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Thursday, January 22, 2009

Frozen Inaugural Quartet & The Moral Standing of Instruments

Yo-Yo Ma, freezing on Obama inauguration dais, Washington, D.C., 20-JAN-2009

D ue to the mistake in administering the oath of office], if in fact Barack Obama is not the President, who is? Okay, the Constitution says that the President takes office at noon on Inauguration Day, oath or no. So I’m pretty sure that means the Presidency goes to whoever was on-camera at noon. The new President is Yo-Yo Ma! ... It’s still pretty darn historic to have the first Asian-American President and the first Vice President who is a cello.”
— Steven Colbert, Comedy Central , 21-JAN-2009.

S upposedly, Oistrakh once recorded Paganini’s 17^th Caprice in one take, in an unheated, freezing-cold studio in Russia in wintertime. Impressive.”
— Carl Fulbrook, Cambridge (Churchill College Music Society).

C ellist Yo-Yo Ma, violinist Itzhak Perlman, clarinetist Anthony McGill, pianist Gabriela Montero performed at the Obama Inauguration on Tuesday. The quartet played a piece by composer Williams called ‘Air and Simple Gifts’ immediately before Obama was sworn in. It was 31 °F (-1 °C). The wind was blowing at about 3 mph (5 km/h). Attendees seated nearby were bundled up in scarves and thick winter coats and knit hats pulled down over their ears. How is it possible to play in such conditions? Those of us who have performed outdoors in freezing weather—in a marching band or brass band, say—dread it. But violin? Cello? Piano? Inconceivable! At least Gabriela had some fingerless gloves on…

H ere is a YouTube of the performance:

T hink of the cello! Think of the violin! (And the clarinet and the piano, too, although those are not in such clear and present physical danger as the strings are.)

T hese are not mere inanimate objects. They merit care and ethical concern—in somewhat the way that animals do. If pets have rights, then instruments do as well. The violin and cello deserve a loving, respectful home. My moral character and virtue as a human being depend on how I treat them.

H ell, I take my violin into the supermarket rather than leave it in my car’s back seat, even if only for 30 min. Swaddling the instrument in a blanket for extra insulation is good. What musician knowingly mistreats her/his instrument? Well, don’t answer that...

WeatherChannel, WDC temperatures hourly listing, 20-JAN-2009

S o never mind the human agony of playing in freezing conditions in Washington, D.C., this Tuesday. Never mind the aesthetic tuning and articulation issues that the humans are subjected to when performing in extreme temperatures. My hopes and prayers are for the instruments.

M y ethical feelings toward instruments do come with a distinction, not unlike that of 18^th-Century Scottish philosopher, David Hume. Since the instruments are inanimate and cannot reciprocally behave virtuously toward me, they cannot have exactly the same moral standing as a person or an animal. My sense of an instrument’s ‘valor’ and ‘utility’ has to be combined with what philosophers would call ‘aprobation’—a moral calibration that takes into account its inanimateness: the fact that it is not a sentient creature. Just the same, I care about its wellbeing...

M y questions, though, are these: (a) is the physical risk of damage to the violin-family instrument mainly due to the temperature excursion or instead mainly due to the effects of sudden change in humidity? Is it (b) mostly a matter of stress between the top plate vs. saddle or instead a matter of temperature/humidity changing how the soundpost is fitting? And (c), what parts change dimension at the fastest rate? Will I (d) hear the fatal cracking of the top plate while the instrument is still cooling down, or will the distaster be more likely to happen when I bring it inside and warm it up? Finally, (e) after exposure to cold, what rate in degrees per hour would be best to allow the instrument to warm up, to prevent the instrument from cracking or the gluelines from separating upon thawing?

Violin saddle, photo © Stewart-Macdonald

T he thermal expansion coefficient of dry wood parallel to the grain (as for the ebony saddle) is essentially independent of wood species and density. For ebony, the thermal linear expansion coefficient α_l is 3.1 x 10^-6/°C. But the thermal expansion coefficient across the grain (radially, as for a sitka spruce top plate, or tangentially) are strongly dependent on wood species and density (gm/cm³).

α_r = (9.9 + 32.4ρ) x 10^-6/°C

S ince sitka spruce ρ = 0.42 gm/cm³, α_r = 23.5 x 10^-6/°C. In other words, the chilling top plate contracts about 7.6 times as much as the ebony saddle for a given temperature excursion.

If we take the violin from at 68 °F (20 °C) room outdoors onto the inauguration platform at 31 °F (-1 °C) a contact area between the saddle and the top plate that is about 50 mm long will begin shrinking—the ebony will shrink -3.26 μm and the sitka spruce will try to shrink -23.5 μm, but will be prevented from doing so by the saddle. The woods and the glue between the spruce and the ebony will be under considerable shear and tensile stress while this is going on.

T he modulus of elasticity for the delicate sitka spruce is 9.86 GPa (1,430,000 psi), and the modulus of rupture is 65 MPa (9,430 psi). Since we don’t know—for any specific instrument, or for stringed instruments in general—the precise area A₀ to use in the force equation (below), nor do we know how spatially uniform or variable the bond between the top plate and the ebony saddle is, it is not possible to calculate the stress-strain relationships with certainty. We would have to build a special violin to be able to measure it. But ‘ballpark’ calculations I have done indicate that the stresses can easily exceed the maximum tensile strength of 2.48 MPa (360 psi) for the sitka spruce in the top plate.

equation for Force as a function of Elastic Modulus and area and length and strain (ΔL)

W ood that is not totally dry reacts differently to varying temperature than does dry wood. When wood with non-zero moisture content is warmed, it initially expands because of normal thermal expansion but after a few hours begins to shrink because of loss in moisture content. Unless the wood is very dry initially (4% moisture content or less, which is unrealistic for an instrument), shrinkage caused by moisture loss on warming will be greater than any thermal expansion, so the net dimensional change on warming will be negative. Wood at intermediate moisture levels (say, about 8% as for a violin in its humidified case) will expand when first warmed, then gradually shrink if the warm, low-humidity condition persists. The net dimensional change will often be near zero if enough time is allowed to equilibrate at the new conditions. But at intermediate times the dimensions are expanded compared to the initial temp. For the wind conditions and high outdoor relative humidity at the Obama inauguration, I think we can safely bet that the humidity-generated effects were negligible compared to size of the thermally-generated dimensional changes and forces.

H ow rapidly do the strain and stress develop in the top plate, especially in the area that is constrained by the lower-expansion-coefficient saddle? Well, if the movement is sudden, from inside to outside, and if convection is efficient (e.g., wind at 3 mph or greater) then it will occur within 10 to 15 min.

T o fully model this process mathematically, we would have to solve the partial differential ‘Heat Equation’ for the conduction and convection of heat (cold) into the wood, from the cold-exposed surface inward. Readily doable using available software like MATLAB, but more than is reasonable to put in a CMT blog post.

A simple Excel spreadsheet will give you some sense of the stress (force per unit area) that the top plate has to bear. Click on the screenshot below to open or download a copy to play with.

Spreadsheet estimating stress between violin saddle and top plate for temperature excursion of 21 °C

O bviously, stringed instruments do occasionally experience unintended temperature excursions that are this wide or wider—and yet a split top plate is amazingly rare. How can this be? Well, the rarity of it must be due to most such occurrences’ having a relatively slow rate of change of temperature—the interior of a closed violin case (with the instrument wrapped in cloth) in the rear seat of a car, for example, will take several hours to drop the first 10 °C when exposed to a new ambient temp that is 21 °C lower. And, in a slow cooling or slow warming excursion, the glue that bonds the various pieces of the instrument together has time enough to accomodate the shearing forces that develop. In a fast cooling or warming, the macromolecules in the glue don’t have time to relax and, as a consequence, the full stress developed (by the thermal expansion coefficients differential between the different woods and cross-grain orientation) is imposed on the joined parts immediately—with a much higher probability of catastrophic failure beyond the material’s maximum tensile strength.

W hich brings up a possibility. If you know in advance that you will be required to perform at a freezing inauguration, you might take your least-favorite instrument to a cold storage facility the day before, to incubate it at a temperature that is close to the outdoor temp that is predicted during the performance the following day. Retrieve it from the cooler, put the whole thing (the instrument in its case) in a big padded Igloo® portable insulated cooler, and schlep it to the performance venue, only pulling it out and tuning up when you are outdoors in the cold. Then when you are done, allow the instrument to warm up slowly in its still-cold case, over a day or so before opening it up at room temperature again.

A simple example of physics / mechanical engineering in service of instrument health!

N ear the end of the film, ‘The Pianist’, the piece that Szpilman plays for the German officer is Chopin’s G minor Ballade. Yes, we suspend our disbelief when we think of the freezing room and prison-camp starvation and no opportunity for practice—yet, despite these things, the performance is excellent. But everybody thinks of the humans and their suffering and implausible virtuosity in the face of impossible odds; nobody thinks of the poor, suffering musical instruments and their impossible odds.

N ear the end of Tuesday’s inauguration, we had to suspend our disbelief at the remarkable style and grace that Ma, Perlman, McGill, and Morteno mustered. Would that their instruments had been weather-impervious fiberglass/plastic ones. I hope they are doing okay and none was injured...

T he ethics of how we treat instruments is, I want to tell you, just a ‘hop, skip, and a jump’ from the ethics of how we treat our environment and public goods. The world and its resources are ‘useful’ to us; they are ‘instrumental’ in serving the needs of humankind. But the ethics of environment is predicated on the notion that the world is a collection of ‘public goods’, not only for the human public but for animals and plants and other ‘publics’. In the case of privately-owned musical instruments, it could be argued that old, rare and historic instruments are indeed a sort of public good—with value to broader and future society beyond the scope of needs and utility of its present owner. But what about cheaper, commodity-grade instruments? Is it ever justifiable to recklessly abuse them or destroy them, or for politicians to command that they be abused/destroyed? (When a rock guitarist smashes a fine instrument on-stage, must one be a ‘virtue ethicist’ to say he is wrong to do so? S’pose so... )

Sunday, February 10, 2008

Love’s Oboe: Chamber Music Idioms within Larger Forms

[50-sec clip, Toru Takemitsu, ‘vers, l’arc-en-ciel, palma’, John Williams, Gareth Hulse & London Sinfonietta, 2.2MB MP3]

Slightly larger than the oboe, the oboe d’amour has a darker, less assertive tone—an alto timbre and personality. It’s a transposing instrument, and it sounds a minor third lower than it’s written (i.e., C is A). The oboe d’amour uses a ‘bocal’ and has this pear-shaped bell, similar to the larger English Horn.

Among contemporary works for this instrument I especially like Toru Takemitsu’s ‘Vers, l’Arc-en-Ciel, Palma’ (Verse, Rainbow, Palma/Caliper) for guitar and oboe d’amore soloists with orchestra. It’s nominally Takemitsu’s homage to the painter Joan Miró whom Takemitsu met in 1970—but it’s an interesting piece in a variety of other ways as well.

To me, it urgently begs the question of what the boundaries of chamber music are. This symphonic piece encloses or encapsulates a duet between the oboe d’amour and guitar. Here we have chamber music sounds within orchestral playing. Hulse and Williams interact beautifully, authentically.

[50-sec clip, Toru Takemitsu, ‘vers, l’arc-en-ciel, palma’, John Williams, Gareth Hulse & London Sinfonietta, 2.2MB MP3]

The piece is an essay on music’s cohesive social power, capable of guarding the lovers from the outside world and facilitating their growth as individuals and as a couple. The symphonic sound masses form the walls that define the intimate space that the couple occupies. Transparent textures and clear lines make the intimacy even more striking.

Maybe this music is too tepid for Valentine’s Day? The protagonists each in turn adopt an ironic stance, distancing themselves from their shared experience. The musical dialectic prompts us to likewise take a step back to contemplate the borders and limits of emotional experience and communication. Both the writing and the performance show great sensitivity to colors and drama. On second thought, the authenticity of the ‘Thou-ness’ that’s displayed here between the guitar and the oboe d’amour makes this an entirely appropriate piece for Valentine’s. The Takemitsu composition and these two performers clearly believe in a transcendental Self – and have a sense of the interiority and trueness to self that that transcendent belief implies – and the challenge and moral duty that it poses. And authentic subjectivity is always romantic. Valentine’s it is, then.

Another wonderful oboe d’amour player is Jennifer Paull—who performs oboe d’amour works by de Caix d’Hervelois, Marais, Bach, Telemann, Stölzel, Schurmann, Graupner, Böhm, Heinichen, Lotti, Fasch, Quantz, Kuhnau, Forster, Graun, Janitch, Chelleri, and Prowo. Her ‘Volume 2’ CD has oboe d’amour works by William Blezard, Edwin Carr, Wilfred Josephs, John McCabe, John Rushby-Smith, Leonard Salzedo, and Harold Schiffman. Some links below, for your interest.

B ach’s favourite tonalities for hautboy d’amour were A minor and D minor (23 solos in each). When he began composing a piece and had to decide the tonality to put it in, surely one of the important considerations was how it would sound on the obbligato instrument ... Bach usually kept the fingered key, even when he switched sizes of the hautboy.”
— Bruce Haynes, p. 217.

Sunday, February 25, 2007

Identifying the Author(s) of Misery & Redemption: Meta-Bosnia, Misanthropy, Unnatural Lotteries, and the Almighty Blind Watchmaker

Jao meni, jao meni, u zali čas rojenu!”
[Woe is me, woe is me—I was born at the wrong hour!]
— Discourse No. 8, Vision of Tondal, tr. Katarina Livljanić, Dialogos

CMT: One thing that impressed me about last night’s Dialogos performance of the Vision of Tondal was the theology of the Glagolitic text. The moral status of Tondal’s actions was not what we would ordinarily find in Roman Catholic or Protestant traditions. The singing was truly beautiful. But, more than that, the text itself shed a glorious light on Croatian culture and medieval thought. The idea of suffering as Tondal’s (everyman's) bad luck.

DSM: There are, you know, two basic approaches to moral luck—an Aristotelian vulnerability (vulnerable to factors outside the person’s control), and the Kantian ambition to make morality immune to luck. These are not necessarily mutually incompatible. Additionally, there have been recent developments in virtue ethics and neo-Kantian ethics that add yet more approaches.

CMT: In its older forms, it’s a problem about the structure of the external world: if there is Fate, or some divine foreknowledge, or some cosmic mechanistic causality, do human beings really choose what they do and are they morally responsible for their actions? In its newer forms, it’s a problem about the structure of the internal self from which our actions emanate.

DSM: Modern scholarship has suggested that several parts of the Bible in Croat Glagolitic breviaries were initially translated from Greek but a later date were amended under the influence of the Latin Vulgate. Vajs and others believe that the Croat version of Ecclesiastes was translated from the Vulgate directly.

CMT: In fact, various translation mistakes in the Croatian texts reveal that the source for the Glagolitic translations was Latin. For example, Eccl 2:19 ‘et est quicquam tam vanum?’ [‘and is there anything so vain as this?’] is rendered as ‘i est vsacskim takoe razlicno?’ The translator misread the Latin vanum ‘vain’ for varium ‘different’ and translated it as razlicno [‘and is there anything so different/discrepant as this?’]. It diverts the meaning away from human free will and moral responsibility and redirects it to something, say, involuntarily or happenstantially matter-of-fact. Not determinism so much as just dumb luck, good or bad. This is inherent in the outlook that pervades other passages of the Croatian Bible. Evidently, the fatalistic perspective of the culture that influenced the early Croat bible translators was at odds with the Tondalian vision of moral responsibility. More recent translators have corrected the earlier mistakes and translated vanum as ispraznost. Of course, there are far greater liberties that have been taken with this text . . . The differences in wording and grammar between the texts in the Croatian Glagolitic breviaries and in the Ostrog Bible go way back.

DSM: Let me tell you a little bit of bizarre local North Shore Boston history—something that bears on theodicy and the Herzogian nature of the world. The idea of gravity specifically—or physics in general—as manifestations of the problem of evil. On Saturday, August 26, 1893, Edith Low Babson was swimming in the Annisquam River in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and drowned in the current—a tragic, needless death of an innocent child; an undeserved horrible fate that a beneficent and omnipotent God should not allow. Edith’s older brother was Roger W. Babson, who grew up to become a prominent businessman of the early 20th Century, a statistician, philanthropist, and founder of Babson College. Roger was troubled by the problem of evil in the world, by the problem of bad things that happen to good creatures—troubled by theodicy. He was deeply affected by his sister’s death, as he was again many years later, in 1947, by the death of his grandson, Michael, who also drowned. One year after his grandson’s death, Babson dedicated a significant part of his wealth to establish the Gravity Research Foundation, which thereafter awarded an annual prize for theoretical research on gravitation, a prize whose winners include the likes of Stephen Hawking. Babson explained in a pamphlet published by the Foundation in 1948, “Gravity: Our Enemy Number One”, that the goal was to “alleviate the suffering for which gravity was responsible.” It was gravity that seized them “like a dragon and brought them to the bottom,” he said. The Foundation was chartered to support research toward developing an 'insulator' against the “evil and deleterious force of gravity.” You may like to see the Foundation’s website:

“Gravity Aids for Weak Hearts,” Grace K. Babson;
“Gravity and Health,” W. Stewart Whittemore;
“Gravity and the Weather,” Raymond H. Wheeler;
“Possibility of Free Heat,” William R. Esson;
“Is Free Power Possible?” George M. Rideout

CMT: There are some finite deists who take the position that God is not all-good. This position is actually very rare. It seems that most finite deists would rather have a good God who is weak than a strong God who is not all-good. Usually, those who feel constrained to give up the goodness of God, just give up the idea of God altogether. Nevertheless, some feel this is the best approach to the subject. Syllogistically, the argument looks like this:

If God were all-powerful, he could destroy evil.
If God were all-good, he would destroy evil.
But evil has not been destroyed.
Therefore, God is not all-good.

G od has purposefully placed us in a situation of less than optimal advantage and subject to more suffering and destruction than any purpose can account for. We have not been given good odds for success. This does not prove that there is no God but simply that we are dealing with a God capable of harshness more extreme than some people would use...”
— Frederick Sontag, “Anthropodicy and the Return of God,” in Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy, 2001, ed., Stephen Davis, p. 141.

DSM: One finite deist, John K. Roth, makes a strong denial of God’s goodness: “Everything hinges on the proposition that God possesses—but fails to use well enough—the power to intervene decisively at any moment to make history's course less wasteful. So, in spite and because of his sovereignty, this God is everlastingly guilty and the degrees run from gross negligence to murder...” (in Davis, Encountering Evil: Live Options In Theodicy, p. 11).

CMT: There is a another position on the problem of evil that says God Himself is the cause of evil and that He has included evil in the overall scheme of things for some specific, unfathomable purpose. Evil is in the world, we are told, because God wants it to be there. Those who take this position actually go so far as to say that evil is actually necessary for God to be able to carry out his purposes for mankind. Curiously, those who take this position usually hold to the view that God is both all-good and all-powerful. The idea is that moral perfection cannot be created ex nihilo: it must be developed. But since such growth is impossible apart from the experience of evil, it was therefore necessary for God to include evil in the world by His own design. According to this view, God designed evil to be in the world because evil is necessary for humankind’s spiritual and moral growth.

DSM: Yes, “a world in which there can be no pain or suffering would also be one in which there can be no moral choices and hence no possibility of moral growth and development” (John Hick, “An Irenaean Theodicy,” in Davis, Encountering Evil: Live Options In Theodicy, p. 46). Why? Because a morally wrong act is by definition an act that harms somebody else. But, if pain and suffering is structurally, constitutionally impossible, then no action could be morally wrong—and no person would ever face the challenge of overcoming the temptation to harm someone else. Consequently, no moral growth would occur.

CMT: So God must be omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient. He must be eternal, existing before time and beyond time. He must be absolutely transcendent with reference to the physical universe and yet must operate in every part of it as its sustaining cause. He must create a Vale of Tears as a proving ground for morality. And if He does not do all of these things, then everything—including the basis for Good and Evil and moral action—supposedly collapses, right? That’s what they contend, right? They contend that I can have no rational basis for morally good action unless this peculiar kind of evil-causing God exists . . .

DSM: The philosophers and theologians who take this tack are gymnasts! This is a good time to point out that humans’ capacity for pain and, in some cases, even pain itself are not evils per se. In fact, the body’s pain mechanism works as a warning system that keeps us from injuring ourselves. Therefore, our capacity for pain seems to be absolutely necessary for living in this finite world. Philip Yancey says that although it is “the gift nobody wants,” man’s capacity for pain may be “the paragon of creative genius” (Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?, p. 21). However, there’s a big difference between humans’ capacity for pain including transient warning pains—and the horrific, prolonged agony of victims of certain diseases and human-inflicted torture.

CMT: Yes. What a desultory bit of backward logic it is! Without reward and punishment, there is no justice. Without justice, there is no judgment. Without judgment, there is no law. Without law, there is no lawgiver. Finally, if there is no lawgiver, then there is no God like the one described in the Bible. But there must be such a Lawgiver, and therefore we must have evil and punishment.

DSM: This is a weird argument that holds that punishment is remedial—that holds that the primary and divine purpose of evil and punishment is to reform a person’s character. A backward vindication of Law and the satisfaction of Justice. But is it so unreasonable to think that a good God would order His universe so as to make His subjects happy? Tondal—and other medieval and modern-day Croatians—face this challenge. At least the innocent Tondal didn’t agonize over what he might have done to deserve his suffering. He was just born at the wrong hour!

B orn at the wrong hour, forced to leave father and mother.

Who takes care of you now, who carries you around?

They suffered injustice and stayed in jails for endless terms,

Their lives trusted to a single tattered mat.

The Dead, their bones are buried in a dungeon corner.

When can your innocence be established and you be free?

Then there were the little babies—

How poignant your unformed cries must be!

Then, the ones drowned in rivers and rapids,

Those who slipped and fell from trees,

Those who died when well-ropes broke,

Those carried away in flood-waters, caught by fire.

Others met with mountain spirits and sea monsters,

Or got caught in wolves’ fangs, elephant tusks.

Some had children, but refused to raise them,

Others had abortions, others met with dire happenings.

Anyone walking on the road is likely to make a false step

And form endless queues with others on the Nei-ho bridge.

Who does not have his own distinct karma?

Where are they now whose souls and spirits have disintegrated?

Are you hiding in this bush or that clump,

Or are you hovering near brooks, amidst clouds?

Are you taking shelter under this grass-leaf or that tree

Or just wandering by this inn or that bridge?

For a time you take refuge in a temple or shrine

Or find lodging at the marketplace, near the riverbank.

Empty meadows also can provide you with places to stay

And so can a hillock, a bamboo grove, a sedge-clump.

Alive, all of you suffered one tragedy after another,

You spent days on end without food, in the biting cold,

For years exposed to the vagaries of life.

Yet now, you have to lament underground, sleep on dew,

Going into hiding every time the cocks crow

And groping your way out after sunset,

Forming dreary processions of children carried on the arms

And old people guided guided along.

Should you have knowing-power, come and listen to the Scriptures!

May you, through the Law, escape rebirth and reach the Pure Land!

May His Aureated Light save you from suffering, deliver you from darkness!

In the four seas and all the lands

May the Lord Buddha shake away our anxieties and cleanse our hatreds,

May the All-knowing and Omnipresent Buddha

Change the Wheel of Life in the three Worlds and Ten Directions!”

— Excerpt from ‘Summons to the Souls’, Nguyen Du (1765-1820) in A Thousand Years of Vietnamese Poetry, tr. Nguyen Ngoc, W.S. Merwin, and Burton Raffel. Random House, 1975.