jwilzewske: truth

Showing posts with label truth. Show all posts

Saturday, April 28, 2012

Giya Kancheli on the [marital] virtues of revealing, accomodating

M usic, like life itself, is inconceivable without romanticism. Romanticism is a high dream of the past, present, and future—a force of invincible beauty which towers above, and conquers, the forces of ignorance, bigotry, violence, and evil.”
— Giya Kancheli.

I ’m listening to a recording of Tblisi-native composer Giya Kancheli’s 26-minute-long 1997 Piano Quartet ‘In l’istesso Tempo’ performed by Bridge Ensemble. The consistent pulse and the narrative epicness of it intrigue me. I replay it twice and the complexities and layers that I’d missed on the first listen gradually become more apparent...

G iya Kancheli’s sustained tones build in layers; melodic lines hover like chant, either offered plainly or decorated with trills and turns befitting a liturgical cantor. The mostly-smooth surface gives way to bare plucks, crackling outbursts and grand crescendos with a Romantic sense of drama... The wide-open space of his music stems more from silence than the repetitive structures of minimalism.”
— Aaron Grad, 2009.

A nephew of mine and his fiancé are getting married next month; I think about them as I listen to this ‘In l’istesso Tempo’. GoogleTranslate says ‘in l’istesso tempo’ means ‘in the same body’—which seems poetically fitting, given the line of thought that Kancheli’s piano quartet and its pulse has induced in me. This piano quartet is full of musical artifacts of a healthy intimacy... a kind of transcendence through durability, with the relationship between lovers deepening and diversifying as things change and as time passes. No [Nietzschean?] pre-conception of will-to-power with forces/personalities/resources coming together, pushing and pulling. Instead, a [Heideggerian?] will-to-dwell: mutual, enduring attention and being present for the other, present-in-body and present-in-mind.

A nd a pluralistic view of truth that does not insist on any one voice (partner) being ‘right’ and the other ‘wrong’... a kind of aletheia (ἀλήθεια).

T he Italian tempo designation ‘in l’istesso tempo’ signifies a musical passage where the speed of the underlying pulse does not change, even if the division of the beats within a bar does so. Music written this way can create an impression of stillness.”
— David Lewis.

K ancheli’s enduring pulse—affirms that love is not love that alters when it alteration finds. There is what music cognition researchers would call ‘event-salience’ in these piano quartet rhythms as-written, leading to automatic beat-induction (BI) for the listener/performer. Auto-BI, in turn, leads us to recognize nature—our bodies!—and how out of our control they are! This is no determinism or fate in which we have no choice or in which human free will plays no part; instead, just an important dimension of reality, and one that we’d do well not to ignore. By the time I’ve finished listening to this the third time, I’ve come to regard the quartet’s accomodation of meter to a pervading, faithful pulse as a romantic gesture—an inspiring acknowledgement of constancy and mutual devotion of friendship, marriage, or civil union founded on true love. No idea as to whether that was what Kancheli had in mind, but the notion is plausible, and I am grateful that the music happened to propel my thoughts in this direction. Unexpected effects like this are a big part of why any person likes music, I think.

T he nothingness of the individual, expressed in simple musical ideas, and its relationship to a more meaningful whole lie at the heart of Georgian composer Giya Kancheli’s work, often disconcerting in its profoundly sad take on modern society. The composer’s aesthetic is admirably served on this exceptional ECM disc by performers who appear to share his vision of a world afflicted by destructive turmoil.”
— Andrew Stewart, Music Week.

O ther ‘in l’istesso tempo’ pieces include Elgar’s Enigma Variations, Op. 36, v. 1; or Ginastera’s Variazioni e Toccata sopra Aurora lucis rutilat, Op. 52, vv. 3,5,6; or Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 43, vv. 1,2,3,6,9,10,14,23. I’ll plan on immersing myself in those on some future evening. Maybe they will lead me further on this path.

B y the way, Artemis String Quartett and pianist Jacques Ammon will be performing at Le Poisson Rouge in NYC on 01-MAY-2012. Their account of Kancheli’s ‘In l’istesso Tempo’ is really superb. Their performance of ‘In l’istesso Tempo’ was positioned in middle of program in last night’s concert in Kansas City and received a standing ovation—which is a pretty uncommon occurrence in mid-program in any performance in any country, you must admit.

A gain and again, with deep regret, we see how alongside obvious achievements of the civilized world we are being worn down. Our planet is being torn apart by bloodshed and antagonisms, and no creative deep is able to withstand that destructive force, which so easily strikes out the fragile means of progress. Taking very close to my heart all that is happening around me, I am trying to express in my music the state I feel in my soul, writing basically for myself, without illusions that ‘beauty will save the world,’ as Dostoyevsky said. That is why my music is more sad than happy, and is addressed more to the lone individual rather than to society. Here you won’t find appeals for striving, equality, or ‘a bright future.’ Most likely, you will find threads of sorrow caused by the imperfection of the world, which keeps disregarding the most horrendous examples in human history. My thoughts are expressed in extremely simple musical language, and I hope that the audience ... will not mistake my deliberate simplicity for what, in my opinion, is the most dangerous phenomenon: indifference.”
— Giya Kancheli.

T he biggest tragedy is to write music.”
— Giya Kancheli.

Friday, June 12, 2009

William Porter on Musicological Truth, Speculation, and Web 2.0

Jean Raoux, Orpheus & Eurydice, ca. 1718, Getty Museum

S ome time ago, I was giving a harpsichord lesson and the student was playing this piece by Johann Casar Ferdinand Fischer—‘Uranie’. And in the Passacaglia an idea occurred to me: I noticed a similarity between the development in Fischer’s music and the plot in the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. The Passacaglia begins in D minor… the accented tritone in measure #3 already indicates danger. Then the descent—descending and descending in D minor: Orpheus is descending into Hades to save [the snake-bitten] Eurydice. Then we have the relative major, F, the sweetest key in this historical temperament, and these trills: Orpheus is overjoyed to find Eurydice, and he begins his return, rescuing her. After the ascent, we have A minor. Orpheus looks at Eurydice, violating the stipulation that had been set in Hades—and the texture of the music thins out, and the furies begin tearing her from him, tearing her limb from limb, and she vanishes…

I said this to my harpsichord student—told my student that this Passacaglia seemed to me to have structural similarities to the plot of Orpheus & Eurydice… and nothing more about it than this. To my knowledge, nobody had ever before considered that Fischer might have been inspired by the Orpheus legend when he composed this piece.

Months after that harpsichord lesson, I Googled ‘Fischer, Passacaglia, Uranie, Orpheus’ to see whether anybody else had had this idea, and to my surprise there was an entry on Wikipedia that said ‘Some experts think that the final dance of the Uranie suite tells the story of Orpheus & Euridice’—but it did not have any footnotes to name who the experts were. Then, some months after that, I Googled it again, and the entry had changed, saying now that ‘William Porter, professor of music at Yale [sic], thinks that this Passacaglia was inspired by the story of Orpheus’. More recently, the entry has been changed yet again, to remove any reference to me.

The moral of this story is that today we can casually invent our own truth. Truth is regarded in a [casual, relative] way. What begins as honest, original speculation gets quickly repeated on the Web, usually stated as fact and usually without attribution.

I like it better when the tentativeness of [my original] conjecture is restored—it ‘might’ be this way; Fischer ‘might’ have been inspired by the Orpheus & Eurydice legend. Speculation and conjecture allow each person to consider an idea and its possibility themselves, and that is far more interesting and beautiful than a [cold, hard] fact.”
— William Porter, pre-performance remarks to audience at BEMF keyboard mini-festival, 11-JUN-2009.

F irst, it is necessary to hold tenure at a prestigious university school of music or conservatory. Second, the person putting forward a musicological opinion should have published extensively in refereed academic journals and be widely regarded as an expert in the field to which the opinion pertains—publishing well-regarded books on the subject, even better. Third, the opiner should cite all previous work by others and present the opinion in a scholarly manner in an appropriate medium or at a worthy venue—certainly not in Wikipedia, which is the quintessential purveyor du jour of all that is unreliable. Fourth, he/she should present exhaustive evidence, detailing each argument that supports the idea and fairly entertaining all rejoinders that are conceivable, summarizing the strengths and limitations of each. Fifth, it is necessary to expressly identify the remarks as opinion only, and to indicate that it should be regarded as tentative, based as it is on conjecture and modest evidence—so that tender babes reading things on the Web will not be deceived or misled.

O r, instead, we can responsibly have fun. And accept that there are valid use-cases besides serious academic ones, and accept that some of those valid use-cases will be fictive and creative ones. Or trust that anyone interested enough to consider some wild, colorful conjecture will be vigorous enough to do their own thinking and fact-checking independently.

W illiam Porter, professor of harpsichord and organ at Eastman School of Music, gave a wonderful performance in yesterday’s BEMF ‘keyboard mini-festival’. He prefaced his performance of Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer’s ‘Musicalischer Parnassus—Uranie’ with the humorous story in the blockquote above, about his speculation about similarities between the plot of Orpheus and Uridice and the dramatic arc in Fischer’s Passacaglia in D minor.

I f you’ve read any of my posts here on CMT blog over the past three years, you know that I’m partial to a kind of truth that is like the kind preferred by Michel Foucault—an evolving, exploring kind of truth; one that we ‘inscribe’ and that ‘inscribes’ us. I respect expertise and evidence, but I don’t especially like regimes and power structures that restrict access to expertise and that legislate/adjudicate what evidence shall be admissible. I like knowing things, but I don’t especially like knowledge that needlessly suppresses imagination, play, creativity, art or fiction.

W e might surmise from his pre-performance remarks that William Porter prefers a pluralistic style of truth, and that he prefers this on aesthetic grounds. Is the position that Porter maintains closest to the one that Michael Lynch has written about? You don’t have to insist that there is one and only one true story of the world. And if you reject the unitary position, you don’t have to resign yourself to having no objective truth, every relativist’s view as good as any other's view. Lynch’s brand of pluralism holds that, although there can be more than one truth, there is nevertheless such a thing as objective falsity based on evidence.

T his, I think, is what Porter meant by his wry comments yesterday. There is no evidence to say that Fischer was not inspired by the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice—nothing that can objectively falsify that conjecture. Yet there is a good bit of musical and circumstantial evidence to support the possibility that the conjecture is true. Aesthetically, Porter’s conjecture makes sense, is coherent, is constructive. The conjecture leads us in interesting, beautiful, valuable directions with regard to understanding Fischer’s music and Baroque interpretation and performance practice.

P orter’s playing yesterday—of the Fischer ‘Uranie’, and of Bach’s Partita No. 4 BWV 828—was wonderful, and his Orpheus & Eurydice story beforehand was provocative, an added ‘bonus’. Together, they were a highlight of my day. Bravo!

P rior to his appointment at Eastman, Porter was a member of the faculty at Oberlin (1974-1986) and the New England Conservatory (1985-2002), and was director of music at Yale Divinity School. He has taught and performed at the North German Organ Academy, the Italian Academy of Music for the Organ, the Göteborg International Organ Academy, the Dollart Festival, the Lausanne Improvisation Festival, the Smarano Organ and Clavichord Academy, the Boston Early Music Festival, and the National Convention of the American Guild of Organists. He is co-founder of the Boston-based Baroque ensembles Affetti Musicali and Musica Poetica. From 1985 to 1997, Porter was director of music at the Church of St. John the Evangelist in Boston. From 1999 until 2002 he was Artist in Residence at First Lutheran Church in Boston, the venue for yesterday’s BEMF keyboard mini-festival. Besides his faculty position at Eastman, Porter teaches part-time at McGill University. And, whether he likes it or not, Porter does have an entry on Wikipedia. As of this moment, it seems not to contain any errors or wild conjectures.

I ncidentally, if you are attending BEMF, you may be interested to know that there is a copy of Clancy Martin's new book, Philosophy of Deception, on display in the exhibitors' area on the 6^th floor of the Boston Radisson Hotel. Not sure whether it contains any mention of Wikipedia...

Friday, May 22, 2009

Isaac Albéniz and Automythology: Chants d’Espagne, Chants des adieux, Chants biographiques

N umerous accounts of Albéniz’s life have been written... Even a cursory examination of any half-dozen of them soon reveals, however, that they are all plagued by inconsistencies and contradictions. This one says he was a stow-away on a Steamer in Cádiz and traveled to Cuba when he was twelve; that one says that the steamer was bound for Buenos Aires, not Havana; another says that it left from La Coruña, not Cádiz. This one says that he studied for nine months in Leipzig; that one says 18 months; another, 3 years. This one says that he studied with Liszt in Weimar, Rome, and Budapest; that one says that he studied with him for a year but only in Italy; another says that he played for Liszt but once, in the summer of 1880. And so it goes, throughout his life.”
— Walter Clark, Guide to Research, p. 3.

T he birthday of the brilliant, prevaricating, self-mythologizing, perpetually leave-taking Catalan-emigre composer-pianist Isaac Albéniz (29-MAY-1860 – 18-MAY-1909) is today.

[50-sec clip, Guillermo Gonzáles, Isaac Albéniz, ‘6 mazurkas de salon, Op. 66: No. 5. Christa’, 1.6 MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Guillermo Gonzáles, Isaac Albeniz, ‘Souvenirs de Espagne: Asturias’, 1.6 MB MP3]

A t age 7 Albéniz passed the Paris Conservatoire entrance examination at the Paris Conservatoire. Bored following the exam, he took out a ball from his pocket and broke one of the Conservatoire windows while he was ‘playing’ with it. The authorities denied him Conservatoire admission on account of this incident. By age 12, he’d run away from home at least 9 times... Clark’s and others’ biographical writings about Albéniz are a delight—full of wonderful enigmas. Hell on wheels.

I n fact, it’s fascinating to read these biographies in parallel—read one for fifteen minutes, then switch to another, then switch to another, and another.

I think this is the best way to do it, and probably the way that would please Albéniz most. You should never allow the apparent veracity of any one of the accounts to win your devotion. Each one should remain at most a mere semblance, a sketch only, as good or shaky as any of the others. Read the biographies while you listen to recordings of Albéniz’s music, multiple performers’ multifarious interpretations of the same pieces... many excellent new recordings have recently appeared—including the ones of performances by Guillermo Gonzáles, who is himself very capable of Albénizian mythologizing.

Guillermo González, Albéniz, Vol 3, photo © Naxos

G onzález, born in Tenerife, is one of Spain’s leading artists and a prominent champion of Spanish music. A professor at the Conservatorio Superior de Madrid since 1975 and concertizes throughout the world, he has appeared in Spain, France, China and around the world. His many recordings include releases of music by Scriabin, Hallfter, de Falla, Antón Abril, de la Cruz, Carlos Cruz Castro, Turina, and Teobaldo Power, for which he received the Premio Nacional del Disco in 1980. Since 1990 he has presided over the Concurso Internacional de Piano de Jaén, receiving a gold medal for his work with this organization. He is a member of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes of Tenerife (Canary Islands), Granada and Cádiz, as well as Honorary and Extraordinary Academician of the Conservatory of Santa Cruz of Tenerife. In addition, several music schools have been named after him in his native Spain. In 1994 he was awarded the gold medal of the Island of Tenerife and named ‘Favourite Son of the Lagoon’ and ‘Adoptive son of Garachico’ (Tenerife).

A lbéniz’s ‘6 Mazurkas de salón’, Op. 66 date from 1885. The 25 year-old Albéniz composed them for a brace of his well-to-do girl piano students. Each is inscribed with a florid, worrisome dedication... ‘To my adorable little friend Christa Morphy’ (daughter of Count de Morphy, private secretary of King Alfonso XII and Albéniz’s patron). The No. 5 (MP3 clip above), dedicated to Christa, is the longest and most enigmatic insofar as it is a delicate presto that requires a player capable of rapid, masculine filigree. The last mazurka, No. 6, entitled ‘Maria’, is more Chopinesque.

G onzalez is an enthusiastic exponent of Albéniz’s music and a faithful interpreter of the music’s implications—even the slippery, noncommittal, dionysian, raggedy, perennially leave-taking ones.

[John Williams, Isaac Albéniz, ‘Asturias’]