Collaboration with Mariana Bernoski.

At a recent performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, the memory and stamina of the performer Andreas Schiff was such that the second movement of Beethoven Piano Sonata Opus 111 was presented as an encore. The performer was making a point. The movement represents the sublimation of variation technique to a higher level of expression than the larger, more architecturally ambitious variations sets, regarding by many as the highest acheivement in that form.

Opus 111, on the other hand, was the last music, along with the Bagatelles, that the composer wrote for the piano. He was stone deaf. How does someone, even with an inner ear as well developed as Beethoven, write such extradorinary music without being able to hear it?

The answer, I think, is in the realm of mind (counterpoint) and body (resonance). As these are the two primary areas of focus in my own music production, I hesitate to make this claim, concerned that I am seeing it only through my own myopic interests. I am convinced that there is no other reasonable explanation for how a deaf composer could project into the future an experience of the sublime in such an authoritative manner.

Looking at the score to Op. 111, Movement 2 (‘Arietta’), what leaps off the page is a lot of black. The tempo is slow and the subdivisions, as the pace increases in the variations, become a blur of beams and syncopes. It reminds me of the tendency with modernism to avoid the dull white emptiness of  half and whole notes and to set extremely slow tempi with an eighth or sixteenth notes ictus. It is the manner in which scores come to resemble scientific illustration – the ascendancy of rational man over his passionate, chaotic feeling self. The fact that such music is often fraught and tortured in actual performance is no matter – the score is an artifact to the composer’s intent to turn away from the irrational fever dream of the Romantic/Nationalist past. After the catastrophe in Europe in the middle Twentieth Century, who can blame them?

So, Beethoven is a precursor, with his complex syncopation and contrapuntal ingenuity the likes of which had never been achieved. It would all be schematic, an academic achievement, if it were not for the fact that he could feel the essence of the relationship between tone and thought in his vary bones. The advances made in Keyboard instruments in his lifetime created larger resonance than had ever been. While composing these counterpoints, he could have felt them by virtue of the memory held by his inner ear (sub-vocalised memory) and the physical feeling produced at the keyboard. At the end of the variations, there is a series of trills that holds the audience in a moment of suspension unlike anything I’ve experienced in the concert hall. It is an ascension to the heavens, something that surely must have occupied the elder man in his late life, but it is also a palpable vibration that must have been physically perceptible to Beethoven. I can just imagine him in his studio, trilling away on a hammerclavier all day, just to get the feel of it in his bones and saying ‘If I can compose something I can hear, then I damn well will compose something I can feel’.

This, then is the essence of what I am speaking about when I explain my theory of resonant compostition, or overtonality.

A short invented word to describe the method I’ve been using to compose instrumental music for the last 15 years, ‘overtonality’ might be better described as ‘resonance-based, continuo-supported harmony’. Over the next series of posts, there will be less whimsy and more articulation of the basis of this type of composing.  for now, here is one example, as performed by CSULB New Music Ensemble a few years ago, Martin Herman conducting.

An idea for how the tradtional components of music are studied in the academy, as interpreted by the teachers of Eastern thought:

1. pulse/rhythm = lower chakra, body, sex, physical attributes of existence (e.g. dancing).

2. melody/monody = heart centered, emotional life, ‘soul’. When produced by a human voice with words, is associated with 5th chakra (creative expression of soul).

3. harmony  = the voice of God that replies to the entreaty of the heart. Mindful contemplation.

4. counterpoint = the intellect, a distillation of the work that melody and harmony does. Modal counterpoint prevailed until Western culture needed more clarity and reason, less floating and soaring of the spirit. Bach’s great achievement was to harness both.

5. color = the aesthetic, sensual world. Does not appear as a major feature until the 19C.

More psychedelic griefwork from 2006:

Better this than the alternatives, too various and generally pathetic and gruesome to contemplate.

Check out this press photo for the ‘singing string quartet’ Well Strung.

According to a recent study published by the National Academy of Sciences, what we ‘see’ trumps what he ‘hear’ in choosing music that we like. For gay guys, it’s a tantalizing prospect – nerdy classical musician types transformed into porn stars. For fans of classical string chamber music, however, this marketing strategy may leave one cold – a gimmick to get in Lady Gaga fans to concerts. Even though the dude’s ripped look good to my eye, the truth is that his musculature probably detracts from his playing as it limits the mobilty and dead arm weight needed to produce a great tone. Do gay fans care? Nah. The pecs trump our interest in tone.

Sight over sound in the judgment of music performanceDepartment of Management Science and Innovation, Faculty of Engineering Science, University College London, London WC1E 6BT, United Kingdom Edited by Dale Purves, Duke-National University of Singapore Graduate Medical School, Singapore, Singapore, and approved July 12, 2013 (received for review December 21, 2012) Abstract Social judgments are made on the basis of both visual and auditory information, with consequential implications for our decisions.

via Pnas

Renders colors to life that one does not normally see. Grief has a well-earned reputation for making grown folks do strange things, but it also sends the habits of life and thinking into exile status for a period of time. Traditional cultures have had a smart approach – with lifespans shorter and infant mortality high, few could afford the luxury of a long, open-ended period of grieving. Women needed to get back to basic tasks and child-rearing – family unit survival, not merely emotional cohesion, depended on it. They took a period of their lives and changed everything, ululating and wearing special colors and making a basic but conspicuous change to the home. Anything to get through it and get back to substantial tasks. What will 21st Century grieving look like, with the social media tools that allow for a narcissistic self-regard? Getting through the crazy quilt wilderness of major grief requires a purpose. For this writer, it was musical. Here’s one that came out of that sorrowful summer.