Ultra-Low Frequency ‘Pulse’ / ‘Hypermeter’ in Dinnerstein’s Bach

I    wanted it to have a feeling of spaciousness, and of ‘breath’ ... I was influenced by Marie-Claire Alain’s [interpretation of Bach’s ‘Goldbergs’] in Paris, who played a Bach recital... an incredible sense of rhythm, almost an organic sense of rhythm ... [to] these large rhythmic structures. But the smaller beats [in Alain’s interpretation] were very free. [The overall effect of Alain’s approach was such that] it had [qualitatively, an astrophysical] feeling—almost like the turning of the Earth [on its axis] ... that there was an inevitability to the way the pulse was going, but within it there was this kind of feeling of ‘give-and-take’ in the rhythm. And I think that [by contrast to Alain,] a lot of the approach to rhythm has [for other pianists] been very ‘motoric’, and influenced by having a very strong feeling of a ‘small’ pulse. And I wanted to experiment with freeing myself of the small pulse and feeling a larger pulse.”
  —  Simone Dinnerstein interviewed by Sarah Dallas of www.moreintelligentlife.com, commenting on rhythmic freedom, breathing, phrasing, and why the silences in Bach, are as important as the notes, 2007.

S imone Dinnerstein catapulted to fame on the merits of her recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations worldwide in August 2007. Her Berlin recording has also been very well-received, and she has a very busy touring schedule. Dinnerstein is a graduate of The Juilliard School where she was a student of Peter Serkin. Last night she performed in Kansas City in the Friends of Chamber Music’s piano series.

H er interpretation of Bach is highly unusual, as some reviews and the blockquote above attest. Despite the written time signatures, Bach’s ‘French Suite’ No. 5 gives the impression of a compound meter. The groupings into hierarchies of nested two-, four-, six-, eight-, 10-, 12-, 16-, 20-, 24-, and 32-bar structures contribute to this.

A rtists’ interpretations of these are widely varied, and the variations are especially pronounced where the hypermeter or polymeter structures change—for example, become more accentuated or obvious, or become less obvious, or become more or less competitive or conflictual. Some artists affirm or cooperate with the hypermetric and polymetric structures; other artists fight the imposition of a hypermeter by regularizing the rhythms and defeating the agogic and rubato cues that are in the score.

S imone Dinnerstein engages in a style of interpretation that alternately cooperates with and, at times, opposes Bach’s cues for improvisational and rubato freedom. At times, she also liberally expands upon the cues that are in the musical text. Characteristically in her playing she sheds light on longer-range, larger-scale hypermeter structures than might have been perceptible to us before. As a result of her emphases and rhythmic decisions, we hear what we might imagine to be the Earth spinning on its axis, one revolution every 24 hours. Maybe more accurately, we imagine the Earth’s axis precessing, one cycle every 26 thousand years. We hear celestial mechanics operating in timeless, wheels-within-wheels majesty. Music of the spheres...

P  robably the most beautiful written-out rubatos in all keyboard music are those in the Andante of [Bach’s] Italian Concerto, BWV 971. With the aid of rhythmic notation of unparalleled subtlety, Bach wrote down the free rhythms that a contemporary singer or instrumentalist schooled in the Italian style might have improvised in performance... To be sure, even Bach’s notation cannot wholly render the infinite subtleties which characterize great artistry in performance. A sensitive harpsichordist will emphasize the B-flat here by playing it just a shade early in order to be able to sustain it slightly longer. This rhythmic flexibility enables good harpsichordists to overcome the relatively inflexible dynamics of their instrument and still play cantabile.”
  —  Paul Badura-Skoda, p. 66.

M ost studies of agogicity and rubato address small temporal deviations with regard to the beat, as defined by the prevailing time signature as-written—they address the ‘shimmering’ effect on a timescale of tens of milliseconds up to several seconds, usually. But hypermeter also has a pulse—it’s just not an explicitly written one, and not readily apprehended on the timescales of our usual attention-span. There can be agogic and rubato effects that arise on the very long timescales of hypermetric patterns—what I might only half in jest call an astrophysical, nebula-esque shimmering on a timescale of tens of seconds to hundreds of seconds: eons, musically speaking. Here are the longest hypermetric timescales that occur in Dinnerstein’s account of BWV 816.

• Allemande, 4/4, two 12-bar repeats: 104 sec
  
• Courante, 3/4, two 16-bar repeats: 48 sec
  
• Sarabande, 3/4, 16-bar repeat and 24-bar repeat: 130 sec and 196 sec
  
• Gavotte, 2/2, 8-bar repeat and 16-bar repeat: 19 sec and 38 sec
  
• Bourée, 2/2, 10-bar (4:6) repeat and 20-bar (8:12) repeat: 52 sec and 104 sec
  
• Louré, 6/4 (2), two 8-bar repeats: 34 sec
  
• Gigue, 12/16 (2), 24-bar repeat and 32-bar repeat: 86 sec and 116 sec

    [30-sec clip, Simone Dinnerstein, Bach, ‘French Suite No. 5, BWV 816, Saraband’, 1.2MB MP3]


    [30-sec clip, Simone Dinnerstein, Bach, ‘French Suite No. 5, BWV 816, Courante’, 1.2MB MP3]

A    century before Bach, Heinrich Schütz had perceived regular time to be ‘as it were, the soul of music’ [preface to ‘Auferstehungs-historia’, Dresden, 1628] ... It is revealing to compare the ‘slow beat’ mentioned here with the remarks about Bach’s conducting... Between the firm ‘pillars’ of the beats there was a large degree of freedom. With the exception of pieces in perpetuum mobile style, there were all kinds of rubato, breathing pauses, breaks, and thematic dovetailing running counter to the beat.”
  —  Paul Badura-Skoda, pp. 16-17.

I f you were a listener who had never seen the BWV 816 score and you did not know that the dances that are “in 2” are separate movements, or that the dances with meters that are “in 3” are separate movements I suppose you might impute even longer-scale hypermetric patterns in French Suite No. 5—ones that transcend inter-movement boundaries.

G lenn Gould, Andras Schiff, Angela Hewitt, Piotr Anderszewski, Constance Keene, Edward Aldwell, and others—almost devoid of these hypermetrical effects and tremendously different from Simone Dinnerstein in myriad other ways.

T he spontaneity and greater temporal elasticity of, for example, Dinnerstein’s Sarabande—reduce our attention to the longer-scale structure. But the more motoric dances draw our attention to longer-scale hypermetric structure and the rubber-banding that Simone is doing with time and meter.

W e take a look at how this works quantitatively, using the mathematical/statistical formalism of ‘copulas’. Copulas are functions that link univariate (single-variable) marginal values to their statistical variations with multiple other variables—to their joint multivariate distributions. Copulas are useful because they allow us to discover concurrent or joint multivariable correlations with any set of univariate marginal distributions that may happen to exist. Each ‘voice’ in the left-hand part(s) and the right-hand part(s) in ‘French Suite’ No. 5 has its own rhythmic marginal distribution (of inter-beat time intervals, quantized to 4 millisecond time-resolution or better). Figuring out how Simone Dinnerstein makes this thing ‘breathe’ the way she does is possible by computing the copulas, and comparing them to, say, Aldwell’s or Goode’s or Gould’s.



C opulas are a way of quantitatively characterizing the dependence structures of vectors of multiple random variables. Although copulas were first studied more than 50 years ago, they were not extensively applied. Interest in copulas has been renewed recently in biostatistics, reliability engineering, and financial engineering, and other fields. Within the past 10 years in finance, copulas have become a standard analytical technique for multi-asset basket pricing (especially CDOs and other credit derivatives), equities portfolio modeling, risk management, etc.


A nja Volk, in her paper at the 2004 ICMPC meeting, considers all metric pulses arising from equally spaced notes’ onsets (the so called local meters). All external information (bar lines and time signature) was ignored. Only the internal relations of the actual as-composed notes were analyzed. Anja modeled the inner metric structure of music mathematically, and contrasted it with the outer metric structure given by the accent hierarchy of the as-written time signature. The inner metric weight for each note is calculated on the basis of the meters m_s,d,k it participates in and which have a minimum length that is not smaller than a fixed value l. The variable s denotes the starting point, d denotes the period (the duration between consecutive onsets of the local meter) and k the length of the local meter. The contribution of each local meter to the metric weight depends solely on its length k, not on its starting point s nor its period d. She denotes m_s,d,k= m(k) and gain for each note’s onset o the metric weight w_l,p as the weighted sum of the length k of the corresponding local meters:


whereas the minimum length l and the weighting parameter p can be varied. The calculation of the inner metric weight of a musical piece (or a passage, a part, a passage from a part) can be easily understood from figure below.


A n algorithm calculates all local meters (i.e. arithmetic sequences) within the set of onsets under consideration (there are five such local meters in the short example). The metrical weight encodes the incidences of different meters, i.e. the metric weight of an onset is determined by the set of all local meters passing through it.

M    aintenance of the metre depends on the basic rhythmic character of a work. An arioso allows greater rhetorical freedom—more rubato, that is—than, for example, a gavotte or a minuet. The greatest agogic freedom is permissible in freely structured forms such as the stylus phantasiticus of the toccata and the fantasia. Works of this kind had their origins in instrumental improvisation, such as the free invention of preludes.”
  —  Paul Badura-Skoda, p. 18.

H ave a listen to Dinnerstein, remarking on her intentions with regard to Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations’ (YouTube):



I n my day-job, among other things I perform signal-processing and mathematical modeling of time-series. Sometimes the timeseries are physiologic monitoring variables related to health and survival in critical care units; other timeseries I have modeled include financial trading timeseries and geophysics/seismic timeseries. I think that the spectral analysis software and mathematical tools that are used in those areas have broad applicability to quantifying what is going on in music, including helping to account for what is so unusual about Simone Dinnerstein’s Bach interpretations and rhythmic/metrical decisions.

S o-called ‘adaptive filters’ offer advantages over Wiener filters for time-varying processes. They are used for mathematical ‘deconvolution’ of seismic data which exhibit non-stationary, time-varying behavior, much like Dinnerstein’s ‘waves’ of slowly altering meter. Different algorithms for adaptive filtering exist. The least-mean-squares (LMS) algorithm, because of its simplicity, has been widely applied to data from different fields that fall outside geophysics. And that is what I have used, on my measurements of Dinnerstein’s Berlin recording—I bought her CD, ripped ‘French Suite No. 5’ tracks’ MP3s from it, and performed Fourier transform and Wavelet transform calculations on those digital audio files, annotating each bar against my pdfs of the score.

T he ‘stacking velocities’ I used to model the time-varying alterations of meter do not need to be known very accurately because—just as in deep-reflection seismography—the residual deviations (‘move-outs’) are small on a beat-to-beat basis and have only a minor influence on the results of the adaptive time-slicing.


W hat I discover is what amounts to a very low frequency (VLF = 0.01 to 0.1 Hz) ambient ‘seismic’ hypermetric architecture of Bach’s French Suite No. 5, something I think is heretofore unreported. Maybe it’s just Simone; maybe it’s really there; we will have to measure other elite performers’ interpretations and see if we can find (less pronounced) evidence of it. That such a thing should seem novel is particularly likely in recent years, as the trend has been toward highly ‘motoric’ species of virtuosity, especially with Bach interpretations.

B ut here in Dinnerstein we have ‘ocean waves’ that “couple” into ‘seismic waves’ through (what appears to be, from my measurements and analysis thus far—) a quadratic nonlinearity of the metrical surface boundary condition. The quadratic nonlinearity may be entirely under the artists’ conscious control; or maybe it is not, or at least not entirely. The nonlinearity couples pairs of slowly propagating metrical ocean-like waves of similar frequency to a high metrical phase-velocity component that has approximately double the frequency. These “approximately 2f” relationships are easy to discern in the FFT spectra of French Suite No. 5, with its hierarchical organization of phrases and repeats.

B esides seismology, gravitational wave physics also offers some useful tools and analytical methods for investigating metrical and hypermetrical phenomena in music. Waves familiar from other areas of physics such as water waves, sound waves, and electromagnetic waves are able to carry energy, momentum, and angular momentum. By carrying these away from a source, waves are able to dissipate energy and ‘rob’ that source of its energy and linear or angular momentum. Gravitational waves do the same thing in space. For example, a binary star-pair loses angular momentum as the two orbiting stars spiral towards each other: the angular momentum of the mutually-orbiting pair is radiated away by gravitational waves.

H ere’s what I think: a prevailing musical pulse and meter manifests a particular musical metrical ‘mass’ that exerts a quasi-gravitational force on the space-time continuum through which it passes and which we occupy. If the performer suddenly alters the pulse, it is as though a gravitational wave is created, which propagates forward and may make space-time seem to either dilate or contract, compared to the previous regime. If the performer imparts a hypermetric periodicity, that can be detected or sensed, via neurophysiological monitoring and analytics not too dissimilar from methods to detect gravitational waves.

T he transmission of hypermetrical ‘waves’ is not only through the ‘physical’ medium (sound through the air) but also through ‘cognitive’/’neurophysiological’ media. The latter media have an ‘impedance’ and transfer-function, with rate-dependent,time-dependent, remanent properties—almost like thixotropic or rheopectic non-Newtonian liquids and gels, or like non-Newtonian star-stuff in space. So the transmission of hypermeter waves is imperfect—the waves suffer delays and phase-lags; depending on its spectral properties, the waves experience more or less attenuation and dissipation as they propagates; they undergo refraction at ‘apertures’ (phrase boundaries; movement boundaries) and interferometric interaction with other hypermeters that exist concurrently in the same space-time.

W hen the musical polyphony is ‘shallow’, the hypermeter waves undergo wavefront-steepening and the wave amplitude increases like tsunami waves; and so on. This would seem to me to be a rich space for cross-disciplinary study in the future. To my knowledge, cross-pollination between music theory and physics has not explored these possibilities to-date. Maybe you will be intrigued enough to pick up this line of analysis and give it a ‘go’.

I   t can be seen in accompanied recitatives that tempo and metre must be frequently changed in order to rouse and still the rapidly alternating affections. The metric signature is in many such cases more a convention of notation than a binding factor in performance.”
  — C.P.E. Bach, ‘Versuch über die wahre Art, das Clavier zu spielen’, Leipzig, 1753, p. 153 (trans, W. Mitchell, ‘Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard’, 1949).

• Simone Dinnerstein website
  
• Simone Dinnerstein concert in Kansas City, 14-FEB-2009
  
• Dinnerstein S. The Berlin Concert. (Telarc, 2008.)
  
• Society for Mathematics and Computation in Music (SMCM) website
  
• Gravitational waves page at Wikipedia
  
• Einstein@Home (Univ Wisconsin Milwaukee)
  
• Vinet J-Y. Instruments for gravitational wave astronomy on ground and in space. Sem Poincare 2006; 9:91-114. [1MB pdf]
  
• Aki K, Richards P. Quantitative Seismology. 2e. Univ Science, 2002.
  
• Badura-Skoda S. Interpreting Bach at the Keyboard. Oxford Univ, 1995.
  
• Baldwin R. 2-D Fourier transforms using Java. Developer, 2008. [Java open-source]
  
• Brown J. Determination of the meter of musical scores by autocorrelation. J Acoust Soc America 1993; 94:1953–7.
  
• Ciaramella A, de Lauro E, de Martino S, di Lieto B, Falanga M, Tagliaferri R. Characterization of Strombolian events by using ICA. Nonlinear Processes Geophys 2004; 11:453-61. [1MB pdf]
  
• Couch L. Hypermeter and performers’ choices in recordings of J.S. Bach’s Toccata in F, BWV 540/1. Working Paper, 2007. [1MB pdf]
  
• Dragone L. Spectral clusterer for WEKA.
  
• Eck D. A positive-evidence model for rhythmical beat induction. J New Music Res 2001; 30:187–200.
  
• Ellis D. Beat-tracking by dynamic programming. Columbia Univ, 2007. [1MB pdf]
  
• Urs Enke page at Media Computing Group, Technische Hochschule Aachen
  
• Flanagan M. Fourier Transforms Java source-code, Univ College London, 2008.
  
• Hasty C. Meter as Rhythm. Oxford Univ, 1997.
  
• Large E. Periodicity, pattern formation, and metric structure. J New Mus Res 2001; 30:173-85.
  
• Lay T. Wallace T. Modern Global Seismology. Academic, 1995, pp. 379-83.
  
• Mazzola G. The Topos of Music. Birkhauser, 2002.
  
• Menke W. Geophysical Data Analysis: Discrete Inverse Theory. Academic, 1989.
  
• Nelsen R. Introduction to Copulas. Springer, 2007.
  
• Nestke A, Noll T. Inner metric analysis. In Haluska, Jan (ed.), Music and Mathematics. Tatra Mountains, 2000. [1MB pdf]
  
• Thomas Noll page at Technische Univ Berlin
  
• Rothstein W. Phrase Rhythm in Tonal Music. Schirmer, 1990.
  
• Schulenberg D. The Keyboard Music of J. S. Bach. 2e. Routledge, 2006. [see p. 328ff re: hypermeter in Bach keyboard works]
  
• Sethares W. Rhythm and Transforms. Springer, 2007.
  
• Smith L. A Multiresolution Time-Frequency Analysis and Interpretation of Musical Rhythm. PhD thesis, Univ Western Australia, 1999.
  
• Volk (Fleischer) A. Exploring the interaction of pulse layers regarding their influence on metrical accents. ICMPC8, 2004. [1MB pdf]
  
• Volk A, Garbers J, van Kranenburg P, Wiering R, Veltkamp R, Grijp L. Applying rhythmic similarity based on inner metric analysis to folksong research,. Proceedings of the 8th ISMIR conference, 2007. [1MB pdf]
  
• Volk A. Modeling a processive perspective on meter in music. Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference, 2005. [1MB pdf]
  
• Volk (Fleischer) A. A model of metric coherence, in Proc. 2nd Intl Conf Understanding & Creating Music, 2002.
  
• Anja Volk page at Univ Utrecht
  
• Wessling-Hart L. Cycling 74 releases ‘Momentary Incursions’ sampled rhythms 24-bit .wav files. [long textural beds, active sonic storytelling, cross-morphing, patterned rubato, interpolative re-sync/rendezvous of polyrhythmic threads, transitional sonic objects, elements for builds and sign-posting, etc.], Cycling74, 2005.
  
• Max5/MSP/Jitter software (Cycle74 Inc.)
  
• Yeston M. The Stratification of Musical Rhythm. Yale Univ 1976.
  
• DSM. Autocorrelation and agogicity: Measuring Goode’s Bach. CMT blog, 19-OCT-2008.
  
• DSM. Liquid chamber music: Inter-voice rhythm slip and non-newtonian shear-dependent ‘viscosity’ in BWV 1052. CMT blog, 06-APR-2008.

‘Tis the Season for Violin Hickeys

A    common skin condition experienced by violinists and violists at both the amateur and professional level is ‘fiddlers’ neck’, an area of hyperpigmentation and lichenification on the left side of the neck, below the angle of the jaw. Erythema, scaling, cyst formation, scarring, and inflammatory papules or pustules [of the skin that experiences prolonged contact with the instrument/chinrest] also occur. Focal neck edema can lead to concerns about the cosmetic appearance ... These skin changes have been attributed to a number of factors, including poor technique leading to increased pressure of the instrument on the skin of the neck, increased friction between the instrument and the skin caused by a poorly fitting chin rest or an inadequate shoulder rest, poor hygiene, and even the size of the instrument. Viola players may be more prone to have fiddlers’ neck than violinists because the instrument is larger and heavier [and imposes proportionately larger biomechanical stresses on the cervical skin, that augment the contact intensity under which contact dermatitis arises and that impair skin integrity and/or compromise the skin’s compensatory repair processes in proportion to the greater pressure of skin contact associated with the heavier instrument—leading to greater prevalence of the problem among violists and to greater severity and chronicity of the lesions in violists who experience the condition, compared to violinists who have similar weekly contact time-exposure profiles with their instruments].”
  —  Liu S, Hayden G. Maladies in musicians. Southern Med J 2002; 95:727-34. (citing Peachey & Matthews 1978).

S everal emails to CMT recently have asked about ‘fiddlers’ neck’—inquiring about whether there are any new treatments for it, or asking about the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of specific skin-care products.

B arrier cream for allergic contact dermatitis doesn’t really help—it’s not effective for mechanical dermatitis like what happens with violin and viola. Emollient creams and emollient soap substitutes are pretty effective in managing the condition, as are topical steroids and antibiotics if the area becomes infected.


H ere are things that actually work, for most people:

• Minimize washing of the affected skin—Frequent or prolonged water exposure actually dries out the skin and disrupts the barrier function of the epidermis.
  
• Apply moisturizing lotion/cream on the affected skin—Frequent moisturization improves the barrier function of the skin. Avoid the use of moisturizers with perfumes since these may also act as irritants.
  
• Apply topical steroid cream/lotion—Potent topical steroid (e.g., 0.2% to 1.0% hydrocortisone or equivalent) help to reduce inflammation.
  
• Apply topical analgesics—Pramoxine or similar compounds—can relieve itching or irritation, which can in turn help to minimize the severity of continued mechanical trauma to the affected area.

O vertreatment dermatitis’ or ‘iatrogenic dermatitis’ is a form of secondary dermatitis that occurs when treatment for another skin disorder causes irritation. The case of someone in whom treatment of violin hickey with hydrocortisone causes worsening, rather than improvement, of the hickey, would be termed an iatrogenic secondary dermatitis complicating the primary violin contact dermatitis.

The information on this page is not intended as medical advice and is not meant to be a substitute for individual medical judgment by a physician or other medical healthcare professional. The aim is to provide information and help in suggesting considerations for preventive care. Some products, such as corticosteroids, should be used only after a medical examination and under the supervision of a doctor. Always consult a licensed healthcare provider for individualized advice on your health decisions.

• Violin hickey thread at TheSession.org
  
• Jing-Wen's hickey advice
  
• Tim violin hickey blog
  
• Hickey page at Johnson String Instrument [chinrest covers]
  
• Brun P, Baran R. Fiddlers' neck dermatitis. Ann Dermatol Venereol. 1984; 111:241-5.
  
• Gambichler T, Boms S, Freitag M. Contact dermatitis and other skin conditions in instrumental musicians. BMC Dermatol 2004: 4:3-12. [1MB pdf]
  
• Harvell J, Maibach H. Skin disease among musicians. Medical Probl Perf Artists 1992; 7:114-21.
  
• Lau S. Red mark under your chin? Violinist.com, 10-MAY-2005.
  
• Murphy J. Cello scrotum. Br Med J 1974; 2:335.
  
• Moreno J, Gata I, Garcia-Bravo B, Camacho F. Fiddlers’ neck. Am J Contact Derm 1997; 8:39-42.
  
• Peachey R, Matthews CA. Fiddlers' neck. Br J Dermatol 1978; 98:669-74.
  
• Ramirez A. Rare chance to try out a [Strad] masterpiece. N.Y. Times 30-MAR-2007. [mentions violin hickey as prerequisite of someone worthy of trying a Strad on-auction]
  
• Shapiro P. Cello scrotum questioned. J Am Acad Dermatol 1991; 24:665.
  
• Stern J. The edema of fiddlers’ neck. J Am Acad Dermatol 1979; 1:538-40
  
• Tennstedt D, Cromphaut P, Dooms-Goossens A, Lachapelle J. Dermatoses of the neck affecting violin and viola players ("fiddler's neck", and contact dermatitis). Derm Beruf Umwelt. 1979; 27:165-9.
  
• Withey E. Violinist's tresses the mane event for ESO fans. Edmonton Journal 24-FEB-2008.
  
• Scientist valentines
  
• Plaitt P. Have an astronomical Valentine’s Day. BadAstronomy (Discover magazine blog), 13-FEB-2008. [esp. IC 1805, Valentine Nebula in Cassiopeia and Perseus]
  
• Hydrocortisone valerate cream 0.2%
  
• Sarna moisturizing anti-itch lotion, fragrance-free (Pramoxine Hydrochloride 1%; Benzyl Alcohol, Carbomer 940, Cetyl Alcohol, Dimethicone, Glyceryl Stearate, Isopropyl Myristate, PEG-8 Stearate, PEG-100 Stearate, Petrolatum,Sodium Hydroxide, Stearic Acid.
  
• AmLactin moisturizing anti-itch cream (Pramoxine HCl 1%, lactic acid 12%; Ammonium Hydroxide, Mineral Oil, Propylene Glycol, Glyceryl Stearate, PEG 100 Stearate, Cetyl Alcohol, Glycerin, Magnesium Aluminum Silicate, Laureth 4, Dimethicone (350), Polyoxyl

Ambient-Aleatoric Representation: Lisa Bielawa’s ‘Chance Encounter’

I    s such musical representation ‘depiction’? Is the listener to imagine perceiving a struggle, [or a lover’s kiss]? The mode of perception may be indeterminate. It need not be fictional that it is, for example, by a combination of introspection, kinesthetic sensation, and vision that one perceives the struggle (one’s own), nor that one merely sees and hears it occurring (a struggle among others). It might still be fictional that in some manner or other one does perceive the struggle. One has a sense of it occurring here and now…
  —  Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 341.

I f you happen to be in New York next Friday, on Valentine’s Eve, you might like to go to the Whitney Museum of American Art (945 Madison Ave at 75th Street), to hear Knights Chamber Orchestra and soprano Susan Narucki perform Lisa Bielawa’s composition, ‘Chance Encounter’. The event is Friday, February 13, with two performances, one at 6:50 pm and the other at 8:05 pm. It’s free with admission to the Whitney under their ‘pay-what-you-wish’ policy on Fridays. No tickets or reservations are required.

C hance Encounter’ is a 35-minute piece in, and about, transient public space with texts overheard in transient, public spaces. Susan Narucki and 12 instrumentalists converge and diverge, one or several at a time, in the context of a public space that contains whatever [transient] objects and [transient] occupants (including you, if you attend) as it may—plus whatever occurrences and ambient environmental sounds arise spontaneously in the space during the performance. Susan will sing songs and arias constructed of extemporaneous utterances that were collected in transient public spaces. The interaction of these vocal utterances/sung texts and the instrumental parts amounts to a re-enactment of a private (yet collective) experience of the then-current performance space itself— as well as a meta-enactment of the original eavesdropped utterances (texts) and spaces. The effect is an exciting, haptically-rich chamber music experience—new and different each time it is performed.

I    don’t do anything to it – it just comes out like this.
I’m trying to catch my breath.
I hope they know what they’re doing.
I found a place where we can sit together…
  —  Lisa Bielawa and Susan Narucki, text excerpt from ‘Chance Encounter’, ambient remarks, overheard in a public space.

C ontinuing my thread on intertextuality and representation from the previous CMT post, I want to suggest that even a composition like ‘Chance Encounter’ can be considered ‘representational’. At least it would be if we agree with the analysis of philosopher Kendall Walton.

F    ictional representation’ would point clearly to the exclusion of non-fiction. But I resist the implication that [the category we shall discuss] is a species of a larger class of ‘representations’ … ‘Mimesis’, with its distinguished history, can be understood to correspond roughly to ‘representation’ in my sense … but I disavow any implied commitment either to a ‘picture theory’ of language (or ‘symbols’) or a ‘correspondence theory’ of truth, or to an ‘imitation theory’ of depiction.
  —  Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 3.

T ransient, stochastic, ambient qualities don’t get explicit treatment in Walton’s book, ‘Mimesis’. But some of the examples he uses to illustrate some of his arguments do have those qualities. Just have to extrapolate a little bit; read between the lines.

I f a piece of music is ambient and aleatoric, it’s impossible to ‘know the piece well’ in Walton’s sense. The stochastic performance-time indirection inherent in transient configurations of listeners and passers-by in the performance space preempts listeners’ forming any expectations—other than maybe expecting nothing in particular, or expecting, say, to be surprised by unpredictable rhythmic and harmonic/timbral textures and chance interactions between the text and the music. Lisa and the chamber artists place you in a state of persistent anticipation and collaborative mimesis ...

A    ny ‘non-figurative’ or ‘non-objective’ painting that is to be seen in some figure-ground will qualify [as representational]. So, probably, will any design making use of what Gestalt psychologists call ‘closure’: such a design will mandate our imagining a square, for example, when it contains only hints of one. Jackson Pollock’s dripped and splashed paintings may turn out to generate fictional truths about [the processes of--] dripping and splashing. Most or even all music will likely have to be considered representational, for analogous reasons.
  —  Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 56.

C hance Encounter’ was co-conceived by Lisa with Susan Narucki. Lisa composed the piece for Susan and the New York-based Knights Chamber Orchestra. The overheard texts that were selected and transcribed may be ‘found’ objects, but they’re not ‘random’ ones—and their orchestration isn’t mechanical or haphazard or chaotic; they were selected in such a way so as to be capable of forming a coherent narrative arc and being emotionally parsed—by first-time participants/listeners as well as by those who have prior acquaintance with the work. The conceit is a non-figurative ‘ambience and transience as inescapable elements of the human condition’ that acknowledges and includes the space and the ad hoc, transient listeners and passers-by as quasi-performers.

B ut Bielawa clearly had a specific, coherent vision—one that’s beautifully and ably rendered here, with apt, if variable, emotional impact on virtually everyone present. The personnel for any particular performance can change; the sequence and timing can change; the ambient sounds are different each time; the visual and acoustic elements of the performance space are different each time—and all this ‘run-time indirection’ contributes to the representation ... of the human impossibility of mastering or controlling or insuring or preventing any aspect of life, or death. Linguists might term Lisa’s compositional grammar in this piece ‘agglutinative’, because of the multiple [transient] affixes/morphemes per phrase ...

A    central thesis of Leonard Meyer’s ‘Emotion and Meaning in Music’ is that ‘affect or emotion is aroused when an expectation—a tendency to respond—activated by the musical stimulus, is temporarily inhibited or permanently blocked.’ (p. 31) The appreciation of music derives largely, he claims, from frustrations of expectations about how the music will proceed. In the case of a deceptive cadence, listeners expect the tonic to follow the dominant, and they experience ‘affect’ when it does not. This may be an accurate description of the experience of the first-time listener, but what about the listener who knows the piece well? … It is fictional that the listener expects the tonic, regardless of what she actually expects, and it is fictional that she is surprised to hear the submediant or whatever occurs instead. This makes music a ‘prop’ in a game of make-believe and, hence, representational in our sense, in much the way that non-figurative painting is representational.
  —  Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 262.

T he piece is nominally ‘in and about transient public space’, as Lisa puts it in her program notes. But it’s also and more deeply about our relationships with each other and with the world. The effect you experience when immersed in a performance of ‘Chance Encounter’ is one of intense ‘expectancy’. It does have a ‘beginning’, a ‘middle’, and an ‘end’. It is possible, were ‘Chance Encounter’ extended to several hours or more in length—like an ultra-long Morton Feldman or John Cage or Karlheinz Stockhausen experiment (instead of Chance Encounter’s 35 minutes, as-composed)—that the effect would wear off, or that the narrative arc would be lost—or that the cognitive and attentional demands, becoming after awhile unsustainable, would cause our emotional response to mutate and the meaning of the piece to shift.

B ut, as-composed, ‘Chance Encounter’ is just the right length—poignant, amusing, thought-provoking, uplifting, satisfyingly listenable. It precipitates something of a ‘tikkun olam’ / ‘repair the broken world, one shard at a time’ / ‘if not us, who? if not now, when?’ sizzle in the audience. The displacement of classically-trained musicians, out of venerable-dear-ossified concert halls and into up-close contact with broader society with more socioeconomic and ethnic diversity, like chamber music in bars or like some of what Greg Sandow exhorts us to do, to make serious music more vibrant and accessible.

I    n Haydn’s String Quartet ‘The Bird’, op. 32, it is fictional that one hears the chirping of birds… A ‘depiction’, then, is a representation whose function is to serve as a ‘prop’ in rich and vivid perceptual games of make-believe.
  —  Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 296.

W    hen music is representational, is it [necessarily] ‘depictive’? Music and painting appear to be alike in being ‘perceptual’ arts, in contrast to literature… If music is a perceptual art, won’t musical works [always] be ‘props’ in perceptual games? The answer is, often not… In the case of much ‘expressive’ music, it may be fictional not that one sees or hears or otherwise perceives external things, but that one experiences or is aware of (one’s own) feelings or emotions or sensations or sentiments or moods. The listener imagines experiencing excitement, passion, fervor, … It may be fictional of one’s actual awareness of auditory sensations that it is an awareness of such feelings. In place of fictional perception of external objects, then, we have fictional introspection or fictional self-awareness. If I am right, this is likely to be true even of such stalwarts of musical purity as Bach’s ‘Art of the Fugue’. And to whatever extent introspection is analogous to the ‘external’, it will be reasonable to expand our understanding of ‘depiction’ to include this.
  —  Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 334.

• susan narucki, soprano
  
• kyle armbrust, viola
  
• mike atkinson, horn
  
• christina courtin, violin
  
• gareth flowers, trumpet
  
• josh frank, trumpet
  
• adam hollander, oboe
  
• colin jacobsen, violin
  
• eric jacobsen, cello
  
• stephen menotti, trombone
  
• alex sopp, flute
  
• lance suzuki, flute.

Y ou can get a sense of the beauty of the indeterminacy that Lisa and her collaborators achieve by looking at this segment of ‘Chance Encounters’ from a 2007 performance, on YouTube:

G    ame worlds are paramount in music in a way that they are not in painting. The music still qualifies as representational in our sense: its function is to serve as a ‘prop’ in the listeners’ [introspective fictions and] games. … Listening to music [and performing it--] is thus more like dreaming; one’s imaginative activity is largely solitary [even when it is done in the company of others]. You and I will not, fictionally, notice or learn about something and later compare … when we attend a concert together, we might explain to each other what fictionally we feel; this is like telling our dreams to each other at breakfast. And it can be fictional that we compare notes on what we feel when we hear [perform] the music. But we cannot fictionally compare what we feel about such-and-such a mutually observed event or situation or person. We end up talking about the music, rather than participating verbally together in a game of make-believe using the music as a prop.
  —  Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 337.

C hance Encounter’ songs and arias are made up entirely of speech overheard in transient public spaces including airports, sidewalks, streets, parks, cafes, buses and the subway. Bielawa blogged about her ‘eavesdropping existence’ during the period when she was composing ‘Chance Encounter’. You can read her blog here.

M    usical depictions are ‘weak’ in point-of-view [compared to paintings or literature]. When sounds are depicted, very little is fictional, usually, with respect to the angle and distance… When it is fictional of the listener that she hears in the musical motifs a brook gurgling, is it fictional that she hears it from upstream or downstream, from the side or from above, from near or from afar?
  —  Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 340.

Y es, there is the composer’s/eavesdropper’s viewpoint—the issue of privacy. But it is not at all like capturing ‘found sound’ waveforms in the field, and then reproducing them in some mash-up, like some composers of electroacoustic would do. Nor is it like representational art that generifies and refers to extraneous utterances of anonymous any-woman/every-man. Nor are there any ‘mondegreens’ or misheard phrases, at least not in this ‘Chance Encounter’. Bielawa’s composerly role is not at all like a detached observer of a gurgling brook, rendering a representation of those sounds in music.

I nstead, it is musical anthropology in the era of Web 2.0—and the anthropologist is never ‘neutral’ or purely ‘reportorial’, something Margaret Mead used to point out. In ‘Chance Encounter’, anthropology becomes art… we become installation art, and participate in the uniqueness and immediacy of whatever, musically, is created. It reminds me of some of the classical music events I have attended in Second Life, where performers and other virtual attendees array themselves in unpredictable configurations, and ambient sounds and moving imagery are variable.

F rom what I have heard of it, ‘Chance Encounter’ does not seek to subvert the natural expressive properties of the vocal or instrumental parts into a chaotic process or renounce the traditional control that the composer over the material as deep or ‘radical’ indeterminists (like Cage) do. Lisa is not a ‘radical indeterminist’: sounds and utterances do not have equal value, nor is their placement in time or pitch or timbre fungible. Sounds are chosen according to aesthetic principles by the composer and by the performers, and the choices are guided by the narrative and other intentions that they share, with humanly-varying comprehension and faithfulness. So it seems to me that ‘Chance Encounter’ probably embodies an in-between stance, somewhere between ‘moderate indeterminacy’ and ‘moderate aleatorics’. (In ‘strong aleatorics’ or ‘radical aleatorics’, the indeterminacy is controlled more explicitly by the composer—usually by offering the performers a smaller number of possibilities to choose from, and usually not treating the transient performance space or the transient audience and passers-by as part of the acoustic ‘palette’.)

A ttend the event at the Whitney next Friday if you can. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it. Say ‘Hi’ to Lisa and Susan and the Knights or, alternatively, gift them with some ambient original art-utterance that’s worth their overhearing/eavesdropping.

I    remember the following: four hundred drunken Finns swarming through the Soviet passport control [pushing and cursing in the Tallinn, Estonia, airport] ... their boots making the noise of dried blood... the metaphysical noise [can only, I think, be] called ‘the edge of Night’.
  —  Stephen Kuusisto, ‘Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening’, p. 180 (Kuusisto is blind)

• Knights Chamber Orchestra website
  
• Lisa Bielawa website
  
• Lisa Bielawa blog
  
• Susan Narucki website
  
• Whitney Museum
  
• Creative-Capital.org
  
• New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA)
  
• Lower Manhattan Cultural Council
  
• Second Life
  
• DSM. Second Life: Chamber music mixed reality and virtual reality. CMT blog, 03-JUL-2007.
  
• Second Life Fontana Music Town (classical)
  
• DSM. Sound Art: Beyond mere music. CMT blog, 26-APR-2008.
  
• Mondegreens page at Wikipedia
  
• Boellstorff T. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton Univ, 2008.
  
• Bruns A. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. Peter Lang, 2008.
  
• Cage J. 'Indeterminacy', in Silence: Lectures and Writings. Wesleyan Univ, 1961, pp. 35-40.
  
• Castronova E. Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun Is Changing Reality. Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008.
  
• Chase N, Clark J. Platform Second Life: Developing Real World Applications. Manning, 2009.
  
• Gaylin A. Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust. Cambridge Univ, 2003.
  
• Jenkins H. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. NYU, 2008.
  
• Kuusisto S. Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening. Norton, 2006.
  
• Malaby T. Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life. Cornell Univ, 2009.
  
• Meadows M. I, Avatar: The Culture and Consequences of Having a Second Life. New Riders, 2008.
  
• Meyer L. Emotion and Meaning in Music. Univ Chicago, 1961.
  
• Ray B. I Keee You!!: A Collection of Overheards. Atomic, 2008.
  
• Rufer-Bach K. The Second Life Grid: The Official Guide to Communication, Collaboration, and Community Engagement. Sybex, 2009.
  
• Rymaszewski M, et al. Second Life: The Official Guide. 2e. Sybex, 2008.
  
• Walton K. Mimesis as Make-Believe. Harvard Univ, 2006.
  
• Weber A, Rufer-Bach K, Platel R. Creating Your World: The Official Guide to Advanced Content Creation for Second Life. Sybex, 2007.

D    o Jackson Pollock’s [drip-and-splatter] paintings represent the actions by which they were made? Should we allow that ‘expressive’ music ‘represents’ emotions or the experiencing of emotions? Is expression a species of representation? Program music is representational, no doubt, but what about background/ambient music in film? How shall we classify Stravinsky’s ‘Pulcinella Suite’, Jasper Johns’s targets and flags, Duchamp’s ready-mades, or happenings? The existence of borderline or undecidable cases, even vast numbers of them, is not the problem. What is of concern is the fact that we cannot easily say why something does or does not count as representational.
  —  Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 2.