Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

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Ljova profile

Published by peter on 2010-08-08 in Music and Violin. 0 Comments

Yesterday’s NYT carried a profile by Allan Kozinn of Lev Zhurbin (aka Ljova) who featured in a previous post about Joe Stickney’s poetry.  From the profile:

Lev Zhurbin, the violist, composer and arranger who performs and writes under the name Ljova, almost always has a lot of projects before him. If he isn’t writing for, or recording with, his folk-classical ensemble, Ljova and the Kontraband, or performing in Romashka, a Gypsy band led by his wife, the singer Inna Barmash, he is working on film scores or transcriptions. (He has arranged Indian and Sephardic pieces for the Kronos Quartet; Asian and Eastern European works for Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project; Schubert and Shostakovich compositions for the Knights, a chamber orchestra).”

Which gives me the chance to recommend again Ljova and the Kontraband’s superb album, Mnemosyne.  They are even better live, if that were possible.

Symphonic Form

Published by peter on 2010-08-03 in Argumentation, Mathematics and Music. 0 Comments
Composer and musicologist Kyle Gann has an interesting post citing David Fanning’s quotation of Russian musicologist Mark Aranovsky’s classification of the movements of the typical symphony, a classification which runs as follows:
  • Movement #1:  Homo agens: man acting, or in conflict (Allegro)
  • Movement #2: Homo sapiens: man thinking (Adagio)
  • Movement #3:  Homo ludens: man playing (Scherzo), and
  • Movement #4:  Homo communis: man in the community (Allegro)
This makes immense sense, and provides a neat explanation of the structure of symphonic form.  Many of my long-standing questions are answered with this classification.    Why normally 4 movements?  Why is the first one normally louder and faster and more serious than the next two?  And why does the first movement often seem more like an ending movement than a beginning one?   In other words, why is the climax to the first movement so often more impressive and more compelling than that for the other movements?  Why is there usually a middle movement that is noticeably less serious than the outer movements?  Why is the last movement often in rondo form?  Why do some composers (eg, Mozart, Mendelssohn) include a fugue in their last movements?  Why do some composers include a song to brotherly love  (Beethoven) or a hymn (Mendelssohn)  in their last movements?
Of great relevance here is that the German word for movement (of a musical work) is Satz, meaning “sentence”.  In the German art-musical tradition, a musical work first makes some claim or states some musical position, and then (in Sonata form) argues the case for that claim by exploring the musical consequences of the theme (or themes), or of its  component musical parts, before returning to a re-statement of the initial claim (theme) at the end of the movement.  In this tradition, the theme, being a claim which is developed, does not have to be very interesting or melodious in itself, since its purpose is not to please the ear but to announce a position.   Beethoven, for example, was notorious for not writing good melodies:  his most famous theme, that of the first movement of the 5th Symphony, has just 4 notes, of which 3 are identical and are repeated together.  But he was a superb developer, perhaps one of the best, of themes, even of such apparently insignificant ones as this one.
The distinction between writing good melodies and developing them well strikes me as very similar to that between problem-solving and theory-building mathematicians – both these cases essentially involve a difference between exploring and exploiting.

Poem: Mendelssohn Concerto

Published by peter on 2010-08-01 in Music, Poetry and Violin. 0 Comments

Following this salute to the Moscow Seven, a poem by one of the seven, Vadim Delone (1947-1983, pictured in Paris in 1982), written in 1965, presumably following a performance of Mendelssohn’s E minor violin concerto (translation my own, with help from a Russian-English dictionary, a strong coffee, and Google Translate):

Mendelssohn Concerto
Outside indefinite and sleepy
Autumn rain rustled monotone.
The wind howled and rushed in with a groan
At the sound of a violin, a concerto of Mendelssohn.
I have long been used so painfully,
How long I have not sat sleepless,
So tired and so passive,
Since escaping to a concerto of Mendelssohn.
Running a telephone wire,
Voice of my pain betrayed involuntarily,
You asked me nervously –
What happened to you, what is it?
I could not have answered in monosyllables,
If you even thus groan,
What sounded in the night anxiously
The tempestuous strings of Mendelssohn.
Moscow 1965

Notes and References (Updated 2010-08-08):
All poetry loses in translation.  Working on this poem, I learn that the Russian word for violin, skripka, is close to the word for creak or squeak or rasp, skrip.  In an earlier version, I translated the last line of the poem as “Fiddling passionate Mendelssohn”, but this does not capture the original’s double meaning of violin-playing and rasping.   I am very grateful to violist Lev Zhurbin for suggesting what is now the last line.  With no folk violin tradition in Russia (unlike in Moldova or the Ukraine), there is no equivalent Russian word to the English word “fiddle”.
Websites (in Russian) devoted to Delone are here and here.
Another poem about a violin, Joe Stickney’s This is the Violin, is here.    Other posts in this series are here.

At Swim-two-birds

Published by peter on 2010-07-10 in Art, Creativity, Music, Prophecy and Uncertainty. Closed


Brian Dillon reviews a British touring exhibition of the art of John Cage, currently at the Baltic Mill Gateshead.
Two quibbles:  First, someone who compare’s Cage’s 4′ 33” to a blank gallery wall hasn’t actually listened to the piece.  If Dillon had compared it to a glass window in the gallery wall allowing a view of the outside of the gallery, then he would have made some sense.  But Cage’s composition is not about silence, or even pure sound, for either of which a blank gallery wall might be an appropriate visual representation.  The composition is about ambient sound, and about what sounds count as music in our culture.
Second, Dillon rightly mentions that the procedures used by Cage for musical composition from 1950 onwards (and later for poetry and visual art) were based on the Taoist I Ching.  But he wrongly describes these procedures as being based on “the philosophy of chance.”     Although widespread, this view is nonsense, accurate neither as to what Cage was doing, nor even as to what he may have thought he was doing.   Anyone subscribing to the Taoist philosophy underlying them understands the I Ching procedures as examplifying and manifesting hidden causal mechanisms, not chance.   The point of the underlying philosophy is that the random-looking events that result from the procedures express something unique, time-dependent, and personal to the specific person invoking the I Ching at the particular time they invoke it. So, to a Taoist, the resulting music or art is not “chance” or “random” or “aleatoric” at all, but profoundly deterministic, being the necessary consequential expression of deep, synchronistic, spiritual forces. I don’t know if Cage was himself a Taoist (I’m not sure that anyone does), but to an adherent of Taoist philosophy Cage’s own beliefs or attitudes are irrelevant to the workings of these forces.  I sense that Cage had sufficient understanding of Taoist and Zen ideas (Zen being the Japanese version of Taoism) to recognize this particular feature:  that to an adherent of the philosophy the beliefs of the invoker of the procedures are irrelevant.
In my experience, the idea that the I Ching is a deterministic process is a hard one for many modern westerners to understand, let alone to accept, so entrenched is the prevailing western view that the material realm is all there is.  This entrenched view is only historically recent in the west:  Isaac Newton, for example, was a believer in the existence of cosmic spiritual forces, and thought he had found the laws which governed their operation.    Obversely, many easterners in my experience have difficulty with notions of uncertainty and chance; if all events are subject to hidden causal forces, the concepts of randomness and of alternative possible futures make no sense.  My experience here includes making presentations and leading discussions on scenario analyses with senior managers of Asian multinationals.
We are two birds swimming, each circling the pond, warily, neither understanding the other, neither flying away.
References:
Kyle Gann [2010]: No Such Thing as Silence.  John Cage’s 4′ 33”.  New Haven, CT, USA:  Yale University Press.
James Pritchett [1993]:  The Music of John Cage.  Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press.

Vale: Mike Zwerin

Published by peter on 2010-05-23 in Jazz, Music and Obituaries. 0 Comments

This is a belated farewell to Mike Zwerin (1930-2010), jazz trombonist and jazz correspondent for the International Herald Tribune.   An American in Paris, he was open in his musical tastes and usually generous in his criticisms; his IHT writings personally sustained many a long journey across far meridians, and helped reinforce the urbane, cosmopolitan, expatriate feel that the IHT had last century (now sadly lost, since the NYT bought out the Washington Post and brought it home to Manhattan).  Obits:  London Times and The Guardian.

Carpenter in Cottonopolis

Published by peter on 2010-05-22 in Concerts, Minimalism, Music, Recent Listening and Reviews. 0 Comments

Being a traveling organ recitalist has its own challenges. All pipe and most electric organs are unique. A recitalist needs to practice beforehand on the organ he or she will perform on, to get a feel for the instrument’s capabilities, to know its sounds and colours, to choose the stops (the sounds) for the works to be played, and to become familiar with its physical layout. Thus, deciding what music best fits a particular organ and how best to voice that music on that organ requires the organist to spend some time alone with the organ. Organs are one of the last remaining examples in modern Western life of the primacy of the local, the particular, the here-and-now, over the universal and general and eternal (in the analysis of Stephen Toulmin). It is not surprising that the art of improvisation remains alive in organ recitals, alone among current classical music performance practices.

For this reason, American organist Cameron Carpenter tries his best not to decide recital programs in advance of seeing the organ. Last night in Manchester, playing on a large cinema-style organ in the Bridgewater Hall (not the Hall Organ), he gave an outstanding performance of the following works (as best I can recall):

  • Bach’s Toccata in F minor (though played in F#)
  • One of his own Three Intermezzi for Cinema Organ
  • Bach’s Preludes and Fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I, in C minor, C# minor and D major
  • Schubert’s Erl-King, in Carpenter’s transcription for organ
  • Two Chopin Etudes for piano, in Carpenter’s transcription for organ.
  • Bach’s Prelude and Fugue for Organ in G major (with an inserted cadenza improvisation, cinema-organ style)
  • He ended the concert with two improvisations.
  • The audience then recalled him three times for encores, which including a cinema-organ version of Mozart’s Rondo Alla Turk (famous as the usual music for the chase scenes in silent films) and (I think) a Prelude and Fugue by Mendelssohn.

What a wonderful, thought-provoking performance this was! Before the concert even began, Carpenter spent 20 minutes in the lobby, greeting members of the audience as they arrived, something unknown in classical music (at least since Franz Liszt, who, in addition, chatted to the audience between pieces and even while playing).

Carpenter’s performances then likewise played masterful havoc with the fusty organ recital tradition! But not arbitrarily – the guy had thought intelligently about the music and knew what he was doing. For instance, in Bach’s proto-minimalist Prelude in C minor (WTC, Book I), the left-hand part was taken by the feet, and the subtle melody which emerges from the leading notes of the right-hand part was played on a different keyboard (and thus with different tone colours) to the notes from which it emerges.  Pianists often foreground the leading melody notes while pushing the other right-hand notes into the background; Carpenter did not do this, which I think better matches the minimalist tenor of the music – ie, it is the background here that is really the foreground. His was an intelligent and reflective treatment, and showed an understanding of the ideas in this music. (In case the mention of Bach and minimalism in the same breath surprises you, I think there is a close connection between Minimalism and Pietism, a relationship which deserves its own post.)

Would old JS have liked this treatment of his music? Of course, he would have! The man who imported colorful Italian and French musical styles into the moribund North German church music tradition and wrote a cantata in praise of coffee would surely have loved it. And one only has to listen to Bach’s Piano Concerto in D minor (BWV 1052), with its humorous flourishes and its repeated notes (more minimalism!), to know that this was a man who liked to play the keyboard.

And Carpenter’s delight and enthusiasm at playing the organ was evident throughout. Hands stretched across two, three and even four keyboards, or jumping back and forth between them, along with feet playing 4-note chords or impossible contrapuntal parts (such as the opening voice of the D Major Fugue) or imitating the wild horses in the Erl-King, all showed a man enjoying himself immensely. Even when a technical problem caused one keyboard not to sound, he remained enthusiastic. The hall was only about half full, and all of us who heard him were lucky to have experienced this superb combination of enthusiasm, black-belt technical mastery, and intelligent musicianship. Life has been better ever since!

POSTSCRIPT (2010-08-10): Not everyone shares my enthusiasm for Carpenter’s organ-playing.  I note that the writer and reviewers quoted in that review are themselves organists (or the children of), and wonder if Carpenter’s messing with tradition is what really upsets these folk. For some reason I think of Karl Marx’s dictum that tradition comprises the collected errors of past generations.

References:

Cameron Carpenter web-site.  Edition Peters page.

Guardian preview here. Pre-concert interview with BBC In Tune here (limited time only).

Combinatorics of some musical objects

Published by peter on 2010-05-05 in Mathematics and Music. Closed

Excerpts from Appendix C (page 164) from Keith [1991].  All results assume a 12-tone equal-tempered scale.

Number of diatonic scale classes: 3
Number of note names (A-G); number of notes in a common scale; number of white keys per octave on a piano:  7
Number of scales one note different from the Major scale: 9
Number of notes in the most common equal-tempered scale:  12
Number of common musical keys (C + 1-6 flats/sharps):  13
Number of 7-note diatonic scales (=7 * 3):  21
Number of elementary 2-fold polychords: 23
A k-fold polychord is an n-note chord sub-divided into k non-empty subchords, for k=1,  . . ., n.  For example, the 6-note chord <C, D, E, F#, G, A> can be subdivided into the 3-note 2-fold polychords, <C, E, G> and <D, F#, A>.
Number of 7-note chords:  66
Number of distinct interval sets (partitions of 12):  77
Number of 7-note triatonic scales (=7*35):  245
Number of notationally-distinct diatonic scales (=13 *21):  273
Number of distinct chord-types (= N(12) – 1):  351
Number of 7-note musical scales (=7*66):  462
Number of scales (=Number of n-note scales, summed over all n)  (=2^(12-1) = 2^11):   2048
Number of chords without rotational isomorphism (= 2^12 – 1):  4095
Number of notationally-distinct scales (=13 * 462):  6006
Number of non-syncopated 8-bar 1/4-note rhythmic patterns:  458,330
Number of non-syncopated 8-bar 1/8-note rhythmic patterns:  210,066,388,901

Reference:
Michael Keith [1991]:  From Polychords to Polya:  Adventures in Musical Combinatorics.  (Princeton, NJ:  Vinculum Press.)

Mr Sculthorpe, please call your office

Published by peter on 2010-03-24 in Creativity and Music. 0 Comments

I was thinking recently about concert performances I have attended where the composer was present, or rather, where I knew the composer to be present. Here is my list, as best I remember it:

Don Banks (1923-1980)
Sally Beamish (Hover, London, 21 February 2024)
Richard Rodney Bennett (1936-2012)
Pierre Boulez (1925-2016)
Ann Carr-Boyd (Britannia Fanfare, 2012)
Barry Conyngham
Palle Dahlstedt
Jasper Eaglesfield (London, 13 June 2024)
David Fanshawe (1942-2010, African Sanctus, Liverpool)
Rolf Hind
Archie John (East China Sea, London, 7 June 2024)
Robin Holloway
Keith Humble (1927-1995)
Gerard McBurney
James MacMillan (premiere of “Precious in the sight of the Lord”, Mass for the Fourth Centenary Celebration of the British Society of Jesus, 21 January 2023)
Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992)
Stephen Montague (Piano Concerto, BBC Proms, London)
Nico Muhly (premiere of Electric Violin Concerto, performed by Thomas Gould, and premiere of opera, Two Boys, at ENO, London)
Olli Mustonen (playing his own Sonata for Violin and Piano with Pekka Kuusisto, London 2013)
Tristan Murail (Reflections/Reflets, performed by the BBSO under Sakari Oramo, London 2013)
Nicola Murphy (Wavelength, Brisbane, 29 August 2024)
Loretta Notareschi
Jim Penberthy (1917-1999)
Behzad Ranjbaran (premiere of Violin Concerto, performed by Joshua Bell)
Johannes X. Schachtner
Peter Sculthorpe (1929-2014)
Larry Sitsky
Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996)
David Urquhart-Jones
James Wishart
Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001)

Of course, my presence at a performance does not constitute an endorsement of the music performed:  some of the music of these composers I like or appreciate very much, and some I think is unpleasant, boring or otherwise of low quality.   Although I generally prefer downtown and minimalist music, the music of the composers listed here also includes neo-romanticism (eg, Holloway, late Sculthorpe), abstract expressionism (eg, Penberthy, early Sculthorpe, Takemitsu), and uptown complexity (eg, Boulez, Muhly, Xenakis).  And, I have not included in this list jazz performers, who almost always play some of their own compositions.

For Peter Sculthorpe, one occasion (of several where we have both been present) was a performance in January 1975 near Patonga, Broken Bay, Sydney, of his profound and achingly-beautiful Sun Music III, in which I had the great good fortune, as second percussionist, to play the guiro. One has to wonder how the same person could compose the innovative Sun Music series of the 1960s and also the derivative, warmed-over, late-romantic tosh that Sculthorpe has written in recent years.  Bill Burroughs would have seen it as a clear case of spirit possession.

POSTSCRIPT (2014-01-11):  New Zealander Alannah Currie, of The Thompson Twins, plays a guiro in their hit Hold Me Now (1983).  See video here.

Macho mathematicians

Published by peter on 2010-03-23 in Creativity, Human intelligence, Mathematics, Matherati, Music and Team working. 0 Comments

Pianist and writer Susan Tomes has just published a new book, Out of Silence, which the Guardian has excerpted here.  This story drew my attention:

Afterwards, my husband and I reminisced about our attempts to learn tennis when we were young. I told him that my sisters and I used to go down to the public tennis courts in Portobello. We had probably never seen a professional tennis match; we just knew that tennis was about hitting the ball to and fro across the net. We had a few lessons and became quite good at leisurely rallies, hitting the ball back and forth without any attempt at speed. Sometimes we could keep our rallies going for quite a long time, and I found this enjoyable.
Then our tennis teacher explained that we should now learn to play “properly”. It was only then that I realised we were meant to hit the ball in such a way that the other person could not hit it back. This came as an unpleasant surprise. As soon as we started “playing properly”, our points became extremely short. One person served, the other could not hit it back, and that was the end of the point. It seemed to me that there was skill in hitting the ball so that the other person could hit it back. If they could, the ball would flow, one got to move about and there was not much interruption to the rhythm of play. It struck me that hitting the ball deliberately out of the other person’s reach was unsportsmanlike. When I tell my husband all this, he laughs and says: “There speaks a true chamber musician.”

This story resonated strongly with me.  Earlier this year, I had a brief correspondence with mathematician Alexandre Borovik, who has been collecting accounts of childhood experiences of learning mathematics, both from mathematicians and from non-mathematicians.  After seeing a discussion on his blog about the roles of puzzles and games in teaching mathematics to children, I had written to him:

Part of my anger & frustration at school was that so much of this subject that I loved, mathematics, was wasted on what I thought was frivolous or immoral applications:   frivolous because of all those unrealistic puzzles, and immoral because of the emphasis on competition (Olympiads, chess, card games, gambling, etc).   I had (and retain) a profound dislike of competition, and I don’t see why one always had to demonstrate one’s abilities by beating other people, rather than by collaborating with them.  I believed that “playing music together”, rather than “playing sport against one another”, was a better metaphor for what I wanted to do in life, and as a mathematician.
Indeed, the macho competitiveness of much of pure mathematics struck me very strongly when I was an undergraduate student:  I switched then to mathematical statistics because the teachers and students in that discipline were much less competitive towards one another.  For a long time, I thought I was alone in this view, but I have since heard the same story from other people, including some prominent mathematicians.  I know one famous category theorist who switched from analysis as a graduate student because the people there were too competitive, while the category theory people were more co-operative.
Perhaps the emphasis on puzzles & tricks is fine for some mathematicians – eg, Paul Erdos seems to have been motivated by puzzles and eager to solve particular problems.  However, it is not fine for others — Alexander Grothendieck comes to mind as someone interested in abstract frameworks rather than puzzle-solving.  Perhaps the research discipline of pure mathematics needs people of both types.  If so, this is even more reason not to eliminate all the top-down thinkers by teaching only using puzzles at school.”

More on the two cultures of mathematics here.