jwilzewske

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Love Is Blind: Representational Art and Amative/Amatory Symbols in Chamber Music

A m•a•tive (æm´•ə•tɪ v)
adjective: disposed to love; amorous; symbolizing amorous intent.
1630–40; < ML amātīvus, equiv. to amāt(us) [ptp. of amāre to love] + -īvus –ive.

S cores of Love’, a piece by Catherine McMichael for alto saxophone, tenor voice, and piano—is a fine Valentine’s Day chamber work you may like to try. As is the case with many art songs, this piece draws attention to how music is able to ‘mean’ things—how the intertextuality between the words and the music works; how the ‘representation’ of the emotions happens, specifically, the constellation of sentiments that denote love.

[30-sec clip, Catherine McMichael, ‘Scores of Love…, Love at 20: Love Is Not All, Lynn Klock (saxophone), Jon Humphrey (tenor), 1.0MB MP3]

[30-sec clip, Catherine McMichael, ‘Scores of Love…, Love at 40: April Rain Song, Lynn Klock (saxophone), Jon Humphrey (tenor), 1.0MB MP3]

[30-sec clip, Catherine McMichael, ‘Scores of Love…, Love at 60: Send Her a Valentine, Lynn Klock (saxophone), Jon Humphrey (tenor), 1.0MB MP3]

I n some ways, this piece is in the great tradition of Robert Schumann… the ‘Spanisches Liebes-Lieder’ (Spanish Love Songs), op. 138. But with Catherine McMichael’s piece we have the three-way interaction of voice and sax and piano. The relationship of music to words is cultivated with great intimacy in each of the three movements, and there is a meta-intimacy that comes from the juxtaposition of three ‘chapters’ of life, advancing 20 years at a time (hence, the word-play of the title ‘Scores’ = spanning 20 years), represented by the texts of the three poets. The result is a kind of declamation that is propelled as much by the music as by the poetry. The colors and rhythms in the instrumental parts are not mere accompaniment—they disclose propositions of their own, on a par with the expressions of the tenor’s words—and this fact leads me to revisit my uneasiness with the question of whether and how deeply and accurately musical motifs can represent or allude to specific things.

L ove is not all: It is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain,
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
and rise and sink and rise and sink again.
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
pinned down by need and moaning for release
or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It may well be. I do not think I would.”
— Edna St. Vincent Millay, ‘Love Is Not All’ (age 20).

L et the rain kiss you
Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops
Let the rain sing you a lullaby
The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk
The rain makes running pools in the gutter
The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night
And I love the rain.”
— Langston Hughes, ‘April Rain Song’ (age 40).

S end her a valentine to say
You love her in the same old way.
Just drop the long familiar ways
And live again the old-time days
When love was new and youth was bright
And all was laughter and delight—
And treat her as you would if she
Were still the girl that used to be.

Pretend that all the years have passed
Without one cold and wintry blast;
That you are coming still to woo
Your sweetheart as you used to do.
Forget that you have walked along
The paths of life where right and wrong
And joy and grief in battle are,
And play the heart without a scar.

Be what you were when youth was fine
And send to her a valentine;
Forget the burdens and the woe
That have been given you to know
And to the wife, so fond and true,
The pledges of the past renew
‘Twill cure her life of every ill
To find that you’re her sweetheart still.”
— Edgar A. Guest, ‘Send Her a Valentine’ (age 60).

A llusions, like symbols, strengthen and localize the cognitive and emotional experience for the performer or listener. In literary theory, allusions fall under the rubric of ‘intertextuality’. Intertextuality refers to the relationships between two or more texts that refer to each other. “Intertextuality is therefore the textual exploitation of another text. It would include satire, parody, pastiche, imitatio, refacimento, reference, allusion, modeling, borrowing…” as William Rothstein has written. The synthesis or reconstruction of narratives is a fundamental part of the interpretive process and performance practice. If you’re interested, have a look at Rothstein’s ‘Analysis and the Act of Performance,’ in John Rink, ed., ‘The Practice of Performance’, pp. 217-40. An extended thread assessing these issues runs through Kendall Walton’s writings as well, which are a joy to read.

H ave a look, for comparison, at Roger Scruton’s ‘Aesthetics of Music’. After ending his sojourn in the U.S. at Boston University and repairing to his native Wiltshire English countryside, Scruton has in recent years been somewhat notorious as a conservative political philosopher and ruralist, but Scruton is also an amateur composer. “When we hear music, we do not hear sound only; we hear something in sound, something which moves with a force of its own.”

O ne might imagine from his expressions in this vein that Scruton would hold that music can be representational. After all, he says that metaphors in music are “indispensable ... because we are using them to describe something other than the material world; in particular because we are attempting to describe how the world seems, from the point of view of active imagination ... The indispensable metaphor occurs when the way the world seems depends upon an imaginative involvement with it, rather than on our ordinary cognitive goals. And this is the case when we listen to music” (p. 92). And he asserts that “We are all to some extent sentimentalists” (p. 488). But sentimentality in Scruton’s reading turns out to be a kind of defense against the postmodern world by way of ‘make-believe’ or ‘language games’. In this respect, Scruton’s view intersects with Kendall Walton’s.

W alton famously holds that all effective fictions arise from our playful use of symbols and signifiers: what Wittgenstein once called ‘language games’ or ‘language-play’. When we experience fiction, we suspend our disbelief, enter into the realm of play, and act as if the fictional world were real. Walton charts what amounts to an epistemology of fiction, a virtual world where ‘it is fictionally present’ is equivalent to ‘it is true’ in the real world.

W ollheim’s purpose in connecting ‘seeing-in’ with seeing depth in flat surfaces is not so much to clarify seeing-in as to indicate the range of cases in which it occurs. In viewing many paintings regarded as non-representational, one sees one plane or shape or line in front of another. Many of the works of such artists as Hans Hoffman, Piet Mondrian, and Mark Rothko demand ‘seeing-in’, Wollheim claims, and qualify as representational along with portraits and landscapes, although the former are not ‘figurative’ as the latter are... [Audience members] participate in what I call perceptual games of make-believe. ‘Seeing-in’ ... [is] an experience characterized by the phenomenology of twofoldness: an experience with two aspects—a ‘recognitional’ aspect and a ‘configurational’ one.”
— Kendall Walton, Marvelous Images, p. 136.

A century ago ‘Vom Musikalish-Schönen’, Eduard Hanslick argued that it’s impossible to represent emotions in music because music can’t provide enough specificity—can’t convey the specific cognitive content associated with emotions. “The feeling of hope cannot be separated from the representation of a future happy state which we compare to the present ... Love cannot be thought without the representation of a belovèd person, without desire and striving after felicity, glorification and possession of a particular object.” If music can’t represent these ideas or objects but only some ‘dynamic’ aspects of emotional life, then (according to Hanslick) it can’t be seriously representational at all.

S usanne Langer maintained this conservative view, too, in the mid-20^th Century. And, in his own way, so now, it seems, does Scruton. By contrast, Peter Kivy is an exponent of the view that music can indeed express particular emotions. [I have had in these past few days more Scrutonization than is probably healthy; I think I (and, maybe, you) can find the antidote by rereading and being re-persuaded by Kivy, just in time for Valentine’s Day.]

T he expressive character of art is connected with its role in the Entäußerung or ‘realization’ of our feelings. We encounter works of art as perfected icons of our felt potential, and we appropriate them in order to bring form, lucidity, and self-knowledge to our inner life. The human psyche is transformed by art, but only because art provides us with the expressive gestures towards which our emotions themselves lean in their search for sympathy—gestures which we seize, when we encounter them, with a sense of being carried at last to a destination that we could not reach alone...”
— Roger Scruton, Aesthetics of Music, p. 352.

T o be a proper ‘representation’, a work must ‘express specific thoughts about its subject’. To be interested in the work is to be interested in ‘understanding those thoughts.’ By ‘thoughts’, Scruton means, “the sense or content of a declarative sentence,” which can either be true or false. A representational work must generate propositions with truth-values that are accessible to and, by consensus, agreed upon by [a majority of] those who experience the work: “Representation... is essentially propositional.” N.B.: Wittgensteinian language-games, ballast even on philosophers’ social networks, positively fatal on Valentine’s Day.

P eter Kivy elegantly rebuts Scruton’s arguments that music can’t be representational. Kivy accepts Scruton’s criteria for something to be representational and for a representation to be aesthetically relevant, but disagrees that music fails to meet these criteria.

A traditional painting depicts something, and if the painting is a good one, every part of the canvas contributes to the effectiveness of the visual message that the artist is trying to convey. In traditional literature every passage has its purpose – fleshing out a character, setting the mood, developing the plot, and so on. The same is generally true of music in the European tradition: the composition is considered to be greater than the sum of its parts, a work of art in which each passage has a function that is vital to the overall plan of a work. Think of any tonal work that you know well, and imagine what it would be like if its parts, themes, transitions and so forth—were randomly rearranged. It might be interesting to see how it would turn out, but the piece would almost certainly not be as effective as a whole.”
— Stefan Kostka, Materials and Techniques of Twentieth-Century Music, p. 152.

S cores of Love’ by Catherine McMichael is a composition through which the respective contributions of the vocal text and instrumental parts to the work’s meaning can be dissected and understood, maybe more clearly or dramatically than other examples allow. Here’s an experiment for you: Have a viola perform the tenor part—preferrably while reading from the tenor part—or transposed to alto clef, but with the lyric retained below the staves for the violist to see. Better yet, use a viola d’amore—one with an anatomically correct carved head at the top of the peg box, complete with the blindfolded eyes to represent Love. See if the sense of the piece doesn’t convey substantially the same meaning as it does when the words are sung. Do you not agree that it is as fine and precisely evocative a Valentine when arranged in that way, as it would be in its original mixed trio form?

I t’s like my violin teacher periodically reminds me (odious keyboard/brass/woodwind player and erstwhile tenor that I am): “The string contact-point ... is, at best, like your vocal cords. The instrument and the bow should be your voice. You must remember to make them sing; every note must sing.” The tone quality or sound color of viola can be a wonderful substitute for the tenor voice. Your make-believe mind (the mind of your listener as well) imagines the fictional words and automatically fills in the correct representations, the accurate intertextual truths. It’s enough to know the poems that inspired the setting—that caused the music to be constructed as it is...

I have performed the piece with viola (in place of the saxophone, not the singer), and it’s just as effective. In fact, the tenor at that performance was 60. His wife was in the audience, and it was his valedictory performance ... Several people came up to me at the intermission, literally weeping, exclaiming how grateful they were that contemporary music by a living composer could still be beautiful and moving.”
— Catherine McMichael, email to CMT.

I have to pour unrequited love into bar 100 and not forget a touch of fear and loathing at bar 210.”
— Jonathan Dunsby, Performing Music: Shared Concerns, p. 24. [an interesting on-point quote, I thought; has nothing to do with McMichael’s ‘Scores of Love’, though]

Wagner, Tristan chord, unresolved je n’est sais quoi of longing

Sunday, February 1, 2009

Spiccato Perfection: Formosa Quartet, Shih-Hui Chen’s Quartet No. 5

S hih-Hui Chen’s String Quartet No. 5 (‘Mei-Hua’, ‘plum blossom’) [commissioned by Formosa Quartet in 2007] was performed last night by Formosa Quartet at University of Missouri Kansas City’s White Recital Hall.

[Jasmine Lin (violin), Ayano Ninomiya (violin), Che-Yen Chen (viola), and Jacob Braun (cello) formed the quartet in 2003. Formosa Quartet members trained at Juilliard, the New England Conservatory, the Cleveland Institute, Curtis, Harvard, and Yale. They have held title positions in the San Diego and Cincinnati Symphonies and have been on the chamber music faculty at Interlochen, University of California San Diego, Taos School of Music, and Northwestern University and have appeared regularly at the Marlboro, Caramoor, and Ravinia festivals, and at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. They have taken first place in the Primrose, Paganini, and Naumburg competitions as well as first Prize and the Amadeus Prize at the Tenth London International String Quartet Competition in 2006. Besides the Shih-Hui Chen work on last night’s program, Formosa Quartet also performs other new music, including pieces by Bright Sheng and Richard Wilson.]

B orn in Taipei, Shih-Hui Chen emigrated to the U.S. in 1982 and received her doctoral degree from Boston University. Her works have been performed by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, among others. Also frequently appearing in programs abroad, her music has been featured in China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Germany, Italy, and Amsterdam. A recipient of several fellowships including the Guggenheim, Ms. Chen has received grants from the Fromm Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Meet the Composer Foundation, the Tanglewood Music Center, the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute of Harvard University, the Koussevitzky Music Foundation Commission, and the Bellagio Rockefeller Foundation.

H ard to be unaddressed,
Empty to reflection—
Take the road east—
Be where it is.”
— Robert Creeley, ‘There’, from ‘Gnomic Verses’, 1991.

S hih-Hui Chen frequently collaborates on inter-disciplinary and multi-media projects. She composed a film score for the documentary ‘Once Removed’ by film maker Julie Mallozzi, premiered several years ago at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She also composed ‘There’, a song cycle composed with poet Robert Creeley prior to his dying in 2005. Shih-Hui Chen is currently an Assistant Professor of Music Composition at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University and has served as Composer in Residence at the Tanglewood Institute and at the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP). She is a music advisor for Formosa Chamber Music Society, an active member of Musiqa (a composers’ collective based in Houston), and the Asian Composers’ League.

Some Chamber Music Compositions by Shih-Hui Chen

Six Songs (‘Sweet Rice Pie’) for voice and mixed ensemble
Shui (‘Water’) for cello and piano
Fu I for solo pipa
Fu II for pipa and 5 western instruments
Four Little Pieces of Wood for piano
66 Times (‘Voice of Pines & Cedars’) for soprano and chamber ensemble

S hih-Hui Chen’s Quartet No. 5 is comprised of three movements: Fantasia; Scherzo; and the eponymous Mei-Hua (Plum Blossoms). It is edgy, energetic throughout—athletic, even, in the demands it makes of the artists. Part of its edginess derives from the extensive use of spiccato gestures in each of the instruments’ parts. The bows rarely stop dancing and bouncing.

T he bowing styles called spiccato (sautillé) and ricochét, in which the bow bounces off the string between notes, have a predominant mode between 13 and 15 bounces/sec for a bow tensioned at 50 to 60 Newtons force. The kinematics of the bouncing involves a ‘ripple’ that is dominated by bending moments in the distal part of the bow, out toward the tip.

T he percussive ricochet bouncing—with the dissipation of energy over the series of successive bow impacts with the string—can evoke a variety of suspenseful musical effects. It conveys an emphatic, forward-looking ‘consequentialism’, for example—like a reminder that gravity is inescapable, like death and taxes: a Creeley-esque ‘be where it is’ inevitability. The kinesthetics of the bouncing is trampolinesque, fascinating as our minds anticipate the diminishing intervals of milliseconds between the successive bounces.

I calculate that, with a constant bow force, the inter-bounce time intervals approximately follow a hyperbolic Fibonacci series. I do not see that Askenfelt or anybody else has published on this. But, to me, it is a beautiful little mathematical result—writing spiccato as a compositional gesture amounts to invoking Nature and Mathematics and situating human society and its concerns in the large context of the universe and history. Spiccato kinesthetically alludes to the intersection of music and cosmology.

1/1, 1/1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/5, 1/8, 1/13, 1/21, 1/34, 1/55, 1/89, ...

B ut you need exceedingly skilled artists to pull the gesture off in performance! You need a light bow-hold, yet a bow-hold that stays under control despite the vigorous bouncing. The bow more or less pivots around an axis through the ‘U’ in the frog with the thumb and middle/index finger (depending on your bow-hold technic) daintily opposing each other. You want the force of the bow on the string to stay essentially constant during the successive bounces in order to avoid ‘multiple-slipping’.

A squarish, Gibraltar-shaped force curve with a sharp rise and sharp drop, slipping during contact, has been shown to be optimal for a crisp spiccato. This was the result of physics experiments performed about 15 years ago by Anders Askenfelt and his colleagues at KTH in Stockholm. They found that the ‘ripple’ bending mode in the bow serves to reduce the build-up time for the force between the bowhair and the string with each successive bounce, enabling the sharp, box-shaped force as a function of time—and the crisp attack and release. However, more is not necessarily better, with regard to the sharpness imparted by the ripple. The risk of multiple-slipping is increased if the ripple mode is too great. Askenfelt found that spiccato playing properties of different bows varied widely and that the reproducibility of spiccato effects within-player and between-players also varied widely.

O ne of the [many] remarkable qualities that characterized the Formosa Quartet performance last night was the astonishing cohesiveness and elegance of their spiccato bowing. A cohesiveness of style and technic—all four of them—not just Ayano’s violin ricochet cohering with Jasmine’s violin ricochet. In fact, the extensive spiccato in each of the parts in the Shih-Hui Chen quartet provided ample empirical opportunity to confirm Askenfelt’s experiments: the ‘ripple’ in the bow dominates the effects, and the predominant 13 to 15 Hz mode is the same in violin, viola, cello, double bass. The effects are quite insensitive to the size and register of the ‘anvil’ (instrument) and have mostly to do with the physics of the bouncing ‘hammer’ (bow). The fact that this is so lends itself toward a ‘sectional’ unity that the composer can take advantage of. That spiccato physics plays no ‘favorites’ imparts a sense of the pervasiveness of ‘cause-and-effect’ natural law, of (eventual) justice and karma catching up with each and every one, of our embeddedness—every last mortal one of us—in Time.

T here are so many wonderful things in the Formosa Quartet performance and in this Shih-Hui Chen composition that I really must apologize for my ‘over the top’ delight in this one bowing-style/technical feature | compositional device. But, after all, this is a blog, not a ‘review’.

T he Formosa Quartet was joined by guest violist Scott Lee, Assistant Professor of viola at UMKC for Dvorǎk’s Op. 97, String Quintet in E-flat Major (1893). Scott won First Prize in both violin and viola in the Taiwan National Instrumental Competition, and was a top prize winner in the Lionel Tertis International Viola Competition and the William Primrose Viola Competition. He has performed at the the Newport Chamber Music Festival, La Jolla Chamber Music Festival, The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Music from Marlboro, and, in addition to collaboration with the Formosa Quartet, has been a guest artist with the Miro, Guarneri, Juilliard, Orion, and Miami String Quartets, and with the Beaux Arts and Mannes Piano Trios. Scott Lee has been a featured soloist at the International Hindemith Viola Festival and at the 22nd and 24th International Viola Congresses. Born in Taipei, Taiwan, 29 year-old Scott trained beginning at age 14 in the U.S. with violist Donald McInnes and violinist Todor Pelev and later with Michael Tree at Curtis Institute of Music and Paul Neubauer at Juilliard.

B edřich Smetana’s String Quartet No. 1 in E Minor (1876) was also performed. Both the Dvorǎk and the Smetana were superb—highly narrative, dramatic expressions that cohered with the Shih-Hui Chen piece, in terms of their grounding in the composers’ respective (auto-)biographical, nationalistic and folk-music traditions. Without question, last night’s performance was an adventure and a high-point of my concert-going thus far in the 2008-2009 season. Bravo!

O ne of my reservations about trendy new music that is heavily based on folk music—some pieces by Osvaldo Golijov and Tan Dun, everything by Mark O’Connor—is that it is too transparently a recycling of those sounds. With [Shih-Hui] Chen’s work, by contrast, the Taiwanese melody is heard only furtively, as if it were lurking around the corner or hovering spectrally above the music. Indeed, an imagined pentatonic melody rattled through my head at intermission, even though it was never really quoted fully in ‘Mei Hua’. The folk original was evoked in fragments, with microtonal bends and other effects, obscured by dissonance in the first movement and treated with viscerally exciting rhythms and a repeated-note pulse in the second movement. The instruments were called on to make sounds more specific to Chinese music in the third movement, reminiscent of the pipa and erhu mostly.”
— Jens Laurson, IonArts, 17-DEC-2007.

[Happy Groundhog Day!]