Les lignes mystérieuses...

My recent collaborative "encounter" with artist Jim Zingarelli found us not only decorating old scores, but also creating a sort of music from the act of drawing itself. I've been intrigued for some time by the contrasting ways in musicians and visual artists think of and experience direction. I've heard Jim talk many times about the ways in which an image can lead a viewer to follow a kind of path in the act of viewing, but it's quite a different thing than the temporally prescribed way in which one experiences the events in a piece of music. (Let's put aside for now the complex ways in which a listener does indeed keep "in mind" musical events that have passed or that are yet to come.)

[NOTE: I mused on this issue at some length here, including some reference to Jim's work, although that was long before we'd imagined this collaboration. There's also some further commentary on the matter from Dan B. at Thoughtlights, with yet further comments by me in the comments to his post.]

Whatever you might think of this distinction between the worlds of art and music, I wanted to see and document what it would be like to watch a drawing unfold as a sort of performance. I decided a fun way to do that would be to have Jim sketch on my Tablet PC, using screen capture software to record all the strokes of the pen. The first time I handed him the tablet, he immediately threw a challenge back at me by asking me to play something for him to "draw to." Not being an improviser (see previous post), I pulled Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier off the shelf and faked my way through the C Minor Prelude from Book I. Not my finest moment as a pianist (nor had my office piano been tuned yet for the semester, so things were less well-tempered than ideal), but afterwards we were both captivated by the sight of watching his lines dash across the screen. Even the sound of the pen tapping against the tablet added something surprisingly satisfying. [Perhaps some day I'll have the courage to post this first session, although I'll have to load it up with as many disclaimers as possible about my playing.]

So, for now, I'm going to post a "live drawing" we did several weeks after that first encounter with Bach. In this case, having already embarked on our adventure with ornamenting a Couperin score, I decided to play what is probably Couperin's most famous work, "Les barricades mystérieuses," a bewitching little piece I compared to Schumann last month. What you see below is Jim's pen dancing along to the notes as I play. It's an unrehearsed, one-take, unedited performance by both of us. The point here is not to present some finished product, but rather to see what happens when these two worlds join forces, and when a drawing becomes something which can literally be experienced as unfolding in time.

Illuminating Ornamentation

I mentioned about a month ago that I recently collaborated with artist Jim Zingarelli as part of an exhibit called "Drawing as Encounter." Again, just to be be clear, he did all the drawing/painting/etc. I was just an encounteree, although that did produce some musical performances from me that have become part of the exhibit. The process of talking with Jim about the different ways we think as artists - he as free-thinking creator in visual media, I mostly as a recreator of existing musical scores - brought us back several times to thinking about the phenomenon of the musical score, both as visual object and as a somewhat vexing authority figure.

Musicians, of course, tend to refer to the score as "the music" even though, as I cleverly demonstrated at the exhibit opening by holding The Well-Tempered Clavier up to a microphone, the score doesn't produce any actual music. The process of interpreting those little black specks is an art in itself (I like to think), but one fraught with all sorts of tension about being true to the composer's wishes, etc.

Jim had the idea of emancipating the score, in a way, by treating it as a sort of canvas to which he could add his own decorations. We talked about various possibilities, including some music of Poulenc, whose musical spirit reminds me of Z's work. Jim showed me a little impromptu watercolor sketch he'd made that was inspired by listening to some Poulenc I'd suggested. The delicate figurative intricacy of the sketch somehow brought to mind the kind of florid ornamentation one sees and hears in the French Baroque style. It occurred to me that the music of François Couperin, whose scores are readily available in public domain form, might make an interesting canvas for our experiments since the music lends itself to liberal ornamentation from the performer.

The first score I gave him is a beautiful little piece charmingly self-titled "Le Couperin." I chose it partly because it can be played slowly enough that florid elaborations are possible; I actually removed all of Couperin's indicated ornaments and then basically instructed Jim to do whatever he wanted to with the rest. His intent was not to try to think like a musician, but rather to respond to the score as a visual object. My job, then, was to perform it, finding whatever suggestion and inspiration I chose to from Jim's encounter with Couperin.

I don't mind admitting that I'm no expert when it comes to Baroque improvisation - or when it comes to any kind of improvisation, for that matter. In fact, this is part of what I hoped to gain from the experience - the enigmatically ornamented score presented itself less as an academic challenge in following instructions than as inspiration to be freely creative. Although I did settle on some consistent ways of interpreting some of the colorful markings, I gave myself permission not to be too constrained by them. Still, one of the outcomes of the experiment was finding that the new score was not just liberating - I also learned that certain ideas (end of m.4, for example) worked so naturally that they became, in my mind, settled ways of reading some of the markings.

But, I'm not going to try to explain or defend any of my choices here. There are still some passages that I'd like to explore more, but I won't say which ones. Here then, complete with the Couperin/Zingarelli score, is one possible interpretation:



Note that there are ways in which this sort of visually inspired interpretative process is related to some of shuffling experiments I've blogged about recently. Although Jim's score markings (or "illuminations," as I like to call them, thinking of medieval manuscripts and the like) aren't exactly random, the way in which they interact with the notes is at best tangentially related to the kinds of instructions that notes are supposed to convey. So, just as shuffling an iPod can lead to unexpected connections and discoveries, using an artist as intermediary can provide a fresh way of looking at an old score.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

I wrote last year about the Boston Symphony's lame "video" podcasting ventures, and it seems nothing has changed. Having just heard the BSO last night in a terrific concert with Joshua Bell, I stopped by www.bso.org a few minutes ago and see they're proudly proclaiming: "NEW! Video Exclusive - interview with Joshua Bell - WATCH IT NOW." I'm not gonna break this down like I did last time, but suffice it to say, the "video" is mostly just publicity stills of Mr. Bell that zoom slowly in and out with little rhyme or reason. (For example, when Bell is talking about visiting the White House recently, are there photos of the White House? Uh, no.)

Oh wait, no, I just realized that, a few minutes in, they've inserted some actual video footage of Bell performing with the BSO (looks Tanglewood-y) which, quite frankly, is even more bizarre. We see him passionately playing with not even the slightest audio hint of what he's playing. (Actually, it's just occurred to me that it could make a fun "violin puzzler" game to figure out what he's playing; maybe later.) They use this video as a sort of wallpaper a couple of times in the "video" podcast, but it's basically a poorly enhanced audio interview. Yet they're desperately urging us not to listen, but to WATCH.

Here's my point: it's astounding to me that as we approach 2010, this is what passes for multimedia on a major orchestra's website. The interview is fine, if rather tepid, but the BSO is about music, not talking. I know there are all sorts of union issues involved, but it's ridiculous that an orchestra website isn't filled with audio and video of actual musical performances. As I type, I'm sitting and watching NFL football for free, and yet the NFL stadiums are packed and the league makes plenty of money.

I feel certain that if the BSO website was filled with musicmaking, visitors to the site would be much more likely to think about buying tickets. They don't need to put up complete performances if they're afraid of giving away the farm, but 30 seconds of watching Joshua Bell actually playing the Brahms concerto would certainly do more than 10 minutes of him talking. Could a union really not agree to that? (Actually, don't answer that.) Orchestras need to figure this out.

UPDATE: I just noticed that there is a "music player" option on the front of the BSO website, though the button is hardly featured. Actually, this little music player is nice, with quite a few listening options (though it doesn't seem to ID the performers clearly). I can't imagine why it's not more prominently featured, but maybe it's a start.

UPDATE 2 (12/2): I see (via BSO's Twitter account) that the Bell interview "video" is on YouTube as well. I noticed that there are some images of Bell playing in the White House, so either I was mistaken above or the video's been updated a little. I probably just missed them; they don't exactly scream "White House," but I apologize for suggesting no White House images were used.

See also: an MMmusing podcast that actually uses images to enhance what's being talked about in the interview.

Do the MMmusing Shuffle

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More than two years ago, about 100 days into my blogging career, I noticed that multimedia was starting to play a big role in my musing, so I designed the machine above to send readers off to random images, sounds, and videos that had figured in my posts. I've been updating it ever since. As of November, 2009, there are now about 150 directions in which it might send you. In most cases, you'll land on multimedia that was created specifically for this site, and in all cases you'll find a link to the original blog post to which the content was first linked. However, it can be fun to stumble on the content first and wonder why it's here. (In some cases, I'm still not sure.)

So, spin the wheel and see what happens...and you can always spin again using the machine over there in the margin.

[Last updated 11/10/14, now with about 300 possible outcomes.]

See also: The Power of Random

-bert to -mann

I promise this won't be as long as the previous post, but I had another recent experience noticing an unexpected connection between two works. Sunday night, I heard the terrific cellist Carol Ou play Schubert's "Arpeggione" Sonata and, as pianist Noreen Cassidy-Polera introduced the main theme, I suddenly realized how similar it is to the main theme of Schumann's Piano Concerto. I happen to have a student working on the Schumann right now, so that may explain why it was available for easy comparison-noting in my subconscious playlist. I've actually played both works, the Schubert many times, but perhaps never in close proximity to each other. Schumann was, of course, a great admirer of Schubert, so perhaps he knew the "Arpeggione," although Wikipedia informs me the sonata wasn't published until 1871, well after Schumann's death.

Anyway, it doesn't take much analysis to see how closely these A minor tunes parallel each other at their outsets, both in rhythm and melodic structure. And that's really all I have to say about this; I did play around briefly with some sort of mashup idea (such as replacing Schumann's piano statement of the theme [which follows woodwind statement] with Schubert's theme), but nothing worked. So at least now you have evidence that I won't just slap ANY two tunes together. (Well, OK, you can hear the beginnings of the two tunes slapped together by clicking the third image below.)

Schubert

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Schumann

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Schumbertmann

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Don't forget to visit my old Tune Theft archive, though the above doesn't quite qualify as tune theft in my book.