jwilzewske: psychology

Showing posts with label psychology. Show all posts

Saturday, November 10, 2012

Xenakis Matters

Xenakis, photo (c)1999 Ulf Andersen/Getty Images

T he Demiurge (1) creates from an intuition of Good; (2) takes disorder and friction and waste and makes it orderly and efficient, so far as is possible to do; (3) places Reason within the soul, and the cosmic soul within the cosmic body; (4) models the cosmos on the form of a generalized sentient lifeform, i.e., an animal with moral standing; (5) creates the cosmic body on principles of geometric proportionality; (6) creates the world soul out of population-level sameness and difference; (7) blends these into a durable alloy; and (8) divides the alloy into useful, value-generating harmonic intervals.”
— Plato’s ‘Timaeus’, quoted by Eric Lewis in Kanach, p. 81.

U nlike Schoenberg, who controls and organizes his music at the level of the individual note, Xenakis works at the level of the whole population [of all notes, taken together, as a sound-mass].”
— Brian Kane, in Kanach, p. 97.

T he new book, ‘Xenakis Matters’, the latest in the multi-author, multi-volume series edited by Sharon Kanach and published by Pendragon, provides a superb and many-faceted view of the enduring impacts of composer-artist-architect-engineer Iannis Xenakis, who died in 2001. Sharon Kanach is Vice-President of Centre Iannis Xenakis in France and Founder and President of the Xenakis Project of the Americas of the Brook Center at CUNY. She served as Xenakis’s assistant for two decades prior to his death in 2001.

X enakis was an iconic, formative influence on me, even though I encountered him and his teaching only for a short while in 1972. Xenakis was then still on the faculty at Indiana University at Bloomington in 1972... IU with its beautiful-and-powerful-and-then-new Control Data 6600 computer, sylvan wooded paths of the campus, and its quiet, clear-flowing limestone creek so incongruous with the intensity of the University and the minds gathered there.

S pringtime 1972 was, I suppose, before many of us recognized that the Sixties were over. It was when students at the University of Minnesota were protesting the War and barricading Washington Avenue with piles of lumber set on fire, an incendiary deconstructionist action undertaken not far from the School of Architecture where I attended Xenakis’s lectures.

S pring 1972 was when my life still straddled music and engineering equally—and when Xenakis, his music, his cross-disciplinary, fusion-avid compositional methods and materials, and his talks and writings were the epitome of innovation—his compelling, unifying vision a convergence of nature, science, engineering, and art.

H is mathematical models as automatic generating functions—not only for making music but for representing it—where equations accomplished this in a manner so much more compact than mere notes on paper could ever do: so crystalline, the beauty of this.

T he idea becomes the machine that makes the art .”
— Sol Lewitt.

H is programmatic transformations of acoustic forms and found-sounds—embodying a mode of creativity beyond pitch and rhythm and traditional music pedagogy—a random and happenstantial process can nonetheless have statistical self-similar or fractal properties across the ensemble of parts/voices and across time, and can manifest and evoke specific, real meanings.

C an order be established from noise? Well, your music was the first to discover this.”
— philosopher Michel Serres, remark during Xenakis’s PhD thesis defense.

H is physicality and love of ‘immersive’ media and sonic productions—in which the raw and elemental and cranked-up challenged us to (re-)discover the boundaries between Nature and the human.

H is famous book, ‘Formalized Music’, wherein he referred to some of his work as the musical equivalent of the “phenomena of a political crowd... protesters forming a human ‘river’, and their shouted messages propagating from front to back, comprehensible to an observer situated at a distance from the crowd but often not coherent, as such, to individuals within the crowd”.

I ’ve spent the 40 years since then in very different ways than I would have imagined, most of them doing software engineering. But the maieutic* debt that I owe to Iannis Xenakis as an important teacher in my life is great. [*uncovering through analysis; eliciting knowledge by provoking or questioning; assisting-in-coming-into-being; midwifing]

I suppose only as we get older do we really begin to appreciate/apprehend the entire cycle of Life. There is a sense of totality to life and its review, a summing-up. The emphasis is on the ‘examined life’, on how we assess our life and how we have lived it, and assess what truth we have synthesized from the events that have accumulated, from our own efforts and decisions, and from the acts of others and how they have filled and inhabited our lives.

A powerful mixture of emotions—happy memories; regret; guilt; 40 years’ longing and loss—is part of what this book caused to well-up in me—part of what will lead me to read and re-read this volume in years to come. The poignancy of what is remembered so vividly across the decades is staggering. I become reattached to my past as it is reanimated by these authors on these pages.

S ignificant for many readers besides me, though, is how this book works as historiography—revealing how life crystallizes itself in the artifacts that remain in us, emblems of the impact that others have had on us.

I n hindsight, it’s impossible to exaggerate Iannis’s importance to my development, as a person and as an engineer. While insisting on holding students to high standards, he also took an active, personal interest in each one’s well-being. Puckish and provocative, but always seeming to accurately gauge the limits of each. Xenakis’s legendary generosity/hospitality/charity is part of his legacy and, no doubt, a major reason why he is remembered so vividly by so many people, even ones like me who only encountered him briefly.

R emembering now Iannis Xenakis’s smiling face, remembering his exuberance and enthusiasm—how he confided his uncertainties about what some of his music meant, while he simultaneously professed that each motive and pattern did have meaning(s), however ineffable those meanings may be; how he excitedly expressed his ideas and showed his students how to make them work, or, at a minimum, how to believe sufficiently in the possibility so that they fearlessly strived to make it happen—redeems me a bit from my long history of sinning by transience and forgetting.

G enuine problems are... both necessary and impossible. Possibility arrives right when you no longer expect it. That is what an ‘event’ really is.”
— Alain Badiou, quoted by Olga Touloumi in Kanach, p. 101.

I n summary, reminiscence can be dynamic and creative—it can be productive of new discoveries; reminiscence does not have to be reductionistic or static—and I thank Sharon Kanach and her co-authors for this gift.

A ll of the essays in ‘Xenakis Matters’ are engaging and a joy to read. Each essay advances the scholarship regarding the composer’s ideas and influence. And each conveys the kindness, humanity, and something of the humor and kindly nature that are what I remember of him. Robert Wannamaker’s chapter (pp. 127-141), especially, on math exhorts composers to emulate Xenakis’s use of ‘discretion’ in humanizing the combination of mechanical/programmatic musical elements with human ones, to achieve a synthesis that can touch the heart and move us in valuable or even life-changing ways.

M usic is a mathematical exercise, disguised in such a way that the mind does not realize it is counting.”
— Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

I love this book—for reasons noted above, universal as well as personal. Whether or not you have personal memories of Xenakis as an excellent human being, you will, I’m confident, love the book too.

Recording of Pianist Yuji Takahasi performance of Xenakis’s ‘Herma’

I n 1963 I became [Xenakis’s] composition student. When I showed him my piano piece, he pointed to two sections in the piece and offered me a big eraser... I can still feel the notes of ‘Herma’ at my fingertips. Performing ‘Herma’, I discovered the gravity-free state of sound. It was the feeling of lightness, rather than the violent movement other people surmise from the pianistic virtuosity of the work... I hear through those hundreds of notes—and I sense from them at unexpected moments—something like a voice of the inexplicable.”
— pianist Yuji Takahashi, quoted by Roger & Karen Reynolds in Kanach, p. 13.

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Frogs: Invasive Chamber Music

T heories pass. The frog remains.”
— Jean Rostand (French biologist/philosopher, 1894-1977) ‘Ce que nous apprennent les crapauds et les grenouilles’, 1953.

I ’m awakened by owls’ hoots outside our bedroom window, third night in a row. I listen for awhile, then all is quiet again. I get up, don my bathrobe and headphones, and put on ambient music of amphibians.

F roggy recordings by The Weather Station [Tamara Lindeman, pictured above in a woodsy Canadian landscape], Thom Brennan, Anne LeBaron.

H armonic soundscapes like these invite our taking rhythmic journeys. Invite our acceptance of deafening silence as well as deafening sound; accept uncountable, anonymous plurality as well as self-obsessed namable individuality.

W e are reminded of the karmic virtue that attaches to our accepting life’s uncertain beginnings, uncertain middles, and uncertain and sometimes sudden/catastrophic endings.

T he politics of this music are what I decide to call ‘interspecies anarchist’. The psychology of it: ‘agoraphilic’. Agoraphilia admixed with coexisting/concomitant agoraphobia. After all, predators are seeking prey, suitors seeking mates. Situatedness with no hope of escape, in the long run.

T hese recordings are ‘specimens’ illustrating the paradoxes of solitude in a crowd, evidence of unfoldings that don’t yet realize what end-state toward which they are unfolding. Burden and necessity and automaticity of living. Heart that beats and beats, from one beat to the next, not needing a reason.

T his is not ‘droning’ or ‘cacophony’ as its detractors allege, only a [human-ambitions-agnostic] diversity of natural purposes that are opaque to human reason.

T his [the sounds; the animal originators of the sounds] can be experienced but not owned. This can be embraced but not held.

E very sound/song on these recordings challenges or refutes the property rights we as individuals imagine that we have, unmasking our self-delusion of human mastery or control.

T he naturescapes of Lamont Young and Terry Riley will be on my list if awakened tomorrow. Or the sound sculptures of Morton Subotnik. Early Brian Eno, possibly.

D ialectics of sonic invasiveness/intrusiveness/pervasiveness... every living being has a right to be here. But not every living being has a right to sleep.

S ome people might not like this principle. Instead of headphones, I could maybe amplify it through the loudspeakers on our patio...

Monday, April 23, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday, December 24, 2011

Hans Zimmer & Co. save Holmes, entropically

I t’s the furiously melodic likes of Gladiator, The Lion King, Inception, Batman Begins, Dark Knight Rises, Pirates of the Caribbean, Kung Fu Panda, and Sherlock Holmes that’s elevated film music to a thing of rocking beauty, as Zimmer and his team have employed every oddball instrument and influence from Gustav Holst, Lebo M. and the sound of bat wings into percussively thematic adrenalin.”
— Daniel Schweiger, 2011.

I f you ask me, Zimmer’s score rescues Sherlock Holmes (and Guy Ritchie et al.) in the new ‘A Game of Shadows’ film.

Z immer and his composer-orchestrator colleagues at Remote Control Productions created a beautiful and varied score that augments the color and vista of the film, lending atmosphere, scope, and interest to what otherwise could seem predictable. Never gets in the way of what the script and imagery are doing, but never merely reinforces or sonically reiterates what’s been said or shown.

B ut more than this, I am really thrilled with the tempi and the rhythmic architecture of this score. I got the soundtrack and listened to it several times, measured the tempi bar-by-bar in each of the cues, and created a spreadsheet of the values (see jpeg above). I also put an EKG on myself and digitized my heartrate during each listening. Not only did my heartrate adapt to each of the tempo changes, but the heart rate variability (HRV, using the simple RMSSD metric) also synced with Zimmer’s music. Empirically, I suspect that that “N-of-1” experiment is indicative of why this music “works”—physiologic response “pulls” cognition, rather than the other way around.

S ee the book by Bacci and Melcher (link below) for more on phase-locking and rhythmic ‘entrainment’ of breathing, heartbeat, and other physiologic rhythms, syncing with music.

S ince I’d captured the tempo timeseries, I decided to do some other calculations on it, too. I used the open-source R system’s package ‘entropy’ (link below) to calculate the Miller-Madow, James-Stein, Tsallis, Chao-Shen, and Shannon/Jeffreys entropy values. The entropy of the timeseries of tempi for these 18 cues is H = 2.72... pretty high... indicating a substantial amount of variability/unpredictability/interestingness. If you do entropy calcs for “bad” or ineffective film scores (as I happened to do several times last summer), you get much lower values, H between about 1.10 and 1.90.

M ost film schools don't even mention music, much less compare examples of good and bad scoring.”
— Richard Bellis, 2006, p. 8.

T he cues’ titles (track-names) collect words and phrases from the screenplay that are cadential—perfect rhythmic-harmonic demarcations of the narrative arc and plotting. It’s clear that Zimmer applied an admirable amount of objectivity in the spotting session, to inject material that adds considerable depth to the character or the story without the material asserting itself as a vehicle for his own ego.

T he score (Die Forelle; The Red Book; Moral Insanity) makes Robert Downey Jr’s Holmes more alert and angry when he is facing Jared Harris’ Moriarty. The score (He’s All ‘Me! Me! Me!’) makes Jude Law’s Dr. Watson all the more hapless as he gets unwillingly caught up in the plot.

T he producers and Guy [Ritchie, the director] and Jude [Law, co-star] and I got together and tried to have it feel like an extension of what we think brotherhood is—the bickering and miscommunications are part of something that aspires to something higher.”
— Robert Downey Jr., Scotland BigIssues Magazine 05-DEC-2011.

A Game of Shadows’ stands as a valentine to the public-school buccaneer. It provides Ritchie with a licence to run wild with Gypsies, trade punches with cossacks, or just generally arse about in expensive hotels. It gives us anarchy as panto and global espionage in the guise of a homoerotic stag weekend.”
— Xan Brooks, The Guardian.

I n other words, Zimmer’s score truly ‘services’ the film’s narrative, neither over-writing nor under-writing. Naturally, given the big-action subject matter in this film, there are lots of huge orchestral cues. But there are more than half of the cues that are intimate, chamber-like pieces.

M any think that what we do is ‘Art’. I disagree. Music is an art form. Film music is a craft with its roots in art. Art is a form of self-expression, and the last thing a director wants is some composer coming in and expressing him/herself all over the director’s film.”
— Richard Bellis, 2006, p. 69.

F olk idioms in the Romani melodies (doina repeated-note gesture of lament), pentatonicism, Phrygian scale with the second and third scale degrees raised when ascending, and fraigish harmonic minor, flying-staccato, alla zingarese poco a poco accelerandos “hallgató/lassú-közép gyors-friss" (e.g., Kesergö or or verbunkos or csárdás style in ‘It’s So Overt, It’s Covert’; ‘Romanian Wind’) to breakneck speeds, acrobatic violin with pitches bending and glissing, and the tone growling and crying ... great colla parte tempo-leading.

T he Hungarian hallgató of the ‘Did You Kill My Wife?’ brass band is superb.

G ee, this soundtrack is an admirable thing! The tremolos begin slowly, and the accelerandi melt into the flourishes so that they sound like one gesture—far bigger ones than you imagined when they began. The playing and conducting are excellent throughout. Precisely nailing the tempo variations, yet sounding totally organic while remaining faithful to meter. Very, very nice!

Saturday, November 5, 2011

Object-oriented operator-overloading in Fauré’s Fantaisie for Flute and Piano Op. 79?

B y overloading standard operators on a class, you can exploit the intuition of the users of that class. This lets users program in the language of the problem domain rather than in the language of the machine.”
— Marshall Cline, ParaShift C++ FAQ.

A ttended James Galway’s recital the other evening. Thoroughly enjoyed it.

G alway is not subtle. His technical virtuosity, charismatic personality, and emphatic, extroverted playing style are incomparable.

B ut, beyond that, his performance of Fauré’s Fantaisie for Flute and Piano, Op. 79, led me to notice “key-undefining” and “-redefining” elements that strike me as similar to “operator overloading” in compiler design, or, more specifically, to runtime “polymorphisms” in parallel computing and cloud computing, where multiple processes that are interacting with each other concurrently implement more than one version of an operator, and the different operator instantiations have different semantics.

L ook at the score snippet above! In the Andantino movement we have middle-register F-natural (Ddim) against piano’s E in the LH. Other dissonant passages involving the flute object/process communicating with the piano object/process. Finale’s chord-analysis plug-in labels this as Ddim9 (third inversion), then Bdim. Your brain is like a master process that is executing and integrating multiple parallel child processes. If the scope of your brain’s attention encompasses all of the pitches in m. 17 in Op. 79, say, then it receives a hexachord back from the flute object class and the piano object class—an E major triad invasively intermingled with an F major triad... triads that are a dissonant semitone apart... a sort of exotic suspension.

I t is like operator overloading in C++, C#, Scala, Python, Ruby, R, and other languages.

T he interval of the fifth serves as a melodic frame for flute class execution and piano class execution in each of the ‘mélodie’s’ sections, its space gradually rising and becoming more chromatic—making the timbre brighter and the emphasis stronger or more individualistic or ‘recitational’. Melodic motion expands both registrally and chromatically. This is not so much subjectivity/ambiguity or vagueness/tentativeness that are aspects of impressionism, so much as it is concurrent, deliberate polymorphism of operators implemented by different object classes!

T he Allegro movement has rampant elisions of phrase completions, such that cadences are implicit and there is implied emphasis on what is omitted. That’s another feature in Op. 79 that, to me, presages parallel and cloud-based computing... Eager quitting by the Map-Reduce master process when ‘reducer’ jobs have by now yielded enough to enable the master process to abort the rest of them and proceed to the next task.

G abriel Urbain Fauré was, shall we say, an erstwhile compiler engineer who lived, oh, about 100 years “before his time”.

F or your interest, some Op. 79 videos on YouTube are here, and here, and here, and here, and here. In them you will see that the “object polymorphisms” in Op. 79 are not necessarily evident unless the flute playing is as strong as Galway’s.

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

With You in Mind: Some Romantic-Period ‘Directed’, Uncommissioned Chamber Works

W e should get used to the idea that tones have lives of their own, more independent of the artist’s pen in their vitality than one would dare to believe.”
— Heinrich Schenker, 1906.

E njoyed New England Conservatory faculty members’ first ‘First Monday’ concert of the season last night…

Dvořák: Terzetto in C major, Op. 74, B.148 ... Miriam Fried, Lucy Chapman, violins; Paul Biss, viola
Arensky: Trio ... Masuko Ushioda, violin; Laurence Lesser, cello; Sergey Schepkin, piano
Brahms: Quintet in G Major, Op. 111 ... Borromeo String Quartet; Kim Kashkashian, viola

T he Terzetto—with the two upper-register voices and the alto voice (viola)—is an interesting texture that leaves us wondering what the tenor/baritone voice (cello) would do had a part been written. Why did Dvořák choose this unusual orchestration—“string quartet minus one”? Well, said Laurence Lesser in his pre-concert remarks, it was because Dvořák wished to honor a violinist friend and the friend’s violin teacher, both of whom lived in the same boarding house where Dvořák himself lived at the time. Simple. Good enough reason as any!

B esides this Terzetto, there is Dvořák’s String Trio in B-flat, Op. 75a, Kodály’s Szerenád for 2 violins and viola, Op. 12, Sergei Taneyev’s Trio, Op. 21, and Frank Bridge’s Rhapsody Trio, H.176. Probably there are more, but I am traveling and not close to a conservatory library to do a decent job of looking them up. In any case, the literature in this space is not large. This repertoire for 2 violins plus viola is not performed nearly as much as it should be. (And, for that matter, the diversity-enhancing decision to compose for non-standard ensembles is not taken nearly as often as it should be either.)

T he viola’s role as an ‘outer’ (bass) voice in the Terzetto sheds light on differences (compared to violin) in viola bow-arm technic: not some violin-style (with hand, wrist, and arm predominantly above the level of the bowstick), the hand and forearm are lower and the upper arm doesn’t move so much. I sat up close, on one side of Jordan Hall to the right of center-stage, far enough to the right where Biss’s movements were not obscured by the music stand. The viola fingering in the Terzetto also presents more than the usual range of challenges, it seems to me. It was wonderful to be able to observe his technic, see his decisions, hear the results.

T he Arensky trio, written in memory of cellist Karl Davydov, was really good. Unusual timbres and textures… the Adagio (Elegia) third movement … the strings’ mutes on throughout. The ‘accessory’ thematic elements to a memorial piece lend depth and verisimilitude—a sort of ‘I remember when’. Ushioda’s touching remembrances, answered by Lesser’s (Davydov’s) inspired and atmospheric replies, modulated by Schepkin’s brilliant and sensitive arbitration/counsel. These are dramatic meditations on the death of a beloved person and, like all elegies, are poetical—with language and cadence governed by impulses of memory. The elegy form tolls departure and loss, irrevocable going-going-goneness… rapturously, ecstatically... often with more of a pastoral or more serene or idealized or sanitized aspect than the person remembered may have had in real life… which is okay and as it should be. We were touched; we are touched; we will continue to be touched.

T he Brahms piece is not elegiac except for the Adagio. It’s instead optimistic and lighthearted, but it is memoristic nonetheless, inspired by Brahms’s walks in the Vienna Prater. By rights, it’s a viola quintet, full of rich alto sonorities. The first movement, Allegro non troppo ma con brio, is in 9/8. Opens with a cello solo in G major, transitions to G minor, with excursions through various other keys before returning to G major. The second movement, the Adagio, begins with a viola solo. The main theme goes through a sort of ‘versioning’ or software refactoring—reimplementing it on different ‘platforms’ and architectures—pondering and recasting the material and, through each refactoring, discovering new dimensions in it and reaching different conclusions. The third movement, Un poco Allegretto, a cheerful minuet and trio form in 3/4, ends with a short coda. And the fourth movement, Vivace ma non troppo presto, is tremendously buoyant and vivacious. Brahms’s pen—and tones—and the Borromeos plus Ms. Kashkashian—had more vitality than one dares to believe…

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Processionals: Repetitions, Situational Minimalism, and Elgar’s ‘Pomp and Circumstance’

T he kind of learning that will define the 21st Century is not taking place in a classroom. Rather, it is happening all around us, everywhere. We call this the new culture of learning... a fluid infrastructure where everything is constantly creating and responding to change... This new type of learning process is a cultural phenomenon that underlies a large number of people’s experiences and affects them in myriad ways. It takes place without teachers, without classrooms, and it requires [virtual, networked] environments that are bounded yet provide complete freedom of action within those boundaries.”
— Douglas Thomas & John Seely Brown.

F arewell, the neighing steed and the shrill trump,
The spirit-stirring drum, th’ear-piercing fife,
The royal banner, and all quality—
Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!”
— Shakespeare, Othello, Act III, Scene III.

T here is a big challenge in shaping the performance, vamping as it must for an indeterminate length of time while the procession continues.

T he CCM Brass Quintet did an admirable job sustaining audience interest throughout, projecting every note with the necessary dignity and authority. They varied the dynamics, softer to convey an intimate feeling while still staying audible in the large arena, louder to convey more pomp and aggrandizement. They varied the instrumentation, the round timbre of lower brass to convey a magisterial attitude, the bright timbre of high brass to convey heraldic progress.

T he physical stamina required for what can be a very long performance is considerable, a gauntlet made all the more risky to run insofar as there are only five of you (or 4 at a time, if trumpets are alternating). The thing then amounts to a 20-min quartet or, in some passages, amounts to a trio or duet ordeal, depending on the arrangement.

W hen you are repeating and repeating the same short passage for 20+ minutes, there is a natural temptation to embark on small improvisations or decorate some figures a little. Somewhat like turning a word over and over in your mind until it looks nonsensical or silly, or until finally you wonder how the word was ever coined or came to be associated with the thing it names ... tangelo, tan-gelo, tan-ge-lo, tange-lo... t’angel-o.

T he CCM Brass Quintet played nice little fanfares throughout, for all of the graduates. But when graduates of the conservatory (CCM) approached the lectern, the Quintet’s fanfares mutated into ones that were longer by several ostentatious bars, with dilatory flourishes and a grand unpredictability… droll extra service, musicians proclaiming the specialness of other musicians, heh!

E stablishing a strong relationship with a faculty mentor is one of the most important factors in determining the success one achieves as a graduate student. Faculty members “know the ropes,” so to speak, and their guidance on research, and on professional and personal conduct, can be invaluable. Typically, a faculty mentor is someone whose research interests are similar to those of the student. As such, the mentor can be an excellent source for ideas and can serve as an informed reviewer of and advocate for the student’s work.

F or those who have succeeded in establishing a strong relationship with a faculty mentor, the prospect of that relationship changing—or becoming more distant—contributes to the tumult of emotions that well-up during the graduation ceremony. Well, not to worry, usually moving away and the resulting absence make the hearts grow stronger. They will remember you fondly, more fondly than when you were slaving away, nearly for free, in their face everyday.

F or those whose mentors’ neuroses aligned in perfectly perverse way with the mentees’ neuroses, graduation may feel like a long, badly-written fugue has concluded. Begin your next Prelude, ASAP, with Pomp and Circumstance marches played by brass quintet:

March No. 1 in D (1901)
March No. 2 in A minor (1901)
March No. 3 in C minor (1904)
March No. 4 in G (1907)
March No. 5 in C (1930)
March No. 6 in G minor

Elgar Chamber Music:

Romance for violin and piano, Op. 1 (1878)
Salut d’Amour for violin and piano, Op. 12 (1888)
Chanson de Nuit and Chanson de Matin for violin and piano, Op. 15 Nos. 1 and 2 (1897/1899).
Violin Sonata in E minor, Op. 82 (1918)
String Quartet in E minor, Op. 83 (1918)
Piano Quintet in A minor, Op. 84 (1918–1919)
Concert Allegro, piano, Op. 46 (1901)
Organ Sonata in G, Op. 28 ()