jwilzewske: spirituality

Showing posts with label spirituality. Show all posts

Thursday, December 13, 2012

Beiser/Harrison/YPC: Joyous Time Loops, Just Intonation

T his is the basic premise of the Transient Glory® project: that a child’s voice is a unique instrument during that fleeting time between childhood and after-childhood... and that this instrument can tackle the most challenging and uncompromising music written for them. Children leave something behind [as they grow up and leave childhood]. I don’t know what it is, but children are able to communicate in a way we adults have forgotten how to do.”
— Francisco Núñez, YPC, 09-MAY-2011.

T he entirety of ‘Time Loops’ is performed using ‘just intonation’ tuning, based on whole number proportions. With ‘Time Loops’ I am demonstrating the simpler and more harmonious aspects of just intonation. As a result the tunings on the CD don’t push boundaries per se, but rather they sound clearer and more direct than the normal equal-tempered scale that is used in most Western music.”
— Michael Harrison, 23-AUG-2012.

T he new recording ‘Time Loops’ is a superb stimulus to joy and reflection. Meditation to bring peace at this or any time of year.

I n concert performances, cellist Maya Beiser plays the lead part live accompanied by pre-recorded, digitally-processed tracks forming an auto-ensemble of many sonic layers. Multi-media artist Bill Morrison created a film for ‘Time Loops’ that incorporates archival footage and CGI images that illustrate the movement of the planets, celestial mechanics mathematically conforming to the integer ratios of the music’s just intonation. Composer Michael Harrison performs the piano part with sensitivity and feeling. Even amidst the complexity and conflict of everyday life, we rediscover here the beauty and solace that are immanent in the natural world—the patterns and harmonics of a clockwork Universe whose physics was first formalized mathematically by Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and others—and rediscover that our own homo sapiens processes are as real and natural and immutable as those.

T he last and largest-scale work on the CD, ‘Hijaz,’ was composed by Harrison for Beiser and the Young People’s Chorus of New York City under the direction of Francisco Nuñez, as well as composer and percussionist Payton MacDonald on tabla and shaker. The text combines a prayer written by Harrison with spoken South Indian rhythmic syllables, which merge with the choral textures to evoke a sense of joy and unity and transcendence—deeply fitting for this holiday season.

E specially vivid and poignant are the perspectives of the school-age voices in the choir (see blockquote above). Wise beyond their years; empowered and uplifted by the music. To me, joy is mainly what music is for, and people should, through writing and performing music, feel joyous and acquire a better ability to create more joy. This CD—the compositions and performances—is first-class evidence supporting this idea. Evidence, too, of how crucially important opportunities are for kids to learn and perform music—before adulthood overtakes them as it does us all. Not a nostalgia for a childlike simplicity, but instead a meditation on clarity, on earnestness, on wonder, on the youthful drive to penetrate the truth of things, on receptiveness to joy.

[50-sec clip, Beiser/Harrison/YPC, ‘Hijaz’; (track 8), 2012, 1.4MB MP3]

M y intention was to invoke a sense of pilgrimage, either to a wondrous or holy place, or, metaphorically, to a sacred place within each of us. The chorus is the soul of the journeyer... The pulsing rhythms trace our footsteps, and those of our camels, as we make our way on the path of self-discovery.”
— Michael Harrison, 23-AUG-2012.

T he recent release of ‘Time Loops’ coincided with the first productions of Maya Beiser’s ‘ELSEWHERE: A CelloOpera,’ created by Maya with director Robert Woodruff, composers Missy Mazzoli and Eve Beglarian and writer Erin Cressida Wilson. For more information, visit www.elsewherecelloopera.com.

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Experiencing ‘Map of Rain Hitting Water’ in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy

W   hen at last Justine arrives, he’s at the piano
     the hammers strike and rise
with his fingers, and the pedal’s damp
   shifting carries through the instrument
as waves echo through the frame of a ship...
Now he thinks perhaps the music’s
More like a map of rain hitting water—
He’s moving closer to her without moving;
And how wonderful to be held from her
   at last by nothing but the song's duration—”
  — Wayne Miller, ’What Night says to the Empty Boat’, p. 73.

I ’d first listened to Mara Gibson's new 16:30 work commissioned by Mark Lowry of newEar Contemporary Music Ensemble in July. The DVD has Mark performing vibraphone, log drum, woodblock, gong, tam-tam, songbird whistle, cymbal, and miscellaneous percussion, accompanied by video imagery and film by Caitlin Horsmon. Bob Beck rendered a high level of engineering and production values achieved in this recording.

T he beauty of the chromatic intoning of vibraphone, punctuated by tolling woodblock, drum, and, less frequently, other instruments captured my interest from the first listening. The glisses and pitch-bent post-processed sounds of the vibraphone acoustically paralleled the imagery, the lateral motion of water in the foreground and in the distance; the water droplets in air, falling under gravity in parabolic arcs; the globules of water separating from a stream; the intercalating pastel cloud layers.

B ut now several months later—having just last week returned to the midwest after a period at our home on the East Coast, and having driven through some of the areas of hurricane-caused power outages and natural devastation—these textures and narrative arcs of ‘Map of Rain Hitting Water’ evoke different meanings for me. The watery surfaces now seem ominous and obscure what lies beneath.

T he reflections imply sky and sun, but these seem untrustworthy. The eddies and vortices imply structure and hidden currents, turbulence: the violence and indifference of Nature to humanity.

T he speed of the current makes abundantly clear how rapidly we will be swept away, annihilated, pointlessly. The accelerando/ritardando phrasing imparts a large-scale 2+ minute hypermeter to the piece.

N o animals or other sentient creatures are seen anywhere in Horsmon’s imagery here... bulk matter only, liquid and air. The abruptly changing frame-rate... declares a capriciousness of our frame of perception, together with Nature’s propensity to precipitous, emergent change, against which our human wishes and needs are respectively futile and irrelevant.

T here is midway through the film a montage of stop-action stills, with different transparency/saturation settings, calling into question what is motion. It brings to mind horror film sequences built up out of successions of freeze-frame stills.

T he very high-speed video of the water droplets, together with digitally-stretched contrast and/or edge-sharpening, gives heightened perception of the separateness of the individual [droplets].

W e have here a sort of ‘video-monitor-as-painter’s-canvas’ effect... a palimpsest of successive masks and over-writing of previous images and surfaces.

T he film draws our attention to the very thinness and 2-D nature of our existence in the biosphere, between the sky and the depths of water.

I n fact, most of the film is of deep water: the first 5:45 is sky; second 6:00 is water; third 4:45 is water hurled into sky—with gradual transitions between these segments.

T he piece conveys feelings of loneliness and alienation that arise from our understanding that we are alone in the universe and insignificant in its workings. Underneath the performer’s punctuated observations and soliloquy about fate and the stream of events that occupies our attention while we are alive is a certain forboding, a fear of nothingness.

T hat we are in some inescapable way alienated from Nature is an old concept, going back at least to Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18th Century. It is also a notion that coheres with our current environmental problems, insofar as our estrangement from Nature involves a hubris that forecloses upon developing an awareness and regard for how we depend upon Nature, in such a way that we would stop harming Nature.

R elinquishing whatever agency I have in the presence of the bulk matter around me reveals my beholdenness to the agency of other humans who are living now and who will take care of me in my dying days and who will outlive me, and the susceptibility of my remains and the residue of my life’s work to the agency of all creatures and natural processes that persist beyond my tiny lifetime.

T he harsh contrast and unblinking lens of the camera—together with the continuous, unflinching sound of the music—announce the abject hopelessness of our achieving any anonymity in the flesh, or participating in any genuine reciprocity with Nature.

S uch existential worries are absent when reciprocal trans-corporeality involves the definitely spiritual, or “more than human”, or involves an ambiguity or reversibility afforded by the hardly-human-at-all, or as-minimally-human-as-possible, as in Wilderness or Zombieness.

O ne can make some sense then of this piece’s assertion that we might be estranged from the flesh without that meaning either that such estrangement puts us really outside the flesh, or that landscapes including sky and water are themselves not fleshy. We are estranged, every bit as much as sky and water are patently fleshy.

T his is a superb composition, an excellent film, a beautiful performance, an excellent recording—sufficient to propel an evening’s meditation and beyond.

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Ingrid Stölzel’s Explorations of Time and Identity

A fter picking the title ‘For the Time Being,’ I realized just how often I use this expression in my daily life. When we say these words we imply that whatever state we are in or whatever action we are performing is temporary and merely a fleeting moment. In reality, of course, all states and actions are temporary, and our perception of permanence is an illusion. ‘For the Time Being’ is the newest in a series of works examining this concept of passing time.”
— Ingrid Stölzel.

I didn’t measure how long I was doing mouth-to-mouth breathing, but I remember thinking during the last several minutes that [the plight of this lifeless, transverse-presenting, APGAR-score-zero newborn] was hopeless. But I persisted [thinking that my doing so was, for the time being, at best ridiculous and, at worst, wrong or disrespectful of the natural fact]. And I was finally rewarded when Anna MacRae of Middle River, Victoria County, came to life.”
— C. Lamont MacMillan, Memoirs of a Cape Breton Doctor.

I ngrid Stölzel’s new composition for flute, soprano saxophone and piano offers great beauty for the listener, plus intriguing expressive and technical challenges for each of the performers. The flute and soprano sax parts are balanced partners, while the piano undertakes an impetuous, omniscient-narratorly, cantus firmus role, with occasional upper-register tolling that explicitly marks the passage of time.

F or the Time Being’ was a commmission by the Greenbrook Ensemble in Nashville. The work that resulted from their commission is a phenomenally beautiful and poignant addition to the trio repertoire for flute, soprano sax, and piano: a 7-min fantasie, in a Walter Piston-esque, Bohuslav Martinů-esque neoclassicist modal-chromatic idiom, symbolically-charged with repetition in both rhythm and pitch, including pedal points. The work is contrapuntal, highly chromatic.

I ts initial lyrical, light and graceful lento is seeded with contemplative rubato, becoming adagio and intermittently more animated/incisive—embodying the transitoriness/impermanence suggested by Stölzel’s remark in the blockquote above. Flute and soprano sax parts are intertwined, coalescing into close harmony and then diverging again. The work embodies an intense chromatic saturation, as contrasted with more ‘open’ diatonic style. The result is subtle: acutely self-aware but never self-absorbed.

I relistened to the Colorado State YouTube video several times (vid embedded below), capturing timings for the woodwinds. The rhythmic interplay between flute and soprano sax exhibits a fractional structure as a function of frequency that is close to a 1/f relationship, intermediate between uncorrelated ‘white’ noise and strongly-correlated Brownian noise. (An important property of 1/f timeseries structure is that it correlates logarithmically with past values. The last 3 notes, say, have equal influence on what comes next as the last 30 or the last 300.)

A nother feature of 1/f or “nearly-1/f” structure is ‘self-similarity’, which means that the smaller-scale details resemble coarser features that are higher in the hierarchy of structures that comprise the piece. Self-similarity of musical structures has fascinated composers long before fractal and multi-scale mathematics was known. For example, Bach sometimes used the same pitch contour in his fugues in the slow cantus firmus as in the fast motoric figures. So, too, with this new Ingrid Stölzel piece.

S tölzel changes meter many times in the course of the short piece. The continual shifts of meter and tempo are a most noticeable aspect of the work’s complexity, and of its perspective on personhood, self-awareness, and awareness of Time.

T he piece is constructed on a series of dyadic conflicts: episodic expansion/contraction metaphors, mainly involving the flute and soprano sax. Neither wind player can escape or circumvent these chromatic inflections, but must make believable decisions about how to use timbre/spectra to express the conflicts and their resolution. Am I azure or lavender? Was I light turquoise or dark robin’s-egg blue? Remembering/forgetting? Separating/reuniting? Living/dying?

S tölzel meditates... on the socio-historical reality of what it is to be a person, situated in Time and lacking any guarantees; on the connectedness of how we conceive of ourselves, in the context of yesterday, today, tomorrow; on our uncertainty about how much time we have (or don’t have, in the case of those of us who have a highly-uncertain and likely very-much-shortened future due to chronic, life-threatening illness). Martin Heidegger, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Paul Ricoeur are among the philosophers who explored this terrain in the 20th Century. (Links to works by other, more recent authors appear below, for your interest.)

I n other words, the trio is a delicate balance of love and horror—we create something meaningful that soon slips from our grasp; we inevitably lose our loved ones or they lose us; we cling futilely, to hopes that no longer have any reasonable basis. Life: so brutal, so unreliable. Life: the only good thing that we have, for the time being.

I n any instant the Sacred may wipe you [out] with its finger. In any instant, the bush may burst into flames, your feet may rise, or you may see a bunch of souls in a tree. In any instant you may avail yourself of the power to love your enemies; to accept failure, slander, or the grief of loss; or to endure torture.”
— Annie Dillard.

I ngrid Stölzel has written for ensembles such as newEar contemporary chamber ensemble, NOISE/San Diego New Music, California E.A.R. Unit, Adaskin String Trio, Erato Chamber Orchestra, Allegrésse, and Synchronia, among others. She is the winner of the 2010 NewMusic@ECU Festival Orchestra Composition Competition, the 2009 Cheryl A. Spector Prize, the 2007 UMKC Chamber Music Composition Competition and the 2006 PatsyLu Prize awarded by the International Alliance of Women in Music. Stölzel is a frequent guest composer and her music has been performed at music festivals and conferences including the 2011 Festival of New American Music, 2011 International Alliance of Women in Music Congress, 2011 New Music Festival X, IC[CM] 2010 International Conference on Contemporary Music in Spain, NACUSA 2010 National Conference, soundOn Festival of Modern Music, 30th Sacramento State Festival of New American Music, Oregon Bach Festivals, Ernest Bloch Festivals, Women in New Music Festival, Chamber Music Conference of the East, Otterbein Contemporary Music Festival, and Indiana State Contemporary Music Festival. Stölzel received her doctorate in composition at the University of Missouri Conservatory of Music and Dance in Kansas City, where she studied with James Mobberley, Chen Yi, and Zhou Long. She holds a Master of Music in composition from the Hartt School of Music in Hartford, Connecticut. Stölzel was a guest composer at the 30th Sacramento State Festival of New American Music. She has done artist residencies at the Ragdale Foundation and the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida.
Ingrid is a native of Germany and has lived in the U.S. for the past 20 years.

F or the Time Being’ will be performed in Kansas City in a concert by newEar Ensemble on Saturday, 11-FEB. Go, hear!

I f the muscle can feel repugnance, there is still a false move to be made;
If the mind can imagine tomorrow, there is still a defeat to remember;
As long as the self can say ‘I,’ it is impossible not to rebel;
As long as there is an accidental virtue, there is a necessary vice:
And the garden cannot exist; the miracle cannot occur.
The garden is the only place there is, but you will not find it
Until you have looked for it everywhere and found nowhere that is not a desert.
The miracle is the only thing that happens, but to you it will not be apparent
Until all events have been studied and nothing happens that you cannot explain.
And Life is the destiny you are bound to refuse until you have consented to die.”
— W.H. Auden, ‘For the Time Being’.

Aries Composers’ Festival at Colorado State University Center for the Arts, 07-NOV-2011.

B eran and others comprehend musical self-similarity as a problem of engineering. In contrast, investigations that consider its cultural significance within a certain historical tradition, are very rare (e.g. Kieran 1996, Yadegari 2004). In a brief article published in 1995, Alexander Koblyakov throws a first light on this matter, making a basic statement about the study of musical self-similarity, noticing that [in principle] ‘there is a problem[atic] situation... It is necessary to include the perception (mentality) factor in a considered phenomenon of self-similarity.’ Unfortunately, most of the literature on the subject disregards this sharp observation.” — Gabriel Pareyon, 2011.

Saturday, January 14, 2012

Gene Pritsker: William James and Pluralistic Consciousness Beyond the Margin

T he new recording of Gene Pritsker’s ‘William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience: A Chamber Opera’ is beautiful—musically and dramatically.

W illiam James was fascinated by what he termed our ‘selective interest’—our harmoniously adjusting ourselves to things seen and unseen. In the sea of evolving, conflicting stimuli in which we are immersed, we pay attention to a small subset of things... mostly things that match our predispositions and expectations: our interests and beliefs. A renowned psychologist and pragmatist and empiricist philosopher, James in the late 19th Century set about to assemble evidence that could reveal whether and how experiences that are gated by interests and beliefs in things unseen can catalyze positive changes in people—especially when people attach symbolic or emotional/spiritual importance to the experiences. “Explore the peculiarities of this attitude... All our attitudes... are due to the objects of our consciousness... the things we believe to exist. We feel a presence in the room... definitely localized... coming suddenly, and suddenly gone... I felt myself to be the less ‘real’ of the two...”

I n VRE (p. 55), James says “so far as religious conceptions are able to touch this reality-feeling [of objective presence of the Other] they would be believed in spite of criticism, even though they might be so vague and remote as to be almost unimaginable... even though they might be such non-entities in point of ‘whatness’...”

Gene Pritsker, guitar
Greg Baker, guitar
Dan Barrett, cello
Larry Goldman, contra bass
Lynn Norris, soprano
Chanda Rule, mezzo soprano
Marc Molomot, tenor
Charles Coleman, baritone
Chester Layman, narrator
Kim Pritsker, narrator

D elicate, taut, and incisive writing. Beautiful interplay between instruments and voices, between the rhythm/melodies/harmonies and the text. ‘Synaptic’ guitar picking; a really elegant solo improvisation on Track 5.

T he guitars-cello-bass instrumental ‘presence’ pervades the whole—this fact plus the fact that the voices in the foreground are so crisp and tangible make it seem as though the instrumental parts must collectively be ‘God’. But then the timbre of the voice changes, and I’m doubting that my sense of that was right. Maybe this is sonic evidence for some sort of pantheism? Everything is divine... everything that’s not being deceptive, anyway.

P ritsker’s ‘William James’s VRE’ is not a contemporary event-centric historical opera per se (not a “headline opera” about a famous historical figure and a famous moment in history, a la John Adams’s ‘Doctor Atomic’, on J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project to create the atomic bomb). Sometimes event-centric works feel too self-referential—‘program music’ or a suite of ad hoc ‘concept’ compositions that are too overtly seeking adherents.

T his chamber opera is not like that. It’s far too unpredictable! It does, though, share with historical operas an attractive ‘topicality’ in terms of (a) dramatizing interrelated subjects (spirituality; religion; multiculturalism; tolerance) that have plenty of currency these days and (b) grounding these in the life of one well-known historical protagonist.

I really admire the judicious excerpting of William James VRE texts for this libretto! Attention to the unbiddenness of how we recall things: verses, that bubble up in our minds, contrary to our ambitions or plans.

M any passages from James’s book (VRE) are dense and literary: the sentence structure was meant to be read by readers of 100+ years ago. When spoken aloud in this opera, these words engage our minds in provocative ways that highlight the finiteness of our attention as well as the alienness of the century-ago culture that produced the notions in VRE. Our relation to the music that is being performed while the voice-over narration is going on is altered, far more than happens in ‘conventional’ opera.

W hat’s more, some of the narrators/texts are more ‘reliable’ as narrators than others. Each is clearly earnest in his/her own way, and yet some of them make statements that are more accessible or less accessible to us, given our own beliefs and style and inclinations/disinclinations to share our feelings in ways that resemble what the narrator is doing. Listening to these different narrators/singers, we’re led to recognize more of what we ourselves are doing: selectively filtering, giving and getting, allowing and forbidding.

T he opera and the ‘arc’ of the 8 tracks of the recording ably convey dramatic tension of setting out on a journey to explore the diversity of spirituality; of encountering many instances and types of experience; of empirically assessing each of these; and finally integrating and summarizing what we’ve found out.

T he 43-min performance time is just sufficient to develop the ideas and the ambience and characterizations, and bring things in for a satisfying “landing”.

T he sound has warmth and intimacy throughout, perfectly matched to the subject and content. Beautiful performances by all, plus excellent engineering and production values on the recording.

I ’m uplifted by this new Pritsker CD—impressed by the authenticity of music that “had to come out”, had to be composed, had to exist. There is a wonderful ‘meta-meta’ aspect to the work as well. It is as though Pritsker has created a sonic picture of ‘William James’s Red Mood’ (see Arthur Danto’s famous book of 30 years ago, link below)—plus a further picture, an abstract minimalist exemplar of geometrical art which happens to be lush and sensuous and red and pulsating—plus yet a further picture, a metaphysical painting based on the fact that James knew the Nirvanic and Samsara orders are identical and that the Samsara world is fondly called the Red Dust by its deprecators.

J ames near the end of VRE says “Religious mysticism... is much less unanimous than I have allowed... It is dualistic in Sankhya and monistic in Vedanta” (VRE p. 336). He maintains that, rather than being adversarial or conflictual, the varieties of spiritual experience can in fact be harmonious with each other... there can be rapproachment between individuals and religions that hold what appear to be incompatible ‘over-beliefs’. James says that this can be done by looking to everyday feelings and to everyday acts—however unplanned and discordant with ambitions and ideologies as they may be—looking to these as comprising the essence of real religion (VRE p. 397).

T his opera by Gene Pritsker honors that Jamesian notion. The opera—and this recording—are a welcome invitation to self-discovery, to mutual respect and tolerance for the spirituality (or lack thereof) of others, and to joyous, mindful living in community. Look for the CD when it’s released in February. Very worth your listening!

Saturday, December 10, 2011

Silent Steppe Cantata: Serendipitous transport, to places of unexpected illumination & healing

M usic can—and often does—transport us to places that no other artform can.”
— Anne LeBaron.

T his international project presents fresh ideas by opening new and often unexpected horizons of creativity. The serious nature and deep content and design of the cantata aroused genuine interest from the public. The Cantata is one of the most important international events of contemporary classical music in Central Asia.”
— Aigul Beisenova, Business Kazakhstan.

T here are artistic projects that heal and redeem and enlighten. And then, to our even greater delight, there are those that achieve this across vast cultural and political chasms, auguring well for world peace.

A nne LeBaron’s Silent Steppe Cantata receives its world première today (10-DEC-2011) at the Palace of Peace and Reconciliation in Astana, Kazakhstan.

T he Silent Steppe Cantata Project is an artistic consortium, consisting of composer Anne LeBaron with her co-producer, tenor Timur Bekbosunov, plus filmmaker, Sandra Powers. The multi-media cantata is a sonic and visual portrait of Kazakhstan. Together with Bekbosunov, the Sary-Arka Folk Instrument Orchestra and the Chamber Choir of the Astana Philharmonic Society will perform the official premiere.

T he libretto incorporates Kazakh stories and mythology, and draws upon poems of Russian and Kazakh writers, including the poet Olzhas Suleimenov. Suleimenov has authored more than 16 volumes of poetry and prose, and his 1975 novel Az-i-Ia received both wide recognition in Kazakhstan and abroad, plus censure by Soviet authorities.

T he Palace of Peace and Reconciliation is a 77m high pyramid-shaped facility designed by Foster+Partners Architects and built by Sembol Construction at a cost of 8.74B Kazakh tenge (about USD$58M). Among other things, it houses a 1,500-seat concert/opera hall. It opened in late 2006. What a fitting venue for today’s première!

L istening to excerpts online, I am intrigued by the exposition of Kazakh ethnogenesis that the cantata and film portray. Without being revisionistic or grinding any particular philosophical “axes,” the cantata (the music, and the historical and contemporary texts comprising the libretto) reveals the inherently slippery, shifting imagination of Kazakh ethnic origins. It is their shifting, not a Western shifting; it is an indigenous acceptance of transitoriness/ephemerality that may derive from the primordial “geography” of the Kazakh nation and tribes. Acceptance without relativism/fatalism/determinism.

T he cantata demonstrates evidence of local elders and a musicoliterary elite struggling through the millennia to come to terms with the evolving political demarcations of Central Asia. Through their struggle, they created a handful of discrete ‘nationalities’, sustained through the centuries. If anything, the impression (from the bits of the cantata and film that we can experience online) is one of the indomitability of the spirit and of authentic human diversity. Needless adversity and suffering destroy things; they are never ‘noble’ or ‘desirable.’ But there is this residue of survivors—people, and music, and stories, and culture—and this once-dogged, now-expansive persistence of the will to peace. This cantata inspires as well as teaches!

W ish we could be there for the première!

Friday, October 21, 2011

Tokyo Quartet: Meta-Messengers, Physics of Flow in (Musical) Porous Media

M usic has values which are above the ‘ordinary’ realm—unchangeable and not subject to mortal instabilities. They are not ‘human-made’ as such, but are domiciled in more esoteric realms of our musical nature. We must turn to the immaterial, spiritual aspects of music in order to find them... The veiled secrets of Art dwell in a region of visionary irrationality... the composer [and, for that matter, the performers-] can never enter this region but can only be elected as its messenger(s).”
— Paul Hindemith, A Composer’s World: Horizons and Limitations, pp. 2, 221.

J uxtaposing the ‘familiar’ with the ‘unfamiliar’ is tremendously helpful as a ‘programming pattern’, and this program performed by Tokyo Quartet in the Friends of Chamber Music series was a case in point. Juxtapositions like this reveal new facets of the familiar works and provide context for apprehending the facets of the unfamiliar ones. Juxtapositions produce dynamic contrasts that boost our minds’ “signal-to-noise” ratio, and we are able grasp ideas and feelings that we otherwise might totally miss.

Haydn – Quartet in G Major, Op. 77, No. 1
Hindemith – Quartet in C Major, Op. 22, No. 4 (formerly No. 3)
Schumann – Quartet in A Major, Op. 41, No. 3

I ’d never heard the Hindemith before. The whole program was a treat, but the Hindemith was especially cool. The Tokyos’ lyricism is a fine match for this Hinde-mythic cosmic, rapt vision. The slow Sehr Langsam and Ruhige Viertel movements have a persistent impulse keeping them going… an impulsion that is (‘stets fließend’!) almost feminine in its other-regarding flow.

T he fast passages of the Schnell Achtell, Massig schnelle Viertel, and Rondo movements are robust and motoric, as they should be. Seasoned and mature, without any compulsion to use any work as a technical warhorse. (The whole piece is extremely challenging; the viola and cello parts of Op. 22 present monumental, virtuosic demands, say, but the Tokyo Quartet’s playing never feels self-referential. It is about going to the ‘heart’ of the music... communicating its true message(s)... which is precisely as things should be!) Phenomenal to hear the deep, ‘heart-felt-but-deliberated’ results of musicians’ living for 40+ years with all of these pieces!

I listen... listen to Op. 22 and try to place it, understand it, fit it with other things I think I understand... Yet, it defies fitting. This can’t be ‘counterpoint’—Can it?—if the parts/voices are not dependably running ‘counter’. It is like Hindemith had invented a kind of parallelization/fluidization not unlike what happens in cloud computing these days—with multiple, parallel Hadoop 'map-reduce' jobs.

M utants of a theme ‘melt’ and percolate as subordinate voices, which in turn are witnessed by the other voices, moving in different pores or channels. The ‘stets fließend’ mutants accompany the theme itself, and we get a complex texture or ‘network’ of intertwining thematic lines.

T he network of relations among the various motives in this Hindemith quartet make me look at Fiore’s and Satyendra’s 2005 article (link below). The more direct the relations, the more intuitive they are, and the more of our attention they command. The more direct, intuitive ones then seem to “take precedence” over the more indirect or prosaic ones. Their flow seems to accelerate; each seems to streamline in its channel or crevice as they pass other slower-moving expressions that other members of the quartet are playing at that moment. In that regard, Dembske’s 1995 article mentions Rahn’s work exploring musical “hydraulics” and ‘paths of least resistance’… After the Tokyo Quartet performance, I guess I need to look at Rahn now, too…

A stretch with recurrent, penetrating C-sharps played by the viola (‘mit dämpfer’) in the Ruhige Viertel movement of Op. 22: acknowledging no relationship to the other ‘parts’/‘molecules’/‘reducers’ they have just passed or displaced in the flow… Fragments rejoining each other after each has percolated through different crevices and tubules and pores before converging again… And at passages with fermatas and subsequent resumptions of flow, the dynamics of the musical parts “feel like” moving-boundary integro-differential equations—equations characterizing the flow of a mixture of long-chain macromolecules, a suspension of ‘beads’ undergoing melting as it flows: phase-change equations (Stefan Problem) for flow through a 3-D (or even higher-dimensional) porous-media network. To me, it feels like there is even ‘porosity’ and inter-movement ‘trans-phase mass transport’ between the first and second movements, and between the fourth and fifth. Control-volumes of stets fließend musical ‘beads’ percolate between these movements. It is hard to imagine Hindemith writing such elegant complexity as this at the tender age of 26 years...

P hysics and computational methods for modeling flows in porous media would, I believe, be highly relevant and productive, for better understanding this wonderful music—this graphic Hindemith Vision—quantitatively (please see links below). It remains only for some enterprising young, conservatory-based music theory student to do it! Some of the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software packages that would be relevant to such a project are in the links below. Also several links for CFD papers that have been delivered at IRCAM conferences in recent years, for your interest. [It’s regrettable that the science and finite-element and Galerkin and other applied mathematics to do this were only developed after Hindemith’s lifetime, because I am confident that he would have enjoyed what they may reveal about the sonic imagery he created—this string quartet and other of his works.]

A ll in all, a tremendously exciting performance, vivid, thrilling!