13 hours ago
12.23.2009
one buttock playing
Some people want to teach the world to sing. I want to teach the world how to listen. This man does a great job of that in a presentation at the TED conference. It's a must-see for anyone involved in Classical music and is even more important for those who have not yet been smitten by it.
12.17.2009
subject, object
I've had some time to think and have found some thought-threads that I meant to weave together and share with the world--well, with you.
Teaching music appreciation this past semester, I was constantly in search for language that could speak music to non-musicians. The textbook spent a couple of chapters on musical terms ranging from pianissimo to presto, tonic to sonata. And while some of those words might be necessary, we spent way too much time for the amount the students actually absorbed. I still got a lot of papers saying things like "I felt that this piece had a lot of chord progression."
When we got to the Romantic period, I searched for language that could describe the difference between the Romantic and the Classical eras. I explained that both use the tonal language and so contain an inherent drama. (The tonal system--tonality--establishes one key as the "home key" and then spends the rest of the time going away from and back to that key to create tension and release.) Because of this, both can be heard as containing narrative, but the difference is in the way the story is told. Classical music is a story told from the outside by an omniscient narrator, while Romantic music has a more first-person perspective. The former, we would assume, would tell the story more objectively since it is not involved in the action; the latter perspective, we often forget, is distorted by the close proximity of the narrator to the action.
This fits with each aesthetic. The Classical Era in music, coming at the tail end of the Enlightenment, was based on a preference for reason over emotion, objectivity over subjectivity. The great thinkers of the time--Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu--envisioned governments and societies set up according to rationalist principles. (We can still hope, right?) The Romantic Era, however, inheriting these very societal advances, saw the rise of the individual. Whereas, using rational methods, we should arrive at the same answer, in our emotional lives, we are unique.
I think this duality, this continuum, can be applied to other periods of music. Stravinsky certainly wrote objective music, even calling his output "objects":
"My Octet is a musical object. This object has a form and that form is influenced by the musical matter with which it is composed....My Octet is not an 'emotive' work but a musical work based on objective elements which are sufficient in themselves." (more)
Other composers of the twentieth century are more subjective, more expressive. John Adams, for one, has called himself a "neo-Romantic," having grown out of the "classic" minimalism of Glass and Reich.
Ultimately, this is just another way of categorizing composers and their music. Instead of thinking chronologically, it may prove interesting or helpful to group music along the subjective-objective continuum based on various mixtures of intellect and emotion. Ideally, then, it would help listeners draw connections between, say, a Haydn symphony and a Webern opus or a Gesualdo madrigal and a Liszt etude. I have my hunches as to where I fall on this continuum, but I'll leave that to you.
On a side note, I've been ensconced in simplicity at a cottage in Michigan the whole week. I plan on doing this every week during the winter, coming back to Chicago on the weekends. I started another blog to detail the more mundane aspects of my life up here.
Teaching music appreciation this past semester, I was constantly in search for language that could speak music to non-musicians. The textbook spent a couple of chapters on musical terms ranging from pianissimo to presto, tonic to sonata. And while some of those words might be necessary, we spent way too much time for the amount the students actually absorbed. I still got a lot of papers saying things like "I felt that this piece had a lot of chord progression."
When we got to the Romantic period, I searched for language that could describe the difference between the Romantic and the Classical eras. I explained that both use the tonal language and so contain an inherent drama. (The tonal system--tonality--establishes one key as the "home key" and then spends the rest of the time going away from and back to that key to create tension and release.) Because of this, both can be heard as containing narrative, but the difference is in the way the story is told. Classical music is a story told from the outside by an omniscient narrator, while Romantic music has a more first-person perspective. The former, we would assume, would tell the story more objectively since it is not involved in the action; the latter perspective, we often forget, is distorted by the close proximity of the narrator to the action.
This fits with each aesthetic. The Classical Era in music, coming at the tail end of the Enlightenment, was based on a preference for reason over emotion, objectivity over subjectivity. The great thinkers of the time--Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu--envisioned governments and societies set up according to rationalist principles. (We can still hope, right?) The Romantic Era, however, inheriting these very societal advances, saw the rise of the individual. Whereas, using rational methods, we should arrive at the same answer, in our emotional lives, we are unique.
I think this duality, this continuum, can be applied to other periods of music. Stravinsky certainly wrote objective music, even calling his output "objects":
"My Octet is a musical object. This object has a form and that form is influenced by the musical matter with which it is composed....My Octet is not an 'emotive' work but a musical work based on objective elements which are sufficient in themselves." (more)
Other composers of the twentieth century are more subjective, more expressive. John Adams, for one, has called himself a "neo-Romantic," having grown out of the "classic" minimalism of Glass and Reich.
Ultimately, this is just another way of categorizing composers and their music. Instead of thinking chronologically, it may prove interesting or helpful to group music along the subjective-objective continuum based on various mixtures of intellect and emotion. Ideally, then, it would help listeners draw connections between, say, a Haydn symphony and a Webern opus or a Gesualdo madrigal and a Liszt etude. I have my hunches as to where I fall on this continuum, but I'll leave that to you.
On a side note, I've been ensconced in simplicity at a cottage in Michigan the whole week. I plan on doing this every week during the winter, coming back to Chicago on the weekends. I started another blog to detail the more mundane aspects of my life up here.
12.13.2009
critical sound mass
One Sunday evening as Chicagoans and tourists mingled among twinkling lights on the Magnificent Mile, a group of about 35 people carrying about 15 boomboxes gave a performance of mobile electronic music, winding its way from Water Tower to Millennium Park and finally to the Christkindlmarkt at Daley Plaza. "Unsilent Night" was originally conceived by Phil Kline in 1992 as a group and has developed into an annual New York tradition, attracting hundreds or thousands of people. It has also spread to 25 cities around the world, including Chicago.
I went sans boombox (or iPod dock) and, really, sans expectations. It's one of those things that was hard for me to imagine being successful, and so all my feeble attempts at picturing the event ended with disappointment. Fortunately, the actual event surpassed my preconceptions and was a pleasant surprise.
For one thing, the music itself was simply beautiful. At the beginning, a mood of tranquil wonder was set by a sea of bells shimmering underneath a sky full of stars. The sound samples on the Unsilent Night website don't do justice to the richness of the texture created by multitude of speakers both in motion and slightly out of sync. I tried to stay towards the middle of the group to have the "surround sound" experience. 30 speakers is better than 5.1.
The subdued awe persisted as the music slowly changed from twinkling bells to drones to chant. The mass of people moved as a herd leading to the Bean in Millennium Park. We stopped for several minutes underneath the Bean which amplified the sound and gave us a chance to hear things a little more clearly.
There were certainly a mixture of reactions from passers-by ranging from curious, amused, and bewildered to perplexed, indifferent and even angry. And it was interesting to witness the effect of the music on my own perceptions of people. There was a point at which the music felt like the non-diagetic music to a film montage. As that happened, I caught a glimpse of a cashier at a pharmacy watching us through the window with a glazed look of indifference, and suddenly I was watching the documentary of her life.
We ended soon thereafter at Daley Plaza. I would highly recommend finding (or starting) this event in a city near you. It only happens once a year in each location, so you might have to wait until next year. Don't be skeptical, it's worth it. In fact, I would like to see more such similar performances. Someone should start a boombox ensemble and then encourage composers to write this kind of electroacoustic music.
Here's a video of the Unsilent Night in San Francisco. More videos available on their website.
I went sans boombox (or iPod dock) and, really, sans expectations. It's one of those things that was hard for me to imagine being successful, and so all my feeble attempts at picturing the event ended with disappointment. Fortunately, the actual event surpassed my preconceptions and was a pleasant surprise.
For one thing, the music itself was simply beautiful. At the beginning, a mood of tranquil wonder was set by a sea of bells shimmering underneath a sky full of stars. The sound samples on the Unsilent Night website don't do justice to the richness of the texture created by multitude of speakers both in motion and slightly out of sync. I tried to stay towards the middle of the group to have the "surround sound" experience. 30 speakers is better than 5.1.
The subdued awe persisted as the music slowly changed from twinkling bells to drones to chant. The mass of people moved as a herd leading to the Bean in Millennium Park. We stopped for several minutes underneath the Bean which amplified the sound and gave us a chance to hear things a little more clearly.
There were certainly a mixture of reactions from passers-by ranging from curious, amused, and bewildered to perplexed, indifferent and even angry. And it was interesting to witness the effect of the music on my own perceptions of people. There was a point at which the music felt like the non-diagetic music to a film montage. As that happened, I caught a glimpse of a cashier at a pharmacy watching us through the window with a glazed look of indifference, and suddenly I was watching the documentary of her life.
We ended soon thereafter at Daley Plaza. I would highly recommend finding (or starting) this event in a city near you. It only happens once a year in each location, so you might have to wait until next year. Don't be skeptical, it's worth it. In fact, I would like to see more such similar performances. Someone should start a boombox ensemble and then encourage composers to write this kind of electroacoustic music.
Here's a video of the Unsilent Night in San Francisco. More videos available on their website.
12.10.2009
Sad Clowns and Blackbirds
Theory: the more complex a piece of art, the longer it takes to penetrate and the longer it takes to fade with repeat experiences. In the history of music, there seems to be a roller-coaster relationship with complexity: things start out simple and get steadily more and more complex until they get so impenetrable that there's a crash: WHEEE! The Baroque was thorny and difficult, and it was to that the Classical was a reaction. The Romantic period period seemed to have a fake crash but was instead redirected into serialism, then total serialism which then spawned a reaction in the hypersimple minimalist style that is decorating so many movie scores these days.
One theory among composers is that writing hypercomplex music means your music (and therefore your soul) will live on forever. They're think they're writing for the future. Unfortunately, there are far too many examples of artists appreciated only well after they died to give this group of misfits hope.
The same theory necessarily applies to live performances, something which I realized watching eighth blackbird's performance of Pierrot Lunaire.
I had been building up to the performance in my mind for several weeks before, listening to the score, explaining the work to my students (music appreciation), and even somehow interviewing 8bb's flutist Tim Munro. I felt ready to take the complexity of the score and make sense of it in a total-brain, dreamlike way.
To me, the music and the text are more than enough to try to make sense of. Already in Schönberg's score, there is tension between foreground and background. Clearly, the "singer" is meant to be the foreground, but the instrumental writing is so dense and ear-catching that I try to fuse the various parts together into some sort of cohesive, symbiotic whole, splitting my conscious attention evenly: 50% singing, 50% instrumental music, and 50% text. That's right, to really absorb the Gestalt requires 150% of conscious thought.
But 8bb doesn't stop there; they add yet another layer of meaning in the choreography of Mark DeChiazza. The movement itself was interesting and eye-catching, but it turned out to be too much so. One could have spent 100% of their attention watching the movement and making sense out of a series of abstract and unrelated relationships.
In talking about the work, DeChiazza seemed overwhelmed by the music, finding it impenetrable. He related stories of burying himself in Expressionist thought and art to try to find a visual language that would correlate to the score. In essence, then, he tried to create a choreography that would be on the same level as the text and music.
This was where he went wrong.
Pierrot Lunaire, for admirers of 20th century music, can stand completely on its own and, even then, merits myriad repeat listenings to penetrate its thick exterior. The goal with the staging, then, should be to make it more immediately accessible to general audiences. While I think DeChiazza succeeded in this to some extent, his success came about through visually distracting the audience from the difficulty of the work rather than highlighting elements in the music or the text.
Less is more.
Musically, 8bb have found a balance with their singer, the incomparable Lucy Shelton. Shelton is a dynamic performer and both demands and merits the audience's full attention. So while she is singing, we don't need a dancer doing twirls in the far background, musicians dramatically sweeping chairs into place, and Pierrot climbing a ladder. We don't need four layers of visuals because we already have four layers of music and an inscrutable text.
Ultimately, it's all about balance. The "volume" of the visuals was too loud for the volume of the music, which could be solved by turning down the visuals (by quieting down the least essential layers: move more slowly or not at all) or turning up the audio. I would do a little of both but making sure that the audio is loud enough to demand attention--though this may go against the birds' time-tested idea of "sound reinforcement" in lieu of "amplification".
information
Adding complexity to complexity creates a work that is both more difficult to penetrate but also one that merits more repeat listenings. The irony is that by adding a visual layer, in an effort to make the work more accessible to some, they made it more complex, therefore less accessible, to others. With repeated experiences, my opinion of the work could change. It was too much information to make sense of in one sitting but will take many, many more before it becomes remotely redundant.
One theory among composers is that writing hypercomplex music means your music (and therefore your soul) will live on forever. They're think they're writing for the future. Unfortunately, there are far too many examples of artists appreciated only well after they died to give this group of misfits hope.
The same theory necessarily applies to live performances, something which I realized watching eighth blackbird's performance of Pierrot Lunaire.
I had been building up to the performance in my mind for several weeks before, listening to the score, explaining the work to my students (music appreciation), and even somehow interviewing 8bb's flutist Tim Munro. I felt ready to take the complexity of the score and make sense of it in a total-brain, dreamlike way.
To me, the music and the text are more than enough to try to make sense of. Already in Schönberg's score, there is tension between foreground and background. Clearly, the "singer" is meant to be the foreground, but the instrumental writing is so dense and ear-catching that I try to fuse the various parts together into some sort of cohesive, symbiotic whole, splitting my conscious attention evenly: 50% singing, 50% instrumental music, and 50% text. That's right, to really absorb the Gestalt requires 150% of conscious thought.
But 8bb doesn't stop there; they add yet another layer of meaning in the choreography of Mark DeChiazza. The movement itself was interesting and eye-catching, but it turned out to be too much so. One could have spent 100% of their attention watching the movement and making sense out of a series of abstract and unrelated relationships.
In talking about the work, DeChiazza seemed overwhelmed by the music, finding it impenetrable. He related stories of burying himself in Expressionist thought and art to try to find a visual language that would correlate to the score. In essence, then, he tried to create a choreography that would be on the same level as the text and music.
This was where he went wrong.
Pierrot Lunaire, for admirers of 20th century music, can stand completely on its own and, even then, merits myriad repeat listenings to penetrate its thick exterior. The goal with the staging, then, should be to make it more immediately accessible to general audiences. While I think DeChiazza succeeded in this to some extent, his success came about through visually distracting the audience from the difficulty of the work rather than highlighting elements in the music or the text.
Less is more.
Musically, 8bb have found a balance with their singer, the incomparable Lucy Shelton. Shelton is a dynamic performer and both demands and merits the audience's full attention. So while she is singing, we don't need a dancer doing twirls in the far background, musicians dramatically sweeping chairs into place, and Pierrot climbing a ladder. We don't need four layers of visuals because we already have four layers of music and an inscrutable text.
Ultimately, it's all about balance. The "volume" of the visuals was too loud for the volume of the music, which could be solved by turning down the visuals (by quieting down the least essential layers: move more slowly or not at all) or turning up the audio. I would do a little of both but making sure that the audio is loud enough to demand attention--though this may go against the birds' time-tested idea of "sound reinforcement" in lieu of "amplification".
information
Adding complexity to complexity creates a work that is both more difficult to penetrate but also one that merits more repeat listenings. The irony is that by adding a visual layer, in an effort to make the work more accessible to some, they made it more complex, therefore less accessible, to others. With repeated experiences, my opinion of the work could change. It was too much information to make sense of in one sitting but will take many, many more before it becomes remotely redundant.
12.05.2009
ex nihilo nihil fit
On 12.3.09, I went to a concert by dal niente, one of the many new music ensembles that have sprung up in the last few years--inspired, no doubt, by the success of eighth blackbird and ICE. Of those, dal niente seems to be the most likely to succeed, combining prodigious talent with a clear sense of identity. The demiurge behind the group, composer Kirsten Brøberg (sic), mostly culls musicians from Northwestern and focuses her programming on the traditions stemming from and interweaving around French spectralists and German timbralists. The two facets seem to have grown simultaneously, like calculus, in those two countries and now have flourished into a mostly Scandinavian tradition.
The concert was expertly performed, highlights being Gareth Davis on clarinets and J.Austin Wulliman on violin. Davis got in touch with his inner Henry Rollins in the middle of a slew of multiphonics and strange articulations during Lindberg's Ablauf. I enjoyed the insanity that the piece portrayed or, in some cases, induced, but I'm not sure I'd willingly sit through another performance of schizophrenic clarinet violently interrupted by bass drums cleverly situated behind the audience in the choir loft. Effective but unnerving.
Wulliman channeled Gidon Kremer in his performance of Kaija Saariaho's Calices, the work being a scaled-down version of her violin concerto Graal Théâtre. Though Saariaho uses extensive notations to produce various timbres, overtones, or noises, Wulliman made it seem as effortless as playing Mozart.
The first piece on the program, Jay Alan Yim's Songs in Memory of a Circle was the most interesting from a composer's perspective. Resembling one of my many unrealized ideas, Yim's piece is a series of pieces able to be played individually or in various simultaneous combinations. Amazingly, the three pieces chosen created a unified whole, a rich tapestry of sound, that actually moved between moments of calm and moments of fluttery activity. The piece was accompanied by a video that was manipulated live. The video was static and ugly compared to the richness in the music, and the manipulation seemed primitive and distracting--something that is not ready for public performance.
The grand finale of the concert was more of an anticlimax. Broberg's Origins received its world premiere. The work was dedicated to Gareth Davis and incorporated him on bass/clarinet in each of the five movements. Each movement involved a different instrumental combination of winds, strings, or mixed ensemble. Compared to the Lindberg work, the piece didn't seem to explore Davis's technical ability to the same extent. Compared to Yim's piece, the textures were less rich and sonorous and so did not hold my attention. It may have been that the work grew out of Broberg's new-found home soil in Minnesota with its deep winters and Scandinavian roots, and my big-city, over-caffeinated ears couldn't shift gears. At the very least, it would have been better situated at the end of the first half; by the end of the concert, our ears had already been worn out and needed something less demanding of our attention.
Overall, though, the ensemble continued to show its mettle and seems durable enough to last for a long while. I look forward to future dal niente concerts, in particular Grisey's Partiels in the Spring.
The concert was expertly performed, highlights being Gareth Davis on clarinets and J.Austin Wulliman on violin. Davis got in touch with his inner Henry Rollins in the middle of a slew of multiphonics and strange articulations during Lindberg's Ablauf. I enjoyed the insanity that the piece portrayed or, in some cases, induced, but I'm not sure I'd willingly sit through another performance of schizophrenic clarinet violently interrupted by bass drums cleverly situated behind the audience in the choir loft. Effective but unnerving.
Wulliman channeled Gidon Kremer in his performance of Kaija Saariaho's Calices, the work being a scaled-down version of her violin concerto Graal Théâtre. Though Saariaho uses extensive notations to produce various timbres, overtones, or noises, Wulliman made it seem as effortless as playing Mozart.
The first piece on the program, Jay Alan Yim's Songs in Memory of a Circle was the most interesting from a composer's perspective. Resembling one of my many unrealized ideas, Yim's piece is a series of pieces able to be played individually or in various simultaneous combinations. Amazingly, the three pieces chosen created a unified whole, a rich tapestry of sound, that actually moved between moments of calm and moments of fluttery activity. The piece was accompanied by a video that was manipulated live. The video was static and ugly compared to the richness in the music, and the manipulation seemed primitive and distracting--something that is not ready for public performance.
The grand finale of the concert was more of an anticlimax. Broberg's Origins received its world premiere. The work was dedicated to Gareth Davis and incorporated him on bass/clarinet in each of the five movements. Each movement involved a different instrumental combination of winds, strings, or mixed ensemble. Compared to the Lindberg work, the piece didn't seem to explore Davis's technical ability to the same extent. Compared to Yim's piece, the textures were less rich and sonorous and so did not hold my attention. It may have been that the work grew out of Broberg's new-found home soil in Minnesota with its deep winters and Scandinavian roots, and my big-city, over-caffeinated ears couldn't shift gears. At the very least, it would have been better situated at the end of the first half; by the end of the concert, our ears had already been worn out and needed something less demanding of our attention.
Overall, though, the ensemble continued to show its mettle and seems durable enough to last for a long while. I look forward to future dal niente concerts, in particular Grisey's Partiels in the Spring.
Interview: Tim Munro, eighth blackbird
As a preview for the upcoming performance of Schönberg's Pierrot Lunaire by Chicago-based eighth blackbird, I did an interview with the ensemble's rockstar flutist Tim Munro. Tim has become the de facto spokesperson for the group and gives some interesting insights into the work as a whole as well as certain specific songs.
As a teacher of Music Appreciation, I wanted to make this into something that would be both accessible to a wide audience but interesting to people who already know Schönberg's groundbreaking work. It ended up being about 17 minutes long, but it seems to go by quickly.
Originally, this was just to be audio, but the only way to post the audio to this blog was as a video. So I whipped up a little video accompaniment in iMovie. It was in serious danger of being really cheesy, but I think I righted the ship before it was too late.
Let me know what you think.
As a teacher of Music Appreciation, I wanted to make this into something that would be both accessible to a wide audience but interesting to people who already know Schönberg's groundbreaking work. It ended up being about 17 minutes long, but it seems to go by quickly.
Originally, this was just to be audio, but the only way to post the audio to this blog was as a video. So I whipped up a little video accompaniment in iMovie. It was in serious danger of being really cheesy, but I think I righted the ship before it was too late.
Let me know what you think.
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