jwilzewske: rzewski

Showing posts with label rzewski. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Criminal Justice & Chamber Music: Rzewski’s ‘Coming Together / Attica’

A ttica… is … in … front … of … me.”
— Frederic Rzewski, Text of ‘Attica’ (remarks of prisoner upon being released from Attica prison, when asked what he thought of Attica).

I think the combination ... of age and the greater coming together ... is responsible for the speed ... of the passing time. it’s six months now ... and i can tell you ... truthfully ... few periods in my life have passed so quickly. i am in excellent ... physical ... and emotional ... health. there are doubtless ... subtle surprises ... ahead but i feel secure and ready.
as lovers will contrast their emotions in times of crisis, so am i dealing ... with my environment. in the indifferent brutality, incessant noise ... the experimental chemistry of food, the ravings ... of lost hysterical men, i can act with clarity and meaning. i am deliberate—sometimes even calculating—seldom employ histrionics except as a test of the reactions of others. i read much, exercise, talk to guards and inmates ... feeling for the inevitable direction of my life.
special love to flotsam + brood, charlene, lenny, jetsam.”
— Frederic Rzewski, Text of ‘Coming Together’ (Sam Melville, letter from Attica prison, addressed to ‘dear brother,’ dated 16-MAY-1970.)

T he performance last night at NEC was deeply moving. The performances of Jo Kondo’s ‘Falling’ and György Kurtág’s ‘Scenes from a Novel, Op. 19’ by [nec]shivaree members were spectacular—I may have time to post some detailed comments about those later this week.

B ut the rare performance of Frederic Rzewski’s 1972 composition, ‘Coming Together / Attica,’ by the ensemble Gradient Us completely captivated us—blew me away, in fact. It is a superb example of ‘activist’ music, a composition motivated by social issues (in this case the situation 40 years ago at Attica penitentiary in New York, and the ongoing impact of incarceration as a means of implementing criminal justice in societies).

T he two-movement piece is in canon form, (re-)animated by a 10-piece ensemble performing en-face with a male speaker positioned to the side of the ensemble. The speaker recites text from a letter written by one of the leaders of the uprising at Attica prison, and the timing and inflections of the Sprechstimme-like recitation are scored in precise, explicit detail by Rzewski.

Kathleen LaFleur – director, and tenor saxophone
David Prum – speaker
Alicia Mielke – flute
John Diodati – clarinet
Jay Hutchinson – bass clarinet
Jason Belcher – baritone horn
Kayleigh Miller – viola
Stefan Koim – acoustic guitar
David Goodchild – electric bass
Benjamin Vickers – conductor

T he 20-minute first movement is full of polyrhythms—aleatoric rhythms that are only periodically in-phase or synced with each other. It is like we are witnessing the irrepressible, impulsive inner workings of a mind—someone who has 9 different trains of thought that are coursing through the brain simultaneously.

I ndividual motifs are triggered, fire synapses, propagate neural pulses down axons, arrive at junctions with other nerves and synapses, in turn causing those nerves to fire. Once fired, a synapse is ‘refractory’ for a finite period of time, before it is once more able to receive a signal and fire again. Nervous system as musical canon! Autopoiesis of personhood by synapses alone! This is an anatomist’s ‘Visible Human’ transparent polystyrene-model conception of what goes on inside us. To any who would challenge what is portrayed here as ‘reductionist’, Rzewski seems to have the ready-made rebuttal: the literal working machine: how the mind thinks these thoughts; how the mouth is made to move; hear the words that come out.

T he phat electric bass insistently plunks its robotic, obsessive 16th-notes, running, running, running—to what destination? for what purpose?

T he speaker’s (Prum’s) inflections are exquisitely measured and spoken with conviction—delivered in a taut, emphatic manner that is meant as much to (1) reaffirm for the prisoner himself that he does believe the things being spoken as to (2) carve out and defend a psychological ‘territory’ that the prisoner can call his own. The loss of freedom and property-rights while in prison induces a hyper-awareness of the boundaries of self and non-self, a hyper-sensitivity to what [little] is ‘mine’. The vivid, dramatic depiction of the results of the retributive justice ‘violence-perpetrated-by-the-system-upon-the-offender’ is heart-wrenching, especially for those of us who have never been inside a prison, or have never been closely acquainted with anyone who has been incarcerated for a long time.

I ronic, lyrical major-key, warm timbres. Pneumatics of wind instruments. The baritone horn, evocatively/symbolically plugged-up with a giant red-and-white straight mute. The whole composition goes for your jugular, truly. It intends to make you care—make you.

T he 10-minute ‘Attica’, while structurally a simpler musical canon, is likewise a glimpse into the heart of the rehabilitated criminal whose text accompanies and was the motive for the music. Time is warped to super-slow speed as the speaker utters one word (‘Attica’) or syllable, pauses many seconds, utters another one (‘is’), resets to the beginning and re-utters a word that was said earlier and proceeds on (‘in’) in a festinating (‘front’), damaged way (‘of me’)—almost like a Parkinson’s type of dementia. The legato music and the major-key warmth are manifestations of the fact that whatever anger may have landed the person in prison is long-since extinguished. Equanimity has been achieved for this prisoner—This is not veiled residual rage we are hearing, but honest equanimity with the situation of having lost so much while in jail, and having so little now with which to remake a future upon release!—but at a terrible cost.

P henomenal! Art as therapy or as collective neutralization of past violence; as meditation on who the human beings are who are incarcerated, and why, and how they got that way; as a call to empathy; an exhortation to rethink what it is that we as a society are doing, really, through our correctional systems and policies, finding ways for effectively reducing recidivism and restoring dignity and some semblance of a desirable future to the lives affected.

U ndeniably, works like this are difficult for presenters to program: the subject material is awkward/disturbing, even though the music is accessible and attractive—poetic, lyrical, beautiful. The performance last night is ample evidence of salutary, humanizing effects that live performances of such works can have on us, as individuals and as a broader society. We should do this more often.

R zewski is a musician, not a pamphleteer. None but the naïve could imagine contemporary classical music as the lever for social upheaval. It was a teaching job that brought him to Belgium, not the state of the American nation. ‘No philosophy,’ he said recently. ‘I had a family to support.’ ... Once asked if commentators were right to call him a Marxist composer, he snorted, ‘Harpo or Groucho or what?’ The anarchic streak in his music is as much comic as it is political.”
— Mathew Gurewitsch, interview with Frederic Rzewksi, 27-MAR-2003.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday, May 15, 2009

Piano and Combinatorial Inspiration: Fred Rzewski

B esides his composerly skill, Rzewski is—] a granitically overpowering piano technician, capable of depositing huge boulders of sonoristic material across the keyboard without actually wrecking the instrument.”
— Nicolas Slonimsky, Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians.

T hose who have been criticizing contemporary music for lacking true melodic lines, may be consoled to learn that some composers now are very much concerned with melody. I don’t mean that they are writing romantic melodies, or popular melodies, or any other familiar kind of melodies, but they are certainly writing melodies. I heard two very good new pieces of this sort last week. One was Frederic Rzewski’s ‘Coming Together’.”
— Tom Johnson, Village Voice, 13-APR-1972.

T he piano music of Frederic Rzewski kept me company during the wee hours this morning.

[50-sec clip, David Jalbert, Fred Rzewski, ‘North American Ballads, No. 2, Which Side Are You On’, 1.6MB MP3]

F red’s music... often exhibits a chromatic background that intercalates with a diatonic contrapuntal background. Chromatic events are initiated by dyadic conflicts in the foreground—the interactions of chromatic and diatonic species. In his piano works he often manipulates a single pitch-class so as to bring about large-scale harmonic motions. Henry Burnett’s and Roy Nitzberg’s analyses resonate deeply, based on the evidence in Rzewski's writing. Which leads me to wonder whether Fred would feel that Henry’s and Roy's characterization of the compositional process rings true. My guess is yes.

I do not have the score (yet), so I rock the MP3 of Jalbert’s recording back and forth and pick off the notes, transcribe some of the figures...

H₀ + T_t I H₀ = A, for some t

where the hexachord H has a subscript denoting the order number associated with the hexachord’s first element, I is the inversion (permutation) operator, and T is the transposition operator with subscript t denoting the transposition number, any odd integer.

L acking 2s and 6s (whole-tones and tritones), the ‘6-20’ hexachord has a high degree of symmetry—and Rzewski resorts to it, maybe in part because of its mathematical/structural beauty and diverse possibilities. It [‘6-20’] is paradoxically ‘malleable/slippery’ and ‘crystalline/interlocked/solid’ at the same time. According to John Rahn’s calculations, ‘6-20’ maps into itself 3 times under transposition and 3 times under inversion: the prime form (0 1 4 5 8 9) duplicates itself under transposition at 0, 4, and 8; under inversion at 1, 4, and 9. In pitch-class content, there are only 4 distinct forms of ‘6-20’; only the whole-tone hexachord ‘6-35’ is more redundant. Under transposition or inversion it yields sets that are either completely identical or nonidentical—whence comes the slippery crystallinity of it.

S everal segments are F# minor, the Dominant of home key B minor. Patterns of transposition levels are generated either 2 semitones or multiples of 2 semitones apart—except for one, I think. The transposition levels convolve as modulo-2 multiples of semitones, in contrary motion within octaves. The distance between each transposition becomes smaller and smaller until it meets the middle of the octave, the tritone.

J albert’s account of the ‘North American Ballads’ adheres nicely to the political agenda set forth by Fred—not ‘Leftist’ so much as ‘Ethical-Humanist-Concerned-with-Justice’.

W hich side are you on’ is basically asking ‘Are you for war or against it?’ There are minimalist idioms in the middle section, with obsessive repetitions of the rhythms with slowly proliferating deviations/convergences, noted above. These reinforce the obstinacy of the political question, which demands to be answered. It won’t go away by ignoring it. But the majority of the piece is melodic, wry, playful, lyrical Rzewski.

O f course, besides these ‘North American Ballads’ (1978-9) many of Rzewski’s works over the years have been inspired by social and political themes—for example, ‘The People United Will Never Be Defeated!’; ‘Coming Together’, a setting of the letters of an inmate who was murdered at the State Prison at Attica at the time of the riots in 1971; ‘The Price of Oil’ and its questions about the legitimacy of societies’ priorities; ‘Les Moutons de Panurge’, about aggression and mutual destruction; ‘Antigone-Legend’, a meditation on principled opposition to the policies of the State; ‘Struggle’, whose text is taken from a letter written by Frederic Douglass in 1849, about the constant struggle necessary to achieve social reforms.

S tudied at Phillips Academy, Harvard and Princeton. Studied under Randall Thompson, Roger Sessions, Walter Piston, Milton Babbitt, and Luigi Dallapiccola. Professor of Composition at the Conservatoire Royal de Musique in Liège, Belgium, since 1977. Politically active always; honest as a matter of conscience and constitution. Belovèd in Boston and everywhere. Delightful sense of humor and irony, humane, wonderful teacher. I learn quite a lot before dawn, taking his music apart, putting it back together.