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Saturday, October 16, 2021

Augmented Reality

Although I believe I'm the inventor of AUG SIXTH DAY, that special occasion every August 6th when we *should* celebrate harmonies which exploit the interval of the augmented sixth, it still sneaks up on me every year. So I never give it the attention it deserves. Alas, on August 6, 2021, all I could find the time to do was hit re-play on this old celebration of a German Sixth Chord in a string symphony by a 12-year-old Felix Mendelssohn.

However, as I was also spending early August prepping to teach AP Music Theory for the first time this year, thinking about that wonderful Mendelssohn passage got me thinking about the whole 4-minute Andante and all the ways the young composer uses texture, register, and harmony (with melody emerging from a combination of those three elements) to create something truly magical. I played it for my students on the first day of class, using an analytical score I created, to show them some sense of where we were heading with our study of music theory. For me, at least, there's something deeply satisfying about seeing these under-the-hood structures and hearing how they enable the music to flow, to soar, and to surprise. You can see a video demo of this score analysis at the end of this post.

I suppose my main goal that day was to introduce the concepts of harmonic reduction and Roman Numeral Analysis. Most of what happens in this Andante is fairly conventional and thus easily reduceable; even the particularly beautiful details relate closely to that framework. I wanted to show the students that all those notes the young Mendelssohn wrote have a clear, internal logic which can help us hear and understand why certain notes are so effective and affecting. In other words, I wanted to show why it's worth taking the time to study music theory!

Although I do genuinely enjoy this kind of exploration, I'll admit I don't have the kind of ear which can instantly recognize and label harmonies as they go by. But it's been satisfying to realize that after years of looking for augmented sixth chords (in part because theory students often get tripped up by the seemingly convoluted way in which these "chords" arise and are labeled), my ear does sometimes intuitively notice what's going on before I see it in a score.

So it was that a few weeks after starting my re-exploration of Mendelssohn's augmented-sixth-based modulation in this Andante, I heard my 14-year-old cellist son play the extraordinary first movement of Brahms' first sextet at chamber music camp. (To be honest, this music was a bit over the heads of these campers musically and instrumentally, but they did a great job with the challenge, and managed to present it with confidence and a convincing overall shape.) It's music I've heard often enough, but didn't know super well, yet as the Recapitulation approached, I remembered that something special was going to happen. (Side Note: this kind of musical memory-based recognition/anticipation is one of the most satisfying things about listening to familiar music; this is surely one reason people who love classical music enjoy returning to old favorites.)

As the dramatic texture unfolded and suddenly the opening theme returned in a harmonically arresting way, it occurred to me that this sounded a lot like what happens in Mendelssohn's Andante. The two musical passages (Mendelssohn and Brahms) are different in so many ways, but that makes the analogical connection all the more meaningful. (I've been writing about my love for and fascination with analogical thinking since the blog began.) Hopefully I'll get around to writing about the Brahms sextet more in a future post as there is SO much to say, but for now just listen to the way the music moves from G-flat Major to the home key of B-flat Major. These are not closely related keys (they only share three common pitches), but Brahms uses a German Sixth chord as a sneaky way to get from one key to the next. The video below should begin at 6:35, where the cresc. is marked in the score.

The most important thing to listen for is that, in m.233, the first violin (highest instrument) goes from E-natural to F (up a half-step) at the same moment the 2nd cello (lowest instrument) goes from G-flat to F (down a half-step). G-flat and E-natural are an augmented sixth apart - not an interval that shows up if sticking to one key - and the resolution of those distant notes outward to an octave is the fundamental thing about how augmented sixth chords work. (There's something else unusual going on in this case which I'll get to in a later post.)

Also, as we'll see/hear in the Mendelssohn, the recapitulation of the main theme occurs over a dominant pedal tone F instead of the tonic B-flat we heard at the very beginning. This adds a heightened kind of tension to the otherwise stabilizing effect created by the return of the main theme in its home key.

Now, let's back up a little. This kind of modulation technique is where I find Augmented Sixth Chords are most powerful, but they can appear in other, sometimes simpler contexts in which the chromaticism (use of pitches outside the key) is just a means of heightening the approach to a cadence. Below are two such examples from works by Haydn which crossed my path this summer. (Remember, part of my point here is to focus on augmented sixth chords which I happened to notice without looking for them.) These nicely demonstrate the simple voice-leading origins of these harmonies.

The first movement of Haydn's well-known Piano Trio in G Major, which I coached in July, begins with a graceful theme in G Major which modulates to D Major in its second phrase. The modulation is intensified by the use of chromatic passing tones between G and A in treble and B and A in the bass. The G and B occur as part of a very standard IV chord leading to a I 6/4-V-I cadence, but the insertion of G-sharp leading to A above and B-flat leading to A below creates an augmented sixth chord (in this case, a German Sixth again). All of the harmony can be heard in just the piano part, so for simplicity, I just show that, but you can hear it played below, both without and with the German Sixth.

In a case likes this, it's almost silly to think of the sonority as a chord - the main point is the voice-leading created by the chromatic passing tones, but they do add an extra oomph to the cadential approach. (For the students I was coaching, I pointed this out as a rationale for leaning on those notes just a bit.) You can hear and see this passage both with German Sixth removed and then as written in this little demo video:

In my most recent blog post, I wrote about a Haydn quartet movement with which I'd fallen in love. My focus there was on a more unique cadential approach in the opening phrase, but that simple theme also includes a passage quite close in character to the trio excerpt shown above. In this case, the music is in C Major and approaching a cadence in C, so the destination for first violin and cello again is the 5th scale degree (G) which anchors the I 6/4 chord.

Again, you can hear and see this passage both with German Sixth removed and then as written in this little demo video:

Both Haydn examples of Augmented Sixth Chords are German Sixths because of the addition of one more chromatic note (F-natural in the trio and E-flat in the quartet), but the basic idea of intensifying the connection between the very conventional IV and I 6/4 is easy to see, and again, it would be tempting simply to call these chromatic passing tones and not even bother to attach a fancy name to the sonorities.*

In the Mendelssohn and Brahms examples, the German Sixth is used much more dramatically as a means of modulation which initiates a harmonically suspended recapitulation. In each case, the music has ended up in the distant "flat 6th" of the tonic key (A-flat in Mendelssohn's C Major and G-flat in Brahms' B-flat Major) as the music has reached a low ebb. Both composers then add an augmented 6th above that flat 6 - that means the addition of a sharp 4 - to push back to the I 6/4 chord of the home key which features a 5 in the bass. Flat 6 goes down to 5, while Sharp 4 goes up to 5. Whereas the two Haydn examples had the German Sixth pass quickly mid-phrase into a concluding cadence with no change of key, Mendelssohn and Brahms use the German Sixth to push us into a new key and a new (returning) phrase.

Technically, the new phrase - recognized as such because of the return of the main theme - becomes an extension of a longer cadential motion, so it's also a continuation of the distant key music that led into the Recap. (We generally think of a phrase ending as being defined by a cadence; here, the new phrase arrives mid-cadence.) We definitely hear the melody as beginning something new, but because the German Sixth naturally progresses to an unstable I 6/4 chord, the main theme begins over the fifth scale degree (Dominant) instead of the first (Tonic). This sleight of hand propels the music forward until the cadence in the home key is finally reached. Mendelssohn's cadence back in C Major happens as expected after eight bars. Brahms somehow manages to evade a cadence back in the home key of B-flat for a full 36 bars! Listen here starting at 10:38 until we finally get our resolution in the tonic over a minute later at 11:45.

There is so much more that could be said about each of these works, and I will devote future posts to a "running diary" account of all the little details that I love. (I already have thirty virtual sticky notes on my 3-page Mendelssohn score.) In the meantime, here is a draft of a scrolling score I've prepared for the Mendelssohn. It has a few special features:

I've included a basic (hopefully correct) Roman numeral analysis below the score which shows the modulations to G Major and A-flat Major and return back to C. The German Sixth chord occurs exactly halfway through in m. 42. (more on these proportions in a post to come)
A reduction of the harmonies to two staves below. Although register shifts play a big role in how Mendelssohn's music takes shape, I chose to set up this 4-voice reduction to emphasize where common tones occur between chords. Thus, you'll find that this reduction does not correspond exactly to where the pitches occur among the parts. (more on these registral shifts in a post to come)
Perhaps most unusually, the recording I use is the one of my then 12-year old daughter's chamber orchestra playing this in a concert ten years ago. Though far from perfect, there are many elements (including my daughter's participation, of course) which make this my favorite recording I've found of this transcendent music. (This is my favorite professional recording.)

* Just to give Haydn his due, he does sometimes use Augmented Sixth chords in more dramatic structural ways as well. The suspenseful introduction to his "Oxford" Symphony ends with strings repeating the notes of a German sixth multiple times before the music resolves to the V7 chord of the tonic G major as the Allegro begins. In this case, Haydn does not resolve the Augmented Sixth in the usual way: while the bass E-flat does go down to D, the C-sharp which ought to resolve up to D moves down to C-natural instead. However, the effect is similar, and as with the Mendelssohn and Brahms examples described above, the fact that the cadence doesn't really end until four bars later makes this a most unusual opening for a symphonic main theme. You can see/hear all of this starting at 1:15 here.

P.S. If you're interested in more different contextual uses of Augmented Sixth chords, the Beethoven and Schumann examples I posted way back on the inaugural Aug 6th Day in 2012 are quite tasty as well.

Thursday, May 10, 2007

Fake Your Tutti

Thanks to Sarah Marie for pointing out this article and online quiz. [You might want to take the quiz before reading further.] It's a story about the ever-improving digital synthesizing technology that's starting to make real-sounding virtual orchestras come to life. (Even more real sounding than these guys!) How real sounding? Well, two music professionals failed to pick the fake out of a lineup of Reiner, Zinman, Norrington, and RoboOrchestra. Now, I'm proud to report that I nailed the frauds the first time and was 98% positive I was right, although I listened to each example several times before committing to a final answer. (I also correctly ID'd all the others, though I could only confirm that by submitting them in turn as "answers.")

Like most such "tests," this one has some serious flaws. First of all, all of the excerpts are sampled at 32kbs; so, not only are we not getting to hear the real orchestras live, we're hearing them in a seriously compressed format (typical iTunes MP3s are 128kbs, and many consider that a significant compromise) which tends to take some of the bloom off the sound of the instruments, real or fake. The diginstruments are, of course, just sampled versions of real instruments in the first place; so, in this setup, the real instruments are having to compete in the digital domain, and at a very substandard level. As it happens, I was also listening on some pretty crummy desktop speakers. Since Paul Henry Smith, conductor of the software symphony, has the stated goal of 'performing' with his charges live, the real test is how his pseudorchestra would compete in an actual concert hall.

This reminds me of when I bought a digital piano while in grad school. I did most of my practicing at school, but wanted something affordable at home for note-learning, etc. I actually bought the piano at the local Steinway dealer, and I spent quite a bit of time trying it out first. However, I later realized that I spent most of that time practicing it at the store with headphones on. (I'm not sure if this was particularly encouraged by the sales staff, or if I was just too shy to play in earshot of others.) When I got the "piano" home, I was definitely a bit disappointed at the way it sounded played through its internal speaker, which no doubt produces a less realistic sound than the headphone effect. The piano still did its job, and I was glad I bought it, but I've never forgotten that lesson. Since then, I've heard and played many varieties of digital pianos and, at their most impressive, what I realize is that they can sound like really good recordings of pianos.

Otherwise, the main problem with the quiz is that the examples are so brief. The full recording of the movement that they later provide is woefully unsatisfying, but that's not to say Mr. Harris won't get there eventually. So, again we come to the question of why we listen in the first place, and what sorts of meaning we draw from what we hear. I miss Joyce Hatto, and all the furor surrounding that wonderful story, because it brought up so many great questions. For example, I was recently thinking to myself that, what with the relative ease of making recordings and distributing them as MP3s, it would be great if artists just started releasing their own regular live recordings on their own websites. Eliminate the record company middlemen and only a few audiophiles would really care. (Of course, many pop groups are doing this. Actually, the Borromeo String Quartet is doing this.) Except . . . what evidence would we have that all these homemade sounds were honestly produced? Not only would we need to be wary of Hatto-ing, but Hatto's husband also revealed how easy it is to speed things up digitally.

I was thinking of this driving home last night when, again, I was listening to Maurizio Pollini abuse (in the good sense) Stravinsky's Trois mouvements de Pétrouchka. Wow, is that ever astounding playing. Here's what odd. Although I know that Pollini's technique is legendary, we still all pretty much accept that his recordings will consists of multiple takes spliced together. I doubt he could get it quite that perfect in one live take. On the other hand, I suspect we wouldn't accept it if someone learned that the music was artificially sped up to increase the virtuosity factor. The question is, why?

Now that I'm listening to sports radio again, I can't help but connect this with the whole steroids issue in baseball; interest in that topic is ramping up anew as Barry Bonds, assumed cheater, is closing in on the all-time home run record. There's a lot of complexity in that issue that deserves its own post, but most can agree on the underlying assumption that baseball players shouldn't get credit for cheating because the game is defined by the rules. Is that true of music performance as well? What are the rules? Is there a rule that says a recording needs to be something the performer could actually accomplish without the aid of an editor? In terms of cutting and pasting, we've long since OK'd that, but I'm guessing most classical music folks would still say no to "artificial tempo enhancement."

Immediately, we need to qualify that, since there's been plenty of music written that takes intentional advantage of mechanical and electronic ways of doing the impossible. Conlon Nancarrow and his player-piano concoctions come to mind first, but there are many other examples, and in the pop world no one bats an eye at such things. In fact, they're much more honest and businesslike about the end justifying the means. (Milli Vanilli is just an exception that proves the norm.) The Beatles' wildly overrated In my Life (#23!) has a famous little "harpsichord" interlude that is really just a slow electric piano solo that was electronically double-timed. Of course, in those days that also meant it came out transposed up an octave. I remember hearing a probably apocryphal story about a cello teacher at some conservatory who played some famously fast solo (Elfentanz?) at a very deliberate tempo, then doubled the playback speed to produce a viola audition tape that wowed his colleagues.

Well, it's long since become possible to doubletime a performance without changing the pitch at all. So, for all the talk that came out of Hattogate, I'm surprised so little attention was paid to the fact that some of her spectacular "performances" were not just just stolen; they were artificially made more impressive by speeding them up. As I've written before, that most listeners would think of that as cheating just proves how much we listen to most of the core classical repertoire as being about more than just the sounds we hear. There is an important athletic component that we associate with hearing the music performed.

Do we have to think about music this way? Of course not. Glenn Gould tried his best to convince us that the performer should be transparent - that the resulting sounds are all that matter. But when I hear Pollini play Stravinsky, I get a real thrill at the thought that one person is actually playing all those notes in real time. Now what if the tempo was bumped up 10%? If I didn't know about the doctoring, I'd be really astounded. If I did know - well, I don't know. My reaction would be different, but hearing it would still be pretty cool. (I'll have to try this out tonight. I have the technology. UPDATE: Done.)

Sorting all this out is really complex: our brains learn to hear certain kinds of sounds as virtuosic because they are virtuosic; then, when an artificial way of producing the sounds is developed, our brains are still left with the old associations, so the meaning we take away is a strange blend of enjoying pure sounds and interpreting them according to our understanding of human limitations. Of course, once the impossible is established as possible, it's not really impossible anymore, and our associations change. No wonder aesthetics is such a difficult field.

By the way, I happen to believe that recording technology has also changed our conception of the "possible" just by the simple process of transmitting so many astounding performances so widely. I got in trouble during my DMA oral exams for a throwaway statement in one of my papers that suggested performance standards (especially in terms of sheer accuracy) are much higher now than they would have been in previous centuries. I wasn't very well-prepared to defend that statement at the time, and I'm still not now, but I'm no less sure of it. I think that regular exposure to high standards via recordings (standards that are artificially raised by editing out mistakes) has inevitably changed the global conception of what is possible.

As meager evidence, I'll return to the four quiz recordings. The first recording that jumped out at me was Fritz Reiner's, which presumably dates from the 50's or 60's. The wind playing was simply too out-of-tune and unblended to sound like a contemporary performance. Standards are just different. ("Better" is another question altogether.) Norrington's jumped out next because of the brisk, relatively uninflected tempo. As for the sythnony, the woodwinds sustain in a hollow, straight way that just doesn't breathe right. They're too smooth. and too blended. One hardly notices the different timbre of the flutes when they come in halfway through.

Still, I don't doubt that all of that can be worked out in time. On the other hand, where I can see the value of using these virtual orchestras in theater and opera pits, I'm baffled by the suggestion in the article that Beethoven symphonies would be performed this way for live audiences. The only reason that I can imagine I'd prefer that to hearing the same thing in my living room is if the acoustical reproduction was especially fabulous - just way better than a home stereo system could deliver. But still, I believe most people go to hear a Beethoven symphony in part to witness the remarkable ensemble achievement of well-trained musicians playing together. I can easily imagine that music of the future will not be about that, though.

Surprisingly, the pop world is way ahead of the classical world on this front. From mid-career on, the Beatles were no more about live performance than Glenn Gould. If you go to this fantastic site that analyses all of their songs, it's amazing how much of the analysis has to do with the recording techniques, not just the melodies and harmonies. Still, I hope there's always a place for appreciating musicians' technical prowess as part of what makes music meaningful. And I still will dream, however hopelessly, of being able not only to hear Stravinsky played by Pollini, but to play that piece that way myself.

[I stole the post title from an old grad school paper of mine. Too good not to use again.]

Friday, February 13, 2009

Adventures in Airturning

My big full recital debut with the Airturn is only one day away, but in the meantime, I thought this would be a good time to take stock of how the experiment is going. If you're just wandering in, basically I'm working towards using a Tablet PC as a music reader, thus replacing paper and page-turners. The key technologies are:

The Tablet PC - although a laptop could be used as well, the tablet provides a lighter, more flexible and attractive option since its keyboard can be folded behind the screen to make what basically looks like a black binder. A regular laptop is awkward in portrait mode since the keyboard would be flipped out to the side - in landscape mode, a laptop wouldn't work on an upright piano. Also, Tablet PC technology makes it remarkably easy to mark up the scores with a virtual pen. (Here's what I'm driving.)

PDF Annotator - software which reads PDF files and enables all kinds of general editing, re-paging, pasting, and, yes, annotating in a wide variety of colorful ways. There are, of course, other software options, including a newish program called Music Reader that isn't quite what I'm looking for right now.

Airturn - a wireless transmitter, developed by the pioneering pianist Hugh Sung, which makes it easy to signal page turns by using a footswitch. I've settled on using a single footswitch that turns pages forwards, and am using buttons on the tablet to turn back if necessary. The availability of the Airturn is what finally got me off the bench and into the game. So far, it works just as advertised, with perhaps its best feature being that it involves no setup other than plugging one part into a USB port and connecting the other part to a pedal. I did make the mistake of just mindlessly going with the non-alkaline AA's that it shipped with when I was getting started. I had a couple of turns that didn't transmit in my first live performance - and discovered the next time I tried it that the batteries were shot, which means I'd probably been skating on very thin ice. I've now got two sets of rechargeables that I'll shuttle back and forth.

IMSLP.org and a wide variety of other online sources of music scores in PDF format. Possibly the best website in the history of the world.

A Konica photocopier at work that makes it extremely easy to scan in just about anything and have it emailed directly to me as a PDF file - it's really fun to make photocopies and never worry about paper jams, bad toner, etc.

I've now used the system in three different informal recital formats for a total of six fairly brief performances. I've also been using it in rehearsal as much as possible. Discovering how easy it is to scan via the photocopier has really helped this process, since I'd spent my first week or so fiddling around with all sorts of scanners and photo-editing software in search of the perfect scan. The Konica does not deliver perfect scans, but you simply can't beat the speed, and the results are sufficiently readable without being so large in file size as to make for slow turns. So, I've been able to build a usable library fairly quickly.

Here are my observations so far on the basic advantages and disadvantages of this whole enterprise.

THE GOOD

I've been mentioning this just about every post, but Tablet PCs are really wonderful. I've found my tablet to be a really nice lecturing tool - not only can I use the pen to mark up PowerPoint slides as easily as if I'm writing on a whiteboard, but, better yet, I can display scores that I've scanned in and use the pen to mark them up as we discuss. I'm still learning how best to take advantage of all this, but it offers a lot of flexibility. I also have really enjoyed using the Tablet when teaching piano lessons - in fact, a couple of days ago I happened to have it with me while listening to a student performing a Schubert impromptu in recital. It may seem strange to say this, but it's much easier to write quickly, legibly, and quietly (the stylus just glides across the screen) this way, and all the markings show up easily because they're in color. And, of course, they can just as easily be removed.
Colorful annotations. It's amazing how helpful it is to have various little reminders in red. They just jump off the page.
The Airturn! It really does work just as advertised, although every now and then I end up turning two pages. Setting the keyboard delay rate to the slowest possible setting has helped, but not totally solved this - I still find that if I jab too quickly at the pedal, there's a chance the page will turn twice. [UPDATE: 2/14 Hugh posted a fix for this on his blog yesterday, and I can happily say that it completely solves the double turning problem. I'll write more about this later.] It's not a big deal to reach up and turn back, but I'm hoping to get more consistent with this. What's interesting is that the pages turn so quickly, I don't really even seen the double-turn taking place, so I only realize the mistake by recognizing that the wrong music is in front of me. I've actually thought about using colored markings in the upper corners that would alternate left and right so that I'd get a quick visual affirmation that only one page has turned. In fact, I think I'm gonna try that tomorrow...
Not having to hold a book open. Today, during a vocal coaching, I had to switch from a virtual score to playing from a big, fat book that wouldn't stay open. It's so annoying to have to keep swatting at flopping pages.
The coolness factor. Actually, this is a bit awkward since, as an accompanist by trade, one doesn't want to distract attention from the soloist. Still, it's fun to show off the technology.

THE DRAWBACKS

Cost, of course. In fact, I'm not even going to do the math here, but there's the PC, the rather expensive extra battery (I still need to invest in a backup power cord), the Airturn, the pedal, the batteries, the license for PDF Annotator, etc. (One reason I chose PDF Annotator, which is quite affordable, is that I already had a license for an earlier version that I'd been using as a lecture tool for years; the upgrade to the newer version wasn't that big a deal.)
The hassle. I expect to get more used to all this, but there's a lot to think about, even in rehearsal settings, with getting the computer powered up, being sure it's charged, remembering to turn off the WiFi to save power, resetting the keyboard response rate, getting scores downloaded, scanned, opened. Obviously, a performance setting makes all of these considerations all the more important.
Resolution. I chose a PC with a 12.1 inch screen, which is a good bit smaller than standard laptops. The advantage is that it's quite light, and I don't find reading from it to be a problem at all. In fact, because our recital hall generally has poor stage lighting, I'm thrilled to be playing from a self-illuminated score, but the bottom line is, I'm generally reading smaller notes that aren't as clear as they would be on paper. Yes, I know that Music Reader software enables viewing half-pages in roomy landscape mode, but see #4. Still, I really haven't found that the resolution thing bothers me - I certainly mind it less than playing in a poorly lit setting, and as mentioned above, the colored annotations jump off the page.
The extra turns. Until a much larger screen size is practical, it just makes the most sense to view one page at a time in portrait mode, which means I'm having to turn much more often than in the standard two-page at a time mode. This is one reason why, for now, the half-page views in Music Reader don't appeal to me. That's just doubling the number of turns yet again. Hugh Sung is actively promoting this method now, but he's been pedal-turning for so long that it's probably less of a big deal to him than it is to me. (See #5.) Also, I just like seeing lots of music at a time, although that may be largely because it's just what I'm used to.
Pedal fears. Finding the pedal at the right time is still not trivial for me, especially in performances. For now, I've just about stopped using the soft-pedal (which is a positive temporary development because I tend to use it way too much), and yet I still find myself distracted by my left foot. The truth is, I've already found I can almost always find the pedal in one quick motion, but that "almost" worries me.

THE FUTURE

Obviously, the most desirable improvement would be more screen real estate. Hugh Sung has recently been writing about his experiences with a PianoDisc piano that has a built-in widescreen monitor in the music rack. Now, I'm mystified by why anyone would want to experience something like this (especially the part at 0:40), but, yes, I would like to have a wide-screen monitor built into all of my pianos, please. (Actually, if you watch that video, I've got to admit that the little video pianos lessons look like a neat idea. And the Bugs Bunny clip at the end is cool.) In fact, I was sitting in my office yesterday, looking at the 19-inch LCD I bought for cheap on Black Friday and thinking, I could just prop that up on the piano right now. Unfortunately, it wouldn't work well as a music rack for the kind of old-fashioned paper scores my students tend to bring in.

However, I'm already plotting a performance with this monitor. In April, we'll be doing our annual opera scenes shows, which have me sitting and banging away for a couple of hours from scores that tend to have lots of page turns. I think it will be worth the trouble to drag the monitor over and give myself double-page views for these performances. Since I'll be off to the side of the stage, it shouldn't be too distracting for the audience, even with the necessary power cords. And, I'll be able to check email and sports scores while I play!

The larger point is that my current little Tablet PC is just a starting point. One reason I haven't committed to the Music Reader software is that puts all your files (PDFs or other) into its own proprietary format - for me, it's too early in the whole process to commit to something like that when PDF Annotator saves files in the pretty-much universal PDF format. If I'm on the road and my tablet is lost or crashes, I could still play my music (assuming it's saved somewhere else) from just about any computer I could get my hands on.

So, that's where things stand. I mention the drawbacks above not so much to say that this is a bad idea, but to concede that it's not just some magical new perfect world. Obviously, I feel the advantages already outweigh the disadvantages, and the technology will only get better.

Now, back to figuring out how best to set up two laptops for playing four-hand rep with one Airturn! I'm almost there...

P.S. Seriously, you should watch this Sync-a-Vision movie, and then consider the comedy potential when the PianoDisc piano is way out of tune. Imagine that guy singing Autumn Leaves with microtonal accompaniment. Now that I would watch. Also, imagine the possibilities of having the Sync-a-Vision. Practicing Hanon while watching TV! Creating interactive "piano hero" games that involve live piano performance with 3D graphics flying at you. In fact, this all needs its own post, but that will probably have to wait...

Tuesday, September 24, 2024

Bach to Bach

Here's how I began an unfinished blog post back in 2017:

I'm slightly worried this blog is going to turn into a "Tales from the Organ Bench*" kind of thing, which really shouldn't happen until I've had at least two organ lessons in my life. But, much as my organ technique is kind of an improvised thing that has evolved in the context of real-time necessity, I take special delight in musical discoveries that happen under pressure.

I was sick for much of the week leading up to this past Sunday and had missed Thursday choir rehearsal, so things were already feeling a bit less settled than ideal. I then discovered about 20 minutes before the service that the music for the scheduled prelude (based on Salzburg, the opening hymn tune) was not on the premises, so I got to make up something on the spot, for which the poor listed composer will have to take all the blame. I've actually been scheduling hymn tune improvisations as preludes fairly regularly in 2017, so that wasn't too disconcerting.

The other place in the service where I'm most likely to do a bit of freestyling is at the end of Communion, depending on time needed. We generally have a choir anthem and a congregational hymn scheduled as the Eucharist is celebrated, but another 1-3 minutes of fill is often required. In such cases, I almost always just continue quietly with the hymn that's just been sung, sometimes noodling extra things here and there, slowing down, changing some harmonies, or making a fool of myself.

As it happened, both the anthem and hymn were pretty short, and so I'm most appreciative for the soprano who, during pre-service rehearsal, asked if I was going to have to keep playing that hymn over and over when we ran out of verses. The hymn, "Jesu, Jesu," based on a Ghanian folk song, is quite simple and circular, and as I thought about it while the service was already going, I did start to worry that I was going to get trapped in a loop. And, this tune wouldn't be high on my list of "tunes in which to get stuck looping." [UPDATE FROM THE FUTURE: Here's a tune I don't mind getting lost in.]

So, as the service progressed, I started thinking about this potential problem and wondered if I should just plan on having something else ready to play once the hymn ended. In some cases like this, I'd pick something to anticipate the recessional hymn that would soon follow, but remembering that the communion hymn was in E Major, I did my standard mental trip to The Well-Tempered Clavier to ponder what Kapellmeister Bach had ready-made for me in this key. Then I remembered that the E Major prelude from the WTC Book I is in the same sort of lilting 6/8 [technically, it's in 12/8] as the hymn above, and it's a piece I know well as we used to analyze it every year in a class I taught.

My WTC is always nearby, and as I had already chosen to play the folksy hymn on the piano, I was then able to segue right into the Bach. To my delight, it felt even more natural then I'd expected, and I'd also forgotten what a gratifying piece it is to play, fitting beautifully under the fingers and featuring lots of opportunity for dialogue between the hands. There are a couple of brief chromatic passages that made we sweat in the moment, but everything went smoothly. Because I did end up needing to fill time for a while, I played the Bach twice through (leaving out the brief coda the first time), and it could not have timed out more perfectly. If only every Sunday went this way.

I guess maybe I was waiting to make a recording to finish up the post, or maybe had some grander plan in mind, but that post never got published. Anyway, seven years later, I was thinking about this again since I recently made another unexpected Bach connection with a Sunday morning hymn. In this case, the processional hymn was to be the lovely, folksy Morning Has Broken, which is best known in a sweetly sung pop version by Cat Stevens. (That piano intro/interlude is famous, I guess, though it seems like an odd fit with the tune.) As this was a Sunday featuring a more relaxed musical style, with a couple of guitarists on hand, I knew I would be at the piano instead of the organ.

So, in looking for a prelude, I noticed I'd played Bach's well-known Prelude in C Major from Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier as prelude last time we'd sung this hymn (with the associated fugue played as postlude that day). I'm not really sure why I'd chosen that other than that it was low-key summer Sunday and C Major fit with the version of the tune in our hymnal. In thinking about it, I wondered if I could combine Bach's iconic, flowing arpeggios with Morning Has Broken. After all, Bach's prelude was turned into the accompaniment for a beautiful setting of Ave Maria by Gounod. (That may be one of the most perfect examples of building a new work on top of a completely, self-contained work. It's always felt to me like Gounod discovered the solution to a puzzle Bach had left behind.) After a bit of time noodling around in Dorico (notation software I'm learning upon the news that Finale, my old friend/nemesis, is being put out to pasture), I had something that works pretty well.

Since I had about five minutes of time to fill, I ended up playing Bach's original prelude flowing directly into my new "Morning has broken chords" arrangement. Although the first four bars stay very close to Bach, from there, the broken chords are led more by the tune in the left hand so that the entire arrangement is less mashup than homage. However, the power of suggestion should not be underrated in cases like this. I've often found that the mere hint of a connection can make two different works seem like natural partners. (Sometimes, if I'm playing a postlude with no specific connection to the recessional hymn which precedes, I'll start off the postlude - with apologies to the poor composer - by incorporating some bit of the hymn tune - even just a few notes. In my mind at least, this can make the entire postlude seem as if it was inspired by the hymn, even if the actual connection vanishes within a bar or two. Perhaps I'll post some examples of this kind of thing in a future post. UPDATE: There's one example found in this post.)

The recordings posted below were made in a slightly unusual way. I recorded them by playing a full-size Kurzweil digital keyboard connected to my computer, but I wasn't loving the sound. So I looked around at various virtual pianos on hand and found a nice "American Home Grand" in a set I'd downloaded for free. I simply ran the MIDI data through that, and I have to say I really like the result. The piano has a tender but clear sound that works really well here. It's still missing things I love about the feel and sound of a real piano, but it was fun to experiment with this not quite the real thing. Though a sampled virtual piano like this is intended to replicate the sound of an acoustic piano as closely as possible, in some ways the most interesting thing is discovering something new in a sound because it's different.

To circle back to where I started, I also recorded the Ghanian hymn tune "Jesu, Jesu" transitioning into Bach's E Major Prelude using the same setup. The arrangement of the tune which I play here is worth a few words. Many hymnals publish the song with very simple, block chords, but this version (printed in F Major via that link) is written in a style that could be described as "Bachian," with active inner voices, countermelodies, and some subtle harmonic shadings. Though some might find the effect appropriative, I think it's a lovely meeting of two different styles that works quite well - and, of course, it makes the transition into Bach's prelude almost seamless. As for the prelude, I forgot how delightful and expressive it is. Though it looks conventional on the page, it's that perfect marriage of mechanical and magical that Bach does better than anyone.

Since hymn tunes played such a vital role in Bach's career with all his chorale harmonizations and chorale preludes, it's very satisfying to find how well his music can work alongside these more contemporary melodies. (And I tossed in a little surprise at the end of the "Bach.")

* See, from the past year (this footnote is from 2017 as well):

P.S. Just realized this at least the second blog post which I've titled "Bach to Bach." If you'd like to read these posts back to back, go here: MMmusing: Bach Day #3: Bach to Bach

Monday, November 29, 2010

Bach Doubled

So, in our last episode, I wondered about the ways in which we all take for granted that most major instrumental pieces are broken up into distinct (often self-sufficient) movements - distinct movements which, nevertheless, are generally expected to be performed in the context of the whole. In other words, the serious classical artist doesn't generally record or perform in recital just a single movement of a Beethoven sonata or Mozart symphony. I mentioned a few exceptions to that rule, but for better or for worse, the bias against excerpting movements is pretty strong. (It's always one of the chief complaints about the less high-minded classical radio stations that they dare to play unattached movements - I should know, having made this complaint many times!)

So, if pulling movements out on their own is frowned upon, I'd guess it would be even more controversial to re-order movements within a tidily assembled work or - horror! - to patch various movements into a new whole. But, quietly geeky radical that I am, I do find myself having such thoughts, three of which I'll share here - all of them, curiously, having to do with violin repertoire. (I can't really explain why that is, other than that I love the violin repertoire.) The first two "thought experiments" are pretty straightforward, and mainly noteworthy because I think they'd 1) work really well and 2) would probably never be seriously considered by anyone. The third one has spawned both the title of this post and something altogether more interesting.

Switcheroo #1: Back in September, I twittered about my idea that Brahms' amazingly wonderful third violin sonata might be just a tad more amazingly wonderful if the 2rd and 3rd of its four movements were swapped. Honestly, my reasoning is more intuitive than anything else (and, I know, who am I to put my intuition up against Brahms'?), but the song-like 2nd movement has such a radiantly tender, calm-before-storm quality that it feels right to me for it to precede the violently stormy finale. Meanwhile, the nervous hesitations of the scherzo seem to fit nicely after the weary ending of the passionate first movement. I'm perfectly content for others to disagree with me about this, and it's always hard to argue against the rightness of familiarity, but I think it would be a lovely idea to try this 1324 order out in performance - and yet, innocent and simple though the change would be, it feels like it would be some sort of violation. Here's a helpful playlist in which you can try out my version...if you dare!

Switcheroo #2: This is maybe even more radical, though no less innocently simple in concept, but the truth is I've never been completely in love with any of the Mozart violin concerti. Not that they need my love or anything, and sure, he was a young composer when he wrote them, etc., etc. I do think the 5th and final concerto is mostly ideal except it just doesn't have a great second movement. Or, let me put it more bluntly: it's second movement is not as perfect as the slow movement of the 3rd concerto. That slow movement is as divinely inspired as anything Mozart ever wrote. For whatever reason, the slow movement of Concerto #5 always sounds to me like a melody in search of...well, in search of that tune from the Concerto #3.

So, if I were somehow transformed into an internationally-acclaimed violin virtuoso asked to play a Mozart concerto for an upcoming gig, I would seriously want to propose my own little hybrid concerto. The key relationships work out just fine: A Major, D Major, A Major. (The "original" 2nd mvt of Concerto #5 is in E Major; up a 5th, down a 5th. Same difference.) You can try it out with this little playlist. It's not like I'm proposing first movement from Sibelius, second from Bruch, and third from Brahms. Just three Mozart movements which would complement each other beautifully. One of his piano sonatas (K. 533/494) is basically a hybrid as well, its third movement having been composed first and then added to two other movements at the request of a publisher. Maybe I'm not supposed to say this, but a lot of Mozart and Haydn movements are somewhat interchangeable - but we never get to play around with them. (Well, I HAVE since played around with them!) Pianists get to make their own multi-movement composite Scarlatti sets all the time (since his so-called sonatas are all single-movement works), but convention denies us that creative option with most other composers.

My last example is a bit different, as here it's more a problem of a work that has proportional issues. (By the way, if you think it's impudent of me to be challenging the final shape given to works by Brahms and Mozart, then imagine my trepidation at finding fault with Bach - and not just any Bach, but one of his revered works for unaccompanied violin.) Well, a few months ago, my violinist daughter was assigned her first-ever solo Bach - a deeply meaningful milestone to me. Curiously, her marvelously old-school Russian teacher decided to start with what to me is the most musically severe and uncompromising of these works, the Partita No. 1 in B Minor. It consists of eight binary-form dance movements, but it's really four dances, each of which is each then followed by a variation called a Double. Curious things, these Doubles. Each has the exact same formal and harmonic shape as the dance that precedes it, but the Doubles generally feature faster and more evenly flowing note values, meaning the dance character is sublimated a bit. All of the dances are in B minor (an austere key for Bach), and all are rather severe in shape and gesture - dances, yes, but not quite like listening to the Nutcracker Suite.

So my problem has always been that, as a listening experience, the eight movements back-to-back-to-back-etc. can be a bit too much. [...dodging lightning bolt...] What vexes me particularly is hearing each dance played with repeats and then hearing the Doubles traverse the same territory, with the same repeats. In fact, the first time I saw the score, I assumed the Doubles were intended as alternate ways to play the repeats, and I still think this could be an interesting approach. But, it seems the most common approach is to be a good soldier and play everything as written. If the violinist is good enough, the experience can be richly rewarding, as this is some of the most profound and centering music ever written...but still. I can't help but help wonder if Bach would ever have imagined hearing this music presented in recital in such a way. Again, if I could suddenly be a great violinist, I'd be tempted to perform the work either with no repeats or, better yet, with the Doubles acting as the repeats. I have heard of pianists interspersing works by Schoenberg amongst the movements of Bach sets as a way of opening ears to the cross-century connection*; I wish artists would be as open to re-imagining ways of presenting a single composer's works.

But my favorite discovery out all of this came from thinking of another way of dealing with those Doubles. It occurred to me that they could perhaps be played simultaneously with their dances as duets. A quick experiment with the opening Allemanda was somewhat disappointing as there was too much literal doubling between the two parts. However, the Courante and its Double proved to be a revelation. I imagine violinists must have tried this out on occasion - maybe with teacher and student in lessons - but my not-extensive Googling hasn't turned anything up in the way of recordings. So, I went to work with a couple of the virtual violinists residing in my computer and, voilà, a strikingly successful duet.** It's almost as if Bach intended these movements to be "mashed up," as they mostly move in contrary motion to each other, the slashing sixteenth notes of the Double parrying the more angular eighth-notes of the original Courante. My favorite piece of music in the whole world is probably Bach's Double Violin Concerto, known far and wide as "The Bach Double," but it's rather satisfying to have stumbled on this new "Bach Double" (a much bigger success than this bizarre "Bach Double" I created a while back.)

A couple of final points: I'm rather proud of the way the video above traces the two separate scores. In an ideal world, I'd have taken the time to format both movements nicely into duet form, but it's kind of fun trying to follow both scores at once. [Here's another Bach animation of mine that lets you do something similar.] It's a reminder that counterpoint is always a kind of "mash-up." One of the joys of counterpoint is the experience of experiencing multiple distinct strands simultaneously; mash-ups can often be engaging for the same reason. In these multi-tasking times, perhaps Bach's music is more timely than ever.

* Note that Andrew Rangell, the pianist who interspersed Bach with Schoenberg for a conference recital, is quoted as saying he'd never do that in a "real" concert. What a crazy world we live in!

** As it happens, another work my daughter is studying now is a Wieniawski Etude-Caprice, which comes with its own accompanying part for a second violinist. So, I guess I have had violin duets on the brain...

P.S. I'll be posting duet versions of the Sarabande and Bourree in the near future; they don't work as well as the Courantes, but they are worth hearing.

UPDATE: A Twitter colleague, the very knowledgeable JoseSPiano, mentioned hearing violinist Daniel Heifetz perform the Partita No. 2 in D Minor WITHOUT the concluding Chaconne. The 15-minute Chaconne is perhaps Bach's most monumental achievement, but it dwarfs the four much briefer dance movements that precede it. I've no doubt that the Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, and Gigue make a wonderful set on their own, and this practice would allow them to be heard differently, much like what I said about movements by Schubert and Ives in my last post.

UPDATE #2: I mentioned above that I would be posting "duet" recordings of other "dances plus doubles" from Bach's Partita in B minor, but the others just sound too lousy with my synthesized violins. (The Courante + Double works better because the music is so straight-ahead in character; all of the other movements require more thoughtfully conceived breaking of chords, agogic accents, etc.)

Tuesday, September 8, 2015

MM's Musical Manipulatives

[full-screen, HD viewing recommended]

It's been a quiet summer here on the blog, but I've been multimedia-ing away in the background and finally have something to show for it. I've been working on my (previously meager) programming chops for the past 6-7 months, which means that JavaScript (a programming language used for controlling web pages) is less of a mystery to me than it once was.

About four years ago, I put together a series of "integrated listening guides" for my own teaching - they allow the user to click through the landmarks of an analytical outline to jump instantly back and forth within an embedded score and video (or audio). The JavaScript I used was mostly copied and pasted from other sites I'd found online. I often understood very little about how the code worked, but kept applying virtual duct tape until I got the results I wanted, and indeed, I found these guides very useful in the classroom. They made it so easy to navigate a large musical structure on the fly as there's no time wasted turning pages or cueing up a video to the right point.

But there were plenty of drawbacks, especially in terms of cross-platform compatibility. Reliance on some flash elements meant the guides wouldn't work on iPads and the like, and reliance on the quirky Scribd platform for embedding the scores caused some limitations and made things look kind of clunky.* And, basically, it seemed like every six months or so, some web standard had changed so that the guides didn't work properly until I applied more virtual duct tape.

Anyway, over the past few weeks, I finally got around to updating these guides, and they now work much more elegantly, with a variety of improved features, including:

Pages now turn automatically with the music!
The outline automatically updates to highlight the section being played at the moment.
Two of the guides (Brahms and Mozart) feature running captions that describe the music.
Pages resize nicely according to the size of the browser window.
The guides work pretty smoothly across a range of browsers and on iPads! (I assume they work fine in Android devices as well as long as the screen is big enough. They more or less work on my smallish Kindle Fire HD, though it's not a great user experience.)
In the two Beethoven symphony guides, one can instantly jump back and forth within the first and second times though the repeated Exposition sections.
The Beethoven "Eroica" guide includes the option of switching orchestras on the fly! The two performances (Järvi and Bernstein) feature very different tempi, but they nevertheless stay closely synced.
Just for fun, you can speed up or slow down the performances.

In short, they do most of the things I'd want them to do, and I'm also gratified to say that I now understand 98% of how the JavaScript is working. In fact, much of the code is written from scratch. The guides available now include:

Beethoven: Symphony No. 3 "Eroica," 1st mvt.
Beethoven: Symphony No. 5, all four movements
Beethoven: Piano Sonata, Op. 111, 2nd mvt.
Brahms: Symphony No. 4, 4th mvt.
Mozart: The Marriage of Figaro, Act II Finale
Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto, 1st mvt.

I began referring to these guides a few years ago as "musical manipulatives" by analogy to the kinds of hands-on physical objects used to help teach math concepts. The idea here is that, for the student, grasping the structural relationships within a large-scale work can be daunting. These guides provide a framework for visualizing the structure as a whole and examining the components instantly. This makes it easy, for example, to compare various appearances of a theme in different keys and contexts. I've found this to be a great way to help explain the tonal features of sonata form. In the variation movements (Brahms and Beethoven Op.111), one can easily sample individual variations to see how they relate to each other. (Designing the guide for Op.111 helped me make sense of how the last few variations begin departing from the thematic structure.)

I've written before about the concept of storyboarding a piece by listening only to a few seconds of each segment to get a quick overview of the shape of things. In the new Beethoven "Eroica" guide, if you click on the "Big Bangs" link, you'll hear a relatively seamless performance that condenses 15.5 minutes to exactly 60 seconds of sforzando milestones.

A few years ago, commenter dfan wrote here:

I remember as a little kid when I suddenly realized that I actually could hold the whole structure of the first movement of Beethoven's 5th in my head and follow it from beginning to end, and that it actually made logical semantic sense in the same way that a long sentence does, rather than just being a continuous stream of arbitrary music that happened to end at some point. It was a real epiphany.

That is the kind of perspective I hope these guides can help to provide. (Listening to the "Eroica" at double-speed, though kind of silly, is also an interesting way to get a bird's-eye perspective, a concept I explored here: listening at 10x!)

I realize I'm not the first to design something like this, though I think my design has some nice advantages over what I've seen before. The San Francisco Symphony's excellent "Keeping Score" series has an "Eroica" guide. (Warning: music starts playing right away. Bad design.) It certainly has more detail at some levels and a cleaner (though ugly) looking score, with a vertical bar that awkwardly lurches ahead every measure to show exactly where the music is. It also, most frustratingly, only includes excerpts, and never provides a structural view of an entire movement.

Touchpress's amazing Beethoven 9 app includes four perfectly synced performances, plus cool bells and whistles like a manuscript view, a little light-up orchestra simulation, tons of background information, and a constantly scrolling score (which I find a bit disconcerting). It's not easy to view the entire score at once, although a cool "curated score" option shows only the most "important" instruments at a given time to save space. Again, I feel what it does least well is keep a focus on the large-scale structure, as there's no option of viewing an outline while the music plays. It also has the notable disadvantage of only working on iOS devices. I've thought before about getting into mobile app development, but it's more gratifying in some ways to design a single site that works equally well on desktops, laptops, and tablets.

Of course, not everything is perfect about this project. The most glaring problem is that I don't own rights to any of the recordings I'm encouraging you to manipulate. Most are still available on YouTube as well, so it's not like I'm the first to throw them into the wild. Here's an expansion of my Unfrozen Caveman Blogger defense from 2011:

I'm just a caveman. I don't really understand how this whole brave new world wide web works - your free-flowing videos and mixed media messages frighten and confuse me. When I see a big symphony orchestra playing pretty tunes on this smooth, flat, glowing rock, I think, 'Oh no, did an evil fairy shrink them?' I don't know. Because I'm a caveman. I don't understand what's right or what's wrong when it comes to posting media. But what I do know is this: Paavo Järvi knows how to bring out the prehistoric in historic music - and Stefan Jackiw, at age 14, plays the Mendelssohn concerto as beautifully as it can be played.

A project for the future is to build guides like this that use embedded YouTube videos, so I don't have to worry about how it got posted. (I know the basics of how to do that as demonstrated here and here.) This introduces more complications as some videos don't allowing embedding outside of YouTube and there are ads to contend with. (Yes, I understand that watching ads is a fair trade-off for getting free content.)

So, I'm just referring to these as prototypes for now - evidence of what can be done. I'm certainly not making any money from them, but I would encourage people to give them a try, especially in the classroom. I'd love to get feedback on what works and what doesn't. If you do use them in a class or with students, I'd love to know about that as well. I'll do my best to keep them functioning well. If you've visited any of the guides before, it's always a good idea to refresh the page to be sure you get the most recent version as I'm still tinkering with page-turn timing and like - and more features might still be added.

The best place to go to access the guides is thedoctorinspiteofhimself.com/guides**.

Oh, and I have the demo video above (full-screen, HD viewing recommended) which samples the two Beethoven symphonies, the Brahms symphony, and the Mozart opera.

Spread the word!

* If you're curious, here's what things looked like with the Scribd platform, although this version has the auto-page turning enabled, which wasn't true back in 2011. An odd aesthetic principle I've discovered as my design has improved is that the simpler and more elegant things look, the less it seems like there's any significant work behind the scenes. I actually had a strange feeling of being a bit disappointed at a stage when the "virtual duct tape" stopped showing so much and it all just looked like these pages must be easy to throw together.

** I've also recently debuted a new landing page for thedoctorinspiteofhimself.com, which used to point to information about an edition of a Gounod operetta I prepared, but now serves as a gateway to a range of multimedia creations.

Sunday, November 23, 2025

eGriegious Behavior

This perhaps belongs in my "Emptying the Desk Drawer" series, except that the material here has not been sitting around cluttering the desk for long at all - and a surprising coincidence last night made the content seem a little more purposeful. This journey began when a friend mentioned in a group chat that Grieg's oft-played Holberg Suite for strings began its life as a suite of piano pieces, although the string version is much better known. I commented that I had written program notes (p.4 here) about this music once, and there I had discussed 1) the work's origin as a nod to older musical styles, and 2) Grieg's added second-piano parts to Mozart piano sonatas which put a late 19th-century spin on late 18th century style. We'll start with #2 and get back to #1 a little later.

Sunday, November 24, 2013

Shostakovich 5: Mashed-up Memories

So, my daughter's youth orchestra gave a stunning performance of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 last weekend in Boston's Symphony Hall, a program which repeats in Carnegie Hall on Monday, December 9. First then, a tip to any NYC readers I may have picked up along the way: DO NOT MISS THIS CONCERT.

That may just seem like proud parental posturing, but believe me, conductor Ben Zander ignites something in these kids (ages 13-21) that is very special. His vision of the Shostakovich symphony is uncompromising and there's nothing jaded about the playing; the students believe him every step of the way. There's also nothing at all compromised about the level of the playing. Daughter of MMmusing is just one among 43 or so violinists, so I'm not pretending she's the star of the show, but this orchestra is fully up to the challenges posed by the most demanding music. (Mahler 5 is on deck for March!) I don't know how often one gets to hear an orchestra of this level which also has the luxury of rehearsing as often and as intensely as they do. (Read here what soloist Christopher O'Riley had to say about the first concert. Here's another review.)

Anyway, the Shostakovich has been a longtime favorite of mine (and of countless others, of course) for well more than two decades. I could say tons about it, but will simply share a few observations for now.

My first memory of the piece comes from when my older sister was home from college for Christmas break and received a birthday card from a sort of intellectual hipster type she had some interest in. In his letter he wrote something along the lines of "my gift to you is the third movement of Shostakovich's fifth symphony." [Just to be clear, the "gift" was not a recording or score; just "the" movement. It's the thought that counts.] I'm not sure I'd even heard of the piece or composer at that point, but this seemed to me (age 15 or so) the most impossibly romantic gesture imaginable and it set the bar high for my expectations about what this music must be like. (It's not clear to me if the Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra cleared performance rights with my sister. It is clear to me that this is actually NOT the most thoughtful type of gift, but I still like the idea.)
A few years later, as a college freshman, I had the amazing opportunity to join the cello section of the Chattanooga Symphony Orchestra at the exact time that a brilliant Russian conductor had just escaped (with Viktoria Mullova!) from the Soviet Union and become music director of this little orchestra that could. For the first concert, we performed Shostakovich 5 and even got a review in The New York Times. (The reviewer is right on about the not-quite-ready-for-prime-time string section. Like Groucho Mark, I look with suspicion on any orchestra that would have me as a cello-playing member.) Vakhtang Jordania was a protege of none other than the legendary Yevgeny Mravinsky, who premiered the symphony in 1937, so this put me in a pretty cool line of Shostakovich descendants. The truth is I remember very little of the musical specifics of that occasion, but it was still an unforgettable experience, even if I was also terrified!
Since that time, I've certainly listened to recordings of the symphony off and on, but it was more part of my past than present when I first sat in on one of this fall's rehearsals. On that Saturday afternoon, I had one of those marvelous flashback moments which sometimes seem to me the best kinds of moments music has to offer. The orchestra was in the middle of that 3rd movement (the one that now belongs to my older sister) and had just descended from a huge climax. As the violins were scuttling around, I had a strong sense of déjà vu - I knew something special was about to happen and, seconds before it started, I suddenly remembered that the oboe was about to introduce a heartrending new tune. One of those memory "click" moments. As I listened, I remembered that our Chattanooga oboist had played this solo perfectly (he got a nice citation in the Times review cited above), but I also slowly started to remember that this oboe melody was going to be returning later in...wait for it...the cello section! That's right, the cellos are the ones who take the lovely tune and realize its full potential as an anguished lament. Suddenly, all at once I was hearing the melody as new and old, as tender and tortured, as an oboe melody and as MY melody. This kind of slow unfolding of memory and expectation can be very rewarding, especially when connected to notes I've actually played with my own fingers.

The oboe melody makes its first appearance just after the 29:50 mark in the video below:

Then the cellos fulfill its cataclysmic potential here at 34:45.

I don't know about everyone, but for me this intersection of past and present, the way that music interacts with memory, is what it's all about - which makes musical experiences particularly ephemeral and unrepeatable. The fact that I both knew the piece deeply and had also forgotten much about it made the listening experience particularly rich in this regard. I might have to wait another 20 years before such a moment can be relived! Broadly speaking, it would be fascinating to determine how much of listening to music is about "hearing backwards and forwards." How often can one really be said simply to be listening to the present moment? Is that even possible without reference to past and future (memory and expectation)?

Still, as listening experiences go, the Symphony Hall performance last week was one of those everything-lines-up kind of experiences when my attention didn't seem to wane for a second during the entire 50 minutes of the symphony, aside from this kind of thinking back and forth through the music. It felt like Shostakovich was speaking quite directly to all of us, and if my attention was enhanced by the knowledge that my daughter was on stage, so be it.

The arc of the 3rd movement is particularly satisfying as a visual, by the way. When I listen to it (which I've done about 6-7 times since the concert), I find myself listening with reference to the evenly spaced outbursts which are easily visible below:

That amazing, time-stopping oboe solo occurs at about 6:15, shortly after the first of the movement's two enormous climaxes. The cello section reprise of the tune happens at 11:00 in the midst of the other great climax (you can actually see the music hit a dynamic wall right before). Looking at the music this way is a nice metaphor for what it's like to listen with a view of the overall structure, although one can't see all the important musical details in such an image. (Here's a post where I reflect on that idea more fully.) One can see, though, that the oboe/celli sections are proportionally spaced in a satisfying way. By the way, the tune returns one last time at the movement's very end [39:00 in the videos above] with the ethereal combination of harp and celeste.*

Though I think most of my listening that night was focused on Shostakovich, I did inevitably get distracted by one unexpected connection (here's where my regular readers will sigh knowingly) - certainly not something I was looking or listening for. There are a few bridge passages in that devastating third movement in which the strings play a simple rocking figure, richly voiced in a way that started ringing bells for me. At some point, I realized that these passages reminded me a LOT of similar bridge-like passages in Vaughan Williams' very different Tallis Fantasia. That famous work predates the Shostakovich symphony by almost three decades, although I have no reason to believe it's a direct influence. A more likely interpretation is that both works are referencing an intentionally old-fashioned kind of choral writing to create a particular kind of stillness in a more troubled modern context. Here are two such passages. Note that each features conventional triadic harmonies with the 3rd on top and the melody doubled by an inner voice.

Naturally, I decided to try merging these two passages. What you hear below begins with the two excerpts shown above and then alternates between six other excerpts, three from each work. Like so many of my mashups, the connections aren't intended to make a perfectly satisfying new whole, but rather to "say" with music how I hear these works conversing with each other. So, enough words. (...except to note that the entire sequence of eight alternating excerpts is looped four times in the audio below, just because I could...)

* Yes, the oboe solo is followed by clarinet and flute turns with the tune, but they feel more like extensions of the oboe moment than new sections.

Monday, July 30, 2012

Lost in translation...

I’ve made many passing references this blogging summer to Douglas Hofstadter’s Le Ton beau de Marot, a book which I’ve said changed my life. The book first attracted my interest when I was trying to find a dissertation topic back in the late 90’s. Since I was in the process of metamorphosing from a pianist into a collaborative pianist*, I had become quite interested in the subject of musical transcriptions. After all, I was often spending hours a day pretending to be an orchestra accompanying concerti, arias, opera scenes, oratorios, etc. – and I loved being an orchestra. Come to think of it, my first deep attraction to music came when I took up the cello and joined my junior high school orchestra; seeing how parts fit together this way had an important catalytic impact on my theretofore casual piano studies. So, perhaps it makes sense that my piano training led me back to the “orchestra.”

And those scare quotes around “orchestra” are what, for awhile, I hoped to dissert about. I was and still am intrigued by what it means to have some core identity of a musical work shapeshift from the product of 100 musicians to 10 fingers. It says a lot about how Western music has been constructed that we so often accept this transfer from one media to another, even though we know something always gets lost in translation. Although piano reductions have long served utilitarian purposes, I thought there should be more literature addressing this curious art as art.

So when I saw that Hofstadter, author of the wonderfully interdisciplinary Gödel, Escher, Bach, had written a book about the art of translating art (in this case, poetry), subtitled “In Praise of the Music of Language,” I read it with great anticipation. (You might say I hoped to write a similar book about translating music, perhaps subtitled "In Praise of the Language of Music.") The surprising thing is that I became so interested in poetic translation that my dissertation topic shifted into the process of translating a French operetta libretto into English (while also “translating” a fairly standard orchestration into a chamber version). The aesthetics of piano reductions continued more as a side interest, something I still hope to explore more fully some day.

Well, that day has not yet fully arrived, but I've brought a small-scale case study. Hofstadter’s book is all about translating a tiny, tightly constructed French poem into English. (You'll see a few of my translations in future posts. UPDATE: See these translations here.) Most of the 600-plus pages flow out of questions about just what a translator should prioritize when transferring this "information" from language to another. Is it primarily a matter of getting the same ideas across? What about the rhymes? Meter? Alliteration? Does every line have to match up exactly, or can ideas move from one place in the poem to another? Medium vs. Message? Robert Frost famously said that "poetry is what gets lost in translation," but Hofstadter disagrees pretty strongly, just as I feel pretty strongly that a big concerto can still be very satisfying with only piano accompaniment. Yet, I'm sure we can all agree that there are times when a translation fails in some fundamental way.

So, to my case-study. My daughter started working on Prokofiev's first violin concerto this summer. I'm not sure why, but it's a piece I've never really gotten to know well, although I heard Hilary Hahn slice and dice it in absolutely glorious fashion with the BSO a couple of years ago. (The more popular second concerto I've known for years and accompanied - er, served as its "orchestra" - many times.) I've written before about how when Daughter of MMmusing is studying a piece, I tend to like it more than expected and that the enthusiasm often wears off when she's moved on, but I'm pretty sure this "new to me" Prokofiev is a keeper. I've fallen head over heels in love with it, and for now, it seems like the most perfect and special of all concertos. (And I LOVE the violin concerto repertoire.)

One of its most magical and fairly unique features is the way the first and final movements end in almost exactly the same way. In the first movement, the closing section has featured the flute playing [7:50] the melody (see above) with which the soloist had opened [0:15] the concerto, the flute line now embroidered by intricate violin filigree; in the final movement, the violin itself revisits the same tune [19:44], trilling every note ethereally. In both movements, the closing section leads the soloist up to a high D [I: 9:25 III: 21:28], and then a few echoes of the rising fourth (A-D) that first generated the melody. Beneath this stratospheric rocking motion, the flute introduces a quirky, rising figure outlining F-sharp minor and thus emphasizing a C-sharp against the tonic D Major chord, with an even stranger clarinet line snaking up chromatically below. These flute and clarinet lines seem to have wandered in from some other concerto.

[click to view larger]

So, there's resolution mixed with the unexpected, heavenly serenity mixed with earthy sensuality. When the violin finally lands on the last high D, the flute slithers up an exotic scale from its lowest reaches. One could easily argue that this flute line is less about melody or harmony or even rhythm than it is about color – the piece is basically over, but it’s as if this final resolution (and new vantage point) unearths a curious new discovery. I don’t hear the ending as subversive or deceptive, although it could be interpreted that way, but rather as an unexpected heavenly reward, a little bit of earth come to color the sky.

That’s about as sappy a musical description as I’ve ever attempted here on the blog (I hope), and it’s much too wordy. A musical picture may be worth a thousand words, but who wants to read a thousand words about five seconds? The point is, this flute line is both superficial and essential to the character of the ending.

Here’s what it looks and sounds like in the score (slightly simplified to make these parts easier to read; note that this is a synthesized performance - not bad for virtual reality!).

[for some reason, clarinet audio is barely audible in transfer to YouTube; will fix soon.]

And here’s what those three bars look and sound like in the published
piano reduction I have:

All the good stuff is gone, especially in the final bar! Nothing but D Major arpeggios ascending upwards, a completely different effect. In the previous two bars, rather than play the distinctive rhythm of the flute, the pianist is given a bare outline that was originally played by the harp, but clearly subsidiary to the flute line.

There are all sorts of legitimate philosophies about what to leave out in a piano reduction, and all sorts of practical reasons to leave out even the most beloved little orchestral touches, but I can’t imagine the mindset that says those flute lines are expendable. It’s the end, the culmination, the reward, the final thought. The ending of the piece in the piano version above is missing the ending – like getting to heaven and finding it predictable and a little dull. It’s true that a piano can only begin to approximate the special color of a flute in that register. In fact, this concerto as a whole has many lovely chamber-like moments when only a few instruments are audible (clarinet, flute, and harp especially) and a piano can only begin to suggest what Prokofiev had in mind, but we collaborative pianists are all about suggesting. The fact is, it’s not very hard to play that little flute scale, and I will certainly do it when performances come around.

On the other hand, I would probably leave out the clarinet line (because it would be hard!), even though it also adds something unique, so there's a sliding scale in play. Hopefully it would come out something like this, though a real piano can do more shimmering (or so I choose to believe) than you get here.

Actually, after years of thinking I wanted to create my own piano transcriptions, I’ve realized that as a performer, I care less and less about exactly how things are rendered on the page, because I’m more and more likely to use my in-the-moment instincts to make decisions about what to play, how to pedal, etc. I think I’d drive myself crazy trying to get all these little decisions notated, and I suspect that the subtleties of touch and pedaling have more to do with a good “black and white orchestration” than what is printed on the page. (Trying to get that L.H. tremolo to sound decent with synths was much harder than getting the other instruments to sound real-ish.) But I do think this art of translation is worth pursuing as well as possible. I realize that whoever transcribed the Prokofiev above may have thought of the reduction as little more than a rehearsal dummy to let the violinist feel how things synch up, but endings matter. And that's the end of this post.

P.S. It's never totally clear to me how many people are interested in this kind of musical minutiae (I just wrote a lot of words about three bars of music), but if this post has inspired you either to get to know Prokofiev's first violin concerto or to explore Hofstadter's Le Ton beau de Marot, then I will have accomplished something. I genuinely think these are two of the most sparkling monuments of the 20th century.

* I used "scare italics" to put a skeptical tone on this notion that a "collaborative pianist" is somehow different from a "pianist." Personally, I don't even mind being called an "accompanist!" Note the combo "scare quotes, italics, and exclamation point" to suggest just how volatile this word has become. Also note that, although I'm sure many writers and editors would say I use way too many parentheticals, hyphens, italics for emphasis, and scare quotes for eyebrow-raising, I think all these elements can help clarify the language being used.

It also occurs to me that, just as Hofstadter talks about translation as a kind of analogy-game (e.g. "jeux is a French analogy for 'game'"), scare quotes and the like can be a way of clarifying that a word is being used in a particularly analogical way. When I say that I am a pianist being an "orchestra," I want to say more than that I'm playing the orchestra part, but less than that I'm becoming dozens of people. I'm actually acting as an analogy for the orchestra. And if I do a good job, then like a good poetic translation, I have managed to keep from losing all of the art in the process of translation. (By the way, Hofstadter begins his great book noting that "Lost in an Art" is an anagram of "Translation.")

MMmusing