Idealized, Totemic Love: Godfrey Winham and Bethany Beardslee before the Age of AutoTune

L    et me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not Love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
Oh, no!

It is an ever fixèd Mark
That looks on tempests, never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring barque,
Whose worth’s unknown though His height be taken.

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within His bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with His brief hours and weeks,
Love bears it out to the edge of Doom.

If this be error and upon me prov’d,
I never writ nor no man [or woman] ever lov’d.”
  —  William Shakespeare, Sonnet CXVI.

L isten to this excerpt:


    [50-sec clip, Bethany Beardslee & Robert Helps, Godfrey Winham, ‘To Prove My Love’, III, 1974, 1.6MB MP3]

O ver the past month I have been reading Leslie Blasius’s 1997 monograph on Godfrey Winham (link below), especially passages about Winham’s composition for soprano and string quartet, ‘Habit of Perfection’.

D uring this month I have also been listening and re-listening to the CRI disc, ‘Tribute to Bethany Beardslee’, who was Godfrey’s wife. The disc contains a recording of Bethany singing Winham’s composition, ‘To Prove My Love’, accompanied by Robert Helps on piano.

T he piece is published by Boelke-Bomart Inc in Hillsdale, New York, but the score for it was originally published in memoriam, in volume 13 (1975) of the journal, Perspectives of New Music, immediately after Winham’s death.

T he phrasing and perfection of the intervals that Beardslee sings are amazing. The voice-leading that Winham wrote for her is tight-rope like—no, more like virtuosic, risky ballet “choreography” for the voice.

L ove bears it out to the edge of Doom, as Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 has it.

W hat were these three sonnets—to Godfrey; to Bethany? The piece was composed during the first several years of their marriage, but on this recording it is performed when they had been married 19 years, still in their 40s, near the end of Godfrey’s long illness, youthful but within a few months of his dying and aged way beyond their years...

T here is a maturity and expressive clarity of Beardslee’s and Helps’s performance that poignantly manifests the vulnerability of the soprano wife gazing into the abyss of her husband’s fast-approaching terminal phase. It simultaneously bears the marks of bravery and devotion, defiant strength and tragic fragility. Frailty with advancing illness. Glenn Gould’s last recordings of the Goldberg Variations in 1981, compared to the ones from 1955? Well, no.

O r Johnny Cash’s last recordings? No, but still.

W    hen we first went back and listened to the recordings after he had passed, it really just felt like this voice, coming back from another ‘place’. It had all this weight and gravity to it. Scary. You can hear good days and bad days in the voice. Sometimes, it’s weak—as if Cash were struggling for breath. Other times it’s stronger.”
  —  Rick Rubin, interview with David Bauder on new Cash CD.

W inham’s frailty and inner strength, projected vicariously through the piano part that Robert Helps executes beautifully. We suspect that ‘bearing it out to the edge of Doom’ meant something a bit different in June, 1974, when the piece was recorded than it meant in 1956 when the piece was composed. In 1974, Doom was plainly visible.

A  lapse in sense happens between the twelfth and thirteenth lines of the sonnet. Most of the words are monosyllables; only three contain more syllables than two. Poetic diction is ruptured. The language is now concrete, not abstract or metaphysical. There are run-on lines and the pair of double-endings. There is, as Brooke put it, “a happy blending of open and closed vowels, and of liquids, nasals, and stops.” No Antares AutoTune® or vocoder processing. Only human pitch-shifting and formant correction that defies the impermanence of the flesh. The res-o-lute, fixèd accents in the quatrains give way finally to progressively more vulnerable, unrelieved iambic feet—ones that accept the reality of the soul stuck in the unreliable flesh. The thing converges on silence and ends. The ending is a meditative silence, a ‘hanging’ sonic [non-]event. Runic, millennial, catastrophic.

W    hat is needed is a definition of ‘hanging’ which makes use of the notion of ‘effective context’, with the result that a tone is not ‘hanging’ before it occurs. An event x may be said to be ‘effective’ at the time of an event y if and only if x belongs to the effective context of y. An event x may be said to be ‘closed-off’ from y if it is subordinate to another sonic event z which occurs between x and y in time. An event x is ‘hanging’ at the time of an event y if it belongs to the effective context of y and is not closed-off from y, although there is a superior stage at which it is closed-off from y.”
  —  Godfrey Winham writings, Container VIII, page *26d.

L istening to the piece over and over, I sense a sort of adult willfulness that is out-of-sync with an inner childlike sense of reality. The complex personality who wrote such complex, chaotic music theory, all stored in 6.7 linear feet in the Princeton University Library in 16 archival boxes of cross-indexed papers and notebooks... still had this child inside, who was true and who hoped for everything. Who loved these sonnets, not as worthy artistic vehicles for creating prestigious, commendable academic compositions, but as totems erected to honor a love that defined him. Standing stones.

“Will Bethany be able to do this? Will I be able to do this?”

C hords with more upper structure notes, sounding more active compared to ones with more basic chord tones, which become points of resolution. Idiomatic and fluent writing; the beginning of each movement asks a question and so drives our interest; natural flow to focal points and climaxes; appropriate and sensitive realization of the text; effective and resourceful use of texture, with many imaginative challenges. This is the composer who in the 1960s imagined elegant computer-synthesized soprano voice, long before the technology could fulfill the fantasy. This is the soprano who could sing whatever notes are on the page, the fantasy who inspired the composer’s imagination.

M ost people don’t think of Winham as a contrapuntist, and it is true that one does not find much in the way of imitative counterpoint in his music. He never composed any fugues, and there are not many canons by Winham. However it can, and should, be said that Winham’s counterpoint is exquisite.

L eslie David Blasius is currently Professor of Music Theory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His book includes a set of complete excerpts of materials and an index for the entire Winham archive, which is housed at Princeton University. The book also contains a series of photographs, of Godfrey and Bethany and friends (including the one above).

T o read Blasius’s book and to listen to this CD is to wish to have known these wonderful human beings. I will plan to visit the 6.7 linear feet of Winham boxes the next time I am in Princeton...

• Tribute to Bethany Beardslee. (CRI, 1997.)
  
• Blasius L. The Music Theory of Godfrey Winham. Princeton Univ, 1997.
  
• Cash J. Ain't No Grave. (American Recordings/Lost Highway, 2010.)
  
• Fuller J, ed. Oxford Book of Sonnets. OXford Univ, 2000.
  
• Maren R. Godfrey Winham Writings on Music. Princeton Univ Lib entry.
  
• Miller N. Basic sonnet forms. Summary at Sonnet.org.
  
• Morris R. Composition with Pitch-Classes: A Theory of Compositional Design. Yale Univ, 1987. [origins in Winham's array composition]
  
• Princeton Univ Music Dept website
  
• Regan S. The Sonnet. Oxford Univ, 2010.
  
• Schneiderman L. Embracing Our Mortality: Hard Choices in an Age of Medical Miracles. Oxford Univ, 2008.
  
• Vendler H. The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Harvard Univ, 1999.
  
• Winham G. Composition with arrays. Perspectives of New Music 1970; 9:43-67.
  
• Wuorinen C. Simple Composition. CF Peters, 1994. [esp. pp. 130ff on time-pitch correlation]

H    ow can you make a new revolution when your last statement already said that anything goes?”
  —  Charles Wuorinen.

Frozen Inaugural Quartet & The Moral Standing of Instruments

D    ue to the mistake in administering the oath of office], if in fact Barack Obama is not the President, who is? Okay, the Constitution says that the President takes office at noon on Inauguration Day, oath or no. So I’m pretty sure that means the Presidency goes to whoever was on-camera at noon. The new President is Yo-Yo Ma! ... It’s still pretty darn historic to have the first Asian-American President and the first Vice President who is a cello.”
  —  Steven Colbert, Comedy Central , 21-JAN-2009.

S    upposedly, Oistrakh once recorded Paganini’s 17^th Caprice in one take, in an unheated, freezing-cold studio in Russia in wintertime. Impressive.”
  —  Carl Fulbrook, Cambridge (Churchill College Music Society).

C ellist Yo-Yo Ma, violinist Itzhak Perlman, clarinetist Anthony McGill, pianist Gabriela Montero performed at the Obama Inauguration on Tuesday. The quartet played a piece by composer Williams called ‘Air and Simple Gifts’ immediately before Obama was sworn in. It was 31 °F (-1 °C). The wind was blowing at about 3 mph (5 km/h). Attendees seated nearby were bundled up in scarves and thick winter coats and knit hats pulled down over their ears. How is it possible to play in such conditions? Those of us who have performed outdoors in freezing weather—in a marching band or brass band, say—dread it. But violin? Cello? Piano? Inconceivable! At least Gabriela had some fingerless gloves on…

H ere is a YouTube of the performance:



T hink of the cello! Think of the violin! (And the clarinet and the piano, too, although those are not in such clear and present physical danger as the strings are.)

T hese are not mere inanimate objects. They merit care and ethical concern—in somewhat the way that animals do. If pets have rights, then instruments do as well. The violin and cello deserve a loving, respectful home. My moral character and virtue as a human being depend on how I treat them.

H ell, I take my violin into the supermarket rather than leave it in my car’s back seat, even if only for 30 min. Swaddling the instrument in a blanket for extra insulation is good. What musician knowingly mistreats her/his instrument? Well, don’t answer that...


S o never mind the human agony of playing in freezing conditions in Washington, D.C., this Tuesday. Never mind the aesthetic tuning and articulation issues that the humans are subjected to when performing in extreme temperatures. My hopes and prayers are for the instruments.

M y ethical feelings toward instruments do come with a distinction, not unlike that of 18^th-Century Scottish philosopher, David Hume. Since the instruments are inanimate and cannot reciprocally behave virtuously toward me, they cannot have exactly the same moral standing as a person or an animal. My sense of an instrument’s ‘valor’ and ‘utility’ has to be combined with what philosophers would call ‘aprobation’—a moral calibration that takes into account its inanimateness: the fact that it is not a sentient creature. Just the same, I care about its wellbeing...

M y questions, though, are these: (a) is the physical risk of damage to the violin-family instrument mainly due to the temperature excursion or instead mainly due to the effects of sudden change in humidity? Is it (b) mostly a matter of stress between the top plate vs. saddle or instead a matter of temperature/humidity changing how the soundpost is fitting? And (c), what parts change dimension at the fastest rate? Will I (d) hear the fatal cracking of the top plate while the instrument is still cooling down, or will the distaster be more likely to happen when I bring it inside and warm it up? Finally, (e) after exposure to cold, what rate in degrees per hour would be best to allow the instrument to warm up, to prevent the instrument from cracking or the gluelines from separating upon thawing?


T he thermal expansion coefficient of dry wood parallel to the grain (as for the ebony saddle) is essentially independent of wood species and density. For ebony, the thermal linear expansion coefficient α_l is 3.1 x 10^-6/°C. But the thermal expansion coefficient across the grain (radially, as for a sitka spruce top plate, or tangentially) are strongly dependent on wood species and density (gm/cm³).

   α_r = (9.9 + 32.4ρ)  x 10^-6/°C

S ince sitka spruce ρ = 0.42 gm/cm³, α_r = 23.5 x 10^-6/°C. In other words, the chilling top plate contracts about 7.6 times as much as the ebony saddle for a given temperature excursion.


If we take the violin from at 68 °F (20 °C) room outdoors onto the inauguration platform at 31 °F (-1 °C) a contact area between the saddle and the top plate that is about 50 mm long will begin shrinking—the ebony will shrink -3.26 μm and the sitka spruce will try to shrink -23.5 μm, but will be prevented from doing so by the saddle. The woods and the glue between the spruce and the ebony will be under considerable shear and tensile stress while this is going on.

T he modulus of elasticity for the delicate sitka spruce is 9.86 GPa (1,430,000 psi), and the modulus of rupture is 65 MPa (9,430 psi). Since we don’t know—for any specific instrument, or for stringed instruments in general—the precise area A₀ to use in the force equation (below), nor do we know how spatially uniform or variable the bond between the top plate and the ebony saddle is, it is not possible to calculate the stress-strain relationships with certainty. We would have to build a special violin to be able to measure it. But ‘ballpark’ calculations I have done indicate that the stresses can easily exceed the maximum tensile strength of 2.48 MPa (360 psi) for the sitka spruce in the top plate.

W ood that is not totally dry reacts differently to varying temperature than does dry wood. When wood with non-zero moisture content is warmed, it initially expands because of normal thermal expansion but after a few hours begins to shrink because of loss in moisture content. Unless the wood is very dry initially (4% moisture content or less, which is unrealistic for an instrument), shrinkage caused by moisture loss on warming will be greater than any thermal expansion, so the net dimensional change on warming will be negative. Wood at intermediate moisture levels (say, about 8% as for a violin in its humidified case) will expand when first warmed, then gradually shrink if the warm, low-humidity condition persists. The net dimensional change will often be near zero if enough time is allowed to equilibrate at the new conditions. But at intermediate times the dimensions are expanded compared to the initial temp. For the wind conditions and high outdoor relative humidity at the Obama inauguration, I think we can safely bet that the humidity-generated effects were negligible compared to size of the thermally-generated dimensional changes and forces.

H ow rapidly do the strain and stress develop in the top plate, especially in the area that is constrained by the lower-expansion-coefficient saddle? Well, if the movement is sudden, from inside to outside, and if convection is efficient (e.g., wind at 3 mph or greater) then it will occur within 10 to 15 min.

T o fully model this process mathematically, we would have to solve the partial differential ‘Heat Equation’ for the conduction and convection of heat (cold) into the wood, from the cold-exposed surface inward. Readily doable using available software like MATLAB, but more than is reasonable to put in a CMT blog post.

A  simple Excel spreadsheet will give you some sense of the stress (force per unit area) that the top plate has to bear. Click on the screenshot below to open or download a copy to play with.


O bviously, stringed instruments do occasionally experience unintended temperature excursions that are this wide or wider—and yet a split top plate is amazingly rare. How can this be? Well, the rarity of it must be due to most such occurrences’ having a relatively slow rate of change of temperature—the interior of a closed violin case (with the instrument wrapped in cloth) in the rear seat of a car, for example, will take several hours to drop the first 10 °C when exposed to a new ambient temp that is 21 °C lower. And, in a slow cooling or slow warming excursion, the glue that bonds the various pieces of the instrument together has time enough to accomodate the shearing forces that develop. In a fast cooling or warming, the macromolecules in the glue don’t have time to relax and, as a consequence, the full stress developed (by the thermal expansion coefficients differential between the different woods and cross-grain orientation) is imposed on the joined parts immediately—with a much higher probability of catastrophic failure beyond the material’s maximum tensile strength.

W hich brings up a possibility. If you know in advance that you will be required to perform at a freezing inauguration, you might take your least-favorite instrument to a cold storage facility the day before, to incubate it at a temperature that is close to the outdoor temp that is predicted during the performance the following day. Retrieve it from the cooler, put the whole thing (the instrument in its case) in a big padded Igloo® portable insulated cooler, and schlep it to the performance venue, only pulling it out and tuning up when you are outdoors in the cold. Then when you are done, allow the instrument to warm up slowly in its still-cold case, over a day or so before opening it up at room temperature again.

A  simple example of physics / mechanical engineering in service of instrument health!

N ear the end of the film, ‘The Pianist’, the piece that Szpilman plays for the German officer is Chopin’s G minor Ballade. Yes, we suspend our disbelief when we think of the freezing room and prison-camp starvation and no opportunity for practice—yet, despite these things, the performance is excellent. But everybody thinks of the humans and their suffering and implausible virtuosity in the face of impossible odds; nobody thinks of the poor, suffering musical instruments and their impossible odds.

N ear the end of Tuesday’s inauguration, we had to suspend our disbelief at the remarkable style and grace that Ma, Perlman, McGill, and Morteno mustered. Would that their instruments had been weather-impervious fiberglass/plastic ones. I hope they are doing okay and none was injured...

T he ethics of how we treat instruments is, I want to tell you, just a ‘hop, skip, and a jump’ from the ethics of how we treat our environment and public goods. The world and its resources are ‘useful’ to us; they are ‘instrumental’ in serving the needs of humankind. But the ethics of environment is predicated on the notion that the world is a collection of ‘public goods’, not only for the human public but for animals and plants and other ‘publics’. In the case of privately-owned musical instruments, it could be argued that old, rare and historic instruments are indeed a sort of public good—with value to broader and future society beyond the scope of needs and utility of its present owner. But what about cheaper, commodity-grade instruments? Is it ever justifiable to recklessly abuse them or destroy them, or for politicians to command that they be abused/destroyed? (When a rock guitarist smashes a fine instrument on-stage, must one be a ‘virtue ethicist’ to say he is wrong to do so? S’pose so... )

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