jwilzewske: presenters

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Sunday, October 16, 2011

The Darwin Project: Does a Multimedia Biography Need to Have a ‘Center’?

A loose-jointed affair that never really found an aesthetic center.”
— Robert Trussell, Kansas City Star, 15-OCT-2011.

W hen I read Robert Trussell’s review, I thought about how different mindsets and expectations can produce profoundly different experiences for different attendees at a performance. Trussell came to the Friends of Chamber Music premiere of The Darwin Project event with one set of expectations, geared to his commitment to write a review to be published in a daily newspaper on deadline. I came to the event with a different set of expectations--with only a genuine interest, really; that is, with no specific objective or purpose. (I attend lots of events; I only write about some of them, mostly ones that are strictly chamber music per se. This event was theatrical and multimedia, and I only decided to write this blogpost after seeing what Trussell wrote. I feel that Trussell’s words do not reflect what I and others who attended experienced, and that is what prompted me to post about it.)

T hree actors (Gary Neal Johnson, Darwin and others; Kathleen Warfel, Emma Wedgwood (Darwin’s wife) and others; Cinnamon Schultz, narrator) portrayed Charles Darwin’s life story (script by Jeremy M. Lillig and Nancy Cervetti), accompanied by classical music performed by the Daedalus String Quartet, solo pianist Alon Goldstein, and Kansas City Collegium Vocale chamber choir, under the direction of Ryan Board. Above the performers on-stage, historical images and dramatic original nature photography were projected on a large, suspended screen—animations, montages, and stills.

T he musical performances were impeccable throughout. Direction by Kyle Hatley was insightful and dynamic. The actors—especially Gary Neal Johnson—fully inhabited their characters. The imagery was well-chosen to complement and synchronize with the dramatic arc and cadences of the music. The sound reinforcement (which Trussell complained about) was just fine for those of us who were down in the Orchestra section. (Not sure where Trussell was seated Friday night, but it should be recognized that it has only been a few weeks since the Kauffman Center opened, and the people manning the mixing console up in the studio loft are surely still just discovering as they go what the optimal level settings are for various ensemble types, genres, miking configs, and audience sizes.) The staging and deployment of the musicians and actors were thoughtful. The lighting direction was done in a manner that appropriately emphasized the shifts in action and mood. The antiques/props, complete with rare blooming orchids and fossils, lent just the right amount of atmosphere.

T he one issue about which Trussell and I agree is the bit about the small percentage of the audience clapping after each ‘number’. It is vital that—for productions that are comprised of multiple short segments or ‘scenes’, and where piddling, confused applause will disrupt the atmosphere and continuity of the performance—the presenter should instruct the audience before the program begins: ‘Please do not applaud until the end.’ Simple.

B ut, gee, look at what this thing is! And look, too, at the fact that this was its premiere performance! The writing of lives is inherently difficult and complex, and The Darwin Project should, I think, be considered on its merits as biography. The aims of accuracy and commemoration can undoubtedly be helped by multimedia content, to convey what is hard to capture in words. Well-chosen music and images can clarify and intensify the characterization of the multiple milieux that affected the person the biography is about, over a long (73-year) and illustrious lifetime. The agnostic and Unitarian and Anglican excursions in Darwin’s changing (‘evolving’?) religious/spiritual thought, were elegantly and empathetically suggested by the diversity of the music selected for The Darwin Project:

Anonymous - Antiphon for the Feast Day of St. Albert, Patron Saint of Science
Mendelssohn - String Quartet No. 2, Op. 13, adagio, allegro vivace
Debussy - Preludes, Book 2, ‘Canope’
Schumann - Fantasiestücke, Op.12, ‘Des Abends’
Schumann - Fantasiestücke, Op.12, ‘Aufschwung’
Byrd - Mass for 5 voices, ‘Gloria’
Ravel - Miroirs ‘Une Barque sur l’oceane’
Haydn - String Quartet in C major, Op. 33, No. 3, allegro moderato
Chopin - Prelude in B-flat major, Op. 28, No. 21
Debussy - Preludes, Book 2, ‘Les tierces alternées’
Des Prez - Inviolata
Chopin - Prelude in A major, Op. 28, No. 7
Janácek - 1.X.1905 Sonata ‘Smrt’
Mendelssohn - String Quartet No. 6 in F minor, Op. 80, allegro vivace assai
Vaughan Williams – ‘See the Chariot at Hand’ (cantata from ‘In Windsor Forest’)

N o. Despite the fame of ‘Origin of Species’ and the reductionistic way in which modern popular society regards who he was and what he did, Darwin did not have just one lifelong aesthetic or ideological ‘center’, and it would be wrong for a biography of him to portray him as if he did. Lillig’s and Cervetti’s quotations and adaptations of Darwin’s writings amount to a kind of verbal portraiture—well-paced; at times humorous; a fine antidote to the monolithic ‘evolutionist-naturist’ caricature that exists of him in popular society. The music likewise opposes one-dimensional caricatures of the man. The production informs the viewers-listeners and invites the audience to think and reflect and imagine and feel and understand and apply, as any good biography should do.

I n fact, the matter of opposing claims and methods of science versus the imagination are a recurring issue in modern discussions of biographical methods. Serious biographers usually agree that their conclusions, while grounded in facts and a scholarly, scientific process of sifting and evaluating evidence, are at bottom ‘intuitive’ in much the way that medical diagnosis is ‘intuitive’: the biographer perceives meaning and reaches conclusions in a high-dimensionality, time-varying set of data; the biographer reliably finds patterns and takes decisions in the face of extreme complexity and contradictions and counter-factuals.

T he facts of his life become the most interesting—and perhaps the most ‘true’—just at the edge of mystery.”
— Jay Martin, commenting about the process of writing the biography of Henry Miller.

R eading all the the extant materials, being open to all points of view on the subject of the biography—these are just prologue to the biographer’s purpose, which is to intuit accurately what it all means and express that in a convincing and authentic way to others, even if the story is irreducibly complex and the intuitions do not reveal just one ‘center’. The Darwin Project succeeds beautifully as multimedia biography of a very remarkable, complex person.

P .S.—You may especially like the Hamilton and Rollyson books (links below).

P .P.S.—Lee Hartman's arrangement (for SATB and string quartet) of Vaughan Williams’s ‘See the Chariot at Hand’ was superb... warm, very moving with end-of-life atmospherics, beautiful orchestration, and a balanced and emotionally-fitting concluding work for this production. Bravo!

Sunday, January 23, 2011

Parker Quartet: Microludes, Cloud Computing, and Imagination-as-a-Service (IaaS)

S ome of the Microludes use simple dramatic devices such as long sustained notes, while others, such as the 10th, represent a terrifying tangle of string techniques. As there are moments of terror, so are there disturbing breaths of tragic lyricism and even a hint of gallows humor as suggested in the ninth. The total effect, however, is tragic desperation even if we cannot clearly define its source.”
— Lucy Miller Murray.

In China the short-short is called a ‘Smoke-Long’ story [the time it takes to smoke a cigarette].”
— Shouhua Qi.

O ne-page fiction should hang in the air of the mind like an image made of smoke.”
— Jayne Anne Phillips.

T he Parker Quartet’s performance last night in the UMKC Conservatory - Friends of Chamber Music Alliance Series was superb, their cohesiveness and intensity most impressive. The unusual program showcased a sort of vivid storytelling through music, a collectivistic mode of expression at which the Parker excels. You Can’t See Dogs on the Radio, as they say, but you have no doubt that they are there, that the dogs in the story are real live dogs. The Parker Quartet plays with imagination and realism that tops the most realistic video game or interactive fiction.

Daniel Chong, violin
Karen Kim, violin
Jessica Bodner, viola
Kee-Hyun Kim, cello

Dvořák — Cypresses, B.152 (I know that on my love; Death reigns; Thou only, dear one; Nature lies peaceful)
Kurtág — Twelve Microludes, Op. 13, ‘Hommage a András Mihály’
Hindemith — Quartet No. 3, Op. 22 (Fugato; Schenlle achtel; Ruhige viertel; Mässig schnelle; Rondo)
Mendelssohn — Quartet in E Minor, Op.44, No. 2 (Allegro assai appassionato; Scherzo; Andante; Presto agitato)

K urtág’s ‘12 Mikrolúdium Vonósné-Gyesre’ Op. 13 were composed in 1977–1978, commissioned by the Witten Festival, and were given their world premiere in Witten on 21-APR-1978 by the Éder Quartet. Each microlude is a “micro fiction”, phenomenally brief, the longest of them being 130 seconds and the shortest a mere 17 seconds. The emotional impact of each nanostory both is tremendous, and the impact of the concatenation of them even more so.

I n her pre-performance remarks, violinist Karen Kim encouraged the audience to consider these vignettes as similar to Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, each volume containing 24 preludes and fugues, chromatically organized in all the major and minor keys. Kurtág’s Twelve Microludes feature each key in ascending half-steps beginning with C.

P ieces so short as these carry tremendous risk. In micro fiction, if you are coercing concision, you run the risk that you will be overpowering or cruel or clichéd, as in Hemingway’s famous six-word story, ‘For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn.’ Plot and character development and meaning are eroded if the form is too severely truncated/compressed. The information-carrying capacity of the available bytes is too small; it is like lossy jpegs—hard to be sure of what scenes and meanings are depicted in the bits of blurry evidence.

B ut in the Kurtág we get rich and spontaneous observations of people in as little as 17 seconds; we get both their superficial expressions and their deep inner pathologies. What we experience in Parker Quartet’s performance—what is especially distinctive about it—is the crystal-clear, unambiguous consistency of their quartetly “we,” regardless of individualistic feelings, emotions, or extrinsic thoughts the quartet members may be having. We are, at this moment, all the same, they seem to say: an assemblage of 4 persons, creating one singularity, one reality. “See it? It floats above us, about 1 meter above our heads, in the column of air between our music stands.”

A nd we in the audience eagerly attach ourselves to the intangible forms—the images and fleetingly accepted ideas, which become our “anchors” in this plane of reality. Over the ensuing seconds, those fixations and attachments become the “bars” that cage us and constrain our understanding as well as entrance us. We remain in this plane; we attach ourselves to this plane; we go with the Parkers’ flow.

T he colors and shapes of our emotions within each piece: short-short stories, slices of life. As such, we narrow the time frame and geographical location of each piece. Kurtag’s ’12 Microludes’ is playful—10 minutes of experimentation and exploration of limits. The four voices pass contrariwise—languid sustained notes, accelerating to disorienting tangles. We listeners are not given much of any anchor to hang onto or point-of-reference to maintain our bearings. These invisible dogs are wearing collars and leashes; the Parkers are showing them to us; we pet them. We readers/listeners are empowered to ascribe whatever personalized significance we wish. Interactive fiction!

T he fifth movement is maybe the most fictional one—folk melodies—some in foreground; others backgrounded—people passing each other, all of them are walking their braces of invisible dogs now, bumping into each other, greeting each other. “See it? At the end of this leash? My dog likes to eat nuts, cashews mostly. And that one likes cheese and bacon.”

S peaking of which, the Dvořák ‘Cypresses’ are micro fictions, too, but they are more programmatic or cashew-representational than the Kurtág ‘Microludes’. Kurtág is full of post-structuralist rhetorics ... a ‘metanoia’, a beyond-knowing or about-knowing-and-the-limits-of-knowing, an epistemology of surprise and doubt. Have a look at Jay David Bolter’s chapter in Philip Cohen’s multi-author edited volume (link below) if you are interested in these cashew-ey lit-theory things...

T he music encodes a compiled program—it has a set of initializations; procedural logic and flow-of-control; conditions; contingent outputs—I mean a set of software design patterns and objects and behaviors, whether perceived by us users as tendencies, rules, methods, or procedures. For this reason the formation of an implied code is a normal (and largely unconscious) process for any of us interactors, regardless of our level of technical experience. To possess an “implied code” doesn’t require that we interactors be skilled programmers with an aptitude for conceiving syntax in the compiled language or an aptitude for imagining new data structures.

I n fact, the presence or absence of such imaginings is beside the point. We are... we are cloud-based ‘Imagination-as-a-Service’ (IaaS) agents.

S ometimes our initial notions turn out to be wrong. Our “implied code” contains errors, and we discover that something crucial has changed after we receive what feels like a pop-up error message. Our mental model gets revised.

I nteractive fictions like these embody a sort of command-line-interpreter CLI user-interface, a site of negotiation between the composer, the performers, and us interactors/listeners: our imaginations contain the “objects” and procedural “methods” code for simulation and animation. The composer emits instructions. We cannot help but receive them, but the instructions may or may not be honored by the “implied code” of our listeners’/interactors’ conceptions.

I nteractive fiction is not a painting or photograph containing a command-line prompt or a transcript of a command-line and a new command-line prompt staring at us, nor is it a story describing a series of input command-lines and command-line prompts. It is not Gibson’s ‘Neuromancer’ nor Stephenson’s ‘Cryptonomicon’. Nor is it a movie scene replaying a command-line interaction, like ‘The Matrix’.

W e interactors are processes in Time, our implied codes contributing to a ‘coming-into-understanding’ system-services ‘stack’. We interactors progress in learning to interact, paralleled by the progress of the protagonists within each Microlude, protagonists who likewise struggle to understand something within the reality of the story, dogs and all. Implied code mallocs an epiphany—the climax—which gives way to the conclusion: the character understands the world in the moment that we listeners understand the code, and at that moment the work ends, and then dealloc/free() and process-rundown.

S o “implied code” in Kurtag is neither a set of instructions nor a transcript of past interactions. The implied code and objects that are instantiated in the minds of us interactors are a reflection of the source code, byte code, or musical manuscript they stand in relation to, but the result is a rendering into a set of an abstractly conceived network of opportunities, allowances, and prohibitions. At the command-line, whose input mode encourages experimentation and ad hoc going-with-the-flow, these prohibitions such as error messages affect our subsequent implied code.

O ur intertwined aesthetic and technical developments can be cast in narrative theory (Iser’s gaps, and ‘fabula / sjuzet’ distinction), in game-theoretic [micro—] ‘ludology’ (player apprehension of rules, evaluation of strategic advancement), and in filmic representations (subjective POV, time-loops). I add more links for your interest below...

I n short, I was blown away by the Parker Quartet’s captivating imagery and flawless technique. The unusual repertoire in last night’s ‘microfic’ program is the epitome of chamber music ensembles’ effectively appealing to broader audiences. And for beautiful art in such a program to end in our making some discoveries, as fictive energy accumulated around the gaps, the ‘unknowns’ in the mind between the ‘knowns’, seems fitting: total success. The Parkers’ invisible dogs were members of the cloud-based potentialDogs class until, in a sudden beautiful and memorable synaptic arc, the connection was made: closure. IaaS gave us visible realDog instances, while the music lasted.

F ounded in 2002, the Parker Quartet was in 2009 awarded CMA’s prestigious Cleveland Quartet Award which honors rising young string quartets. Currently, the Parker is in its second season as the Quartet-in-Residence with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, and in 2010 they were the first-ever Artists-in-Residence with Minnesota Public Radio and American Public Media.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

The Importance of [a modest number of—] ‘Wrong’ Notes

Authenticity is not the only quality for which a performance might be valued. Where a relatively inauthentic performance is highly valued, it is valued in spite of its ‘inauthenticity.’ For example, Schnabel’s recorded performances of the Beethoven sonatas are well regarded despite the wrong notes that they contain.”
— Stephen Davies, p. 47.

Beethoven marks ‘fugue in 3 voices with some license’, which is a serious understatement [Sonata No. 29 in B-flat Major, Op. 106, “Hammerklavier”] and which I read as something of a joke: the joy of the joke being the extent to which Beethoven will simply flaunt the very idea of a fugue. Though the fugue subject begins with a series of consonant, descending thirds (taking up an obsessive theme of the piece as a whole), pretty soon its running sixteenth notes have a willful tendency to encounter all sorts of dissonant neighbors, and these ‘wrong notes’ become a subject for the composer’s perverse and inventive discourse. Beethoven’s ‘play’: causing all kinds of collisions of one dissonant neighbor with another and then miraculously making sense of them: this is the playful creation and resolution of chaos.”
— Jeremy Denk.

I was recently checking to see how my friend, pianist Victor Goldberg, is doing with his Asian tour. As part of my online “checking up,” I looked at his Twitter feed, which I had not done in awhile. There was not much in the way of updates about his performances in Hong Kong or Taiwan or Thailand in there, but there was this little tweet from last June, which I’d not previously seen.

Are wrong notes that important?”
— Victor Goldberg, Twitter, 23-JUN-2010.

N umber one, Victor plays exceedingly well, with wonderful expression and technique. He does not produce wrong notes—at least not many of them, and especially not many of them in the context of the difficult, finger-challenging repertoire he performs. His tone remains consistently focused, clear, and centered throughout the range. The pulse remains secure, and his rhythms are accurate for the style. Dynamic levels are consistent, emotionally coherent, and an accurate interpretation of the style. Phrasing remains always consistent and sensitive to the style. Expressiveness manifests creative nuance and style, remaining responsive not only to the score but to other performers and the audience. Articulation has secure attacks, and all markings (staccato, legato, slur, accents, etc.) are executed accurately. In short, anyone who has heard Victor play would be astonished by his Tweet from last June.

N umber two, Victor’s recoveries from any notes he misses are invariably graceful and, if anything, the few misses lend in an admirable way to the overall humanity of his performances. We do not attend to hear damned automatons or computers perform. We come to hear a real human, and to vicariously experience our own humanity more fully through what that dear human does.

N umber three, we know both the quotidian and the sometimes noble, poignant origins of “mistakes” in elite performers; we understand how they happen, at least those of us who have ever studied music do. And we actually want to witness them. We love virtuosic spectacle, yes, but, more than that, we glimpse first-hand in the virtuosos’ limits and accomodations and recoveries from occurrences around those boundaries some important dimensions that we have and that all people, past, present, and future have.

N umber four: authenticity is not conditioned upon enslavement to the urtext. In any good performance, we witness improvisatory but at the same time fully consequential music. We see the person’s full absorption as it unfolds in front of us. And, given the finiteness of human attention and other capacities, the “full absorption” is not evenly spread across all of the myriad elements to be attended to. As a result, we witness the highly personal irregularities of the elements that receive extra attention, while other less-attended elements recede toward the boundaries where the so-called “mistakes” happen. A lot of what we call “depth” in performance arises via these core-vs-boundary processes. Again, it is part of the beauty.

N umber five: the composer created these risks in the score. In some cases the risks were put there deliberately, in full recognition of what awkwardnesses under the hand (or for the voice, etc.) would do to the performer—some of Rzewksi’s writing is diabolical in this way—and in other cases it was happenstantial/incidental. But the aesthetic whole—the unity of the score’s architecture, replete with its hazards and insurmountable challenges—is what we seek.

N umber six: We can measure the “mistakes” and statistically model the ‘reconstruction error’ or fidelity to the score. In principle, we could study the situations in which the reconstruction error density is high and yet our emotional and aesthetic reception of the performance is also [paradoxically] high.

F irst, we record the occurrences of deviations from the score and transform them from the time-domain to the event-frequency-domain. Then y_t is the power spectrum of those deviations. And we calculate the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence (see Lee and Seung 1999)… the 50-cent equation up at the top of this blogpost.

F or those who are especially interested in these issues, have a look at the paper by Maria Ruiz, Hans-Christian Jabusch, and Eckart Altenmueller at Hanover and Dresden (link below).

N umber seven: some of what we hear as “wrong” is not wrong after all, even if the performer herself/himself obsesses over it.

W e first have to diagnose the right notes as ‘right’ before we can say that any of them are wrongly played—‘diagnose,’ rather than merely find: no longer does the fact that a composer puts down a C on paper [or in Finale or Sibelius, etc.] necessarily mean that s/he cares two hoots if a C sharp is played instead, or a C-semi-sharp for that matter. And even if s/he thinks s/he cares, one takes leave to doubt the profundity of his/her worries when, in rehearsal, one notices that s/he does not perceive the difference between the alleged right note and the wrong note s/he gets instead.”
— Hans Keller.

E vents remaining in Victor Goldberg's Asian tour include:

Masterclass, City Hall, Hong Kong - 20-JAN
Masterclass, Hong Kong University - 21-JAN
Concert, Discovery College, Hong Kong - 23-JAN

B est wishes, Victor. See you back in the U.S. at the end of the month.

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Chamber Music-Induced Chills

L ast night I attended the candle-lit evensong choral services at Kings’ College Chapel. The 28-voice boys’ choir sang the service.

A t various moments, chills went up and down my spine, listening to the organ and the beautiful voices reverberate through the large sanctuary. “Why does the body do this?” I wondered. Go to PubMed and have a look!

C hills seem to be related to distinct musical structures and the “reward” system in the brain, including parts of the ventral striatum, the midbrain, the amygdala, the orbitofrontal cortex, and the ventral medial prefrontal cortex. Considerable research has recently been published on “chills”—as “leading indicator” correlates of emotional “rewards” that the brain is just now processing and propagating to other parts of the body, and as near-term “trailing indicators” of individual cognitive and emotional peaks just-past. Phenotypic measurements of physiological arousal (skin conductance response, heart rate, heart rate variability, etc.) consistently show peaks during chill episodes. Replication of the original studies have confirmed that chills are a reliable marker of emotional peaks that are induced by structures in music, that are temporally associated with self-reported subjective feelings with physiological arousal.

F or example, Oliver Grewe, Eckart Altenmüller, Reinhard Kopiez, Frederick Nagel, and others at the Institut für Musikphysiologie und Musikmedizin in the Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien, Hannover, find that people already familiar with the music are more likely to feel shivers up their spines at characteristic, predictable moments:

At transitions from loud to quiet;
Upon the entry of a solo voice or instrument;
When two (or more) parts have harmonic contrasts, such as close-harmony with beat-frequency interference between the notes'/formants' spectra; and
When the music evokes memories of past experiences that were emotionally intense.

T he responses of people who are not already acquainted with a piece of music are, in general, weaker and less predictable.

I n terms of programming for chamber music presenters and ensembles, these findings may lend some support to the traditional precept of including at least one familiar work in each program.

A s listeners or performers, in terms of explaining why our reactions to a work on first hearing are sometimes less vivid or shivery than we would like or expect, the lesson seems to be “Wait awhile. Give it multiple hearings. Assimilate the piece over time, and see what it does to you later.”

A nd, as composers, there is probably no surprise in these findings. Devising chill-inducing structures and mechanisms to create and resolve dramatic tension is what you do and have always done. Understanding the neurophysiology of music-induced shivering and spine-tingling doesn’t provide you with any new tools beyond the ones you already comprehend and routinely use. The aesthetic decisions about when and how often to use them remain the same as always.

I f you’re interested in the recent research on music and shivering, have a look at these papers (links below) to read about various bits of the physiologic mechanisms of music-induced “chills,” such as are known so far.

Monday, October 25, 2010

Outreach: Sphinx Chamber Orchestra, Urioste and White, and Harlem String Quartet

T he ensemble, conducted by Damon Gupton, opened its program with a shimmering, lovingly-shaped reading of Sibelius’s ‘Andante Festivo’. All the hallmarks of a first-rate string ensemble were in place: its tone was warm and varied, it moved with unity and fluidity, and its textures were appealingly transparent.”
— Allan Kozinn, New York Times, 06-OCT-2010.

T he inaugural program of the new Alliance between Friends of Chamber Music and the UMKC Conservatory of Music and Dance occurred yesterday afternoon—a concert by Sphinx Chamber Orchestra and the Harlem Quartet.

S phinx was founded in 1996 by Aaron Dworkin, a violinist, and is based in Detroit. It is dedicated to developing young black and Hispanic classical musicians and composers, providing instruments, scholarships, and support. The SCO is a 20-piece chamber orchestra, widely acclaimed for its precise and passionate playing, conducted by Damon Gupton (previously Assistant Conductor of Kansas City Symphony and winner of the 2007 Eduardo Mata International Conducting Competition, the Robert J. Harth Conducting Prize, and other awards). The Harlem Quartet is comprised of Sphinx alumni Ilmar Gavilán (violin), Melissa White (violin), Juan-Miguel Hernandez (viola), and Paul Wiancko (cello).

Jean Sibelius – Andante festivo (1922)
Sergei Prokofiev – Allegro con brio (from Sonata for 2 violins, Op. 56, 1932) [Elena Urioste and Melissa White]
Gabriela Lena Frank – Coquetos (2001) [from ‘Leyendas’]
George Walker – Lyric for Strings (1946)
Joaquin Turina – La oración del torero, Op. 34 (1925) [Harlem Quartet]
Frederick Tillis – ‘Wade in the Water’ (from Spiritual Fantasy No. 12, 1988) [Harlem Quartet]
Felix Mendelssohn – Sinfonia No. 7 in D minor (1822)
Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson – Allegro furioso (from Sinfonietta No. 1, 1953)

T he White Recital Hall at UMKC was nearly filled to capacity on this mild, sunny Sunday afternoon—more than 500 people attended. Such a crowd is evidence of the effectiveness that alliance between classical musical presenters and university-based conservatories can achieve, aided by appropriate pre-concert notice in the media. Masterclasses and educational sessions conducted by SCO in collaboration with the UMKC Conservatory Academy’s ‘Musical Bridges’ outreach program before and after the concert included programs at Eisenhower Middle School, Ruskin High School, Paseo Academy, and the Youth Symphony of Kansas City, with members of SCO coaching the students. In all, many hundreds of young music students participated.

P rograms like this help to insure that the Arts are available, not just to a few, but to everyone.”
— Peter Witte, Dean, UMKC Conservatory of Music and Dance.

T he entire concert was exceptionally good and received an enthusiastic standing ovation at its conclusion. It’s not my habit in this blog to do ‘reviews’ per se, but I particularly loved the Prokofiev violin duo and can’t help but say a few words about that.

T his fourth movement, the Allegro con brio, is a fast rondo with athletic, angular, in-your-face themes for the two violins. Urioste and White were a tour de force, spirited and incisive. I had previously heard Urioste perform in 2007 when she was completing her studies at Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. I’d previously heard White when she was at New England Conservatory in Boston. It was a delight to hear these two perform together; to recalibrate my recollections and impressions from several years ago; and to experience their pyrotechnical interactions with each other in this challenging, aggressive piece.

P rokofiev left his homeland for the West six months after the 1917 Russian Revolution and did not see it again until 1927, when he returned for a concert tour. A second tour followed in 1929, and a third, in 1932, marked the beginning of his gradual—and entirely voluntary—repatriation, which was completed by 1936. Just before that 1932 visit he composed his ‘Sonata for Two Violins’ during a holiday at Ste. Maxime (near St. Tropez) for performance in the concerts of the Paris chamber music group called Triton. The four brief movements, which Svyatoslav Prokofiev, the composer’s son, characterized as being ‘lyrical, playful, fantastical, and violent in turn,’ are filled with striking themes. The highly effective sequence apparently reflects the format of the old ‘sonata da chiesa’, and the content gives a fairly clear indication of the warmer style Prokofiev would adopt after his wanderings in the West, increasingly more ‘embracing’ rather than ‘biting’ or confrontational...”
— Richard Freed, Program Note, Kennedy Center, 2004.

I n this mid-term election season in the U.S. that is nothing if not biting or confrontational, Urioste and White provided a welcome antidote. Their playing embodied a politically active, assertive, insightful tone. Embracing, never bellicose or grizzly bear-like. Their playing conveyed a sense of optimism that fair compromise can be achieved, with shared resolve to forge that compromise right away. “Here is how we do it! Here! Listen!”

T heir performance was redemptive—enough to inspire hope for this country’s future, in dimensions far beyond Sphinx, far beyond serious music.

I n conclusion, congratulations to SCO and Harlem Quartet on their tour, and on their luminous performance in Kansas City yesterday. Heartfelt thanks to SCO and Harlem Quartet for their leadership, and for their generous outreach activities that help so many young students. Bravo!

Saturday, April 24, 2010

Maya Beiser: Ideas that You Can Hold Onto, or that Recurse and Hold Onto You

B rightly voiced and musically attentive ... young Israeli cellist Maya Beiser has a firm and even hand, regardless of subject: bleak modernism, sultry ethnicity, or Romantic revival.”
— Allan Kozinn, The New York Times.

T he performance by cellist Maya Beiser last night in Boston in the Celebrity Series (at the newly-restored Paramount Theatre at 560 Washington St in the Boston theater district) was deeply inspiring.

Arvo Pärt: Fratres (4 cello tracks, live cello)
Chinary Ung: Khse Buon (cello and electronics)
Osvaldo Golijov: Mariel (4 cello tracks, live cello)
Steve Reich: Cello Counterpoint (7 cello tracks, live cello, video)
Evan Ziporyn (arr.): Like Smoke (cello track, live cello, voice)
David Lang: World to Come (24 cello tracks, live cello, voice, video)

M aya Beiser’s repertoire enthusiastically propels the audience from ‘intention’ to ‘reception’ to ‘understanding’ and ‘liking’.

E lectroacoustic synthesis, digital reverb, and DAW sound-processing effects and antiphonal elements from her electrified cello (miked at its bridge) predominate in Pärt’s ‘Fratres’. Highly realistic cello emulations of classical qin glisses and sounds of other traditional Asian instruments captivate us and hold our interest in Chinary Ung’s ‘Khse Buon’. Maya’s cello technic is astounding—a spectacle in its own right well worth the ticket price just to see this. She and her production team put great effort into visual spectacle as well, on a par with what we would expect from, say, opera. (Classical music presenters, take note!)

M ost significantly, though, Maya’s repertoire does not involve separating art from life, and therefore it’s likely to be widely appreciated and subscribed to—compared to less accessible art music. People are more likely to integrate it into their listening and preferred experiences. Maya challenges us—including her use of Hebrew and medieval texts for her vocals; including rapidly altering meters and polyrhythms; including prolonged stretches of microtonal dissonances that refuse to resolve into hoped-for comfort. But she doesn’t ‘strip our [perceptual] gears’; doesn’t ‘trip our circuit-breakers’.

B y contrast, think of composers like Philippe de Vitry, who composed motets and other choral music where several languages were heard simultaneously. This is probably the nearest thing to what we heard Maya Beiser perform last night. Or maybe Glagolitic chant. Anyhow, Philippe de Vitry is, to me, emblematic of compulsive fuse-blowing and impedance mismatch regardless what century you live in. If you live for querulous reactions, or if your message is symbolic evocation of disparity and alienation and political discord, then, hey, go right ahead—do it like Philippe. Just don’t imagine that people will love it, buy it like hotcakes.

U nless. Unless, you use the complexity as a way to change the narrative or subvert the intention of the original—which is what Maya Beiser does so extensively in this program (and in her recordings).

E van Ziporyn’s ‘Like Smoke’ is based on Tsmindao Ghmerto, a 13th century Sanctus from the orthodox Georgian Liturgy that exhibits extreme polyphony of 15 or more distinct parts or voices, with untempered intervals and shocking harmonic convergences. In Evan Ziporyn’s arrangement, Maya’s voice and Maya’s cello weave a perception-bending pseudo-archaic ‘fabric’ out of tri-filar (two cello tracks; one vocal track) ‘threads’.

G od, the soul you gave me
Is smoke—
Memories of Love burning on eternal pyre.
Once born, we immediately begin to torch,
And so,
Until all the smoke vanishes,
[I am, we are—] Like smoke.”
— Yehuda Amichai.

T he poetic text [we humans are mortal ‘smoke’ that is not ‘real’ or ‘purposeful’ but only someone else’s (God’s) memories, residue of someone else’s love (God’s), destined to be consumed and vanish forever] subverts the religious postulate of eternal life; we are all inconsequential, beautiful-but-meaningless aerosols—mere air pollutants, not individuals with moral standing and worth.

T his beauteous prostrate imagery is mightily at odds with how we (all of us except monks, that is) conduct our lives. The quasi-archaism belies a post-modern, post-minimalist intention. The original sacred, liturgical purpose of Tsmindao Ghmerto is co-opted to the purpose of honoring romantic/carnal love—which is the substitution that is natural for us post-modern, western, sexy media-immersed souls to make.

U sing György Ligeti’s ‘Lux Aeterna’ and ‘Requiem’ and Johann Strauss’s ‘An der schönen blauen Donau’ in the film ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ is similar. Good examples of musical irony. Provocatively subverting our notions of the ‘specialness’ of us as human beings and individuals; provocatively subverting our assumptions/self-delusions about God, about linear time, about whether there is deep meaning in the Universe. Quasi-archaic music to challenge post-modern world-views.

T he dramaturgy and use of irony are engaging—Maya’s edgy acoustic textural and visual fields do not seriously test our perceptual boundaries, not really. Instead, the consistency and the psychological cohesiveness of Maya’s performance (and the cohesiveness of each of these compositions and videos) keep from blowing the listeners’ ‘fuses’, in much the same way that ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ did not blow any fuses.

C ello Counterpoint’ for eight cellos...is irresistibly driven and less overtly contrapuntal than earlier installments in the series. Mr. Reich explores new harmonic ground, not least an almost Romantic lushness aided by Ms. Beiser’s rich tone and energetic playing.”
— Allan Kozinn, The New York Times.

F or Steve Reich’s ‘Cello Counterpoint,’ Bill Morrison filmed Maya playing seven of the eight cello parts. She plays the eighth part ‘live’ alongside this film, forming an all-Beiser octet. The ‘septich’ film panels reveal the mutability of human personality over time. This is a rather long work, and Maya’s serially recording each of the seven tracks that appear in the film must’ve taken a day or longer. The seven panels comprising the ‘septich’ film show Maya and her cello, projected on the 7-meter-high floor-to-ceiling screen, with facial expressions and bowing gestures as widely varied as anyone might have during the course of a day—from fresh in the morning, to fatigued in the afternoon. The eight Mayas do have contrapuntal conversations with each other, as the title promises. But more than this, we emerge with a sense of the recursive quality of the meat-computer inside of Maya’s head, inside of our heads… its small-timescale 200-millisecond canons that return and re-trigger the same network of synapses and reinvoke the same thought that had not yet finished executing.

I rit Batsry made videos for David Lang’s ‘World to Come’ so Beiser appears to perform inside an empty warehouse or in front of rippling water. Lots of recursion, musically and visually, in this piece, too. In other words, Batsry’s black-and-white video is no mere ‘backdrop’ or throw-down scenery. It is genuine accompaniment and the result, a genuine multimedia performance. Fascinating!

O ver the past decade, Beiser has commissioned and performed many new works, collaborating with composers Tan Dun, Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Osvaldo Golijov, Steve Reich, Louis Andriessen, and Mark O’Connor among others. Raised on a kibbutz in Israel by her French mother and Argentinean father, Maya Beiser is a graduate of Yale University. Her major teachers were Aldo Parisot, Uzi Weizel, Alexander Schneider, and Isaac Stern. Maya was the founding cellist of the new music ensemble, the Bang on a Can All-Stars.