Showing posts with label texture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label texture. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

The Five and the One: Balance between Voices in Franck’s Piano Quintet in F minor

Borromeo Quartet, photo Steiner
A  remarkably accomplished string quartet, not simply for its high technical polish and refined tone, but more importantly for the searching musical insights it brings.”
  —  John von Rhein, Chicago Tribune, 23-AUG-2002.
T his piece was a great discovery for me. It helped me to realize that my piano playing style and my personality match well with chamber music. I believe the Franck was my finest performance during the [2001 Van Cliburn] Competition.”
  —  Stanislav Ioudenitch.
Looking forward to the Borromeo Quartet performance this Friday (25-JAN-2008) in Kansas City, I check out their program and revisit scores for the works they will play. One of them will be César Franck’s Piano Quintet in F minor, a “big”, atmospheric piece.
  • Nicholas Kitchen, Violin
  • Kristopher Tong, Violin
  • Mai Motobuchi, Viola
  • Yeesun Kim, Cello
  • Stanislav Ioudenitch, Piano (guest)
    Piano Quintet in F Minor
  • I: Molto Moderato Quasi Lento, Allegro 16:00 – 17:00
  • II: Lento, Con Molto Sentimento 10:30 – 12:00
  • III: Allegro Non Troppo, Ma Con Fucco 9:20 – 10:00

T he instrumental work was seen [in the 19th Century] as a wordless oration, and its form was viewed not so much as a harmonic or thematic plan but as an ordered succession of thoughts.”
  —  Mark Bonds, p. 53.
The piano part in this Quintet is virtuosic, magisterial, symphonic. In fact, that may be the biggest risk—the fact that the piano part is so “big”. The quartet may play beautifully and cohesively, but the pianist must fully “belong”. This is a chamber music piece. It ought not to come off as a mini ensemble piano concerto. Nobody is ‘accompaniment’. And it’s not a ‘pianist vs. quartet’ duet.

So the real unifying factor has got to be pianist Ioudenitch. Not ‘in charge’, but genuinely ‘unifying’. The opening Molto Moderato is simultaneously tender, muscular, edgy—moderato but almost anxiously hurried—with minimal good-natured geniality: urgent.

The Borromeos—known for their full tone—deliver phrasings that are abundant with feeling, and their sound production has a characteristic lyrical fullness. But, playing with Iodenitch, they are under-stated, more subdued as they merge their playing. There is a wonderfully hushed quality in this Molto Moderato.

And, true to the ma con fucco indication, the Allegro is brisk, lively and light, well-accented, almost hard-driven. Despite the fact that they do not regularly play together, the Borromeos and Ioudenitch manage to achieve what, to paraphrase David Rounds, is clearly ‘The Five and The One.’

Each movement in the Quintet evolves from a single idea, and these ideas clearly connect as a series of narrative episodes. Like a protagonist in a drama, each idea goes on its ‘journey’ through a series of contrasting psychological states hoping for resolution or fulfillment. Inter-connections and inter-movement references are beautifully rendered by the Borromeos. An extended passage, or even a single texture recalled from an earlier moment triggers our memory and builds up a multi-dimensional awareness. All this makes the work feel “Big”.

Ioudenitch’s interplay with the wonderful Borromeos is marvelous. How hard should the players try to minimize ‘inhomogeneity’ between the strings? In my view, not much. It’s routine to have a novel where each character is fully-developed and yet there are leading roles and supporting roles. And so, too, in a piece like this. It’s unreasonable to insist on absolute parity when the expressive/narrative content of the work doesn’t exhibit parity and when the composer didn’t intend it. The ‘characters’ in the 5 parts here are so disparate as to argue against attempting to enforce ‘equality’.

In other words, this is not the same inter-voice dynamic as in a Piano Trio or Piano Quartet. Obviously, the five voices have to cooperate. But the texture is more complex and could get muddy if they do not really, really cooperate and anticipate each other’s phrasing. There are thematic processes that operate on a larger scale. This is not a ‘subject/answer’ or ‘tell-and-ask’ rhetoric, as Peter Smith and others have explored in Brahms, say (Music Analysis 2001;20:193-236). There’s less predictability in individual voice-leading. There are more inter-voice constraints than in a quartet.

David Rounds, The Four and The One, Table of Contents
And the unfolding of the separate voices/characters is idiosyncratic—characteristic of Franck, even if not necessarily characteristic of the period or the quintet form or sonata form. We have ‘hybrid phrases’ where Franck creates ‘antecedent’ and ‘consequent’ phrases—creates the ‘consequent’ of one (sub-) phrase by transposing an initial tonic-oriented antecedent statement of a thematic idea into the dominant key. This is especially notable when the minor dominant is tonicised. In an alternative approach, Franck adjusts intervals within the repetition (consequent) so that the restatement centers on the dominant but remains within the tonic key. Material that unfolds within the tonespace of the 1-5 fifth is ‘answered’ by a repetition that falls within the 5-1 fourth. This alternative approach ‘recontextualizes’ the idea of an ‘answer’.

In fact, if Franck had used a formal ‘subject/answer’ or ‘tell-and-ask’ type of rhetoric, it would have lent a sort of ‘instability’ to the piece. It would have been somwhat of an anacrusis—an under-stressing or ambiguity of authority, before (and in between) the more forceful statements.

It’s a complex phenomenon and it involves the musical and social coordination of the group, an agreed sense of leadership, and the group members’ individual and collaborative construction of meaning through verbal discussions and shared reflections on the playing. Group identity is shaped by individual players’ self-identities and vice-versa (Rounds 1999; Stubley, 1992) and a piano quintet is no exception. We have both musical and social coordination between musicians here (Davidson & Good, 2002; Ginsborg, Chaffin, & Nicholson, 2006; Williamon & Davidson, 2002; Young & Colman, 1979).

Dahlhaus at Technische Universitat Berlin (1991, p. 255) discussed rhetorical coherence in terms of ‘architectonic form’—a balance between phrases, periods, and sets of periods—each rhetorical unit counterbalanced by one or more other metrical/rhetorical units at every level in the piece. He contrasted this with ‘logical form’ (form based soley on ‘motivic connections’) which holds a movement together ‘from within’. This Franck Quintet seems clearly ‘architectonic’ according to Dahlhaus’ definitions. Big and satisfying!

T his music is rich in atmosphere and tenderness. There are so many colors and such a wide range of emotions, it makes it hard to breathe! When all the proportions are right during the performance, it connects us with the composer’s soul. That’s an unbelievable experience for the performer and the audience.”
  —  Stanislav Ioudenitch.

Franck Piano Quintet, Molto Moderato, Piano part
Franck Piano Quintet, Molto Moderato, Violin 1 part
Franck Piano Quintet, Molto Moderato, Violin 2 part
Franck Piano Quintet, Molto Moderato, Viola part
Franck Piano Quintet, Molto Moderato, ‘Cello part


    [40-sec clip, César Franck, Piano Quintet, Molto Moderato, mm. 1-10, Schubert Ensemble, 1.1MB MP3]

    [50-sec clip, César Franck, Piano Quintet, Molto Moderato, “A”, Schubert Ensemble, 1.6MB MP3]

    [30-sec clip, César Franck, Piano Quintet, Molto Moderato, “B”, Schubert Ensemble, 0.9MB MP3]

    [50-sec clip, César Franck, Piano Quintet, Molto Moderato, “C”, Schubert Ensemble, 1.3MB MP3]


Borromeo Quartet, photo Linder


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Sunday, February 25, 2007

Glagolitic Ekphrasis and Melisma in Tondal

Dialogos, Vision of Tondal
DSM: Dialogos uses such—What would we say?—onomatopoetical sounds. If Tondal’s spirit is leaving his body, then what better way to represent that movement than by the splitting of vocal lines—the divergence from unison to close harmonies and dissonances, diminished seconds, and so on—and the re-convergence of those lines back into unison! The whole thing is melismatic (that is, many notes per syllable of text)! The extended, braided melismas distort our sense of time! A fantastic effect!

CMT: Yes. In Tondal, all six of the Dialogos members’ voices execute extensive melismas—sometimes in the upper range to express aspiration or anxiety or other emotions; sometimes low in their vocal range to express a pensive rumble. I think that long melismas are such a vivid musical rendering of the self, of the spirit. Incidentally, Bach often does this on the word ‘geistlich,’ and he even works in some irony in his choral settings—for example, when the alto sings the chorale while the soprano and tenor parts accompany—in his Cantatas and in his smaller works (Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied; Komm, Jesu, komm; Lobet den Herrn; Jesu, meine Freude; and Fürchte dich nicht). The singers bid farewell to life’s vices and passions to gain eternal life, and you would expect Bach to emphasize the joy and eagerness of those expecting salvation. But instead the musical figure of the soprano voices—the way in which they reluctantly release their held notes down a half step—clearly represents regret and doubt. You hear a predominating sorrow—an aporia. Much of Dialogos’ account of Tondal’s Vision is like this—these aporietic melismas!

DSM: Buelow notes Bach’s use of melismatic gestures, which he says are “contradictory to all Baroque theory of recitative.” But maybe Bach was harking back to an early tradition. Not only poets may respond to a work of visual art with a creative act in their own medium, transposing the style and structure, the message and metaphors from the visual to the verbal. Composers routinely engage in interartistic transfers like this. Although the musical medium is reputedly abstract, composers, just like poets, can respond in many different ways to a visual representation. They transpose structure and content. They interpret or play with some of the suggestive elements of the original image. This is basically the musical equivalent of what literary theorists call ‘ekphrasis’. Central questions concern the definition of musical ekphrasis in relation to music’s ability to represent extramusical realities or narratives—to relate to reality by way of musical mimesis or symbolic reference.

CMT: You know, listeners don’t have unbounded capacity to track multiple concurrent lines of sound. David Huron found that as the number of concurrent voices in a polyphonic texture increases, expert listeners are both slower to recognize the addition of new voices, and more prone to underestimate the number of voices present. Here is Huron’s plot of experimental data from five expert musicians. This shows voice-tracking errors while listening to polyphonic music. The data show that when listening to polyphonic textures employing relatively homogeneous timbres, tracking confusions are common when more than three voices are present.

David Huron
DSM: The solid columns show mean estimation errors for polyphonic textures of varying textural densities; the shaded columns indicate mean error rates for single-voice entries. For polyphonic textures employing relatively homogeneous timbres, the accuracy of identifying the number of concurrent voices drops markedly at the point where a three-voice texture is augmented to four voices. Beyond three voices, tracking confusions are commonplace. In a study of isolated chords, Parncutt (1993) found similar results. When asked to count the number of tones in chords constructed using tones with octave-spaced partials (Shepard tones), Parncutt found that listeners make significant errors (underestimation) once the number of chromas exceeds three.

CMT: Limitations in the perception of auditory numerosity may be symptomatic of a broader perceptual limitation, since the results of these studies parallel the results of similar studies in vision. Using a dishabituation paradigm, Strauss and Curtis showed that performance degrades when discriminating three from four items, and reaches chance performance when discriminating four from five items. The work of Strauss and Curtis is especially significant since pre-verbal infants can be expected to possess no explicit knowledge of counting. This implies that the perceptual confusion arising for visual and auditory fields containing more than three items is a low-level constraint that is not mediated by cognitive skills in counting.

DSM: These results are consistent with reports of musical experience offered by musicians themselves including composer Paul Hindemith. It strikes me that this is much like the close harmonies and complex dissonances of barbershop quartet singing. Your mind naturally follows and anticipates the divergences and convergences. In fact, that is a major source of the power and charm of such music—the textural complexities.

CMT: Dialogos compounds this further when they circle themselves on the stage. The choral effect is as though the dissonances are massed—one single aggregate collective spirit, despite the continued multi-vocality of it. Then the antiphonal qualities are restored when they disperse from the circle and distribute themselves across the stage—the individualistic contrast is especially apparent when they are performing in a large cathedral, with all of the reverberations that are characteristic of a church.

David Huron
DSM: Temperley addresses a fundamental question about music cognition: how do we extract basic kinds of musical information, such as meter, phrase structure, counterpoint, pitch spelling, harmony, and key from music as we hear it? Taking a computational approach, Temperley develops models for generating these aspects of musical structure. The models he proposes are based on preference rules, which are criteria for evaluating a possible structural analysis of a piece of music. A preference rule system evaluates many possible interpretations and chooses the one that best satisfies the rules.

CMT: Temperley has addressed some of this in his book, as has Taruskin in his. There is the ontology of musical structure: meter, phrase structure, contrapuntal structure, harmony, and key, as well as pitch spelling (the labeling of pitch events with spellings such as A-flat or G-sharp). Musical structures are inferred, but there is also musical ambiguity, “look-back” retrospective revision of our concepts as we continue listening, and sweet anticipation—‘expectation’ in Huron’s sense. Dialogos is masterful in interweaving all of these to make their performances powerfully evocative!




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