jwilzewske: privacy

Showing posts with label privacy. Show all posts

Friday, November 25, 2011

Claudia Bosse: Antiphonal Speech, Musicality of Eavesdropping

O ne can call this incestuous interplay of times a cacophony... Even, in analogy to the competition of generations, a competition among the texts emerges: i.e., the powerful ancient texts make - like unrestrained show-stoppers - the contemporary daily-life reports look pale. But this also means, that the frontal view distances the spectator, so he can feel comfortable. It is striking, that Bosse’s collage does not involve an immediate contemporary text; of all things, it is the present, that creates a blank spot on the "map of the present"- and of course it is exactly this blank spot that the audience has to occupy, to conquer, the eye of the needle for the audience to filter in. The frontality however blocks or contracts this hole in the overall picture, so that access is hindered or even refused. But, you can reopen this hole, precisely when the spatiality of the theatre is not concealed, when the force of the machinery producing its images is contantly interrupted as in Bosse's theatrical practices. This does not mean a return to cosmic salvation.”
— Sebastian Kirsch, 2011, review of Bosse’s ‘Vampires of the 21st Century’

F ascinating sound-art installation by Claudia Bosse, currently in the Egon Schiele exhibit at the Leopold Museum in Vienna. The installation consists of a series of plate-glass kiosks that are just large enough to stand or sit in, dispersed in a nearly anechoic gallery room that has had foam applied to its walls.

M ost of the glass compartments are large enough to hold only one person at a time (WxDxH: 50 cm x 80 cm x 200 cm). One that is labeled ‘LOVERS’ has two chairs in inside, with enough room for two people to sit facing each other.

S ome compartments have one miniature loudspeaker. Others have two or three of them, positioned at various spots high or low with respect to the vertical axis of the compartment. Some are positioned close to where your ears are located when you are inside the enclosure; others are far above, below, in-front-of-but-to-one-side, or behind your head. These speakers are 10 €, German-made Visaton® 36 mm diameter, 6 mm thick, 1 watt speakers—of the sort that might more usually be found in a laptop computer.

E ach speaker is fed by a pre-recorded, edited, pre-equalized track that is being played-back from a Alesis 24-track hard-disk recorder HD24

T he amplified outputs of the Alesis HD24 are fed via heavy twisted-pair shielded cables that are routed to each glass compartment and snaked up the plate glass walls. The naked black Mylar-cone speakers dangle from these wires—each cable end has been taped to the glass at the right height; the jacket and the wires’ insulation have been stripped; and the speaker has been soldered on, right there.

T he frequency response of these speakers is perfect for the frequency spectrum of the human voice, falling off rapidly below 300 Hz. The recorded tracks are entirely of women’s and men’s voices—either in conversation or in soliloquy. Some of the tracks seem to be spontaneous—‘found’ sounds, ambient bits of incidental speech that Ms. Bosse captured in public spaces. Other of the tracks have the measured phrasing of an actor reciting from a written script or poem or other text.

T he perfectly acoustically reflective plate glass surfaces of the booth interiors produce a listening environment where your ears experience a heightened awareness of directionality—an exaggerated sense of where the sound is coming from. In the ‘LOVERS’ kiosk, the speaker in the center is the most voluble—it is almost always saying something. It is the sound-source that both you and your partner seated in the booth can both hear consistently. The testimony from this central speaker provides the one account that you both can agree upon—a veridical, trustworthy narrator. But I cannot hear the second voice coming from the speaker that is positioned behind your head over there, nor can you hear the third voice from the speaker that is located above my left ear.

A t times I believe that the intermittent/interjecting voice behind my left ear is that of the person whose ‘public’ voice is heard coming from the center speaker, but into my left ear comes this text of reflection, reconsideration, interpretation—an internal dialogue that the person is having with herself, either contemporaneously with the ‘public’ discourse or at some time afterward. The fact that the speaker on the opposite side of the enclosure, behind your head over there, is probably interjecting interior, confessional, discorroborative utterances—maybe with far different emotional tone or factual content—concerns me. I want to talk to you about this after we leave this gallery. But the 5 minutes we spend inside that ‘LOVERS’ box covers too wide a range of ideas and rambling evidence for us to possibly remember, let alone remember accurately. How long does this multi-character ‘LOVERS’ collage continue before it reaches the end of its ‘loop’ and starts again? 20 minutes? 200 minutes?

T he poetical phrasing and sonic punctuations—not just of the more theatrical parts of it, but the ambient, found-sound parts as well—are a joy to hear: the exquisite quality of the multi-track recording and playback, crystal-clear. The musicality of the recorded, processed speech; the wonderful rhythmic design and orchestration of the recordings’ dovetailings with each other; the antiphonality or spatiality of it; the Henry Brant-esque “oblique harmonies” of it—and the intimacy of these small glass chambers, and the discourses that they enact—are all emblematic of what we mean by the term ‘chamber music’.

I have seen Alesis HD24 digital recorders used for recording musical ensembles before, but until now I have not seen them used for multi-track playback in sonic installation-art exhibits. This equipment is perfect for this purpose!

W hat you know and I do not know… What I know and you do not… What we both know; what we both doubt; what we both positively disbelieve... And what we see, through glass cubicles, other people knowing and doubting and disbelieving... The ‘transgressiveness’ of eavesdropping on other persons’ intimate conversations, inner lives, confessions—and the luxury of being ‘permitted’ to do this ad lib in an art gallery installation… The beauty of the artist’s gifting us with these insights that are ordinarily forbidden to us—or gotten only at expense of big, ugly guilty feelings.

Sunday, October 30, 2011

More on Shostakovich’s Privacy: Saying-without-being-said-to-have-said, Finding-without-being-found-to-have-found

Roderigo: Tush, never tell me! I take it much unkindly that thou, Iago, who hast my purse as if the strings were thine, shouldst know of this.
Iago: ’Sblood, but you'll not hear me! If ever I did dream of such a matter, abhor me!”
— Shakespeare, Othello, I.1.1-5.

T he previous blogpost was mostly about hyperlinks as illocutionary acts, and the ways in which Shostakovich may have covered his tracks and obfuscated (some of) his meanings.

S everal readers emailed me to express surprise that several courts have ruled in the way that they have. The emailers were basically saying that the theory of knowing, responsible ‘linguistic agency’ under the law is, in their view, not only about the acts of speaking/writing but also about acts of listening/reading and could equally well be about the act of searching for content to hear or read.

I n other words, the audience members who are listening to a musical work, or searching for music to listen to—or the readers reading a blog, or entering search terms searching for content that they then click on and proceed to read—should bear [do bear] ethical and legal responsibility for their listening and searching and reading.

I n that connection, I observe an upsurge in attention to privacy, on the part of many users of search engines recently. I routinely monitor the traffic on this site, mostly with an eye to making the blog responsive to the issues and interests and concerns of the readers who spend time reading what I put up here.

I t was only three months ago CMT blog received its first hits that originated with Ixquick, DuckDuckGo, Scroogle, and StartPage. Today, visitors from around the world arrive at CMT about 5% of the time from searches initiated at one or another of those anonymized search-proxy sites.

I xquick is my favorite among these search engine anonymizer/search-proxy sites. It has earned the EuroPriSe "European Privacy Seal" for privacy and data-handling practices, is certified by CertifiedSecure and is registered with the Dutch Data Protection Authority.

T hese search engine anonymizers/search-proxies do not interfere with most SEO or site editorial practices that matter to me as a blog author—things that relate to the “what” of site content. The search engine anonymizers/search-proxies only obfuscate the “where” and the “who,” protecting the searchers’ privacy.

M y own use of anonymous search proxy sites arises less out of a concern for my own privacy than out of my need to monitor CMT pagerank in an objective way that is not biased/confounded by my own music-related online searching activity. If you are a professional musician or a faculty member of a conservatory, that objective-monitoring motivation may be true for you as well.

B ut if enhancing your online privacy is important to you and if you haven’t considered using an anonymous search proxy site until now, please give one or more of these sites a try. Resist being described [by the search-engine residue of your searches], like Käthe Kollwitz and her drawings and sculptures resist being described... as mere residue of so many [brush/pencil/pastel/chisel/key] strokes.

H ere are a couple of links for you who are, like the readers who sent me emails, astounded by the recent Canadian and Spanish court decisions...

Sunday, December 7, 2008

Service, Legitimate Power, and Deep Novelty: Grażyna Bacewicz’s Instrumental Chamber Music

I do not agree with a statement that I hear quite often that if a composer discovered his own musical language he should adhere to this language and write [only] in his own style. Such an approach to this matter is completely foreign to me, it is identical with the resignation from progress, from development. Each work completed today instantly becomes the past. A progressive composer would not agree to repeat even himself/herself. He/she has to not only deepen and perfect the achievements, but also broaden them.”
— Grażyna Bacewicz.

I n terms of Polish music history, Bacewicz succeeded Szymanowski in the leadership role in her country, before relinquishing that position to Lutosławski and Penderecki. Her relative obscurity in the U.S. may be due to the conservative language of her music, reflecting her choice to conform to the political pressures of her times. Bacewicz’s music most often receives the adjectives ‘neoclassical’, ‘conservative’, and ‘influenced by Polish folk music’. Perhaps her apparent passivity was [in years past] of less interest to Americans than the rebelliousness and modernism of Lutosławski.”
— Ann McNamee, in MTO.

T here are rich textures and nuances that members of the Penderecki Quartet (PS4) are capable of. I was delighted to hear them perform recently and lucky to have a front-row seat, near enough that none of the delicacy was lost.

The Pendereckis’ repertoire covers the gamut from Baroque to new music and jazz but, founded as they were in Poland, they are particularly noteworthy for their accounts of Polish composers’ works. After the performance I went home and listened to their recording of Bacewicz’s String Quartet No. 3. Precise, disciplined: achieving a style that very much resembles the remarks that Grażyna Bacewicz herself made about her writing.

F or me, composing is like sculpting in stone, not like transmitting the sounds of imagination or fleeting inspiration. The majority of contemporary composers work as systematically as bureaucrats. If there is no inspiration, one produces at best ‘workmanly’ pieces; if there is inspiration, the creative process prevails. Discipline—strict discipline in composition—is essential to for me... I walk quite alone, because I mainly care about ‘form’ in my compositions. It is because I believe that, if you place things randomly or throw rocks on a pile, that pile will always collapse. So in music there must be rules of construction that will allow the work to stand on its feet. Naturally, the ‘laws’ or rules need not be old, God forbid. The music may be either simple in design or highly constructed—that’s unimportant; it depends on the language of a particular composer and the expressive task at hand—but [the music] must be well constructed.”
— Grażyna Bacewicz.

[50-sec clip, Penderecki Quartet, Bacewicz String Quartet No. 3, ‘Andante’, 1.6MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Penderecki Quartet, Bacewicz String Quartet No. 3, ‘Vivo’, 1.0MB MP3]

Some people have said the compositions of Bacewicz are ‘neoclassical’ and non-innovative. I wonder if such people ought not to sit in the front row and think again—or pick up the music and try to play it or analyze it, if they’re able. To deem someone’s work to be ‘non-innovative’ is an awfully serious charge, one that requires far more evidence than is usually offered. Anyhow, the chamber music of Grażyna Bacewicz does foster real experiences and deserves, I think, more frequent performance, especially in North America.

Returning home from the PS4 event, I listen to their account of Bacewicz—and the depth and surprise in this music make me wonder about the casual neglect that Bacewicz’s compositions have experienced in the U.S. Could it be that, ethnomusicologically, there has simply been a cultural ‘impedance mismatch’, in the sense that Bruno Nettl has discussed for 25+ years?

S peaking cross-culturally, what may be heard as ‘new’ composition in one culture might be regarded as simple variation of something already extant in another.”
— Bruno Nettl.

W hy is unprecedented ‘novelty’ a card that should trump all others, anyway? Particularly in the present time of economic upheaval, Grażyna Bacewicz’s music pleases and intrigues the ear in somewhat the way that ‘comfort food’ pleases and intrigues a stressed and anxious tummy; in somewhat the way that a well-crafted novel pleases and intrigues and nourishes us. ‘Rich, warm and widely voiced, and graceful,’ as the New York Times’s Allan Kozinn wrote some 18 years ago. Maybe it was just so at the time that Bacewicz composed these pieces…

I t is vital that the result has something transcendent. It is the ‘inner meaning’ [that matters]. While we [composers] may not aim [obsessively, compulsively] at inventing ‘original’ combinations of sounds, we are never complacent at having discovered a new sound effect. Our intention is, in any case, to create at least what would provide some kind of real experience for the listener—not just for ourselves.”
— Grażyna Bacewicz.

M aybe her results are primarily what we would call ‘neo-Classical’ or ‘neo-Romantic’; maybe her compositional methods are ‘conventional’. But to hear them honestly is to grasp that these are the works that she had in her; that she would have written, no matter what; that she needed to write.

It seems likely to me, in other words, that she was not always conforming herself to the norms set forth by state officials. ‘There is no spoon!’ That is to say, it seems likely that Grażyna stoically denied the external totalitarian, Matrix-oid dystopian spoonocracy that was incongenial to her expressive purposes, spawned a musical world of her own—complete, ab initio—and inhabited that flexible, rich, warm and widely voiced, graceful not-a-spoon world instead.

Yes, we’ve heard that in those days all Polish composers were ‘implicated’ in the actions of the government. We don’t doubt it. As Adrian Thomas has written, in 2000 and earlier, “There were no ‘exceptions’, no ‘saints’,” at least none among those who wanted to eat. In his first book and his journal articles Thomas provides extensive evidence as to how Bacewicz and her contemporaries bent their aesthetics to the requirements of then-prevailing socialist realism and the will of the state. Thomas carefully portrayed this state influence as pervasive—at least in his writings from 2000 and before—maintaining that all composers were hemmed in, all the time. I am in no position to dispute what has been well-argued and defended. I am not a revisionist.

But what if Bacewicz did not need to bend in order to have her works performed, in order to eat? What if her truths were just deep enough to keep her beyond the understanding of censors? What if Bacewicz’s complexities were far deeper than the available evidence and extant documents enable us to know. I will get a copy of Thomas’ new book (link below) to see what may be new in there. But—Think about it!—if one lives in dangerous times, there are certain things that one simply does not write down. One’s life story will, in such cases, necessarily be incomplete. But would you rather live your life fully-but-cryptically, or live less-fully-but-leaving-a-breadcrumbs-trail? It’s a pretty easy question to answer...

So it is possible. I think it is possible (but maybe unprovable) that Bacewicz’s preference for classical techniques and understated forms was a way she found to honor foundational personal and Polish values—the value placed in durability and centuries-long endurance, for example: finding the Dignity that inheres in the quotidian; finding the Ineffable in motherhood; finding the Transcendent through patience and a longer time-horizon than tomorrow—the necessity of doing so. The implications of her enigmatic and philosophical remarks in interviews and some of her correspondence (at USC library) do lead us to imagine Bacewicz to have had a spiritual view and esoteric motives that did not bow to any secular authority.

T here she was in that darkened hospital ward [in October, 1954], fighting for her life—and, though she had difficulty talking, she spent the time [of our visit in the hospital] joking and refusing to discuss the accident or the seriousness of her condition with us. Her thoughts were of a future far removed from the present.”
— Stefan Kisielewski, ‘Grażyna Bacewicz i jej czasy’ [Bacewicz’s Times / Biography], p. 34.

I was having a great time, but I kept feeling there was a conceptual poverty in the society I moved within… More and more I find I want to be living in a ‘Big Here’ and a ‘Long Now’ [with a time-horizon of dozens of generations, or millennia].”
— Brian Eno, quoted in Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now: Time & Responsibility, p. 28.

The textures and harmonies in Bacewicz’s chamber music are … like … those of sacred choral music. We expect—and composers demand of themselves—originality and innovation in writing sacred music, sure. But the standards for innovation are different in that realm. And the time-scale is the time-scale of myth and ritual, not the flash snap-scale of new-new and fashion. Bacewicz—at least in her instrumental chamber music and vocal chamber music, which have formed the scope of my own attention—seems to have embodied an ethic of ‘service’, much like the ‘servant ethic’ that attends to sacred compositional practice in general.

This String Quartet No. 3 is not a self-referential piece by a self-absorbed ‘neo-classical’ composer—it is an artifact of private ritual, consecrated and holy? This String Quartet No. 3 is not a quartetly ‘dialogue’ among four virtuosic adult musicians—it is instead a 38 year-old mother’s essay on togetherness and concerted activity long forestalled and now finally arrived? And other of her later string quartets—are these not informed by a mother’s meditation on the transcendent experience of giving birth and raising her family? of loss and long recovery from illness? of her close encounter with mortality? on the nature of duty and devotion? on waiting for what may never, ever come?

To answer such questions/speculations, you will probably have to ask Grażyna’s daughter, the artist and poet Alina Biernacka, or her sister Wanda, the poet and journalist, who is this year 95. Probably the answer will not be found in Thomas’s or Shafer’s cautious scholarship. Judith Rosen’s writing on Bacewicz does, however, pursue more expansive and personal dimensions.

W szędzie dobrze, ale w domu najlepiej.
Everywhere’s fine, but it’s best at home.

Piękna miska jeść nie daje.
An elaborately decorated plate won’t feed anyone.

Nie wszystko się godzi, co wolno.
Not everything that’s allowed is agreeable.

Kto szybko daje, dwa razy daje.
She who gives quickly gives twice.

Czekaj, Matka, latka.
Wait for years, Mommy. Wait till the cows come home [if ever].”
— Polish aphorisms.

Born in 1909 in Łódź, Grażyna studied first with her father, Wincenty Bacewicz (Lithuanian: Vincas Bacevičius), who gave Grażyna her first piano and violin lessons. She attended Warsaw Conservatory, graduating in 1932 with degrees in violin performance and composition. She continued her education in Paris, with a Paderewski grant to attend the École Normale de Musique, studying there under Nadia Boulanger and Henri Touret. Later she studied with Hungarian violinist Carl Flesch. After WWII, she became a professor at the State Conservatory of Music in Łódź. She progressively shifted from concertizing towards composing, a transition that was partly propelled by prodigious awards and commissions. After she was seriously injured in a car accident in 1954 (fractured pelvis, plus head and neck injuries; age 45, when Alina was 12), Grażyna gave up her concert career and devoted herself entirely to composing. She died 15 years later in Warsaw at age 59, in 1969.

Quintet, for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn - 1932
Theme with Variations, for piano and violin - 1934
Trio, for oboe, violin and cello - 1935
String Quartet No.1 - 1938
String Quartet No. 2 - 1943
Suite, for 2 violins - 1943
Concertino, for violin and piano - 1945
Sonata da Camera, for violin and piano - 1945
Easy Pieces, for violin and piano - 1946
Capriccio, for violin and piano - 1946
String Quartet No.3 - 1947
Sonata No.1, for violin and piano - 1946
Polish Dance, for violin and Piano - 1948
Quartet, for 4 violins - 1949
Sonata No.3, for violin and piano - 1948
Sonata No.4, for violin and piano - 1949
Sonata No.5, for violin and piano - 1951
Oberek No.1, for violin and piano - 1949
Oberek No.2, for violin and piano -1951
Melody and Capriccio, for violin and piano - 1949
String Quartet No.4 - 1951
Mazovian Dance, for piano and violin - 1951
Piano Quintet No.1 - 1952
Lullaby, for piano and violin - 1952
Slavonic Dance, for piano and violin - 1952
Humoresque, for piano and violin - 1953
Polish Capriccio, for piano and clarinet - 1954
Partita, for piano and violin - 1955
String Quartet No.5 - 1955
Sonatina - for oboe and piano 1955
Sonata No.2, for violin and piano - 1958
String Quartet No.6 - 1960
Quartet, 4 for cellos - 1964
Incrustations, for horn and chamber ensemble - 1965
Trio, for oboe, harp and perciusion - 1965
Piano Quintet No.2 - 1965
String Quartet No.7 - 1965

The Penderecki String Quartet was formed in Poland in 1986 and has become one of the most celebrated chamber ensembles of their generation. Their recent schedule has included concerts in New York, Amsterdam, St. Petersburg, Paris, Los Angeles, Atlanta, as well as appearances at international festivals in Poland, Lithuania, Italy, Venezuela, and China. PS4 performs repertoire ranging from Haydn to Zappa to more than 100 new works to date. They are now in their 16th year as Quartet-in-Residence at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Canada. PS4 appears extensively throughout Canada, regularly performing at the Ottawa Chamber Music Festival, Festival of the Sound, Festival Vancouver, and Music Toronto. PS4 collaborates regularly with un-‘neo-Classical’ artists such as Martin Beaver, Atar Arad, Antonio Lysy, Luba Dubinsky, Jeremy Menuhin, James Campbell, radical jazz saxophonist Jane Bunnett, the ‘un-tame’ pipa artist Ching Wong, choreographer David Earle, New York ‘illbient’ hip-hop artist DJ Spooky, and actor Colin Fox. The PSQ members clearly find depth in Grażyna Bacewicz’s string quartets. Maybe you do, too.

Jeremy Bell, violin
Simon Fryer, cello
Jerzy Kaplanek, violin
Christine Vlajk, viola

Friday, August 22, 2008

Recombinant Urbanism of Chou Wen-Chung

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

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

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

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

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

Voice-leading, overlapping and non-overlapping

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And here is another clip:

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

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

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

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

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