jwilzewske: representational

Showing posts with label representational. Show all posts

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Jonathan Kolm: Air on a Super-String

L ove is most nearly itself
When ‘here’ and ‘now’ cease to matter.”
— T.S. Eliot.

J onathan Kolm’s recent compositions reveal that physics can be a rich source of compositional ideas. In particular, Jonathan’s ‘Quantum Music’, a 24-minute chamber work for oboe, clarinet, violin, and cello that received its première in Richmond, Virginia, in 2001 is explicitly evocative of quantum uncertainty, entanglement, and randomness/stochastics. This piece won the third place prize in 2002’s National Federation of Music Clubs Contest. The textures are interesting throughout, and the narrative arc is accessible and deeply moving. Surprisingly so, considering the ‘representational’ motivations and title of the piece.

A ccording to Susan Strehle, [Binghamton University (SUNY) Dept of English], artists who are ‘actualists’ balance attention to questions of art with an engaged meditation on the external, actual world. While ‘actualist novels’ or ‘actualist paintings’ or ‘actualist compositions’ diverge markedly from ‘realist’ representational practice, Strehle claims that they do so in order to reflect more acutely what we perceive as ‘real’. Reality is no longer merely or conventionally ‘realistic’. In the new physical or quantum universe, reality is discontinuous, energetic, relative, statistical, ‘subjectively seen’, and ‘uncertainly known’—all terms taken from physics.

A ccording to conventional aesthetics, [music] aims either at realistic representation of life or at the anti-realistic exploration of artistic processes. It selectively focuses either on human reality or on the linguistic and formal rendering that constitutes its art. Fictional choices work this way because, for traditional theorists, perception itself functions in ‘either-or’ fashion... [Composers] therefore direct the [listeners; performers] to observe either the garden outside the window or the glass through which the garden appears... The legacy of these assumptions becomes especially restrictive—even blinding, I would argue—for critics of post-modern [music].”
— Susan Strehle, p. 1.

A nother of Kolm’s physics-inspired pieces, this time on a cosmology/astrophysics scale, is ‘The Primitive Cosmos’ for 10 percussion (3 marimbas (one 4 1/2 octave), 2 vibraphones, xylophone, bells, timpani and 2 multi-percussionists). This won second-place in 2001’s Percussive Arts Society competition. This piece is intensely rhythmic, taut yet somehow simultaneously tranquil—astonishingly so. Rhythmic ‘mass’ is interconvertible to-from ‘energy’. Beautiful!

O ur minds have difficulty visualizing higher dimensions because we can only move in three spatial dimensions. One way of dealing with this limitation is not to try to visualize higher dimensions at all, but just to think of them as extra numbers in the equations that describe how the world works—or, in the case of Jonathan Kolm, how his music works. This opens the question of whether these ‘extra numbers’ can be investigated directly in any experiment/performance (which necessarily give different results/effects in 1, 2, or 2+1 dimensions to a human scientist/listener/performer).

T his, in turn, raises the question of whether models that rely on such abstract modeling—and potentially impossibly-huge experimental apparatus/ensembles—can be considered scientific/musical. Six-dimensional Calabi-Yau shapes (like the jpeg above) can account for the additional dimensions required by superstring theory. Superstring theory says that every point in space (or whatever we had previously considered a ‘point’) is in fact a tiny topological ‘manifold’ where each extra dimension has a size on the order of the Planck length/nanoquaver. Kolm’s ‘Quantum Music’ evokes impressions along these lines, especially the woodwind parts’ articulations.

B ohmian mechanics’ was formulated in 1952 by David Bohm as an ontological theory of quantum phenomena. It was revisited and expanded some decades later by John S. Bell. Bell investigated the ‘nonlocal’ structure and implications of Bohm’s theory and was led to formulate Bell’s inequalities. Experimental tests of the inequalities verified that Nature is nonlocal—capable of long-range correlations and ‘entanglements’ between two or more particles separated in space. Bohmian mechanics has since then prospered as a logical counterpart of quantum mechanics. Bohmian mechanics concerns the motion of elementary particles. Statistical analysis of these yields the formalism of quantum mechanics in terms of mathematical Hilbert spaces, self-adjoint operator-observables, and projection and positive operator-valued metrics. Tunneling times, ‘arrival times’, and ‘first-exit times’ are mathematically modeled in Bohmian mechanics. I do not know whether Jonathan Kolm has employed the mathematical abstractions of Bohmian mechanics as part of his compositional practice, but the features of his instrumental writing suggest that this may be so.

J onathan Kolm’s music combines emotional intensity and rich harmonic colors and has been recognized with awards and prizes in national competitions—in choral works in addition to his instrumental compositions. In 2008 he participated in the American Composers Forum workshop for new choral music working with conductor Philip Brunelle and Vocal Essence. He has had several choral commissions by the Young New Yorkers’ Chorus and other groups. ‘A Dream within a Dream’ (soprano, cello and piano) and ‘Winter Heavens’, premiered in New York City by the New York Virtuoso Singers, are notable. He was a Symposium Fellow at MUSIC05 in Cincinnati where his piece for three percussionists on one vibraphone ‘Warrior from the Deep’ was premiered. ‘Crystal Fantasy’, for violin, cello, flute, and clarinet was performed at the Dallas Museum of Art where it won second place in the 2005 Voices of Change Composition Contest. In 2006 a cantata for choir and orchestra was commissioned and premiered in April, 2006 in Austin, Texas, as well as set of pieces for violin and piano that were commissioned by the Austin Eurhythmy Ensemble and premiered in St. Paul, Minnesota, in May, 2006, and has been favored with many subsequent performances. His work for SATB chorus ‘Cedo Maiori’ was premiered in October 2006 in New York City by the New York Virtuoso Singers at Columbia University.

U nlike many composers of new music with unswerving devotion to white-on-white, Jonathan Kolm is clearly unafraid of sonic ‘color’. He floods his compositions with natural light to achieve a constantly-changing interior and multiple gradations of intimacy. He is unafraid of introducing bold acoustic colors, covers Le Corbusier celloistic club-chairs with purple oboe and blue clarinet fabrics.

N ature and physics give us an uncountable infinity of variations on the theme of quantum ‘indistinguishability’. In some variations, the theme is obvious; in others it is hidden. In physics, quantum ‘entanglement’ has priority over ‘indistinguishability’. Entanglement is the heart of quantum physics. If there were no entanglement but only one-particle interferences, then why should we not just accept a wave theory as an adequate account of the phenomena? We are able to know that this photon or this clarinet expression is a quantum object because we know that two photons or an oboe and a clarinet can become entangled even though they are spatially separated. Their quantum structureness is made palpable by the parts’ entanglement—the way they are written, the way they are played.

B y ‘quantum structures’ we mean systems of events that model abstract quantum mechanical processes. If you are interested in this stuff (for your own use in composing, or as an aid to analysis of music like this) there is a highly-readable discussion of these things in Mirko Navara’s chapter in Engesser, Gabbay, and Lehmann’s book (pp. 335ff).

J onathan received his DMA in Composition from the University of Texas at Austin in 2007. He previously had taken his MM in Composition at Virginia Commonwealth University (2000). He is currently Asst. Prof. of Composition and Music Education at Grove City College in Pennsylvania.

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Marc Satterwhite: On Absolute Becoming and Quantum Passage

N ec est tamen, quod putes illos ignorare, quam cara res sit Tempus.
Vite solatium: iniqui temporis oblivio.

Do not believe that people are unaware how precious Time is;
Consolation of my life: the obliviousness of Unjust Time.”
— Petrarch, letter to Francesco Nello, 1353.

L a vita fugge, e non s’arresta una ora;
e la morte vien dietro a gran giornate—
le cose presenti e le passate
mi danno guerra, e le future ancora.

Life flees and never rests one moment,
and death runs after it with mighty stride;
Present preoccupations and memories from the past
and things from the future, too, wage war on me.”
— Petrarch, Sonnet 272.

I know that this Marc Satterwhite composition references the famous Flor Garduño photos of the same title. But it troubles me that our sense of the word ‘witness’ is, in English, so passive and bystanderly. To see the score for this mystical cello piece or, better, to hear Paul York perform it, is to think of the word ‘witness’ in its sense as a verb … ‘witnessing’ as a way of actively, interventionally making something happen. Or, alternatively, actively forestalling it or keeping it at bay, containing it.

I do not think that I oversimplify if I say that much of Marc’s music grows out of traumatic experience, his understanding and integration of his emotional response to that experience and the humanity and deep spiritual nature of that response which is so perfectly expressed in his music. Many of these experiences involve loss; personal or shared. That certainly is reflected in the chamber works recorded here. ‘Epitafio’ is an achingly beautiful testament to the deep sadness that Marc felt for the deaths of the parents of a high school friend who were early mentors of his musical talents. ‘Witnesses of Time’ reflect in their starkness, dignity and unexpected joy the pain and delight he found in equal measure during the six years he lived in Latin America. Here snatches of indigenous melodies and rhythms are filtered though a modern sensitivity and given great emotional depth. ‘Memento Mori I’ reflects both of the types of loss mentioned. It manifests the powerful emotional reaction that Marc had to an interactive art exhibit of that name, commemorating the artist’s lost friends and loved ones and the sympathetic reaction it caused to his own continuing pain at the loss of his mother to suicide ten years before.”
— Ronald Grames.

T his is, in a very real way, a Satterwhite essay on the plasticity of time, on plurality of ‘worlds’, and on the possibility of ‘quantum personhood’ and ‘trans-world individuals’. The inspirations for what he has written here—and the superb renderering that Paul York gives the piece in performance—are dark.

T he exotic cello techniques constitute a gallery of ‘modal realism’—in the way that philosophers of language and mind use that phrase… ‘modal’, as in past-present-future modes.

T he limitations of our sense of time are extreme. The smallest interval that is perceptible to us is about 20 milliseconds, and the longest period is limited to a human lifetime, about 100 years. In nature, we know that the range is many orders of magnitude larger, both shorter and longer—from events at the atomic attosecond (10^-18 sec) scale: the time it takes for light to travel the length of three hydrogen atoms; the time it takes for an atomic nucleus to recoil… to billions of years for the age of the Universe. But Nature and evolution did not equip us with senses or memory suitable to be aware of those timescales.

P etrarch regretted every one of his wasted moments. Witnessing time’s passage is always poignant; our own certain mortality and finiteness haunt us. This is not the End, but we can sort of see It from here.

T he speed and irreversibility of Time’s slipping away is inherent in the human condition, the cause for the poignancy. But Petrarch is all about himself, and about financial metaphors—‘rarity-value’ correlations, pearls vs. balsam—as though Time were an exchange-economy. As if. Petrarch commodifies Time and thinks of it as linear only, and those are bad moves, philosophically. There are many possibilities, including the possibility of branching space-time (see the cool little book by Le Poidevin, p. 191ff).

B ut Time has more fugacity [fleeingness] than any other substance ... its fugacity is infinite, unlike other physical things, solutes dissolving. So, following Petrarch’s implication, infinite fleeingness should entail infinite value, pricelessness?

F ew writers (Seneca; Husserl; Heidegger; Ricoeur; Adorno; a few others) have been as aware as Petrarch that time is inherent in poetry and music. Sonic art unfolds in duration; and the work once written bears and maintains an intimate relationship between the Past and the Future, dependent upon our gray-matter CPUs with their sub-MHz clocks and supra-attosecond/sub-century memories.

T he present address instantly becomes past, and the ego-tu in Satterwhite’s text/score addresses indefinite future audiences, as well as our future selves. Satterwhite’s causality is authorial, essayistic—where ‘post hoc, ergo propter hoc’ is not a logical fallacy but is instead Ultimate Truth.

S atterwhite [and ‘Witnesses’] refutes the Petrarchian idea that Time is linear and commodified. The cello engages in [quantum] communication with past and future events—sometimes on timescales within a bow-stroke or thumb-slap, sometimes on timescales very much longer. With such features, this clearly is not music to listen to at a great distance; indeed, it is a meditation that is best apprehended by the player himself/herself or by a friend sitting nearby. If live performance at close range is not an option, then this CD is a fine substitute, headphones on, suitably cranked up.

H inc sepe contingit, ut laudes eorum hominum, qui nobiscum vixerunt ignorantes, mira res dictu vetustissimorum certam notitiam habeamus. [It often happens that, while we are unaware of the praiseworthiness of people who are alive when we are, we amazingly have reliable knowledge of people from long ago.]

Witnesses of Time (Four studies on photographs by Flor Garduño)

Wounded Angel (San Antonio Aguas Calientes, Guatemala)
Tarahumara Pilgrimage (Norogáchic, México)
Threshold of Incense (Chichicastenango, Guatemala)
Tornado (Lake Titicaca, Bolivia)

T hese four movements were inspired by and named after photographs by Flor Garduño. Although Garduño’s work covers many themes, she is best known for her black-and-white documentaries of Latin American life, landscapes, and the human figure.

W ounded Angel’ depicts a Guatemalan Mayan Indian, holding a forlorn wooden statue of an angel sans right wing. The rhythmic structure of this movement—‘sees’ and then ‘raises’ the wager—the one that Flor had made with her photo—to the effect that even sacred icons are frail and require care and repair. Festinating ‘fits’ and ‘starts’ augment our sense of age, decrepitude, and alienation. The pensive mood of York’s cello weighs heavily on us.

T he ‘Tarahumara Pilgrimage’ photo shows a group dressed in their traditional paraphernalia, undertaking a procession that’s paradoxically, astonishingly, simultaneously transcendent and concrete. Some of the people carry drums, embodied in the percussive elements in this movement of the ‘Witnesses’ composition. There are violent pizzicati and sepulchral knocks on the cello belly and shoulder, but these do not draw attention to the performer or the composer; instead, they elegantly serve Satterwhite’s expressive purpose. Crucified cello is home inside but won’t come to the door just now. Strings damped, any sound played ‘short’ enough will be perceived as having no pitch—only the noise spectra of the attacks will be heard. Flesh, thumb-slaps, fingernail taps/trills, bowstick rattle against tender wood—the noises [confer humanity upon—/admonish us to regard the spirit of—] the box of the instrument—the wood itself—and reveal how unfair/pedestrian is our focus only on [transcendental] string-against-bowhair. The earthy box has its own dignity, without which cello pilgrimage would be impossible.

T hreshold of Incense’ is Garduño’s photo taken at the entry to the Santo Tomás Church in Chichicastenango, a culturally important Indian village in the Guatemalan high country. The scene shows smoke of incense mingling with morning fog, to the point where what is interpenetrating what is unclear. The breathy passages evoke meditation on the tenuousness of life; harp-like arpeggios explore an amazing scope of the cello’s colors. The instrument is unrepentant—defiant in its upper register. Listen, half-way expecting it to be apocalyptic: a cello [who] is, when played exactly in this way, Jacob’s Ladder. We perceive Satterwhite’s argument about ‘witness’, the verb, and about active, willful, quantum intervention to change the fabric of Time.

Paul York, near top of Jacob's Ladder, with cello; 12th-Century icon, St. Cahterine's Monastery, Sinai

T ornado’ captures a waterspout menacing Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, signifying nothing? Well, no. No more and no less, I suppose, than Corryvreckan signifies. Elaborating a series of unsettling, incongruous possible significands that are irresolvable, underdetermined. Existential chasm, transient, gaping, capricious, beautiful, fearsome. Musical aporia. There comes a moment when active quantum ‘witnessing’ and ‘becoming’ are done. At the end, we accept what is, utterly without recourse. We take our last breath. No more ‘becoming’. Laters.

W itnesses of Time’ was commissioned by and dedicated to Marc’s colleague at the University of Louisville School of Music, cellist Paul York, who premiered the work in 2004.

[50-sec clip, Marc Satterwhite, Witnesses of Time, ‘Wounded Angel’, 1.6MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Marc Satterwhite, Witnesses of Time, ‘Tarahumara Pilgrimage’, 1.6MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Marc Satterwhite, Witnesses of Time, ‘Threshold of Incense’, 1.6MB MP3]

A mong the groups that have performed and recorded Marc’s works are the Boston Symphony, the Utah Symphony, the Louisville Orchestra, Verdehr Trio, eighth blackbird, the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, the Core Ensemble, Tales & Scales, the Chicago Chamber Musicians, London Composers’ Ensemble, and Percussion Group Falsa. Marc has had residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. A graduate of Michigan State University and Indiana University, he has taught in Texas, Indiana and Michigan and is Professor of Composition and Music Theory the University of Louisville School of Music where, in addition to teaching, he directs the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition.

T his Centaur disc has much to admire on it; sorry to abbreviate my comments just to the eponymous ‘Witnesses’ cello solo.

Saturday, February 7, 2009

Ambient-Aleatoric Representation: Lisa Bielawa’s ‘Chance Encounter’

I s such musical representation ‘depiction’? Is the listener to imagine perceiving a struggle, [or a lover’s kiss]? The mode of perception may be indeterminate. It need not be fictional that it is, for example, by a combination of introspection, kinesthetic sensation, and vision that one perceives the struggle (one’s own), nor that one merely sees and hears it occurring (a struggle among others). It might still be fictional that in some manner or other one does perceive the struggle. One has a sense of it occurring here and now…
— Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 341.

I f you happen to be in New York next Friday, on Valentine’s Eve, you might like to go to the Whitney Museum of American Art (945 Madison Ave at 75th Street), to hear Knights Chamber Orchestra and soprano Susan Narucki perform Lisa Bielawa’s composition, ‘Chance Encounter’. The event is Friday, February 13, with two performances, one at 6:50 pm and the other at 8:05 pm. It’s free with admission to the Whitney under their ‘pay-what-you-wish’ policy on Fridays. No tickets or reservations are required.

C hance Encounter’ is a 35-minute piece in, and about, transient public space with texts overheard in transient, public spaces. Susan Narucki and 12 instrumentalists converge and diverge, one or several at a time, in the context of a public space that contains whatever [transient] objects and [transient] occupants (including you, if you attend) as it may—plus whatever occurrences and ambient environmental sounds arise spontaneously in the space during the performance. Susan will sing songs and arias constructed of extemporaneous utterances that were collected in transient public spaces. The interaction of these vocal utterances/sung texts and the instrumental parts amounts to a re-enactment of a private (yet collective) experience of the then-current performance space itself— as well as a meta-enactment of the original eavesdropped utterances (texts) and spaces. The effect is an exciting, haptically-rich chamber music experience—new and different each time it is performed.

I don’t do anything to it – it just comes out like this.
I’m trying to catch my breath.
I hope they know what they’re doing.
I found a place where we can sit together…
— Lisa Bielawa and Susan Narucki, text excerpt from ‘Chance Encounter’, ambient remarks, overheard in a public space.

C ontinuing my thread on intertextuality and representation from the previous CMT post, I want to suggest that even a composition like ‘Chance Encounter’ can be considered ‘representational’. At least it would be if we agree with the analysis of philosopher Kendall Walton.

F ictional representation’ would point clearly to the exclusion of non-fiction. But I resist the implication that [the category we shall discuss] is a species of a larger class of ‘representations’ … ‘Mimesis’, with its distinguished history, can be understood to correspond roughly to ‘representation’ in my sense … but I disavow any implied commitment either to a ‘picture theory’ of language (or ‘symbols’) or a ‘correspondence theory’ of truth, or to an ‘imitation theory’ of depiction.
— Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 3.

T ransient, stochastic, ambient qualities don’t get explicit treatment in Walton’s book, ‘Mimesis’. But some of the examples he uses to illustrate some of his arguments do have those qualities. Just have to extrapolate a little bit; read between the lines.

I f a piece of music is ambient and aleatoric, it’s impossible to ‘know the piece well’ in Walton’s sense. The stochastic performance-time indirection inherent in transient configurations of listeners and passers-by in the performance space preempts listeners’ forming any expectations—other than maybe expecting nothing in particular, or expecting, say, to be surprised by unpredictable rhythmic and harmonic/timbral textures and chance interactions between the text and the music. Lisa and the chamber artists place you in a state of persistent anticipation and collaborative mimesis ...

A ny ‘non-figurative’ or ‘non-objective’ painting that is to be seen in some figure-ground will qualify [as representational]. So, probably, will any design making use of what Gestalt psychologists call ‘closure’: such a design will mandate our imagining a square, for example, when it contains only hints of one. Jackson Pollock’s dripped and splashed paintings may turn out to generate fictional truths about [the processes of--] dripping and splashing. Most or even all music will likely have to be considered representational, for analogous reasons.
— Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 56.

C hance Encounter’ was co-conceived by Lisa with Susan Narucki. Lisa composed the piece for Susan and the New York-based Knights Chamber Orchestra. The overheard texts that were selected and transcribed may be ‘found’ objects, but they’re not ‘random’ ones—and their orchestration isn’t mechanical or haphazard or chaotic; they were selected in such a way so as to be capable of forming a coherent narrative arc and being emotionally parsed—by first-time participants/listeners as well as by those who have prior acquaintance with the work. The conceit is a non-figurative ‘ambience and transience as inescapable elements of the human condition’ that acknowledges and includes the space and the ad hoc, transient listeners and passers-by as quasi-performers.

B ut Bielawa clearly had a specific, coherent vision—one that’s beautifully and ably rendered here, with apt, if variable, emotional impact on virtually everyone present. The personnel for any particular performance can change; the sequence and timing can change; the ambient sounds are different each time; the visual and acoustic elements of the performance space are different each time—and all this ‘run-time indirection’ contributes to the representation ... of the human impossibility of mastering or controlling or insuring or preventing any aspect of life, or death. Linguists might term Lisa’s compositional grammar in this piece ‘agglutinative’, because of the multiple [transient] affixes/morphemes per phrase ...

A central thesis of Leonard Meyer’s ‘Emotion and Meaning in Music’ is that ‘affect or emotion is aroused when an expectation—a tendency to respond—activated by the musical stimulus, is temporarily inhibited or permanently blocked.’ (p. 31) The appreciation of music derives largely, he claims, from frustrations of expectations about how the music will proceed. In the case of a deceptive cadence, listeners expect the tonic to follow the dominant, and they experience ‘affect’ when it does not. This may be an accurate description of the experience of the first-time listener, but what about the listener who knows the piece well? … It is fictional that the listener expects the tonic, regardless of what she actually expects, and it is fictional that she is surprised to hear the submediant or whatever occurs instead. This makes music a ‘prop’ in a game of make-believe and, hence, representational in our sense, in much the way that non-figurative painting is representational.
— Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 262.

T he piece is nominally ‘in and about transient public space’, as Lisa puts it in her program notes. But it’s also and more deeply about our relationships with each other and with the world. The effect you experience when immersed in a performance of ‘Chance Encounter’ is one of intense ‘expectancy’. It does have a ‘beginning’, a ‘middle’, and an ‘end’. It is possible, were ‘Chance Encounter’ extended to several hours or more in length—like an ultra-long Morton Feldman or John Cage or Karlheinz Stockhausen experiment (instead of Chance Encounter’s 35 minutes, as-composed)—that the effect would wear off, or that the narrative arc would be lost—or that the cognitive and attentional demands, becoming after awhile unsustainable, would cause our emotional response to mutate and the meaning of the piece to shift.

B ut, as-composed, ‘Chance Encounter’ is just the right length—poignant, amusing, thought-provoking, uplifting, satisfyingly listenable. It precipitates something of a ‘tikkun olam’ / ‘repair the broken world, one shard at a time’ / ‘if not us, who? if not now, when?’ sizzle in the audience. The displacement of classically-trained musicians, out of venerable-dear-ossified concert halls and into up-close contact with broader society with more socioeconomic and ethnic diversity, like chamber music in bars or like some of what Greg Sandow exhorts us to do, to make serious music more vibrant and accessible.

I n Haydn’s String Quartet ‘The Bird’, op. 32, it is fictional that one hears the chirping of birds… A ‘depiction’, then, is a representation whose function is to serve as a ‘prop’ in rich and vivid perceptual games of make-believe.
— Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 296.

W hen music is representational, is it [necessarily] ‘depictive’? Music and painting appear to be alike in being ‘perceptual’ arts, in contrast to literature… If music is a perceptual art, won’t musical works [always] be ‘props’ in perceptual games? The answer is, often not… In the case of much ‘expressive’ music, it may be fictional not that one sees or hears or otherwise perceives external things, but that one experiences or is aware of (one’s own) feelings or emotions or sensations or sentiments or moods. The listener imagines experiencing excitement, passion, fervor, … It may be fictional of one’s actual awareness of auditory sensations that it is an awareness of such feelings. In place of fictional perception of external objects, then, we have fictional introspection or fictional self-awareness. If I am right, this is likely to be true even of such stalwarts of musical purity as Bach’s ‘Art of the Fugue’. And to whatever extent introspection is analogous to the ‘external’, it will be reasonable to expand our understanding of ‘depiction’ to include this.
— Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 334.

susan narucki, soprano
kyle armbrust, viola
mike atkinson, horn
christina courtin, violin
gareth flowers, trumpet
josh frank, trumpet
adam hollander, oboe
colin jacobsen, violin
eric jacobsen, cello
stephen menotti, trombone
alex sopp, flute
lance suzuki, flute.

Y ou can get a sense of the beauty of the indeterminacy that Lisa and her collaborators achieve by looking at this segment of ‘Chance Encounters’ from a 2007 performance, on YouTube:

Performing Bielawa ‘Chance Encounter’, East Broadway, NYC

G ame worlds are paramount in music in a way that they are not in painting. The music still qualifies as representational in our sense: its function is to serve as a ‘prop’ in the listeners’ [introspective fictions and] games. … Listening to music [and performing it--] is thus more like dreaming; one’s imaginative activity is largely solitary [even when it is done in the company of others]. You and I will not, fictionally, notice or learn about something and later compare … when we attend a concert together, we might explain to each other what fictionally we feel; this is like telling our dreams to each other at breakfast. And it can be fictional that we compare notes on what we feel when we hear [perform] the music. But we cannot fictionally compare what we feel about such-and-such a mutually observed event or situation or person. We end up talking about the music, rather than participating verbally together in a game of make-believe using the music as a prop.
— Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 337.

C hance Encounter’ songs and arias are made up entirely of speech overheard in transient public spaces including airports, sidewalks, streets, parks, cafes, buses and the subway. Bielawa blogged about her ‘eavesdropping existence’ during the period when she was composing ‘Chance Encounter’. You can read her blog here.

M usical depictions are ‘weak’ in point-of-view [compared to paintings or literature]. When sounds are depicted, very little is fictional, usually, with respect to the angle and distance… When it is fictional of the listener that she hears in the musical motifs a brook gurgling, is it fictional that she hears it from upstream or downstream, from the side or from above, from near or from afar?
— Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 340.

Y es, there is the composer’s/eavesdropper’s viewpoint—the issue of privacy. But it is not at all like capturing ‘found sound’ waveforms in the field, and then reproducing them in some mash-up, like some composers of electroacoustic would do. Nor is it like representational art that generifies and refers to extraneous utterances of anonymous any-woman/every-man. Nor are there any ‘mondegreens’ or misheard phrases, at least not in this ‘Chance Encounter’. Bielawa’s composerly role is not at all like a detached observer of a gurgling brook, rendering a representation of those sounds in music.

I nstead, it is musical anthropology in the era of Web 2.0—and the anthropologist is never ‘neutral’ or purely ‘reportorial’, something Margaret Mead used to point out. In ‘Chance Encounter’, anthropology becomes art… we become installation art, and participate in the uniqueness and immediacy of whatever, musically, is created. It reminds me of some of the classical music events I have attended in Second Life, where performers and other virtual attendees array themselves in unpredictable configurations, and ambient sounds and moving imagery are variable.

F rom what I have heard of it, ‘Chance Encounter’ does not seek to subvert the natural expressive properties of the vocal or instrumental parts into a chaotic process or renounce the traditional control that the composer over the material as deep or ‘radical’ indeterminists (like Cage) do. Lisa is not a ‘radical indeterminist’: sounds and utterances do not have equal value, nor is their placement in time or pitch or timbre fungible. Sounds are chosen according to aesthetic principles by the composer and by the performers, and the choices are guided by the narrative and other intentions that they share, with humanly-varying comprehension and faithfulness. So it seems to me that ‘Chance Encounter’ probably embodies an in-between stance, somewhere between ‘moderate indeterminacy’ and ‘moderate aleatorics’. (In ‘strong aleatorics’ or ‘radical aleatorics’, the indeterminacy is controlled more explicitly by the composer—usually by offering the performers a smaller number of possibilities to choose from, and usually not treating the transient performance space or the transient audience and passers-by as part of the acoustic ‘palette’.)

A ttend the event at the Whitney next Friday if you can. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it. Say ‘Hi’ to Lisa and Susan and the Knights or, alternatively, gift them with some ambient original art-utterance that’s worth their overhearing/eavesdropping.

I remember the following: four hundred drunken Finns swarming through the Soviet passport control [pushing and cursing in the Tallinn, Estonia, airport] ... their boots making the noise of dried blood... the metaphysical noise [can only, I think, be] called ‘the edge of Night’.
— Stephen Kuusisto, ‘Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening’, p. 180 (Kuusisto is blind)

DSM Auer, visiting Second Life Fontana Music Land, chamber music salon

DSM Auer, visiting Second Life Fontana Music Land, concert hall

D o Jackson Pollock’s [drip-and-splatter] paintings represent the actions by which they were made? Should we allow that ‘expressive’ music ‘represents’ emotions or the experiencing of emotions? Is expression a species of representation? Program music is representational, no doubt, but what about background/ambient music in film? How shall we classify Stravinsky’s ‘Pulcinella Suite’, Jasper Johns’s targets and flags, Duchamp’s ready-mades, or happenings? The existence of borderline or undecidable cases, even vast numbers of them, is not the problem. What is of concern is the fact that we cannot easily say why something does or does not count as representational.
— Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 2.

DSM miraculously finishes Jackson Pollock jigsaw puzzle, Christmas, 2008, while representational figures from Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol’ look on from atop the 1920 side-board