Showing posts with label structure. Show all posts
Showing posts with label structure. Show all posts

Friday, February 4, 2011

Morten Riis: Composition of/from/to Compositions

Silesian String Quartet, photo (c) Krzystztof Lisiak
I   nvention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void(), but out of chaos. The objects and materials must, in the first place, be afforded. The constructor method is inevitably more complex than the destructor method.”
  —  Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 1831.
T he pieces on this Silesian String Quartet recording are fascinating, all of them. But I am especially intrigued by the Morten Riis compositions entitled getString(), fromString(), useString(), toString(), and quitString().

R eviews published to-date have focused on the merits of the conventional string quartets. The attention that has been given to Morten Riis’s contribution to the recording has been backhanded—relegating it to the status of sonic ‘glue’ or filler between the larger pieces, or describing it as an ‘electronic remix’ of segments of the other tracks, as if Riis were functioning with no more or less forethought and composerly skill than a DJ in a club.

I t is true, the series of short pieces by Morten Riis do leverage sonic materials from the other tracks, and it is true that Riis’s pieces are a ‘mash-up’ or collocation of those materials.

M oreover, it is true that the pieces do function as an effective ‘glue’ adhering the adjacent string quartets to each other—believably, memorably—forming graceful bridges between them, smoothing textural and timbral differences, and so on.

S till further, it is true that Riis’s pieces may be ideally situated here, intercalated as they are between these other string quartets. If you heard two of the other string quartets performed back-to-back in a live concert, you would be grateful if the corresponding Riis piece were interposed seamlessly between the quartets. It just feels right.

B ut when I cue-up these 5 pieces on their own, I realize how much I like them in their own right, just by themselves. Riis’s digital processing augments the scope of color, contrast, tonal effects and varying dynamics—the four instruments producing a homogeneous timbre, even with their use of ‘extended’ techniques—these are now commented upon by what amounts to an omniscient narrator.

I   n a jam cake or a cheesecake, a single bite gives us the entire essence of the cake. You’ve got to get some icing on the fork too, though, with the former, and some crust for the latter), whereas I’d have to spend time with Bach or Led Zeppelin—to the extent of a movement, in the case of a suite or concerto (arguably) or the whole of the Goldbergs; I can’t stand Pandora or other streaming playlist media that randomly jump from Minor Threat, to Death Cab for Cutie, to Haydn with inadequate value/stylistic judgement and inadequate recognition of higher-level semantics—between movements in a sonata, for example, or between adjacent tracks in a playlist. The MIR representations are flawed, no matter whether you dress them up in ‘Music Genome’ or other marketese. How can you listen to just the third movement of Brahms’s quintet, Op. 111, and not feel a void from not hearing the first and second movements and the fourth? It just isn’t done. The third movement isn’t an encore bon bon, for Pete’s sake.”
  — Robert Kirzinger, Boston Symphony Orchestra, 2007.
D o L-system algorithms and cellular automata underlie what Riis has done here? Recursive application of a set of substitution rules to an initial string, interpreting the resulting rewritten string as structural elements of an ‘organism’; substitution rules determining how each symbol in the current generation should be replaced—is that why he chose these titles for these pieces? (Gary Lee Nelson ‘Summer Song for solo flute’ used L-system algorithms as a compositional tool.)

T hese are not mere ‘bridges’ or ‘interludes’ between the quartets. They are not ‘refrains’ or quasi-reprises or recapitulations or filler.

T he series of Riis pieces builds inexorably, and the quitString() coda arrives with great drama and power. The human-textured denouement resolves finally to a homophonic sinewave inert carrier-signal and cosmic stillness.

A t the end, the feeling is that Riis has conceived the whole entertainment—this whole assemblage of quartets and interstitial C++ like digitally-processed material—in one breath.

E ach quartet exhibits well-nigh perfect balance of momentum and heft. Each is trenchant but has playful elements that make the music work.

S ome conductors seem to regard the spaces between larger works as a perfunctory sort of ‘whitespace’—an interlude. Not Riis. He lavishes the same attention on the interstices that he lavishes on everything else. He doesn’t need to relax too much in order to give us a measure of respite. In some of the insterstitial pieces we get also an air of irony, a feeling we are being given the other side of one coin.

I n summary, this is one of the most extraordinary and innovative assemblies of new music to come down the pike, one that will amply reward your listening.

I n my day-job I am a software developer. I love designing things and seeing them work. I love the tools I use to design and build things. I love designing tools to design and build things. All of my friends accept this about me. So, with that preamble, I can say that the other thing I like about Riis’s pieces are their titles—their explicit homage to C++ object-oriented programming constructors as sources of inspiration and/or explanation for the (meta-)composing process. In a mass-culture that feels progressively more and more dumbed-down and hostile toward knowledge and people who devote their lives to knowing things, here is a work that bears cheerfully geekish titles and enthusiastically brings forth techno compositions that are amenable to techno enjoyment and algorithmic music theoretic analysis. It is as though Riis were speaking to me and to others of my ilk and saying Babbitt-esquely, “I care if you listen! I care if you listen!”

Riis, photo (c) Krzystztof Lisiak
M orten Riis (born 1980) often employs a kind deconstruction of the musical material, aiming to create an expression where diverse genre typical elements are combined and contrasted in an organic ‘liquid’ expression. Riis often collaborates with classical musicians, in order to achieve music a more live, extemporaneous expression. Conversely, he also works a lot with ambient, digitally-recorded sounds processed as little as possible, which he says imparts a natural non-human spontaneity to the musical expression. An expression which, in spite of the through-composed structures reflects organic and flowing gestures, inanimate or otherwise.

getString CD

    [50-sec clip, Silesian String Quartet, Morten Riis, ‘toString()’; (track 8), 2011, 1.6MB MP3]

T    he unprecedented divergence between contemporary serious music and its listeners, on the one hand, and traditional music and its following, on the other, is not accidental and—most probably—not transitory. Rather, it is a result of a half-century of revolution in musical thought, a revolution whose nature and consequences can be compared only with, and in many respects are closely analogous to, those of the mid-nineteenth-century evolution in theoretical physics... Why refuse to recognize the possibility that contemporary music has reached a stage long since attained by other forms of activity? The time has long since passed when the normally well-educated person without special preparation could understand the most advanced work in, for example, mathematics, philosophy, and physics. Advanced music, to the extent that it reflects the knowledge and originality of the informed composer, scarcely can be expected to appear more intelligible than these arts and sciences to the person whose musical education usually has been even less extensive than his background in other fields... Granting to music the position accorded other arts and sciences promises the sole substantial means of survival for the music I have been describing. Admittedly, if this music is not supported, the whistling repertory of the man in the street will be little affected, the concert-going activity of the conspicuous consumer of musical culture will be little disturbed.”
  — Milton Babbitt (1916-2011), ‘Who Cares if You Listen?’, High Fidelity, FEB-1958.
Analysis analysis
SmartEnum



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Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Canonical Form as Social Networking (Reply re: Canonical Form as Epidemic Contagion)

James Tenney
Y    our infectious/epidemiology model may be the first theory of canonical form that says that voices engaged in canon are passive ... coerced, so to say. As though the neighboring parts had some sort of apraxia until infected. But they are not at a loss for words. They are not passive [respondents]. And you obviously do not have anything like the release of tension, which is the conclusion of normal classical music composition structure.”
  —  Anonymous email to CMT.
I  agree with some of the emailer’s observations about the earlier CMT post: the players are not ‘passive’ or ‘inert’. Each is receptive to stimulation and, after being stimulated/infected by those around them, engages in ‘speculative’ or ‘expansive’ elaboration upon what they’ve received.

B ut I disagree about the ‘tension’ point. There’s no ‘law’ that says that all musical events must be deliberative or rational or intended. Individual players may emit sounds that have unintended [but wonderful—] consequences or inadvertent meanings. Players have a possibility for automatic or pre-conscious improvisational sonic production, which the composer can call upon if she/he wishes (think Stockhausen or Nancarrow or Tenney). There may be hyper-structural or obsessive features that are far from ‘rational’ (think Feldman or Babbitt or Cage). Stochastic/random elements don't mean that a piece defies analysis—only that the analytical approach has to change to address the content. It’s not a music theory dead-end.

I n fact, I think that the indeterminacy/stochastic elements tend to make the music more ‘listener-centric’ rather than ‘performer-centric’ or ‘text/composer-centric’. We are on ‘edge’ in part because of the greater indeterminacy/unpredictability that it has, compared to conventional forms. The indeterminacy itself is a kind of ‘structure’ or ‘form’. And, so long as the player or listener understands the relationships of the structures and mechanics of the thing—how the stochastic events and mechanisms fulfill the roles of themes and modulations in traditional music—then the thing can be comprehensible and emotionally accessible, just as any other piece of music is.

I  suggest that Ferneyhough’s ‘Chûte d’Icare’ and other recent compositions that employ canonical structures actually do permit significant run-time indirection. Furthermore, I suggest that such compositions are analogous to social networking and micro-blogging service. Canonical-form compositions like these are neither more nor less coercive than contemporary Web 2.0 apps and the canonical exchanges that arise in those.

Y es, canonical forms are inherently replicative. This cuts out a lot of the ‘me-too’ chatter and dilatory utterances among the parts, by definition. But there is nonetheless a lot of within- and between-channel complexity. The entropy of the signals is high, even though the signals are canonically structured! And in the Ferneyhough—or in, say, James Tenney’s ‘Postal Pieces’—the parts have to decide whether to ‘resist’ or instead ‘give in’/’succumb’ to the neighboring canonical utterances/viruses. There is the text of the score, and then there is each performer’s free-will...

C  learspace uses an unconventional, passive ‘friending’ model. Other users can assert themselves as your friends with or without requiring or permitting your active assent or declining. Your only choice is to remove them (socially awkward), when all you maybe want to do is clear up your “activity feeds” so that you don’t have to drink from such a big fire-hose of information when all those people who friended you generate activity that doesn’t interest you. Facebook and other social networking apps have active/consensual assent-or-decline friending—so filtering/throttling the fire-hose is easier. In the Facebook and other active-friending apps, reciprocal friending is expected, and friend relationships are hard to break. By contrast, in Twitter the ‘following’ relationship comes without connotations of friendship (and less hesitation about unfollowing to control your attention).

W hat would be useful would be if canonical-form compositions were written like Twitter—and offered the notion of ‘following’ a part as an alternative to ‘friending’ or passively ‘subscribing’ as in conventional canonical-form compositions. That way each performer could retain some autonomous control of her/his social filter without having to ignoring feeds or corrupting the composer’s text with individual expressions/interpretations or out-of-band [a-canonical] irruptions.

Y ou can get around this by subscribing separately to each person’s activity RSS feed, but I have found no way to easily aggregate those into a single ‘river of activity’ stream other than creating a combined folder in my feed reader. By contrast, the ‘broadcast’ nature of sound means that we automatically aggregate the acoustic feeds of the other parts around us. (With my chronic hearing loss, I just have a hard time hearing the harpsichord...)

I  suppose a non-broadcast canon could be composed and performed. Actually, tape loops and other electroacoustic media are in that vein. Or we could update Tenney’s postcards, and compose a canon where each performer goes into the studio alone and lays down a single track: each person/part is entirely at liberty to listen or not listen to a headphone ‘mix’ of one or some or all of the tracks that have been recorded by other performers. Then the engineer/producer/composer do the edit and post-production. Still canonical form—only off-line!

T witter itself is a great social filter. It has ‘lower friction’ than blogging, and the 140-character limit per tweet makes it less cognitively intrusive/absorptive than blogging or RSS feeds. It’s a shared party-line, and users tend to tweet things that preserve the signal-to-noise ratio for everybody on the party-line. (If they don’t, they can be un-followed without any concern.) Like blogging, Twitter allows you to time-shift your participation (something you can’t do with IM). And like ‘Chûte d’Icare’ or ‘Postal Pieces’, it permits stochastic run-time indirection.

A bout 20% of my Twitter followers are people I know. For better and worse, the rest are a wonderfully-varied ... canonical, stochastic ... Fire-Hose...

H ow does it feel to perform ‘Chûte d’Icare’ or ‘Postal Pieces’, I wonder?

T hank you for the email, and for the privilege of exchanging ideas about these things here!

I    think of ‘form’ on a larger temporal scale—as what’s called ‘content’ on a smaller scale. That old ‘form-content’ dichotomy is, to me, a spurious one, because they involve the same thing at different hierarchical levels of perception. What we take to be substance or content—say, a string quartet—is really the result of forms—formal shapes and structures at a microscopic level: particular envelopes, waveforms, and sequences of these—detailsin the signal. All ‘form’ is just the same thing at a larger level,involving spans of time over, say, five minutes or more.”
  —  James Tenney, interview with composer Gayle Young, 1978.
Stravinsky, ‘Threni’, virulent tenor infector and susceptible bass, minor 6th below, canonically making and breaking the score’s rules



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Sunday, January 18, 2009

Chen Yi: Design as Narration, Narrative as Totem

Stone Totem, Sanya, Hainan, China
T    he quest for music that elevates the mind is an essential part of the mainstream of Chinese music. Over 8,000 years of the Chinese musical civilization, all types of influences have been experienced... These include the adoption and jettisoning—of various temperament systems, of a wide range of formal designs, and of wide ranges of acoustics. Global consumerism, however, is one influenc it had never encountered [before the 20th Century.”
  —  Sin-Yan Shen, Chinese Music in the 20th Century, p.189.
T    o my mind, the origin of music should not be sought in linguistic communication. Of course, the drum and song have long been carriers of linguistic meaning. But there is no convincing theory of music as language. The attempts that have been made in that direction are no more than camouflages for a kind of naturalism or the most mundane kind of pedantry. The musical message has no meaning, even if one artificially assigns a (necessarily rudimentary) signification to certain sounds, a move that is almost always associated with a hierarchical discourse.”
  —  Jacques Attali, Noise, p. 25.
I    t is true that I use compositional techniques from all of the cultures I have experienced and all the teachers I have learned from—Russian, French, German, Chinese, American. I do adapt Western classical techniques to express Chinese [sensibilities] and so on. ‘From the Path of Beauty’ does take Chinese folk songs as its primary material, but it [secondarily/indirectly] generates ideas that are universal. Music is, I think, a universal language.”
  —  Chen Yi, 17-JAN-2009, Friends of Chamber Music Concert.
I suppose that the main controversy has perennially been not whether music may evoke substantially the same emotions in all listeners/performers, but rather whether music can express propositions or specific questions or perform other representational linguistic functions that are associated with other textual or oral languages. In other words, the idea that musical gestures and harmonic colors and rhythmic textures can serve as signs and symbols that carry subjective emotional meaning is not tremendously controversial. But whether it can do more than this still is a source of disagreement.

Chanticleer, photo (c) Lisa Kohler
Shanghai Quartet in Red Volvo
T he performance at Friends of Chamber Music last night by Shanghai Quartet and Chanticleer, of Chen Yi’s ‘From the Path of Beauty’ for mixed ensemble was a good opportunity to revisit that topic. The performance was flawless, extraordinarily beautiful. The balance between the voices and the strings (who often were played with mutes on) was exceptionally good.

Chen Yi
T he 7 movements of this piece include one a capella portion, one movement for string quartet alone, and the remaining 5 with the combined, mixed ensemble. The vocal parts have accompanying Chinese poems; however, the syllables did not signify anything to us who do not speak Chinese, and it was not clear whether the parts were wordless vocalizes or actual texts of poems.

  • The Bronze Taotie (Shang Dynasty, 1600 – 1100 BCE; choir)
  • The Dancing Ink (Tang Dynasty, 618 – 907 CE)
  • The Ancient Totems
  • The Rhymed Poems (Song Dynasty, 960 – 1279 CE; str qt)
  • The Clay Figurines (Han Dynasty, 206 BCE – 220 CE)
  • The Secluded Melody (Six Dynasties, 497 – 590 CE)
  • The Village Band
T he punctuation and textures of the vocal parts and the string parts closely resembled each other through much of the work—pizzicatos, glissandos, melismata, and so on. On account of this, the ‘discursive’ quality of the interaction between the voices and the instruments was even more prominent than it otherwise would have been.

T he third movement is entitle ‘Totems’, but, to me, the entire piece felt ‘totemic’, mantra-like, invocative, monumental. Totems, after all, are mnemonics—conveniences for social identification, invocation, and attachment. ‘From the Path of Beauty’ is like an elaborate ‘pole’ of totemic figures, stacked one after the other. There is no hierarchy; no particular ‘arc’ to the 7 movements—with the exception that the seventh and last one does feel like it is approaching a conclusion. The rest appear, one by one, in a sequence that seems like it is pretty malleable/flexible; each leaves its impression, conveys what it has to say, be it humorous or meditative or celebratory, and gives way to the next.

T he concept of mantra goes back to the pre-Vedic and early Buddhist traditions and to the primitive cults of magic, animism—and totemism. It has since been a continuing element one way or another in the religious traditions of the world and traces of it pervade to this day among the most modern of them. Practitioners of those believe that mantras have power over the deity and can make it confer the desired benefit. Is this piece, commissioned by Chanticleer, informed by a commission specification that aims at historical survey [of Chinese musical/poetical idioms], or is it instead Chen Yi’s invention as Chinese diaspora/teacher?

G urmantras, mantras imparted by gurus or teachers, are made meaningful by be whispered into the ear of the disciple by the guru. We disciples [in the audience; on the stage] repeat Chen Yi’s gurmantra … to achieve enlightenment.

T here are parts of ‘From the Path of Beauty’ that are luxuriant (esp. mvt. #6), but there are other parts that are arid, desolate, ascetic. In the Buddhist form of asceticism, there is no metaphysical dualism of God and the world, or of soul and the body. Phenomenal existence is viewed as characterized by suffering, impermanence and not-self. The aim of ascetic culture is to go beyond this sphere of conditioned phenomena. The keynote of the ascetic culture of Chen Yi is moderation; self-mortification is rejected altogether. Singers, string players, and audience members can simultaneously appreciate ascetic beauty and enjoyment.

T he community created in the space of the piece is not one of any essentialist definition of ‘chineseness’—taking Chen Yi’s introductory words about ‘universal language’ and assimilating compositional gestures from all over the world, I sense that this is as much an embodiment of diaspora culture as it is a celebration of Chinese music history.

S till, the practice of composing is presently something much more counter-cultural than other public acts, and the community created in Chen Yi’s composition is a quintessential exposition of cultural inversions, turning taboos into totems. Conspiratorial counter-tenors!

I t raises up the space of the ensemble to the realization of the China of the dream of racial and gender and class inclusion.

S yntactic music, notation-centric, rich with norms, expectations, surprises, tensions and resolutions, repetitions. Middleton (p.145ff) once wrote about this, as did Gilles Deleuze in Difference and Repetition (1994). Difference is the distance moved from a repeat and a repeat being the smallest difference. Difference is quantitative and qualitative — how far different and what type of difference.

C hen Yi’s movements are variations on classical form, revealing highly individual choices of tonal planning, melodic repetition, digression and reminiscence. Her techniques enable her to undertake compositional strategies quite different from the models of her contemporaries. Her construction is taut, and her subjects exhibit sharp polarities. A detailed account of digressions and reminiscences at different hierarchical levels in composing can be found in Lewin (1986).

S uch gestures of ‘poeticizing sound’ inflect the tonal design and expressive action of the songs—her primary folk song materials—and their repetitions. The ‘modus operandi’ of disjunct keys by side-slipping to a remote tonal area in the songs—the ambiguities of the modulations up a half-step; the choral dissonances—is not only replayed in the 7 movements of the suite, but is recontextualized within the paradigm of its overall form. It appears as a series of tonal digressions that delays the subsequent subjects on the large-scale. The tonal path shifts unexpectedly and repeatedly, via interrupted cadences, into other keys. The expressive effect is one of ‘remoteness’ and ‘out-of-timeness’—very apropos in view of the Dynasties theme. This is of course not unknown in Western canon—for example in Schubert.

T    he year the mercury drops to the bottom line.
How I miss that year—
My wool jacket at the pawnshop,
Doors and windows sealed tight by a snowstorm.
Thenceforth even good friends were like
Mercury, dropping
To zero.”
  —  Zhen Chouyu, Thinking of a Friend at Year’s End.



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