Janice Whaley’s New Model of Music-Making (Annual Reflections Part 2 of 2)

(for those you whose devices are not flash enabled, the above music can be heard here)
(for those of you unfamiliar with the music of the Smiths, a brief overview can be found here)

Keeping in mind Monday’s thoughts regarding the need to honor the talents, skills, and resources we already have at our disposal, I’d like to share with you the music of Janice Whaley, a new artist who, I think, presents a powerful model of music making that will be of interest to many of us here in the IPAP community. To my mind, it is a blueprint for what classically-informed performance can be in the twenty-first century.

Alan’s Annual Reflections (Part 1 of 2)

Wednesday, I’ll be posting about Janice Whaley, a San Francisco based musician whose work I think will be of great interest to the IPAP community.  Since she deserves not to follow my customary preamble, I’m posting that today.

In honor of IPAP’s first anniversary, Laura asked me to compose a short piece that encapsulates some of the themes that have developed on our blog over the past year. If you’ve spent any time here, you already know that we have a tremendous staff of writers, each of whom has their own set of interests, styles, and ways of working.  It’s been a real growing experience for me to get a more intimate perspective on the different approaches and ideas that each of us bring to our practice of music. In particular, I’ve relearned valuable lessons about two of our key buzzwords: innovation and creativity:

• Being creative doesn’t only involve the ideas that you have but also the actions that you take.

• Asking yourself “What can I do today to be innovative?” isn’t usually the best way to be innovative. Instead, ask “What can I do today to be productive?”  The difficulties that arise from your desire to produce will lead you, by necessity, to innovate.

(As a corollary to the above, if you don’t come across stumbling blocks in your creative activity,
it’s probably a sign that you need to be more ambitious in how you challenge yourself.)

• It’s just as, if not more, important to discover new ways to employ the skills and interests you’ve already won rather than trying to continually re-invent the proverbial wheel in search of the next shiny trend or technique. It’s ok to be guided by your expertise. The fact that we never want to stop learning doesn’t mean that we haven’t already learned much of what we need to know.

Brahms’s Beat Science: Alex Ross’s “Blessed Are the Sad” – by Alan Tormey

Last time, I touched on some of the musical connections between Mozart and the Insane Clown Posse.  Today, I look a slightly less intuitive combination –  Mozart and  Brahms.

“Brahms’s secret weapon is rhythm. Nineteenth century classical music is not prized for its rhythmic invention…but Brahms paid close attention to the science of the beat.”
-Alex Ross

In “Blessed Are The Sad” – Alex Ross’s Brahms essay from the Listen to This collection, Ross points to the composer’s middle-period as a time of deepening rhythmic sensibility and prowess.  In large part, Ross posits, this is due to Brahms’s engagement with Gypsy music and German folk songs.  This is undoubtedly true.  His engagement with non-classical European music is, to me, one of the reasons he is so clearly a Romantic rather than a retrograde classicist. However, I would suggest that, alongside his Romantic-era nationalist interests, his immersion in pre-Beethovenian classical music also helped to shape his specific rhythmic sensibility. Mozart, for example, is well known as one Brahms’s favorite composers and, as such, is very likely a strong influence on his rhythmic sensibility. With that in mind, I would like to take a short look at the opening of Mozart’s concert aria “Bella Mia Fiamma…” to examine how the work of a Classical composer, such as Mozart, is rhythmically different from (Ross’s description of) the Romantic style of rhythm in which “composers would generally put a 4/4 time signature at the outset of a piece, set a pulse in motion, and attempt to sustain large structures through harmonic means.” In this Mozart example, harmony and rhythm work together to create slippery, mercurial phrases that tease the listener’s expectations of musical place and time.

The score for Bella Mia Fiamma can be downloaded from IMSLP

The aria’s opening utilizes six-beat gestures that serve to swap the perceived downbeat between beats 1 and 3 of the measure. In effecting these swaps, Mozart composes a fourteen-measure (plus a downbeat) opening section without allowing the music to feel asymmetrical and/or markedly unbalanced in the way that a later composer like Prokofiev might.

The main shift in metric emphasis appears at m.8, beat 3 (from here on measures and beats will be indicated with a decimal: m. 8.3).  At 8.3, the voice reenters with an altered statement of its original material from m. 2.3. However, because of the way in which Mozart manipulates his harmonic rhythm (that is, the placement and pacing of his chord changes), the entrance at m. 8.3 feels like a downbeat, while m. 2.3 feels, as expected, like a mid-measure entrance. Juliane Banse’s performance with the Munich Chamber Orchestra (streamable on Spotify) emphasizes this by entering her voice slightly later than the strings at 2.3, but with the strings at 8.3.

Through the aria’s first six measures, harmonies basically change at the rate of the half note despite a touch of filigree here or there. Beginning with m. 7, the chords are changing every quarter note. In e minor, the progression from mm.7 – 8.3 is: |i - V/V – V7 – VI – | iv – V – i. However, not all chords in this progression are created equal. In m. 7, it is, of course, the i and V7 chords that fall on the strong beats. Following that, the VI and iv chords that come after the V7 are more of a chordal embellishment of m. 7.3’s dominant harmony than they are independent chords in their own right. If you didn’t quite follow that last bit, look at the bass line between 7.3 and 8.2 and notice how, without the rests, it looks exactly like a double neighbor figure of the sort you’d find as an ornamentation in Bach.

Following this prolonged dominant, m. 8.3 marks that first time in the piece that the voice enters at the same time as a cadence.  The combination of an authentic cadence, pseudo-repetition of melodic material, and a re-normalization of the harmonic rhythm following the speeding up of m.7 – 8.3 creates the sense that the next musical cycle is beginning. That is, in every way but the notation, m. 8.3 is the downbeat. Mm. 9 – 14 work in almost the exact same way, so that when the next substantial section of the piece begins at m. 15, the perceptual and notated downbeats have re-aligned.

So, while music of the classical era may often look somewhat rhythmically stilted from beat-to-beat, it can often contain a wealth of subtlety and sophistication from measure-to-measure. A musician of Brahms’s character would have surely internalized the lessons of Mozart and brought them to bear wherever they might be beneficial to his vision.

IPAP Update 12/8 – 12/14

Hopefully you’re all enjoying our new look this morning.  Here’s a brief update on what we’ll be doing the next few days.

1) First, I’d like to thank all of you readers who have been following our Alex Ross project over the past week.  Our hits per day has been very robust. We’re thrilled to have you reading and we hope that you’re enjoying our offerings.

2) As some of you may have noticed, the weekly digest has been put on hold for the week. It will return next TUESDAY.

3) Our Listen to This project will continue beginning next WEDNESDAY with a set of essays in response to Ross’s chapter on music education.

4) Between now and then we will be posting several new pieces of content by some of your favorite IPAP authors.

“Stupid, vulgar, and insane” – Alan Tormey on Alex Ross

NSFW!  (Information on the above can be found @third man records) 

FYI, Jennifer Borkowski is my new blog crush. If you haven’t yet had a chance to read her fantastic post from yesterday, click here.  I’d like to take this post and just write about all the right-on stuff in her essay, but I feel that I already pulled a bit of a bait-and-switch last time by writing more about Brian Eno than Alex Ross. I would hate to gain a reputation as the site’s master baiter.  So, here’s part two:

“[Classical music is] a tenaciously living art…”

What is it that’s tenaciously living?  Is it the repertoire itself? Is it the act of playing orchestral instruments?  Is it the act of writing and/or playing music through the means of traditional notation? Is the curatorial gravity of the music’s presentational institutions?  Classical music, whatever it might be, is not a thing-in-itself but, rather, a category that emerges when performance, composition, and culture intersect. Because classical music is not a thing, but an outcome of an intersection, I don’t know what kind of music he’s talking about when he talks about…

sǝıbǝʇɐɹʇs ǝnbıןqo

n.b. Don’t forget to check out Alexis del Palazzo’s “Breaking the Cycle” here.

I. – The Shuffle
In the not-too-distant past, I finally acquired a deck of Oblique Strategy cards.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Oblique Strategies, it is a deck of over 100 cards authored in 1975 by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. Each card contains a short aphoristic instruction such as “Honour thy error as a hidden intention” or “Work at a different speed.”  Like many owners of the deck, I use it in somewhat of an oracular fashion, occasionally drawing a card at the start of an artistic endeavor or perhaps consulting the deck if I’m stuck within a particularly thorny creative conundrum. Interested parties can purchase a deck here. 

II – The Deal
In the much-more-recent past, I set about strategizing my initial essay for IPAP’s current series of responses and reactions to Listen To This – Alex Ross’s recent collection of essays. My essay, as it had originally existed in my head, drew from the last three-and-one-fifth pages (from the bottom of p. 18 in the U.S. hardcover edition) of Ross’s “trumpet-blast manifesto” of a first chapter in order to sound a complementary call-to-arms.  It hoped to encourage performers to base their artistic identity in their instrument itself rather than in any specific repertoire and to move towards a type of pan-stylistic model of performative musicianship, using – as an example of one approach to this – the music of Janice Whaley, whose work we will be discussing here in the near future. To accomplish this, the essay would synthesize, among other things, the financial straits of the Philadelphia Orchestra, the role of improvisation in organ pedagogy, Michael Tilson Thomas, Marx’s mode of production, Deadmau5, Duke Ellington, David Foster Wallace, the Oxford comma, and Locatelli.

Greetings from merry olde England!

“I try to demystify the art to some extent, dispel the hocus-pocus, while still respecting the boundless human complexity that gives it life.” The tricky thing, he adds, “is not to describe a sound but to describe a human being.”

- Alex Ross on “Listen to This” – the recent collection of essays we’ll be discussing here starting 12/1/11

 

The Guardian found it to be so nice they reviewed it twice!

From their “Books” section:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/dec/11/listen-this-alex-ross-review

From their “Observer” section:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/nov/28/alex-ross-listen-to-this-review

 

Listen To This – A Special Announcement from IPAP

Hello Everybody,

It is with great pleasure that I’m announcing a special upcoming project that will be taking place here on the IPAP blog.  Beginning Thursday, December 1^st, we will be featuring a number of articles and postings centered around “Listen To This” the recent essay collection by Alex Ross, which is now newly available in paperback.  For most days over an approximately two week period the majority of our authors will be posting reaction pieces to various chapters and/or overarching issues from the book, starting at the top with our authors’ many and varied reactions to Mr. Ross’s expansive first chapter “Listen To This: Crossing the Border from Classical to Pop.”

The book can be found at Amazon here:
http://www.amazon.com/Listen-This-Alex-Ross/dp/0312610688/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1321739845&sr=8-1

or here for the Kindle edition:
http://www.amazon.com/Listen-to-This-ebook/dp/B003SNJL60/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1321739845&sr=8-2

You may also find the book at your local public library and/or independent bookseller.

A Case Study in Interpretation: Density 21.5 (Part 3 of 3)

Well, after a too long of a delay, we’re back with Part 3 of our series on Edgard Varese’s Density 21.5, specifically as performed by Laura Pou. As we illustrated in Part 2, a close analysis of the score’s micro-details suggests that, contrary to some opinions, Density 21.5 is music with a high degree of character and affect – a beautifully hazy, shifting, and obscure composition.  On the other hand, the score’s macro-level indications seems to suggest an opposite perspective; the instruction “Always strictly in time – follow metronomic indications” and the absence of any character markings support the mechanistic, unemotive, inhuman view of the piece that was put forward in Part 1 of this series. This contradiction was implicitly noted by one IPAP reader who posted the following comment on my Facebook page:

If one keeps a solid pulse, is there room for some elasticity in the rhythm? If one needs an extra moment to execute a large shift, string crossing, chord, or even a peak of phrase etc. but the time is made up somewhere else in the measure/line, is it kosher if it’s subtle enough that no one could flat out say the rhythm is distorted or the pulse compromised? Bach comes to mind, pulse is paramount, but some push/pull is required to keep it breathing and keep it sounding organic and musical. I didn’t miss the point about the rhythmic expression/details, I’m just going a step further into how a musician (does or should) interprets an instruction like: “stay at X tempo, do not deviate.”

If I understand the reader correctly we can condense her comment into two questions: What level of interpretive discretion (and/or the application of commonly held standards of musicality) is appropriate to this music and, furthermore, are the issues raised by this analysis of Varese applicable to broader swaths of the Modern repertoire?

To answer these questions, it might be helpful to think a little bit about the time in which Varese was living and what might have been his general expectations towards musical performance and interpretation. Born in 1883, Varese spent his late teens and early 20s in Paris at the Schola Cantorum  and the Paris Conservatoire, thereby coming of age surrounded by the performance practices of the late Romantic period.  Below are three of the earliest surviving recordings of the great violinists.  In their similarities, these are likely to be emblematic of the kind of music making practices that Varese grew up with.

Jascha Heifetz (b. 1901) Mozart’s “Gavotte in G” from Idomeneo  (rec. 1912)

Joseph Joachim (b. 1831) Bach’s “Adagio” from the Violin Sonata no. 1 (rec. 1904)

Eugène Ysaÿe (b. 1858) Kreisler’s Caprice Viennois (rec. 1912)

In brief, Heifetz’s recording contains frequent and pronounced variations of tempo within a phrase and distinct changes of tempo for contrasting material (see, for example, 0:40 to 0:47). Joachim’s recording could be considered almost tempoless since each measure is of a significantly different duration (see below).  Ysaÿe’s recording is similarly fluid.

m. 1 – c. 9.25”
m. 2 – c. 7.75”
m. 3 – c. 10.25”
m. 4 – c. 8.66”

Table 1 – seconds per measure in Joachim’s performance of Bach’s Violin Sonata

Furthermore, not much had changed in the twenty-odd years between these recordings and the date of Density 21.5’s composition in 1936. As evidence, consider the wide range of tempos applied to Beethoven by conductors such as Toscanini and Klemperer. See John Rockwell’s very good introductory summary of that rivalry here.

So, Varese was composing in a time when the same universally-known piece of music could be played either very fast or very slow (Toscanini vs. Klemperer) and had been trained in a time when a piece of music written in a single tempo could be played either in several tempos (Heifetz) or in a tempo that fluctuates to such an extent that the actual pulse becomes obscured (Joachim, Ysaÿe). By contrast, we now live in a world where music software can lock in tempos to at least a thousandth of a second and the bulk of the music is militantly anti-fluid and machine-dependant in its rhythmicity. In this light, it makes sense that Varese’s instructions do not mean that the piece should be performed mechanically or inhumanly but only that the tempo should be consistent and clearly recognizable. Neither those physically necessary “extra moments”, organic “push/pull”, nor even deliberate affectations such as a slight retard to mark the end of a phrase will compromise the clarity or consistency called for by Varese.  However, the performative distortions and absolute fluidity of the Romantic approach to tempo would obscure the music’s very subtle details and connections that were analyzed back in part 2.

At this point, I think it safe to say that we can conclude that Laura Pou’s deeply affecting performance of Density 21.5 is by no means a deviation from either the spirit or the letter of Varese’s composition, and that its qualities are directly related to the music’s score.  Although we may never know the exact process through which her interpretation was arrived, at we hope that the methodologies employed here imply ways of working that will be beneficial to you as you construct compelling performance interpretations of whatever repertoire you may be working on.

A Case Study in Interpretation: Density 21.5 (Part 2 of 3)

Part 2: Interpretation and Analysis
(See Part 1 here)

We left off last time with the charge that Varese’s composition is somehow inherently stiff and inhuman in its expression.  Concomitant with this is the notion that Laura Pou’s very human and expressive performance of this piece is somehow against the spirit of Varese’s score. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that the original commentator is correct that there are a large number of “mechanical” performances of the piece.  Let’s also assume that this “mechanical” quality is something pejorative (What about Antheil, Nancarrow, Kraftwerk?). Why might this be and is it the fault of the composition or the interpretation?  To answer those questions we will need to study the score in close detail and see what it does and does not suggest to the performer.  In examining the music, we will look at tempo indications, surface rhythms, and the piece’s structural relationship between rhythm and meter.

The work’s opening tempo indication is the most likely source of the notion that this composition is inherently “mechanical.”  The initial marking of quarter note equals 72 is followed by the instruction “Always strictly in time – follow metronomic indications.”  This seems to be a straightforward statement: do not deviate from the tempo. It makes sense that a conscientious  performer would interpret that statement in an uncompromising manner that might strike a hypothetical listener as “mechanical.”  But what does “strict” really mean in this context?  What constitutes deviation?

In comparison to other scores of its time, one of the interesting things about Density 21.5 is that it does not give any sort of character indication alongside its metronome marking.  Perhaps this is something that also encourages a “mechanical” understanding of the music.  Varese indicates a strict pulse with no prescribed character – that seems a bit like a description of a machine – consistant motion and no affect.  It would be a mistake, however, to understand this music as being affectless and the close details of the composition give the performer much of the information that’s needed in order to construct an evocative, moving, and humanistic performance.

Density 21.5 – measures 1 – 14 (click to zoom in)

Although the pulse rate referenced by the performer is “strict” the surface of the music seems designed precisely to avoid presenting the listener with a sense of strictly defined musical time. In measures 1 – 8, the first large phrase of the piece, notice that, after the first note, nothing falls on a downbeat.  Furthermore, important moments – such as the beginning of the second sub-phrase at m. 2, beat 4 or the beginning of the ascent in m. 6 – always happen at places in the measure that are different from the placement of any previous important moments. The passage does present a clear sense of pulse  but the music’s sense of meter is deliberately obscured throughout mm. 1 – 8. Similarly, the uneven back-and-forth between duple and triple subdivisions obscures any sense of rhythmic consistency at levels faster than the quarter note.

An important change happens beginning with m. 9, when Varese starts to emphasize the downbeat quite heavily. Although I would like to focus primarily on rhythmic details, one of the strengths of Density 21.5 is the way in which Varese’s approaches to pitch, rhythm, tempo, affect, etc. aren’t easily separable from each other. Therefore, in order to understand why the meter suddenly becomes emphasized at m. 9 (aside from a drive towards variety), we need to momentarily look at what is happening in the composition’s handling of pitch and motive.

Looking back, mm. 1 – 3 trace out a three note chromatic ascent from F to G.  F is emphasized due to its position as the first note, F# is emphasized due to its duration, and G is emphasized by its position as the final note of the sub-phrase.  This three-note ascent is varied and restated in 3 – 4.  Although this ascent is simple to see on the page, (and generally easy to hear for a structurally oriented listener) not every performance will recognize/emphasize this shape and not every listener will readily perceive it.  For example, the piano dynamic of the first G’s attack may, in combination with the leap, obscure its motivic connection to the previous F#. In the same way that the pulse is clear, but the meter is not, the emphasis on F, F#, and G is clear, but the notes’ motivic identity as a chromatic ascent is obscured by a variety of ornamentations and dynamic indications.

Mm. 9 – 12, then, parallel the opening, but bring the previously obscured metric and motivic elements forward.  The three-note chromatic ascent is transposed to begin on Db and the notes that fall on the downbeats are: Db, Db, D, D.  Like G before it, D# concludes the sub-phrase.

Synthesizing these technical observations into a qualitative assessment of the piece, we are describing a music that has a shifting, hazy, slightly obscure and ever changing surface through which different layers of content can move forward and backward in the listener’s perception from phrase to phrase.

Think about those words: hazy, obscure, shifting, layered.  Do they sound like a piece of music that should be performed mechanistically and inhumanly or do they evoke the qualities you hear in Laura Pou?

If you agree that the notes of this piece encourage a rich, nuanced, and subtle interpretive approach, then you may be asking yourself how this reconciles with the mechanistic inferences we’ve drawn from the tempo marking.  Come back for part 3.