jwilzewske: trance

Showing posts with label trance. Show all posts

Sunday, May 20, 2012

Terry Riley’s Aleph (א): Music to Code By

A leph in Jewish mysticism represents the oneness of the Divine. The letter can been seen as being composed of an upper yud, a lower yud, and a vav leaning on a diagonal. The upper yud represents the hidden and ineffible aspects of God while the lower yud represents God’s revelation and presence in the world. The vav connects the two realms.”
— Wikipedia.

T he 1-hour 53-min recording of Terry Riley’s solo synth performance of his composition, ‘א’, is beautiful—and precisely the sort of experience you would expect from Riley.

B ut, apart from whatever else it may be and apart from its merits as a composition and as a performance, I have found it to be especially conducive to my own productivity when working on complex math problems and coding software to solve them. For me, silence works only up to a point, after which I need minimalist music.

B ut not just any minimalist music. For example, Michael Nyman’s music interferes with concentration. La Monte Young’s music contains, for me, too many distractions. I do find Ellen Fullman’s recent work conducive, though, in the same way that Terry Riley’s ‘Aleph’ is conducive.

T he timbre of the Korg Triton Studio 88 Synth is bright like a Chinese single-reed or double-reed, but with a lot of spectral flux like a car horn... or a choir of Chinese tenor and bass suonas. Spectral flux and spectral irregularity are distinguishing features in car horns (see Lemaitre 2003, link below).

T he two-hour performance is filled with dense, organic, continually-changing textures—nimble car horns, if car horns can ever be nimble, and these are supernaturally nimble. The automaticity of preschool kids’ trying out their fingers on a keyboard, enjoying the raw pleasure of making notes and reproducing patterns and sequences... reflexive movements of their fingers and arms, yielding arpeggiation that involves just those notes that are within easy reach without stretching.

T he effect, some minutes into listening to it, evokes a freedom from intention and planning that is unknown to sober adults, and this is what facilitates my problem-solving and coding mind. The uncertain continuation of woodwind-like fingering patterns without aim, as long as they last, until superceded by some new motif... the stochastic, aleatoric innovations... Riley discounts the creative value of mind and deliberation and discounts it again, and again... the dollar-store of intellect... until the passion of meat is all that’s left, and animal instinct is restored...

O nly connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect...”
— E.M. Forster, ‘Howard’s End’, Ch. 22, 1910.

H ere’s a short MP3 clip.

T here is a ceremonial, magisterial, quasi-liturgical quality of ‘Aleph’ that reminds me of requiem forms. Or of chant, which can be heard as both archaic and contemporary. It is a mystical piece that unfolds at an implacable, glacial pace. The tone is largely meditative and serene, which provides space for contemplation and veneration. There are dozens-of-voices atmospheric Ligeti-like sound-fogs... fields of dissonance that convey an inhuman, infinite, primeval power—this surely is part of the Hebrew significance of Aleph; as is true also of the meaning of ‘א’ in mathematics—fitting as well in the context of requiem-writing.

I t has been said that my ‘Requiem’ does not express the fear of death and someone has called it a lullaby of death. But it is thus that I see death: as a happy deliverance, an aspiration towards happiness above, rather than as a painful experience. The music of Gounod has been criticized for its over-inclination towards human tenderness. But his nature predisposed him to feel this way: religious emotion took this form inside him. Is it not necessary to accept the artist’s nature? As to my ‘Requiem’, perhaps I have also instinctively sought to escape from what is thought right and proper...”
— Gabriel Fauré, 1902.

T hroughout, the piece is prodigiously inventive, with prolific layers upon layers of rhythmic and harmonic complexity, yet all presented with what appears on the surface to be minimalistic... it embodies the best of what minimalism can be: full of latent variety that captures and nourishes the listener’s awareness. (Which is why I find it helpful to listen to when I am tackling a hard problem, and why I am writing this blogpost you are reading. If you are interested in reading more about quantitative evidence concerning music listening and work productivity, have a look at the links below, esp. the book by Vikram Kiran.)

T he seamless, cluster-like blends fan out like a spilled liquid on a flat surface—part of the organic quality of just intonation, providing a support structure for the synth suona-like parts, a Toop-style “rawness” of intonation that sustains the emotional intensity of the piece.

M ost a cappella ensembles naturally gravitate to just intonation because its ‘stability’ or ‘target-pitch predictability’ is comfortable. In that regard, maybe the spectral flux and on-again-off-again frisson of this Terry Riley recording will be of special interest to people of a vocal bent, both amateur and professional singers alike.

T his sound of synth suonas keening, synth voices keening, choir of synth car horns keening... bears some resemblance to the György Ligeti piece in ‘2001 A Space Odyssey’, ‘Lux aeterna’... A friend who was overhearing my repeated playing of the 2 Riley ‘Aleph’ CDs wondered aloud “How can you stand that!? It’s driving me nuts!” So, to be truthful I should say that this is an acquired taste, or reveals a patience borne of equanimity. It is like being transported by William Kraft’s music in the walkway between terminals underneath Chicago’s O’Hare airport. It is like listening to a choir of chainsaws in the forest at a great and comfortable distance. Or like the persistent-but-beautiful bleating and tintinnabulation of sheep in a high alpine meadow in the Swiss alps, below the Jung Frau Joch in the late mornings of mid-summer. In other words, the bleating and tintinnabulation signify tolerant, salutary, and humane qualities that are implicit in our planet’s troubled story. Children of the Universe, you (every living creature) are here, hurray. Have a good life.

I n short, these are qualities which make humans, the sum of which could be seen in love (esp. agape, which in turn can be seen as an embodiment of the ‘idea of One’). The musical gaze cast from this sphere upon the story world is distanced, more or less withdrawn, non-judgemental, calm, quiet, and slightly melancholic, yet non-sentimental. As film music, tintinnabuli music often qualifies as an ‘against all odds’ score capable of making the complicated plot-level matters more poignant.”
— Kaire Maimets-Volt, p. 172.

I f you were in a foreign country and experiencing the local people performing on their native instruments, a long raga, for example—you would exhibit a tolerance toward such bleatings and tintinnabulations. But if instead, like my friend, you regard it as a choir of annoying car horns—multiple car alarms being set off repeatedly by marauding kids on a street a couple of blocks away—you just want it to stop.

I n summary, playing these 2 CDs consecutively without a break induces an awareness that can facilitate productive concentration at work and lift you into a realm beyond human understanding or hearing. The music requires an audience who must be willing to accept the spirit of the work and suspend their disbelief in order to receive its many rewards.

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Faster than Sound: Acoustic-Electronic Compositions and Combined Visual-Music Performance at Aldeburgh

M usical sound is too limited in its quantitative variety of tones. The most complex orchestras boil down to four or five types of instrument… This limited circle of pure sounds must be broken, and the infinite variety of ‘noise-sound’ conquered. ”
— Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises, 1913.

T he ‘Faster Than Sound’ program was held at Snape Maltings in the Britten Studio last Friday (12 November), one of Aldeburgh Music’s events. The performance was preceded by a 10-day composing workshop led by composers Milton Mermikedes (Univ Surrey and Royal College of Music, London), Martin Suckling (Somerville College, Oxford), and Ted Machover (MIT and Royal College of Music, London).

T he compositions each involved either one or two performers and utilized a combination of conventional acoustic (‘analog’) and signal processing software (‘digital’) idioms.

Adrian Gierakowski – Unitas Multiplex (eDrum tablets and software DSP)
David Ibbett – Impulse Imagined (miked and processed cello and software)
Charlie Williams – e to one million pieces (miked and processed piano and video)
Gregor Riddell – Skyfish (miked and processed cello and software)
Enrico Bertelli – Drumactica (eDrum tablets and software DSP)
Tod Machover – Michael’s Dream (K-bow processed cello and software with lights)
Tod Machover – Spheres and Splinters (K-bow processed cello and software with lights)

A pre-performance talk was given at 6 p.m. in the Jerwood Kiln Studio at Snape. Among the 5 panelists, Ash Nehru (Software Director) from United Visual Artists (UVA) explained the multiple ways in which the 25-pole LED tower array is engineered to respond to inputs from the various sensors on the K-bow and on the cellist’s body. Ben Bloomberg (MIT student) explained some aspects of the Max/DSP and related software that controls the array of 16 loudspeakers positioned around the performance hall. The pre-performance talk was attended by an SRO crowd of about 70 people on this damp, dreary Friday evening in November. The performance itself was attended by about 150. Aldeburgh is famous, but such a turn-out is pretty remarkable given the considerable distance from Cambridge or London in darkest Suffolk on a Friday night. Fantastic to see!

T he gist of Tod Machover’s preconcert remarks was that electronic and multimedia technology can lead ‘classical’ music into new, financially viable markets and young audiences who are not now disposed to spend money consuming classical music. For my part, I strongly doubt this will happen. I have attended concerts of electronic chamber music for years and occasionally write about them in this blog, but see no evidence of market ‘traction’ or audience growth, certainly not among the youth segments Machover was referring to. The affinities, such as they are, are among those who already are devoted to serious music, new or otherwise. That and things like Classical Spectacular, which is about as far from ‘chamber music’ as one can get.

A nd, honestly, the capital expense for acquiring all the gear required—and the expense to ship it and set it up and tear it down for each performance, and the technical complexity of managing it—are out-of-reach for all but a very few classical musicians. The ‘Faster Than Sound’ faculty do not acknowledge this.

T he financial growth opportunities are considerable, though, for combined electronic-acoustic and multimedia compositions in film or recorded on-demand HD downloadable media that are not ‘live’ performances. Home theatres with synths and lights?

T he Ibbett and Riddell e-cello compositions were the ones that I found most accessible and compelling. Gregor Riddell’s cello performances were passionate and elegant, and the use of electronic DSP software effects was tasteful. The textures and timbres provided by the DSP contributed meaningfully to the compositions’ narrative arc and lent extra emotional tension and complexity to the pieces.

I n other pieces on the program the DSP effects proliferated. Sometimes ‘less’ really is more?

O ne begins with a mark, another mark, a third mark, a splash, a smudge, a drip—until the whole work energetically completes itself and the artists can then see [hear] what has been achieved [if anything]. It is not something in which all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand with ‘the execution a perfunctory affair’! How could Pollocks’ ‘Autumn Light’ have been planned? Or de Kooning’s ‘Woman I’? In Abstract Expressionism, hand and eye were everything, and for those who can remember that era, the intellect could hardly have been more suspect. The painter’s studio and the philosophy seminar room were at one in repudiating the ‘ghost in the machine.’ ”
— Arthur Danto, Unnatural Wonders, p. 98.

T he quality of some of this was a bit like Abstract Expressionistic painting, with cascades of disparate effects—ones that are responsive to telemetered measurements of the performers or their instruments, yes, but not ones that are intentional or deliberated, anymore than Pollock’s dribbles were deliberated in detail. There is an aleatoric, ambient ‘found’ quality to such music, though, and that ain’t a bad thing...

O rson Welles once said, that a movie studio was ‘the biggest electric train set a boy ever had.’ I think [McMillen’s] TrioMetrik® [software] just may be the modern composer’s ‘electric train set.’ ”
— Jay Cloidt, Composer.

B y far the most inspiring aspect of the performance, in my opinion, was the United Visual Artists light installation that accompanied the Machover ‘Spheres and Splinters’ composition. The equipment consisted of 25 poles about 3 meters tall equipped with high-intensity LED lamps from top to bottom. The poles were arrayed in two concentric rings (6-meter and 10-meter diameter) about cellist Peter Gregson who was seated on the darkened stage in the middle of this forest of light-poles. The signals from his K-bow and instrumentation that measured his muscle tension, arm gestures, and other physiological variables were processed by software that then controlled the dynamic geometrical 3-D patterns and changing colors on the light-poles.

H ow much ‘control’ or ‘reproducibility’ there may be to this spectacle from performance to performance is anybody’s guess. But there is no doubt that the combination of light and sound can be emotionally engaging and genuinely moving.

I n the pre-performance Q&A session, one professional cellist inquired as to what, if any, of the DSP and lighting is amenable to ‘notation’ in the conventional sense of musical scores and orchestration. ‘How much of what comes out is a surprise to the performer? How much of it is, shall we say, improvisational and how much of it is explicitly notated?’

T he responses of the panelists were, frankly, unconvincing. If graphical scoring methods à la Stockhausen and Xenakis and others are used, they did not say so. Instead they insisted that everything is exquisitely ‘controlled’ by the performers.

N otwithstanding the fact that the patches and loops and software init parameters and so forth constitute a network of procedural and declarative code, it should be confessed that these bricoleurs’ constructions of dozens of disparate elements and subsystems must be documented, in a manner that can not only be replicated and performed by others (not just by the original composer and collaborators) but can be performed by others in decades yet to come, on future equipment and software that can emulate the equipment and software used today. The equipment and software you are performing on will be obsolete in 2 years! In 15 years you won’t be able to boot one of those things you are performing on today or find replacement parts for it when it fails—they will be inoperable ‘antiques’ by then! You must have a notation and waveform specs and filter specs and patch specs, or your ‘composition’ will be like so much disappearing ink!

A rchival characterizations of current system and DSP object-classes and instances? [Crickets chirping] MusicXML representations, with extensions to MusicML? [More crickets]

T he cellist and I were disappointed with the ‘Faster Than Sound’ faculty members’ answers. But we (and, I think, the rest of the audience, based on their enthusiastic applause) were delighted with the performances, regardless whether they prove to be one-of-a-kind, ambient, impossible-to-replicate, incompletely-documented ‘improvisations’ or installation-art ‘happenings’. These were wonderful new works (works-in-progress), composed, engineered, and produced under the duress of a 10-day-long workshop. Bravo to one and all!

C ombining the visual and classical is not as blasphemous as many would think. More than a century ago Alexander Scriabin notated his 1909 symphonic poem ‘Prometheus, the Poem of Fire’ for the Luxe, a custom designed light projector built by Russian physicist Alexander Moser. In the mid-20th century, as a biography explains, conductor Leopold Stokowski often had lights set up for concerts to cast huge shadows of him on the walls of the concert hall. In the 21st century we maintain the visual convention of dimming the auditorium lights to provide engagement betwen audience and musicians. Light installations such as the one that accompanied Spheres and Splinters at Snape yesterday simply strengthen this engagement... Combining visual and classical could press the important hot button for funders, and a little bird tells me UVA may have some speculative work waiting to be picked up by someone quick off the mark in the classical field. Bring on music and movement.”
— On an Overgrown Path blog, 13-NOV-2010.

Monday, June 8, 2009

‘Empfindsamer Stil’ (Sensitive Style): Aleatory, Jouissance, and ‘Trance’ in the Music of C.P.E. Bach

A cadenza is meant to be improvised and should be performed as though it had just occurred to the performer. But, as it is risky for most players to improvise it on the spot, they ought to write it down or at least sketch it in advance... It is as little possible to prescribe good cadenzas… as it is to teach someone to memorize flashes of ‘wit’ beforehand.”
— Daniel Gottlob Türk, Klavierschule, 1789.

I It is well known that Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach was connected to a wide circle of philosophers, theologians, poets and music critics—both in Berlin, where he worked as court harpsichordist to Frederick the Great, and in Hamburg, where he took up the post as director of music of the city’s churches from 1768. One of the central debates within these intellectual circles concerned the nature of artistic expression and its relationship to the self.”
— Rachel Baldock, Understanding [C.P.E.] Bach, 2008.

T here have been lots of ‘hits’ on the CMT post that I put up a couple of days ago, on Mozart’s ‘Wurfelspiel’ minuet generator—oddly many. Also, a number of emails from readers asking whether I meant the post to be—or, alternately, whether Mozart meant K.516f to be—an attack on minuet form as ‘banal’. Hmmm!

W ell, no! Neither is true! Nor were early aleatoric compositional methods intended as pranks or idle curiosities, probably. I bet the instances that we know of—Mozart’s, Haydn’s, C.P.E. Bach’s, others’—were bona fide musical experiments, meant to earnestly see where things could go… intended to ‘push the envelope’ of compositional techniques and musical experience.

I n 1753 C.P.E. Bach wrote his ‘Versuch’ treatise, and he devoted the long last chapter entirely to how to improvise fantasias. He strongly recommended ‘free improvisation’ and thought that one effective way to encourage it was by [Sacrebleu!] eliminating the bar lines in the score.

B asically, he used randomization to generate sudden emotional contrasts. In the spirit of the so-called ‘Empfindsamer Stil’ for which C.P.E. Bach was famous, the performer/listener was meant to ‘go with the flow’, suspend disbelief, and ‘submit’ to the rite... Allow the evolving and contrasting moods of the composition to carry himself/herself away.

T his was not a superficial pandering to prevailing ‘market’ mores; it was C.P.E. Bach’s experiment in navigating the emotions—and an experiment in discovering what musical gestures were (or were not) effective in rapidly eliciting genuine feelings. Pamela Fox wrote a famous article about C.P.E. Bach’s ‘stylistic non-constancy’ about 20 years ago. But she didn’t speculate much about C.P.E. Bach’s motivations or psychological intentions. Pamela did not write about trances or ecstatic, mystical states…

T The public demands that practically every idea be constantly altered, sometimes without investigation whether the structure of the piece or the skill of the performer permits such alteration... One no longer has the patience to play the written notes [even] for the first time.”
— C.P.E. Bach, Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard.

F or me, the process I experience is as though C.P.E. Bach were aiming at ‘startling’ us players or listeners with sudden changes in dynamics, with altered rhythmic patterns, with unexpected modulations.

T ake the ‘Concerto in F Major for Two Harpsichords’, Wq. 46 [H. 408], for example. There are some aleatoric elements in here, but these are only half-explicit... scored, but not entirely prescribed by C.P.E. And they are not the ‘frozen improvisations’ of the illustrious father, as Scheibe and Birnbaum once debated (see John Lutterman, Early Music America, Summer 2009, pp. 61-4).

I n Wq. 46, the subject enters—the right hand leading the canon—which could have been continued ad infinitum. The momentum that comes from the initial rhythm is not just from the notes’ velocity but also from the accelerated pace of canonical imitation—in other words, speed of fingers begets contrapuntal speed, a kind of organic biomechanical-gestural-psychological cooperation.

A s contrasted with the contrapuntal development of his father J.S., C.P.E.’s cadences are ‘loose’—ambiguous rests of indeterminate length, ambiguous rhythmic cues—suggestive of the physics of superconducting material, or of the physics of superfluidity. C.P.E. lets short-term ‘molecular physics’ of fast-moving harpsichordists’ fingers confront the larger contrapuntal designs and—Surprise!—call the larger designs into question.

I s this Wq. 46 concerto not ultimately a ‘clinical’ piece: C.P.E. Bach, plumbing human neurocognitive pathways of music and emotion? It’s almost as though this C.P.E. Bach composition pre-sages Stockhausen’s controlled aleatory of the later Klavierstücke—a kind of ‘meta-Galant’ style—or maybe instead it reprises the (?) stochastic gestalt of Gregorian plainsong?

T he 11 strings [3-3-2-2-1] and 2 horns have—a priestly role?

W ith the latitude for improvisation afforded by Wq. 46, can we not regard this concerto as a kind of ‘emotional gymnasium’ for esoteric training or ‘tantric exercises’? C.P.E. Bach wants the performers and the audience members to find out how fast can you go from bemusement/humor to pathos, from excited anticipation to ecstatic relief!

I n this connection, the usual sense of ‘frozen’ [scored] improvisations is that the composer was sketching what the performer might do—expecting that the performer would be able, technically, to do what was indicated or readily elaborate on the sketch.

B ut here we have a composer who writes something so demanding that it’s impossible for all but the most elite performer to manage it. Nonetheless, mere mortal performers do attempt it—like firewalkers. Or like pole-vaulters, with stochastically varying degrees of success at vaulting: performing the motoric parts of the Allegro assai of Wq. 46 is like a series of death-defying chasm leaps. We are thrilled to safely land on the opposite side; we are vicariously thrilled when performers do it... the beauty of surviving intact... Is it ‘extreme sport’? Is it a rite?

A nd what about the [runtime] idiosyncrasies of the elite body; or of the musical text/score and its scansion by our human eyes; or of the mechanism of the instrument itself (the plectrum for harpsichord; the bow for strings; the valves/slide for brass; the keys on a woodwind instrument; the laryngeal muscles and flesh of vocal folds). In the case of the harpsichord, the rate of return of the plectrum has relatively high variability (compared to piano, say)… Newtonian physics, in service of transcendent spiritual/emotional experience!

I acknowledge that these are emergent/microgranular sorts of aleatorics that’re not usually considered as ‘proper’ aleatoric forms. They may be either inadvertent (require the participant to ‘let go’ [become indifferent toward self] to enter the altered state of consciousness) or deliberate (require the participant to engage in ritual to induce ecstatic/high-arousal/transcendent state). They may not fit the ‘usual’ definitions, but they’re aleatoric just the same.

T ake, for example, Mozart’s writing in ‘Apollo et Hyacinthus’, where Mozart writes for boy singers (with peri-pubertal changing voices) and creates monumental technical difficulties for them—perilously low ‘alto’ parts for Apollo and Zephyr, especially. Melia and Hyacinth, sopranos; Oebalus, the tenor, for example confronts a technically scary part... a chorus to “sacrifice” on a pyre, then: whose parts Mozart deviously writes so as to expressly conjure a particular emotional state, triggered by events that take place in the recitatives and ‘da capo’ arias. All that.

S o was C.P.E. Bach familiar with tantric and sufi practices? Was Mozart? Were some of their concerti and menuets tantric dance analogues? Were they using aleatoric methods as a way to achieve altered states of consciousness?

E ven if the evidence is too scanty to ever know for sure, ask yourself whether these are sublime incantations with small-scale aleatorics! Ask yourself whether this Wq. 46 union of two harpsichords is an ‘ecstasy of technical plenitude’.

[Musica Antiqua Koln, Andreas Staier, Double Concerto for 2 harpsichords, 2 horns, strings & continuo in F major, H. 408, Wq. 46, I, Allegro]

[Musica Antiqua Koln, Andreas Staier, Double Concerto for 2 harpsichords, 2 horns, strings & continuo in F major, H. 408, Wq. 46, II, Largo]

[Musica Antiqua Koln, Andreas Staier, Double Concerto for 2 harpsichords, 2 horns, strings & continuo in F major, H. 408, Wq. 46, III, Allegro assai]

M y own taste runs more to Gustav Leonhardt’s and Alan Curtis’s or Ton Koopman’s and Tini Mathot’s more ‘over-the-top’ interpretations, I have to admit—compared to the conservative MAK performance. Or maybe the former recordings just happened on occasions of particularly auspicious baroque tantric good luck?

P lenty to discuss with Pamela Fox should she happen to be at BEMF this week…

T The harpsichord is my life... the organ is, in a way, a ‘luxurious extra’ to me.”
— Gustav Leonhardt.

T he work is the death mask of its [improvisational] conception.”
— Walter Benjamin.