jwilzewske: transcription

Showing posts with label transcription. Show all posts

Friday, June 3, 2011

Just returned to U.S. from several weeks in China, inspired by the possibilities

S oft power is derived from both state and society. Savvy states are able to harness the creativity and vibrancy of their societies for soft power purposes while understanding that it is civil society’s independence from the state that contains the real persuasive power. When authoritarian states deny the global public the ability to directly access their domestic civil society, they are potentially depriving themselves of a key soft power asset in the information age.”
— Shanthi Kalathil, ISD Working Papers in New Diplomacy, MAY-2011.

I ’ve just returned from several weeks in China—a wonderful, profoundly stimulating experience. I attended chamber music performances in Beijing, including a delightful concert at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (“The Egg”) by pianist Igor Levit and three of his colleagues (Evgenia Rubinova, Michail Lifits, Herbert Schuch).

U nfortunately, due to Chinese government policy Google Blogger, Twitter, and Facebook are all blocked in the PRC, which is why I have posted no blogs or tweets in recent weeks. (Did not try to use a proxy-server. Hotel ISPs were dodgy enough as it was...)

T here were interesting ‘audience compliance enforcement’ practices in China that we would never see in the West. For example, the concert hall staff aim red ‘marksman’/gun-sight-type lasers on the heads and backs of audience members who make noise or who move or try to take a forbidden photo during a performance. Everyone in the audience sees the bright red dot ‘painted’ on the body part of the offender. We don’t see that kind of enforcement of etiquette in the U.S. or Europe, that’s for sure. But the effectiveness of the social censure by the other audience members who are seated near the ‘offender’ is total and nearly instantaneous. From a performer’s perspective, this is kind of cool—especially when the behavior is disruptive and selfish on the part of the person doing the picture-taking or recording or moving-around.

I gor Levit gave a fantastic left-hand-only rendering of BWV 971 (among other things). I asked him and he says the transcription was Brahms’s, published by Breitkopf & Hartel, but I look in Breitkopf catalog and do not see it... I will have to buy a copy of their EB-6018 to look... maybe it is in there and only the Breitkopf pdf file online is in error. There are lots of LH transcriptions of BWV 1004 Chaconne, BWV 1006, BWV 1002, BWV 1031, and so on. I so far do not find the LH tr. of 971...

T he unlikely LH as proponent of subject, object, everything: this reveals new dimensions in, and sheds new light on, a piece I thought I understood. The RH stands by like a watchful parent, saying nothing.

L eon Fleisher and others have had dystonia or other reasons to pursue such literature, but here in China I hear Igor Levit and learn new things. Some might consider one such piece in an otherwise normal program to be a ‘novelty’ or ‘gimmick’, but it was not. Absolutely masterful.

I visited hospitals—crowded but fastidiously clean and well-run—so many things different from the West, but so many things the same. Visited the Central Conservatory where Chen Yi and Zhou Long and others trained. Oh, the food! The friendly, gracious Chinese people!

S o China blazes this prodigious, distinctive, iconoclastic path—many paths, actually, reflecting mixtures of Han Chinese plus 55 minority groups: regional, metropolitan and rural—always diverging from the West, because why? Because what is distinctly Chinese embodies the belovèd “national circumstances” and reinforces the honorable “Chinese characteristics”, or guoqing (国情). That is why... that is why this Chinese ‘autopoietic’ tendency is self-sustaining. It is a little like Richard Dawkins’s ‘Selfish Gene’ on a large social scale. Based on my 3-week exposure, I think it’s not a deliberated process and not a politically-coerced one. Instead, it feels organic, inevitable. So many people, who mostly seem so happy, so long as the ‘boom’ lasts! I can hardly wait for the chance to return...

Brahms transcription of the Bach Chaconne of Violin partita BWV 1004 for the left-hand (Peters)
Brahms transcription of Italian Concerto (Clavier-Ubung II) for the left-hand (Breitkopf)
Joseffy Violin partita BWV 1006 transcription for the left-hand
Kistler-Liebendorfer Choralvorspiel BWV 711, violin sonata BWV 1001, violin partita BWV 1006, orchestra suite No. 1 BWV 1066, orch suite No. 3 BWV 1068, musical offering canon BWV 1079... transcription for the left-hand
Philipp violin partita BWV 1002, violin partita BWV 1004 transcription for the left-hand
Raff Violin partita No. 2 BWV 1004 Chaconne transcription for the left-hand
Sitsky Violin partita No. 2 BWV 1004 Chaconne transcription for the left-hand
Sosa Chromatische Fantasie und Fuge BWV 903 transcription for the left-hand
Sosa Invention B-Dur BWV 785 transcription for the left-hand
Wittgenstein Violin partita No. 2 BWV 1004 Chaconne transcription for the left-hand
Wittgenstein Schule für die linke Hand III/2: Präludium c-Moll transcription for the left-hand
Wittgenstein Siciliano aus der Flötensonate Es-Dur BWV 1031 transcription for the left-hand

Saturday, January 8, 2011

AntiPatterns: Classical Banjo, Code Refactoring, and Short Time-scale Acoustical Physics

O ne has merely to hear the banjo’s strings touched, or one double-stop drawn out on the fiddle, to recognize the sense in which the meaning of bluegrass begins simply with what these instruments essentially are: it is the aim of bluegrass style to set forth what the instrument—or for that matter the person playing the instrument—essentially is.”
— Robert Cantwell, Bluegrass Breakdown, p. 203.

A thousand kilometers away, one of my nephews is tackling learning banjo. I give him Bullard’s book (link below) and begin listening to exotic recordings by Bela Fleck and John Bullard and others, in hopes of having mutually fun dialogues with my nephew, via email and face-to-face when I go and visit him.

T he banjo sounds on these recordings remind me of the sound—the ‘interiority’, the ‘earnestness’—of traditional shamisen or samisen (三味線, literally “three-taste strings”) music. Shamisen is similar to banjo in that the dō, the skin-covered box, is a lightly-damped resonator, much like the banjo’s. Both instruments are highly percussive and relatively ‘bright’. Both are plucked with the fingers or with a plectrum.

S o I go looking around to see what spectral analysis studies have been published about banjo or shamisen. I am curious to better understand the reasons that explain the unusual tone or timbre of each. Välimäki and coworkers spent a lot of effort on the matter in the mid-1990s (link below). Unlike guitar and other stringed instruments, for banjo the 5th harmonic (fourth overtone; 2P8+M3) and higher harmonics are rapidly attenuated, except for the 8th harmonic (3P8; 3 octaves above fundamental).

S olid body electric guitars don’t lose much string energy to the bridge. As a consequence they have a distinctive sound and are very long in sustain. Banjos on the other hand dump energy from the strings very easily to the rest of the instrument, and their characteristic sound is in large part related to that.”
— Liutaio Mottola.

T he directionality of the instrument’s sound radiation has a lot to do with banjo-ness, too, I think. Plucked string instruments have complex sound radiation patterns for various reasons. The resonant-mode frequencies of the box account for most of the radiated sound pressure. And different mode frequencies of the body have their own directional patterns, such as monopoles, dipoles, quadrupoles, and their combinations (see examples at UNSW, Joe Wolfe’s site, link below).

A nother distinctive factor is ‘masking’ caused by occultation of the sound by (and reflections from) the performer’s body. Masking plays an important role in environments where the listener (or the recording microphones) and the sound sources are positioned off-axis from each other or are freely moving with respect to each other.

T he influence of “X” vs. “Y” hand position for passages that involve the right-hand moving up the neck of the instrument is yet another factor, one I must remember to explore with my nephew when I next see him. The “X” position lends a bright timbre, and the “Y” position gives a rounder, darker quality. What the the player does with the right-hand on the head of the banjo also changes the timbre/color a lot.

A nd then there is picking technic. Fleck’s jazz-influenced single-string picking style lends an extra “impulsion” to the banjo timbre—a consequence of sympathetic acoustic coupling to and from the other un-plucked strings? The “impulsion” is one of the qualities that I am most attracted to in these recordings.

O h, the sheer exoticness of them, though! The sound calls into question the locale, the culture and politics, and the epoch of each musical text and of each of the speakers (composer, performer) and hearers. The ‘rurality’ of banjo timbre... the instrument’s architecture preserved even in the most refined, expensive ones of modern manufacture with technical polymer engineered-composite materials and high-tech strings.

T he ‘interiority’ of chamber banjo sound is radically different from the interiority of lute or harpsichord. If our own interiority is an object, then the music embodies that ‘objective’ world. Not ‘mimesis’ or ‘representation’; more like incarnation...

P hysical strings vibrate in both the vertical and the horizontal directions (well, actually, more like a lissajous curve in the plane perpendicular to the string’s length, so the polarization directions are changing and are only intermittently orthogonal to each other). If the effective length of the string is not the same in the two predominant polarization planes, we get mixing of the subsignals of slightly different frequencies, which in turn creates beat-frequency pulsations in the sound. This is a distinctive feature not only in banjo but in the Finnish kantele’s timbre as well, where the mechanism has to do with the peculiar way in which the strings have been terminated on the box.

V älimäki and colleagues emphasize that distinctive timbral properties of banjo are associated with the “attack”, the early transients in the waveform in the few tens of milliseconds immediately after the string is plucked or frailed. But there are wonderful, deeply banjo-ey aspects in the notes’ “decay” as well. We hear those in the Bullard and Fleck recordings. The ‘openness’ of these transcriptions of baroque, classical, and romantic compositions affords closer examination of those timbral spectral features than would ordinarily be possible to do in, say, idiomatic bluegrass and other banjo repertoire.

I t seems to me that these recordings of Bach and other composers’ works on banjo draw our attention to what neurophysiologists call “event fusion” (the formation of unitary musical events from the micro-evolution of waveforms on a time-scale of tens of miliseconds, too small to exhibit rhythm or voice-leading) and its inter-relationships with harmony and melody and rhythm and larger-scale form.

T hese banjo transcriptions and arrangements are unusual, musically speaking, but they register for me as very familiar in other ways. ‘Refactoring’ and ‘porting’ musical “code” from one performance “platform” to another—in the manner that Bullard and Fleck exemplify—feel to me very much like refactoring and porting computer code from one computing platform/language/operating-system/architecture to another. The process calls into question the [psychological; physical] conditions necessary for making large-scale—that is, ‘formal’—interfaces and system services-stack clear in music, just as the refactoring process does in software. The process in both cases invites or even demands reconsideration of the work’s design constructs and architectural components.

I n both, it vividly reveals the different levels of abstraction that are supported or not-so-well-supported by the different platforms. And it can uncover the essence of our interior selves, by making us pay attention to neural logic-races, multi-timescale communications phenomena, and hard-coded “antiPatterns” that the composer or performer (or listener) might not otherwise have noticed. So even if the target transcribe-to platform (banjo) manifests some antiPatterns of its own, it is still always healthy and illuminating to be outside our “comfort zones” and gleaning what we can from the refactoring process.

T he beauty and elegance of these classical banjo recordings make me want to revisit some of my own code that I have recently [re-]written; improve it; maybe understand it from novel and useful perspectives.

A ll sounds, all colours, all forms—either because of their preordained energies or because of long association—evoke indefinable and yet precise emotions, or, as I prefer to think, call down among us certain disembodied powers, whose footsteps over our hearts we call emotions.”
— W.B. Yeats, The Symbolism of Poetry.

H ow can we know the dancer from the dance?”
— W.B. Yeats.

Sunday, November 7, 2010

Melvyn Tan: 19th-Century Conceptions of Self and Narrative

B etween 1837 and 1840 Liszt made no fewer than 44 transcriptions of Schubert lieder.”
— Derek Watson, p. 45.

T oday it is less necessary to defend the art of transcription, and arrangements are again part of the accepted repertoire. In the 20th Century the prevailing tendency to condemn them was a symptom of the age of radio, of recording, and of anti-Romanticism.”
— Derek Watson, p. 195.

T his was a concert of the choicest winter food, perfect for a cold, dark November London night—the sort of music that beautifully follows a meal of roasted autumn root vegetables, music that you can live off of, music to eat with a fork—the kind of savoury dish that even the most impassive of souls eye with envy when a waiter carries it by. Melvyn Tan gave us lots to contemplate, which we did with gratitude, ensconced in the warmest of red velvet Wigmore Hall seats.

T his program emphasized ‘autobiographical’ and ‘biographical’ narrative qualities, aspects that are a particular strength of Tan’s playing.

Schubert – 3 Klavierstücke, D.946
Liszt – transcriptions of Schubert: Sei mir gegrüsst, S. 558 No. 1; Auf dem Wasser zu singen, S. 558 No. 2; Du bist die Ruh, S. 558 No. 3; Liebesbotschaft, S. 560 No. 10; Ständchen (Horch, horch! die Lerch), S. 558 No. 9
Chopin – Piano Sonata No. 3 in B minor, Op. 58

T he Klavierstücke came in at under 10-min, 11-min, and 5-min durations, the total of them about 1 minute faster than most recent recorded versions. The 4-min, 4-min, 5-min, 3-min, and 3-min durations of the Liszt transcriptions were closer to, say, conventional tempi (of, say, Murray Perahia), but the beauty of Tan’s speed here was the sense of ‘confession’ that it conferred. The overall effect was one of an inspired storyteller, telling sagas of tremendous import with great urgency and pressure-of-speech befitting the excitement and twists and turns of the plot.

T an’s ‘matter-of-fact’ pedaling technique, especially with the prompt releases in the ‘Du bist die Ruh’, added to the strong confessional, diaristic impression of his interpretation.

P laying this entire program from memory lends even more authority to the first-person, omniscient-narratorly effects that Tan conjures up.

I nevitably, that close and prolonged contact with another composer’s music [leaves] its mark on [one’s] own development—not least on his own Lieder.”
— Gerald Larner, program notes, 2010, remarking on the consequences for Liszt of years’ immersion in transcribing/arranging Schubert [consequences that have their parallel, I believe, on immersive performers like Tan].

T he seriousness and tenderness of the Chopin nocturne that Tan played as an encore touched every member of the audience… a wonderful reprise and a fine ending to a truly memorable evening!

Sunday, December 21, 2008

Six-Mallet Marimba Technique, Sparkling Transcriptions

M ore suggestions from readers of the previous CMT post about transcriptions… thank you! The Bach pieces transcribed for marimba, especially. Bach himself transcribed one of his cello suites for the lute, so we guess that gives encouragement to everyone to try her/his hand at it. Without doubt, Bach’s music transcribes well to marimba, although works by Pleyel and Albeníz and other composers do nicely, too.

Like harpsichord, the intimacy and timbre of marimba are in some ways more conducive to the ‘confessional’ Bach—more congenial to a posture of reverence or genuflection than piano is. Modern marimba has five full octaves, but I suppose you might wish that the high register of a marimba had more sparkle. Maybe the origin of such a wish is undervaluing the skill of the transcription and the artistry of the percussionist. Following the advice of an emailer, I listen to Kai Stensgaard. His six-mallet technique accommodates more complex contrapuntal writing than four-mallet could do. Kai’s work is wonderful. Speed is not a limiting factor per se, but it’s extremely difficult to play with 6-mallet polyphony completely relaxed, without fatigue. The tiny, highly personal deviations from perfect synchrony lend a shimmering, human aspect—revealing an aspect of our humanness as we ‘hit a wall’ in our attempts to synchronize events with a time resolution much below about 100 - 120 msec (mm = 400 - 600) [see Bruno Repp's paper here (500KB pdf) ]. It is still computationally difficult for virtual instrument software to emulate this biomechanics with believable realism… Kai’s technic is virtuosic—and the relaxed, earthly, biomechanics-constrained humanity of it is part of the beauty we hear in his performances. There are many other beautiful transcriptions and performances/performers, too.

[ Kai Stensgaard, marimba; Ramirez, ‘Missa Criolla—Gloria’, video 2008 ]

[ Kai Stensgaard, marimba; Albeniz, ‘Asturias Leyenda’, video 2008 ]

For sacred and classical compositions for marimba, you may also like to try Cambridge, Massachusetts based Thomas Oboe Lee’s pieces. For example, his ‘Prelúdios’:

[50-sec clip, Thomas Oboe Lee, ‘Prelúdios’, Mvt. 1, 1.2MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Thomas Oboe Lee, ‘Prelúdios’, Mvt. 2, 1.2MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Thomas Oboe Lee, ‘Prelúdios’, Mvt. 3, 1.2MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Thomas Oboe Lee, ‘Prelúdios’, Mvt. 4, 1.2MB MP3]

Bach at Christmas. Warm fire in fireplace. Mulled cider. Friends and family visiting. Cheers!

[50-sec clip, Ed Hartman, Bach, ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’, 1.2MB MP3]