jwilzewske: resistance

Showing posts with label resistance. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Robert Taub: Aesthetics, Quantum Tunneling, and the Musical Path of Most Resistance

Mountain Paths of Greater and Lesser Resistance

R obert Taub, a Babbitt champion, played ‘Reflections’ (1974), a stunning work for piano and synthesized tape, and ‘Canonical Form’ (1983), a seminal piano work in which contrapuntal lines get put through innumerable combinations and permutations. Yet on the surface, the piano piece captivates with its bold shifts of mood and texture: incisive and clipped one moment, delicate and pensive the next.”
— Anthony Tommasini, NYT, 12-MAY-2006.

I recently heard a portion of Robert Taub’s account of Beethoven’s Sonata in F minor, Op. 2, No. 1, on NPR’s Morning Edition program while in the car, on my way driving to work. Robert Taub is a Princeton- (class of 1977) and Juilliard-trained American pianist known for his performance of contemporary classical music. He has performed and recorded many of the works of Babbitt, Powell, Persichetti, and Brümmer—as well as Beethoven, Scriabin, and others. Robert Taub was Artist-in-Residence at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study from 1994 through 2000. Robert Taub appeared in November 2005 with Rob Kapilow at the Folly Theater in Kansas City on the Friends of Chamber Music’s ‘What Makes It Great?’ series. And I had heard him play many years ago, when Taub was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. But I have not heard him perform live for a long while. Hearing him on the radio prompted me to revisit Taub’s recordings and try to understand why I admire his playing so much.

M y conclusion is that, while he creates an illusion of relative ease, Robert does not take any ‘easy’ routes—not in the Sessions or Babbitt, and not in the Beethoven. In fact, he seems always to cleave to paths less traveled. He takes the ‘path of most resistance’, not the ‘path of least resistance.’

W hy? I would ask Robert if I get the opportunity. But for now, and in view of the previous post’s reflections on Andrew Armstrong’s playing, I think the reason—for Robert, for Andrew, for many others—has to do with personal temperament and avidity for risk, and with personal motivations and how music comes to be a prominent part of one’s life. After all, this playing is not a ‘job’. Artistic integrity is not about free-will, choosing, and then cohering with one’s choice—as if one could simply decide what one is or could be, pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps, and become that. Instead, it’s about discovery—of the truth in the music, and of one’s own ‘chops’—and acceptance of what one has been given or what one has found out.

In his ‘Principia Ethica,’ G. E. Moore asserted that the property ‘Good’ is simple, indefinable, and non-natural [timeless]. Good has an immediacy and immanence that are impervious to analysis: the indisputable aesthetic unity of the fine wine in the glass. That’s what I hear in Taub’s playing, just as I hear it in Armstrong’s playing. The playing is beautifully crafted, yes, and with no unnecessary tension—only the amounts and types necessary to accomplish the aesthetic and expressive purposes. But there is their clear musical ‘vision’ and this burning desire to express it. The fact that the need to express it entails arduous treks up very high peaks—or tunneling straight through them—that’s just the way things are.

W hat is a ‘path of most resistance’? Well, the path of least resistance describes the physical or metaphorical pathway that provides the smallest resistance to forward motion by a given object or entity, among a set of alternative paths. In physics, the concept is often used to explain why an object or entity (electrons, for the flow of electricity) follows a given path. So the path of most resistance is the opposite: the one path among the set of alternatives that presents the maximum obstacle or energy requirement, the most improbable path.

But in quantum physics there is the possibility of ‘tunneling’, where particles behave in a probabilistic rather than deterministic manner. My impressions of Taub’s playing of Sessions or Babbitt are that he is engaging in quantum tunneling, phrase to phrase.

A n aphorism is not a mere fragment, a morsel of thought: it is a proposition which only makes sense in relation to the state of forces that it expresses, and which changes sense, which must change sense, according to the new forces which it is capable of attracting.”
— Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche & Philosophy, p. xiii.

T aub plays Babbitt as though the phrases were quantum Nietzschean aphorisms—a totally different way of doing philosophy, and a totally different way of doing aesthetics: this is maybe the difference in how Taub enters into this music so beautifully, how he makes it his own.”
— DSM.

In a manner reminiscent of Jacques Lacan’s, Jacques Derrida’s or Hélène Cixous’s sense of ‘performing,’ Taub’s playing is like a text that resists stereotypical acts of reading by acting-out his own idiomatic identity. Some may think his taste ‘out-of-step’ with conventional wisdom, but that waywardness and deviance are the basis for his originality and timeless [non-natural] beauty. He’s a musicians’ musician, but one whose diverse, novel, and sometimes dissident styles of playing are accessible to almost anyone with the inclination to listen.

W hat else? There is an innocence about his tone and his phrasing that belies his scholarship and worldliness. There is no law of physics against what he is about to do, and so he does it. Whatever is not forbidden is permitted! A barrier looms in front of him—a musical passage that presents formidable technical challenges—and quantum tunneling kicks in. Suddenly, he is on the other side.

His pedaling technic, among other things, is noteworthy. Listening to it, I was led to revisit the papers that Bruno Repp at Yale published about ten years ago. In that research, Bruno studied conservatory pianists and the biomechanics of their pedal depressions and pedal releases as a function of tempo and musical style. Excerpts from Beethoven and Brahms sonatas were a particular focus of Repp’s research.

Repp found that there was no stable or consistent aspect of personal pedaling style that generalized among the pianists he studied. There was no constant phase-relationship between the periodic key depressions and either peda depressions or pedal releases, nor was there a consistent delay of pedal actions relative to manual actions.

But pedal-change time (PCT) can’t decrease indefinitely as tempo increases. And the kinematics of hand and foot actions changes with global changes in tempo—the velocity of pedal depressions and releases tends to increase with tempo, and the depth of pedal depressions tends to decrease—so that motor delays (both absolute, in milliseconds, and relative, as a percentage of inter-onset interval (IOI) ) are a function of tempo.

Repp found that there were different individual tolerances for overlap between successive sonorities. Long PRT and long key overlaps result in more appealing legato and tend to be mastered relatively late in a pianist’s development. In terms of the neurophysiology, the longer these intervals are, the harder they are to control, according to Repp. But the skill to achieve long PRT and long key-pedal overlap enables elite pianists to systematically vary these times over wider and wider ranges to achieve their expressive purposes—one of the ‘secrets’ of elite legato technic that we hear in Taub’s playing—the Beethoven Sonata in F minor, Op. 2, No. 1, that I heard on the radio, for example.

T he sense of disappointment philosophers suffer from becomes the fundament of profoundly reformist religious and political philosophies called ideologies. Because ideologues radically underestimate the amount of value that is contained—that could be contained—by the world, they suffer from a deep-seated, ever-to-be-frustrated feeling that the world stands in need of a special kind of transformation, or that it must somehow be transcended if human life is to be made worth living. The unique feature of the sought-for change is that it depends on a thoroughgoing reconception of the world. Their thought is that, since the value of the things in the world as we presently conceive it to be is insufficient, we must conceive it wholly anew as the first step toward remaking it—if we are ever to discover the things that would give it sufficient value. Moore responds to this by arguing that such a reconception is not merely unnecessary and self-defeating, but the cause of great unhappiness. Whatever value is to be had by new things results from their being things human beings have known to be good from time immemorial. To try to make any of these things into something never before beheld is to try to make something into what it is not... Our attitude toward the [real things in the world in its current configuration] must then be one of inadvertent denigration rather than enjoyment.”
— Brian Hutchinson, G.E. Moore’s Ethical Theory, p. 172.

M oore’s argument for the indivisibility of Good leaves no room for regret upon the sacrifice of a smaller good for the sake of a greater good. More importantly, although his doctrine of organic unities leaves it open for him to say that the greatest of goods depends on something bad, this is a possibility he explicitly rejects. Immediately, this is suprising, as he finds tragedy—the artistic representation of suffering and evil—to be a very great good. But he maintains that the actions and emotions that art displays for our wonderment (in its presentation of the eternal struggle between good and evil) can rest on make-believe rather than reflect anything real... Moore’s thought is an exercise in the dialectic of innocence rather than of lost innocence itself.”
— Brian Hutchinson, G.E. Moore’s Ethical Theory, p. 175.

T o be completely innocent is to be unaware that there is any perspective or condition in opposition to which a case for innocence needs to be made—it is to be unaware even of the tricks of thought that lead the misguided to deny innocence. It follows then that anyone who attempts to diagnose those tricks of thought in order to make the case for innocence cannot be completely innocent. But if only someone who is no longer innocent can make the case for innocence, then to make the case is to guarantee its defeat. The possibility of innocence as a permanent condition of life cannot be said. But because it could only be done against a backdrop that is impossible, it also cannot be shown. For it even to occur to someone to try to state Moore’s [theory of innocence], he must consider that a simple and easily recoverable misunderstanding lies behind the thought of those who see the world as standing in need of redemption. The impulse to see the world falsely ... must be of the depth of a simple arithmetical mistake.”
— Brian Hutchinson, G.E. Moore’s Ethical Theory, p. 176.

Robert Taub recording of Scriabin sonatas

Sunday, March 4, 2007

Schubert’s Polyphony and Non-accidental Accidentals: Peaceful Resistance & Portato

T o be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history, not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. And if we do act—in however small a way—we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of ‘presents’, and to live now—as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us—is itself a marvelous victory.”

— Howard Zinn, The Optimism of Uncertainty, The Nation, 02-SEP-2004

Schubert Sonata No. 21, 4th movement, m.85-90

CMT: Look at this! The fourth movement of Schubert’s Sonata No. 21 in B-flat. This polyphonic pattern has the fixed position distributed to a double-note and the playing voice distributed to the other three fingers as a melodic figure. It transforms into a delicate and ethereal texture.

DSM: And look back in the first movement. Schubert’s Romanticism here is a harmonic proposition: the entire theme is played out over a dominant prolongation. And his Romanticism is also a motivic proposition: the portato notes (portato, notes against resistance, caressing notes) headed always for the dissonance/resolution. The portato is played by sounding the note for about half of the note's duration; the other half of the duration is to be treated as a rest. A portato is notated by placing a slur above the desired notes which themselves are written with "staccato" markings. The musical heaves and sighs (the crescendos and descrescendos) contribute to this . . .

CMT: The ongoing crescendo meets an “accident” of a portato. And, in place of B-flat major diatonic tones, we get the “accidental” E-natural in bar 11 and 37 (bars 136 and 162 on the repeat). Except that the “mistake” is really beautiful. It’s no kind of accident at all, in the normal sense. It’s a wayward deviation from the sunny path. Comical almost, in the way that an infant can be comical. It’s not a self-conscious E-natural against the F. The E-natural is just straying from the trail a little bit. It doesn’t threaten; it doesn’t demand attention. It’s just a sweet little E-natural on a leash.

DSM: Let’s rip an MP3 sample of it and edit the MP3 sample in MPtrimPRO. MPtrimPRO has a feature that lets you easily and accurately set the ‘begin’ and ‘end’ frame for creating your MP3 clip by using the position of the piece in WinAmp. You pause WinAmp where you want to set the ‘beginning’ of your clip, and then you go to MPtrimPRO (the ‘How much do you want to trim?’ form) and click on the ‘W’ in the ‘begin’ part of the form. Then you fast-forward in WinAmp to where you want to set the ‘end’ of your clip, and go to MPtrimPRO and click on the other ‘W’ in the ‘end’ part of the form. If you want to check to make sure that you set the frame the way you want it, just click on the play-arrow in the MPtrimPRO form and listen to the frame, delimited according to the settings you just created. If you need to adjust the settings you can do it from MPtrimPRO directly (using the time form controls) or from WinAmp. It’s possible to make nice MP3 illustrations for teaching or other purposes pretty easily in this way, taking advantage of the interoperability between MPtrimPRO and WinAmp. Here’s a clip of the bars we were just talking about:

CMT: We also see in this first Molto Moderato movement of D960 an example of how Schubert handles recapitulations. The recapitulation of the phrase you just cited occurs in bar 352.

DSM: And there are more chromatic “accidents,” too. The B-sharp in the left hand in bar 253. The dark, passing intrusion is like a musical interjection. Within a predominantly sunny B-flat major work, it’s a reference to a dissonant inflection from some other narrative, some other piece of music. This is late in Schubert’s life. The B-sharp accidental is a tiny commentary on how Life goes—dissonances, mess and all!

CMT: But bar 11 and bar 253 are “benign” compared to the “accident” in bar 464! The crescendo-decrescendo on the G that looks like a resolution of the F-sharp just dissolves. The resolution dissolves. It lets us know how tenuous and fleeting any security we may have can be! The F-sharp is no ordinary “accidental”. It is an emblem of the uncertainty of the human condition. Yes, it passes. But its effect is corrosive!

DSM: And, in the second movement—in the Andante Sostenuto—look at the B-sharp in bar 32:

and its restatement in bar 121:

CMT: The F-doublesharp in the left hand in bar 121 lends a bit of solace to it. The effect is like a kindly grandparent telling us that things will be alright! Doesn’t it seem that way to you?

DSM: Yes. But it depends on your fingering, I think. The Nineteenth Century fingering systems—Kullak’s The Aesthetics of Pianoforte Playing, Liszt’s Technical Exercises for Pianoforte, Pischna’s Technical Studies, Czerny’s, and Dohnanyi’s Essential Finger Exercises—are now supplemented by Tansescu’s treatise, which is recently translated. Dragos Tanasescu applies mathematical permutation formulas to technical patterns of keyboard performance, to devise polyrhythmic patterns to be practiced between voices in polyphonic exercises and new transposition alternatives. The permutations each have a somewhat different color.

CMT: While Tansescu’s intent was predominantly a pedagogical one, the effect of examining the many permutations is to (re-)discover the many nuances of views and attitudes that different fingerings can lend to a passage.

DSM: Charles Fisk explains how Schubert’s views and attitudes toward his own life may well have shaped his music in the years shortly before his death. Fisk’s book on Schubert is based on evidence from the composer’s original correspondence, his song texts and his written letters, and from his vocal and instrumental compositions. Noting extraordinary aspects of tonality, structure, and gestural content, Fisk argues that Schubert was trying to relieve his sense of exile. He was also, according to Fisk, trying to cope with his sense of mortality—his anticipation of an imminent death from syphilis. Fisk performs careful analyses of the structure and correspondences in the Schubert works that he explores. He identifies in them some detailed musical narratives that relate to the themes of mortality, alienation, hope, and desire. Schubert’s views of these likely informed his composing.

CMT: Besides that, it’s important to consider the political situation in Vienna late in Schubert’s life. Vienna was not a sweet sylvan place of gardens and waltzes at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th. The peacetime was filled with repression and censorship, and Vienna was a city where the safest thing was to stay inside. There was an aura of fear, as we see in Erikson’s book. Unlike his Beethoven, who moved in higher social circles and was relatively immune to political pressure, Schubert occupied a middle-class station in life and had to be careful. But music was maybe the safest of the arts, because, given its abstractness, it was impossible to prove that a composer was expressing subversive political ideas in a particular piece. Vienna essentially became a police-state during Schubert’s adulthood. Schubert’s posture as a musician is, in some ways, not unlike that of Howard Zinn as a historian . . . Schubert’s accidentals are intimations of moral intercession; acknowledgments of principled resistance . . .

DSM: Several Schubert biographies make some note of Schubert’s self-destructive behavior and his ambivalent sexuality, as well as his growing isolation and anxiety in his long final illness. These factors all contribute to D960, the Sonata No. 21 in B-flat that he wrote just a few months before his death in 1828. The subdued, yearning inwardness is other-worldly in spots. The opening theme is grand and resigned. But the rumbling trill in the left hand disrupts the serenity. You can feel Death hovering nearby. The slow movement, with its turbulent middle section, seems like a fare-thee-well gesture. Buchbinder’s varied touch and color are perfectly suited to this Sonata. His phrasing is clear but fluid, like that of a consummate storyteller. He makes the fingering complexities in this piece appear effortless.

CMT: Well, maybe not effortless—but more like the blazing ember of a young person dying of cancer. There is an energy that Buchbinder draws upon that animates this piece in a manner that suggests Schubert himself in his last months or weeks. Very convincing. It is as though Schubert knows what is coming, knows the bad end that will soon befall him, but finds the energy to defy it—to stave it off for awhile. Buchbinder’s interpretive liberties feel just right, and his expressiveness is deeply felt.

DSM: He takes some liberties, true, but they are never sentimental ones. His rendering of the first movement of D960 is flowing and has a certain puissance but at the same time manages to be serene, dreamlike, somehow above-the-world.

CMT: The second movement is slow but cohesive. ‘Collected’ if you are a horse person. The scherzo is lightning fast, but it remains light and crisp; it is virtuosic without drawing attention to its virtuosity. In Buchbinder’s hands, the finale is also nimble but never rushed. His performance was superb throughout, but the Schubert is what really brought the audience to its feet!

DSM: The challenges of Schubert’s music to interpreters are many, both technically and emotionally. Schubert once exclaimed, “Das Zeug soll der Teufel spielen!” (‘Such stuff the Devil should play!’) when converging on the finale of the Wanderer Fantasy. The D960 has something of that in it.