but never decoupled from the capacity to play with interpretive skill. In other words (and to paraphrase Stephen Pettitt, music critic of The Times in London), true virtuosity requires as much poetry as athleticism—or so Bronfman implies, in devising a program like this.

A virtuoso is a musician who can play with panache a score of seemingly impossible technical difficulty... The north face of the Eiger has been conquered. The musician has, once again, triumphed over impossible adversity... A significant part of the musician’s craft has to do with the acquisition—through many hours, many years, of arduous, repetitive practice—of a very particular athleticism, one that enables the accurate playing of a large number of notes within a small amount of time while still making a pleasing sound. Virtuoso playing is a high-wire act, and the sensation it delivers to the audience similar. Surely he’s going to fall off at that speed, we think. When he gets to the other side intact we still think it a miracle. … Surely some dark magical force must be at work to enable such superhuman miracles of execution. … Indeed, is what seems like virtuoso playing necessarily that? Don’t misunderstand me. Even if its purpose is simply to thrill its audience, much as a particularly adroit footballer thrills with a piece of consummate skill, there’s nothing wrong with this showy variety of virtuosity. It’s fun to hear — and see — a violinist skate across a Paganini Caprice now and again. Yet it’s hardly a test of the most insightful musicianship. The player isn’t required to see between the notes, because between the notes there lies precisely nothing. There’s no insight into the human condition. No miracle of contrapuntal logic. Just a musician showing off his or her amazing skills. But maybe we should recognise more generously than we do the exercise of the inconspicuous brand of virtuosity... Virtuosity need not be a matter of playing lots of notes brilliantly at all. The truth is that all serious music worth the playing and singing, no matter how physically simple it might seem, requires a certain virtuosity of the mind. … Although the notes in Mozart might come relatively easily, the contextualising of them, the weighing of them, the nuancing of them, does not. Mozart demands such precision of touch, colour and phrase that an interpretation can fail on the slightest contextual faux pas. Moreover, it’s the performer who must find a personal context, since playing Mozart is no more a matter of choosing one correct way than is playing anything else. Control and freedom need to co-exist in perfect balance, so that the mysterious eloquence of the music is allowed to emerge, the player opening a window on to the soul of a miraculously gifted person. That is true virtuosity.”
— Stephen Pettitt.

In 1928, Ravel wrote, “ ‘Gaspard de la nuit’, piano pieces after Aloysius Bertrand, are three romantic poems of transcendental virtuosity.” Well, Mozart can be technically demanding, too—the two-part cadenza of the opening allegro of K 466, for example. But we usually think of the virtuosity required for Mozart as predominantly interpretive virtuosity. Similarly tough: revealing the emotion in Chopin without falling into cliché, or articulating the voices within Bach without being stilted and suppressing the emotion or creating a fugue-pastiche. Ravel’s ‘Gaspard de la nuit’ imposes demands that are simultaneously interpretive and technical/athletic——hideously, dauntingly so. Aloysius Bertrand’s prose-poems, ‘Gaspard de la nuit: Fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot’, were published posthumously in 1842 and re-issued in 1895, when Ravel’s friend Ricardo Viñes discovered them and introduced them to Ravel. Later Ravel returned to the poems and was captivated by their grotesque, hallucinatory imagery as an evocative subject for a piano composition.

And what about ‘Islamey’—composed in 1869 by Mily Balakirev, then 32 years old? The first theme is a folk dance from the Caucasus. The prevalent augmented seconds lend a south Asian ‘islamic’ aspect. The central section is lyrical and derives from an Armenian folk song. The slow, exotic middle section contrasts with the energetic outer parts. In the third section, Balakirev reprises the thematic material of the opening, culminating in a pyrotechnical coda. ‘Islamey’ is comprised of variations with increasingly, insanely, demonically complex elaborations. (Maybe we should note that Balakirev had a nervous breakdown in 1872, three years after composing this piece?) So our definition of ‘virtuosity’ gets worse: virtuosity is defiant and risky; it tempts fate; it scoffs at danger. It wouldn’t be virtuosic if catastrophe were impossible. You have to work without a safety net! (Balakirev punched out—became a railway clerk for awhile; worked as a school inspector until 1883; then returned to music as Director of the Imperial Chapel and conductor of the Imperial Musical Society, where he remained until retiring in 1895.)

I n music, no less than in athletics, audiences thrill at witnessing exceptional feats of physiological accomplishment, and they fête and reward those who
afford them such thrills.”
— Jane O’Dea, p. 40.

H e did not appeal to the emotions, except those of wonder—for his playing was statuesque, cold, beautiful, and so masterly that it was said of him, with reason, that he would play with the same care and finish if roused out of the deepest sleep in the middle of the night.”
— Sir Charles Halle, review of Thalberg, quoted in O’Dea, p.39.

In ‘Performance as an Extreme Occasion’, Edward Said writes that the contemporary concert is an extraordinary event, highly specialized and totally alienated from ordinary life. Before the mid-20th century performers were often also composers, and listeners were also often amateur musicians. Today the audience is marginalized. The specialized artist so ‘owns’ the work today! The recital has come to be an occasion for the display of extreme ability—on a level that’s totally alien to the listeners, most of whom are neither familiar with the scores nor play any instrument or sing. Their ‘regression of hearing’ (Adorno’s phrase) is manifested in “the listener’s poignant speechlessness as he/she faces an onslaught of such refinement, articulation and technique as almost to constitute a sado-masochistic experience.”

The audience has become more passive and concurrently we get this spectatorly cult of virtuosity. But why has social power recently captivated the imagination of popular culture—and academic anthropologists as well? Surely it’s not just a consequence of fewer practicing amateurs! Is it instead a society-wide reaction to our diminishing power as individuals? Is it a reaction to the decimation of social cohesiveness by the recent emergence of long-tailed, fragmented, web-based culture? Is it a backhanded way to oppose the ‘colonization’ of our selves—that is, an endorsement of and vicarious participation in demonstrations that individual victory over mass culture is still possible—more than gazing at an athlete/artist’s literal victory over physical difficulty?

Stanley Barrett asserts that the answer can be found in the effect of the past 100 years’ warfare throughout the world; the end of old colonialism and emergence of new forms of colonialism under the guise of multinational corporate globalization; the information and technology revolution, mass culture and cultural fragmentation. “The notion of a homogeneous, cohesive, geographically-bounded local culture consisting of people who share a putative common ancestry is obsolete,” he says. The diversity of distinctive cultures and identities “has become constricted, and ‘culture’ has become the new equivalent of ‘race’: difference-as-inferiority; new structures of exploitation and domination; new relations of power saturated with new possibility of inequality and disparities.”

I hope that hearing Bronfman perform on Friday may shed additional light on these issues. Me, I’ll be listening from a moderate elevation, at ‘Base Camp #3’!

T he question of the relationship of the individual person or subject to domination carries ‘resistance’ to the level of consciousness, subjectivity, intentionality, and identity.”
— Sherry Ortner, Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject.

Everest: Cairns (memorials to those who have died on the mountain)

[Mr. Bronfman was born in Tashkent, in the Soviet Union, on April 10, 1958. Bronfman immigrated to Israel with his family in 1973, and made his international debut two years later with Zubin Mehta and the Montreal Symphony. In Israel, he studied with pianist Arie Vardi, at the Samuel Rubin Academy of Music at Tel Aviv University. In the United States he studied at Juilliard and the Curtis Institute—with Rudolf Firkusny, Leon Fleisher, and Rudolf Serkin. He made his New York Philharmonic debut in May l978 and his New York recital debut in January 1982 at the 92nd Street Y. Bronfman became a U.S. citizen in 1989. In 2006, Bronfman partnered with Emanuel Ax in Mozart's ‘Concerto for Two Pianos’ conducted by Lorin Maazel. Early in 2007 he premiered Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Piano Concerto, written for him and commissioned by the New York Philharmonic. In addition to solo recital appearances, he recently served as the Pianist in Residence with the Berlin Philharmonic and completed recordings of all the Beethoven piano concerti and the Triple Concerto with violinist Gil Shaham and cellist Truls Mork with the Tönhalle Orchestra Zürich under David Zinman for the Arte Nova/BMG label. Bronfman is a “Perspectives” artist at Carnegie Hall during this 2007-08 season.]