jwilzewske: temporality

Showing posts with label temporality. Show all posts

Sunday, January 1, 2012

Jan Beran’s ‘Winter711’, fractional Brownian motifs, long-range interdependence

D reams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again. And this interdependence produces the highest form of living.”
— Anaïs Nin.

A new year; an occasion for us to meditate on how our mutual feelings and actions—our own; those of friends and family members—are meaningfully intertwined over long stretches of time.

H ere’s an MP3 of Jan Beran (piano) and Christopher Raphael (oboe) performing Beran’s ‘Winter 711’. Beautiful and evocative of long-range interdependence/entanglement.

I f you’re interested, some of the mathematical underpinnings of the compositional method used to create ‘Winter 711’ can be found in the links below. Happy New Year!

I believe it is not possible to coordinate musical parts in a purely responsive manner. That is, a system that simply triggers its events on the detection of notes in the solo part will perform badly in most musical contexts. This is due, in part, to the inherent detection latency that is built into the problem which makes the responsive system perpetually late. Instead, Music++ schedules the accompaniment’s note times by continually predicting into the future based on what it has currently observed.”
— Chris Raphael, Indiana Univ.

J an says of ‘Winter711’ that he tried to avoid any familiar sense of musical flow. In other words Jan’s music doesn’t give the performer (and listener) the usual cues needed to rhythmically organize the music. While the music is sometimes highly rhythmic, many sections contain no recognizable steady pulse, nor clear points of emphasis whose times differ in simple ways, as in much mixed meter music. While I think these pieces are engaging on their own terms, they work as a wonderful showcase for the [sequencer] accompaniment system, since I doubt they could be played by an all-human ensemble.”
— Chris Raphael, Indiana Univ.

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Marc Satterwhite: On Absolute Becoming and Quantum Passage

N ec est tamen, quod putes illos ignorare, quam cara res sit Tempus.
Vite solatium: iniqui temporis oblivio.

Do not believe that people are unaware how precious Time is;
Consolation of my life: the obliviousness of Unjust Time.”
— Petrarch, letter to Francesco Nello, 1353.

L a vita fugge, e non s’arresta una ora;
e la morte vien dietro a gran giornate—
le cose presenti e le passate
mi danno guerra, e le future ancora.

Life flees and never rests one moment,
and death runs after it with mighty stride;
Present preoccupations and memories from the past
and things from the future, too, wage war on me.”
— Petrarch, Sonnet 272.

I know that this Marc Satterwhite composition references the famous Flor Garduño photos of the same title. But it troubles me that our sense of the word ‘witness’ is, in English, so passive and bystanderly. To see the score for this mystical cello piece or, better, to hear Paul York perform it, is to think of the word ‘witness’ in its sense as a verb … ‘witnessing’ as a way of actively, interventionally making something happen. Or, alternatively, actively forestalling it or keeping it at bay, containing it.

I do not think that I oversimplify if I say that much of Marc’s music grows out of traumatic experience, his understanding and integration of his emotional response to that experience and the humanity and deep spiritual nature of that response which is so perfectly expressed in his music. Many of these experiences involve loss; personal or shared. That certainly is reflected in the chamber works recorded here. ‘Epitafio’ is an achingly beautiful testament to the deep sadness that Marc felt for the deaths of the parents of a high school friend who were early mentors of his musical talents. ‘Witnesses of Time’ reflect in their starkness, dignity and unexpected joy the pain and delight he found in equal measure during the six years he lived in Latin America. Here snatches of indigenous melodies and rhythms are filtered though a modern sensitivity and given great emotional depth. ‘Memento Mori I’ reflects both of the types of loss mentioned. It manifests the powerful emotional reaction that Marc had to an interactive art exhibit of that name, commemorating the artist’s lost friends and loved ones and the sympathetic reaction it caused to his own continuing pain at the loss of his mother to suicide ten years before.”
— Ronald Grames.

T his is, in a very real way, a Satterwhite essay on the plasticity of time, on plurality of ‘worlds’, and on the possibility of ‘quantum personhood’ and ‘trans-world individuals’. The inspirations for what he has written here—and the superb renderering that Paul York gives the piece in performance—are dark.

T he exotic cello techniques constitute a gallery of ‘modal realism’—in the way that philosophers of language and mind use that phrase… ‘modal’, as in past-present-future modes.

T he limitations of our sense of time are extreme. The smallest interval that is perceptible to us is about 20 milliseconds, and the longest period is limited to a human lifetime, about 100 years. In nature, we know that the range is many orders of magnitude larger, both shorter and longer—from events at the atomic attosecond (10^-18 sec) scale: the time it takes for light to travel the length of three hydrogen atoms; the time it takes for an atomic nucleus to recoil… to billions of years for the age of the Universe. But Nature and evolution did not equip us with senses or memory suitable to be aware of those timescales.

P etrarch regretted every one of his wasted moments. Witnessing time’s passage is always poignant; our own certain mortality and finiteness haunt us. This is not the End, but we can sort of see It from here.

T he speed and irreversibility of Time’s slipping away is inherent in the human condition, the cause for the poignancy. But Petrarch is all about himself, and about financial metaphors—‘rarity-value’ correlations, pearls vs. balsam—as though Time were an exchange-economy. As if. Petrarch commodifies Time and thinks of it as linear only, and those are bad moves, philosophically. There are many possibilities, including the possibility of branching space-time (see the cool little book by Le Poidevin, p. 191ff).

B ut Time has more fugacity [fleeingness] than any other substance ... its fugacity is infinite, unlike other physical things, solutes dissolving. So, following Petrarch’s implication, infinite fleeingness should entail infinite value, pricelessness?

F ew writers (Seneca; Husserl; Heidegger; Ricoeur; Adorno; a few others) have been as aware as Petrarch that time is inherent in poetry and music. Sonic art unfolds in duration; and the work once written bears and maintains an intimate relationship between the Past and the Future, dependent upon our gray-matter CPUs with their sub-MHz clocks and supra-attosecond/sub-century memories.

T he present address instantly becomes past, and the ego-tu in Satterwhite’s text/score addresses indefinite future audiences, as well as our future selves. Satterwhite’s causality is authorial, essayistic—where ‘post hoc, ergo propter hoc’ is not a logical fallacy but is instead Ultimate Truth.

S atterwhite [and ‘Witnesses’] refutes the Petrarchian idea that Time is linear and commodified. The cello engages in [quantum] communication with past and future events—sometimes on timescales within a bow-stroke or thumb-slap, sometimes on timescales very much longer. With such features, this clearly is not music to listen to at a great distance; indeed, it is a meditation that is best apprehended by the player himself/herself or by a friend sitting nearby. If live performance at close range is not an option, then this CD is a fine substitute, headphones on, suitably cranked up.

H inc sepe contingit, ut laudes eorum hominum, qui nobiscum vixerunt ignorantes, mira res dictu vetustissimorum certam notitiam habeamus. [It often happens that, while we are unaware of the praiseworthiness of people who are alive when we are, we amazingly have reliable knowledge of people from long ago.]

Witnesses of Time (Four studies on photographs by Flor Garduño)

Wounded Angel (San Antonio Aguas Calientes, Guatemala)
Tarahumara Pilgrimage (Norogáchic, México)
Threshold of Incense (Chichicastenango, Guatemala)
Tornado (Lake Titicaca, Bolivia)

T hese four movements were inspired by and named after photographs by Flor Garduño. Although Garduño’s work covers many themes, she is best known for her black-and-white documentaries of Latin American life, landscapes, and the human figure.

W ounded Angel’ depicts a Guatemalan Mayan Indian, holding a forlorn wooden statue of an angel sans right wing. The rhythmic structure of this movement—‘sees’ and then ‘raises’ the wager—the one that Flor had made with her photo—to the effect that even sacred icons are frail and require care and repair. Festinating ‘fits’ and ‘starts’ augment our sense of age, decrepitude, and alienation. The pensive mood of York’s cello weighs heavily on us.

T he ‘Tarahumara Pilgrimage’ photo shows a group dressed in their traditional paraphernalia, undertaking a procession that’s paradoxically, astonishingly, simultaneously transcendent and concrete. Some of the people carry drums, embodied in the percussive elements in this movement of the ‘Witnesses’ composition. There are violent pizzicati and sepulchral knocks on the cello belly and shoulder, but these do not draw attention to the performer or the composer; instead, they elegantly serve Satterwhite’s expressive purpose. Crucified cello is home inside but won’t come to the door just now. Strings damped, any sound played ‘short’ enough will be perceived as having no pitch—only the noise spectra of the attacks will be heard. Flesh, thumb-slaps, fingernail taps/trills, bowstick rattle against tender wood—the noises [confer humanity upon—/admonish us to regard the spirit of—] the box of the instrument—the wood itself—and reveal how unfair/pedestrian is our focus only on [transcendental] string-against-bowhair. The earthy box has its own dignity, without which cello pilgrimage would be impossible.

T hreshold of Incense’ is Garduño’s photo taken at the entry to the Santo Tomás Church in Chichicastenango, a culturally important Indian village in the Guatemalan high country. The scene shows smoke of incense mingling with morning fog, to the point where what is interpenetrating what is unclear. The breathy passages evoke meditation on the tenuousness of life; harp-like arpeggios explore an amazing scope of the cello’s colors. The instrument is unrepentant—defiant in its upper register. Listen, half-way expecting it to be apocalyptic: a cello [who] is, when played exactly in this way, Jacob’s Ladder. We perceive Satterwhite’s argument about ‘witness’, the verb, and about active, willful, quantum intervention to change the fabric of Time.

Paul York, near top of Jacob's Ladder, with cello; 12th-Century icon, St. Cahterine's Monastery, Sinai

T ornado’ captures a waterspout menacing Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, signifying nothing? Well, no. No more and no less, I suppose, than Corryvreckan signifies. Elaborating a series of unsettling, incongruous possible significands that are irresolvable, underdetermined. Existential chasm, transient, gaping, capricious, beautiful, fearsome. Musical aporia. There comes a moment when active quantum ‘witnessing’ and ‘becoming’ are done. At the end, we accept what is, utterly without recourse. We take our last breath. No more ‘becoming’. Laters.

W itnesses of Time’ was commissioned by and dedicated to Marc’s colleague at the University of Louisville School of Music, cellist Paul York, who premiered the work in 2004.

[50-sec clip, Marc Satterwhite, Witnesses of Time, ‘Wounded Angel’, 1.6MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Marc Satterwhite, Witnesses of Time, ‘Tarahumara Pilgrimage’, 1.6MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Marc Satterwhite, Witnesses of Time, ‘Threshold of Incense’, 1.6MB MP3]

A mong the groups that have performed and recorded Marc’s works are the Boston Symphony, the Utah Symphony, the Louisville Orchestra, Verdehr Trio, eighth blackbird, the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, the Core Ensemble, Tales & Scales, the Chicago Chamber Musicians, London Composers’ Ensemble, and Percussion Group Falsa. Marc has had residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. A graduate of Michigan State University and Indiana University, he has taught in Texas, Indiana and Michigan and is Professor of Composition and Music Theory the University of Louisville School of Music where, in addition to teaching, he directs the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition.

T his Centaur disc has much to admire on it; sorry to abbreviate my comments just to the eponymous ‘Witnesses’ cello solo.

Sunday, April 5, 2009

James Mulcro Drew, Chamber Music at Extreme Temperatures

James Drew, amid instruments made by sculptor Lin Emery

T he work’s timeless quality draws attention to a spatial world not unlike the movement within an Alexander Calder mobile, or parallel forms found in Asian court music ... a protest against the flow of musically-experienced time, rather than a space-drama imaginatively constructed from one fragment of a micromusical idea.”
— James Drew, program notes, Manhattan School of Music, 1970.

I aspire to incorporate spiritual immensities in my music through masses of sound which intensifies by the process of refraction or blurring, while allowing submerged melodic lines to appear and disappear. It’s like painting with a very large brush. Like those old fresco guys—or like Asian calligraphy on a massive scale—even with one tone. You know ... like a big swipe with a very loaded brush.”
— James Mulcro Drew.

I n thermodynamics, an adiabatic process is any thermodynamic process in which no heat is transferred to or from the surrounding space. The term ‘adiabatic’ literally means impassable, coming from the Greek roots ἀ- (‘not’), διὰ- (‘through’), and βαῖνειν ("to pass"). It means a total absence of heat transfer.

A t temperatures near 0°K, nearly all molecular motion ceases and the entropy change ΔS = 0 for any adiabatic process. Pure substances can (ideally) form perfect crystals as T→0.

Entropy change, adiabatic process, in the limit at absolute zero

[50-sec clip, Drew et al., Animating Degree Zero, ‘Animating’, 1.6MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Drew et al., Animating Degree Zero, ’12 Centers Breathing’, 1.6MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Drew et al., Animating Degree Zero, ‘Solemn Acts in Rain’, 1.6MB MP3]

I n this wonderful recording we have members of the Barton Workshop performing several works that James Drew composed between 2001 and 2005.

A t very low temperatures in the vicinity of absolute zero, matter exhibits many unusual properties including superconductivity, superfluidity, and Bose-Einstein condensates.

A t [musical] temperatures close to absolute zero, quantum [musical] particles begin taking on new ‘collective’ properties. Delinquent waves begin to act in concert. At low temperatures where everything occurs in slow-motion, the true nature of the most basic constituents of the ensemble are revealed. I wonder whether it could be measured... wonder whether quantum phenomena like the ‘observer effect’ occurs outside the subatomic world, in the world of macroscopic processes like human beings playing and listening to music. According to the second law of thermodynamics, all physical processes in the Universe can naturally flow only from a state of greater energy to lesser energy.

T hrow a stone into a lake, and the ripples it makes eventually die out. My cup of hot coffee can [left by itself in a setting where the ambient temperature is lower than the coffee] only get cooler, not hotter.

B ut near absolute zero the particles comprising an object behave differently. Although the ensemble ‘atoms’ are still part of a ‘gas’, they behave more like atoms of a metal—like one smeared-out single entity, similar to experiments with rubidium gas by Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman at the University of Colorado Boulder in 1995, for which they won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2001. The James Drew expressions form what I think is a musical equivalent to a Bose-Einstein condensate—a peculiar property of atoms slowing down so much that they are zen-like, almost at rest.

T he sonic attributes that I’m referring to can be heard in each of the compositions on this disc... the ‘direct sound duration’ of each note, as contrasted with indirect sounds and their durations and decay. Listen to the sympathetic resonance between notes and the quadratic effect, especially in the piano part [when applicable].

I n the piano, a very high soundboard Q-factor shortens high frequencies’ durations. The piano’s soundboard mechanical impedance affects the global sound duration of the instrument, and, for the instrument performed and recorded on this disc, the high impedance yields longer-duration sounds, slower decays. The tones ‘blossom’ after the initial attack, and sympathetic resonances bring the ensemble of waves in-line. Electron-cloud-like, metallic.

O n hard [piano key; viola; etc.] attacks, the nonlinear part of the string response increases, producing frequencies with twice the values of the normal ones. The quadratic effect influences the loudness of this nonlinear response, and, when the score has such low entropy [close to musical absolute zero], the nonlinearities are very prominent—and are probably related to the superfluid Bose-Einstein condensate-like quality of the collective, coalescing, long-range musical effects that are created here. Similarities to quantum software algorithms (see writings by Matt Hastings at LANL, and others), in terms of process and in terms of how you go about measuring statistical physics properties of music like this...

D rew was born in 1929 and studied with Wallingford Riegger and Edgard Varèse. He taught at Northwestern University, Yale University, UCLA, Cal State, and other institutions. He has performed with and co-founded several musical groups, including the Crossfire Mission Orchestra in the late 1960s in New Haven (radical performances, often behind barbed wire), the Mysterious Traveling Cabaret, the American Music Theater in California, the Blast Opera Theater. In his quasi-retirement he has undertaken concerts and arts education work with the Grey Wolf Project. Barton ‘Zero’ disk is simply excellent.