Emotional Landscapes

Space for Music: Stage vs. Screen, Final Act

2010-11-06T14:39:00.001-07:00

More than half a year ago, it feels as if there still was snow, I wrote my previous blog posting. It dealt with the difficulties to find space for music on the theatre stage. During summer, I had once again the opportunity to perform thorough research on this. Not least on grounds of complete absorption by the rehearsal process, I was not in the position to cover here work on Cechov's Seagull at Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus. Now I shall catch up, but not until briefly having talked about the film score for Volker Schmitt's Schattenlinie, which I took up recently.

A pre-premier of this film is scheduled for December 8, 2010 at Metropolis-Kino Hamburg. The soundtrack begins to take shape. Which shape and why will be a future subject of this blog. However, a core piece of music leads over to the topic "space for music" right away: it plays along a voice-over.

What is a voice-over? Contrary to an off-text, i. e. an audible text of a figure who features on scene but is out of sight (for the moment), a voice-over is a narrated text that comes from another time and space, so to say. In off-text one could, in contrast to voice-over, in theory display the speaker by adjusting the camera's position in the picture's story space. A voice-over can nevertheless be spoken by a figure who is part of the plot - but without watching her or him speaking, even if on screen. This is exactly what happens in Schattenlinie: two closemouthed characters are on the road in St. Pauli for several minutes, while their thoughs are told by their respective voices. This epic moment is a typical function of the voice-over technique.

Insofar as voice-over (who has heard this on stage, and where? Please comment!) strongly relies on the specific possibilities of sound mix in film - intimate voice-over against fully orchestrated music an street or subway noise -, there could be no sharper contrast to the conditions of the Düsseldorf Möwe production. The rehearsal stage C2 at Central in der alten Paketpost, serving as main stage during the renovation of the regular stage, is a slightly over-acoustic vast room. It remains empty in Möwe, accept some chairs, a low footbridge, some foliage and a curtain.

Director Amélie Niermeyer leaves everybody on stage throughout. Apart from a couple of turbulent moments, the figures converse in a moderate, well-nigh "realistic" temperature, given today's state of affairs in theatre. Her focus on dialog (by the way, Cechov is brillant! An exhilarating read!) and on driving the story literally tolerates interruptions between the acts only, when backfitting is inavoidable. Moments without dialog bear tense silence. There are three "special situations" where there is music under the scene, namely the theatre performance in the middle of act I., the beginning of act II. / Boule game, as well as the beginning of act III. / good bye party.

In short: first, the project to put, apart from those three moments, only the faintest Cello dots under the scene finally had to be abandoned for forlorness. Annoying. Secondly, the rigid limitation in space for music only allowed for fragmentary an low-key concoctions, at least this is what I was able to achieve. Therefore, I do not see why I should receive these as music in its own right, and record them and put online, or so. This is just too little.

The (however well audible) pieces of music between the acts are only three in number, last only a couple of seconds each, and are, following hours-long minimalism, accompanied by frantic actors, curtain, light shift, props and a stage rotating speed all of a sudden. Things which distract attention from the music. Two out of those three exceptional moments mentioned above are bound to repetition and monotony for scenic reasons, and subject to the actors need to "put their words all delicate" in order to get their attitude right. Solely remains the theater performance halfway through the first act. Might be we shoot a video of that one...

To make it complete, there is one more thing the severity of which has been clear in my mind since a long time, but has not been covered in the technique-focused March Space for Music posting: inside the branch Big Houses of Contemporary Theatre, on average (!), music ranks quite low concerning experience and - correspondingly? - regard. The shares, ranging from the average theatre rehearsal over the house's expenses to sentences per press critique, even how long one has the floor at the after-rehearsal pub meeting, are constant: 40% director, 40% actors (star roles 35%, supporting roles 5%), stage and costume design 15%, the rest music, if one is lucky. Apart from individual deviations which can, as always, be substantial, these shares only change by any kind of star status (only culture/entertainment really counts) or personal juice.

For daily work this means that, given a standard two months production period, not even a single hour of regular rehearsal time is sacrified for checking out music. Then, actors would be spear carriers of music; then, work on scene x would not be pushed on. On the other hand, it is absolutely common that music serves as spear carrier of acting, because it is of course impossible to retrieve or develop the right attitude without the music played in earlier rehearsals. In addition, the musical director has to close-mesh follow what is going on on rehearsal in order to be able to react to new requirements at short notice and well-informed. As a result, attendance is generally required, be it to fill the rehearsal stage with sound, be it in order not to miss a thing. Yet it is awkward to work on music during rehearsal. Soundcheck begins at 10.30 p.m., past the lighting rehearsal. "Space for music".

What I have thus said is of course not valid for every production I have luckily been part of - on the contrary, to name only a few, there was luxuriosly large space for music in Inferno/Purgatorio/Paradiso at Thalia Theater 2001/2002, directed by Tomasz Pandur, including the rehearsals. Likewise, all children theatre productions were different in that respect. But I could have made exactly the same points on the Volksfeind production earlier this year, with the only difference that I have been recording plenty of music "in its own right" for it - which however appears in the performance only briefly.

Leaving aside my obvious deficiency to cope with such conditions and just function, I can hear a leitmotif. To say it with (German seventies comedian) Otto Waalkes: In The Seagull my shirt is mouse gray in the first half, whilst in the second half it sports a light dash of ash. Curtain.

Space for Music: Stage vs. Screen

2010-03-01T16:21:00.001-08:00

On February 20, Ein Volksfeind premiered at Staatstheater Stuttgart, before I did the soundtrack of NOWHERENOW, and a movie soundtrack comes next. I take the opportunity to muse about the differences between film music and playback stage music which are all so obvious concerning production and result.

This is not meant to address the differences due to reception history - a groundbreaking film, or rather a groundbreaking soundtrack, has more influence on film than on theatre, and vice vera. By the same token this is not meant to address the differences due to budget, distribution, target audience, and the organisational condition of corporate or non-corporate theatres versus film production enterprises. There are, so I hold, differences which immediately follow from fundamental properties of making plays or films. (This text is, like some on this blog, controversial by purpose: I appreciate any hint (comment-functionality) to films or stage plays contradicting my elaborations!)

Two aspects seem to be of particular relevance. On the one hand there is volume adjustment between (overdubbed) dialoge, original soundtrack and film music; on the other hand there are the specific capabilities of the camera, i.e. optical zoom, perspective, tracking shot, cut. Both are limited on stage. While microphones and a mixing console are available on stage, there are "hard" limits. The same is true for stage design/light, where impressive effects are possible, but nothing like those camera tricks.

Let's begin with volume adjustment. When mixing a soundtrack, a whispering actor can well be put beyond a furious orchestra of 120 people, or a whispering reed-pipe can be effective against a thunderous blizzard or a cried dialog. Here, not only sound level is a parameter. Rather, a subtle combination of panorama and reverb can precisely place a sound signal spacially. A Dolby Surround film in a THX certified cinema is much more transparent than a theatre stage could ever be, given varying reflecting surfaces with moving actors whose microphones, if they wear some, not only transmit their voices but also all kinds of environmental sounds.

The use of support microphones at the theatre, be they attached to the actor or fixed somewhere on stage, is generally not unproblematic. An accentuation of speech level is quickly realised by the listener. On the one hand she feels that the actor cannot produce the volume by herself (which does not happen in a decently mixed film), and on the other hand she registers those tiny sound colorations which can never be completely eliminiated on stage, e.g. wind and plop sounds, amplitude variations, impact noise, comb filter effects etc. As soon as the microphone is noticed it feels at least unnatural. Frequently it even raises the quest of a scenic justification - which sometimes leads to actors wearing visible hand microphones just to state the obvious.

Underlying unamplified speech with music on stage is a difficult enterprise all the more. In case the music is played so soft that speech comprehensibility does not suffer, the music gets stuck below a level where it can unveil its effect. Music needs a minimal volume in order to make significant elements (like melody, harmony, rhythm, sound colour etc.) reach the listener's mind. A music played too soft sounds like a disturbance, like an unspecific irritation. An actor declaiming aloud might drown out music played with functional volume, but his dynamic bandwith is severely restricted. Normal speech gets lost. Common rules of thumb known from film help, but not so much, e.g. to restrict oneself to slow and even movements, or to avoid frequencies which are important for speech comprehensibility. One faces the choice between music under amplified speech, with all unwanted consequences, or no music at all. This is a major handicap in the fight for "time slots".

Another handicap at claiming space for music results from the fixed position of the theatre audience. While the audience normally takes place on stationary seats the eye has a wealth of possibilities in film. These considerably expand the narrative options in favour of music. The camera follows a figure, it zooms into something, it slowly pans over a landscape, a room - this all creates moments, sometimes very long moments, where music not kept underneath speech can unresistently unfold its effects. Cuts helps in a similar fashion to establish extended passages without dialog, or with few bits of speech. Cuts make it possible to proceed with a plot without someone speaking. Classical example: car chase. To carve out a lengthy action scene on stage which is full of suspense is difficult - as difficult as a 100% long shot action scene without a single cut. Something like this can rarely be seen at the movies (counterexamples? Comment in!)

It seems to be complicated to find perspectives on stage which grant space to the music. Music with no text beyond tends to have a retarding effect. The plot does not keep moving. This need not be the case, of course: at the ballet, the plot moves on without anything being told. Maybe here is is no hard, but a soft factor at work, namely theatre tradition. According to theatre tradition, a play is a text in the first place. If not text, it is picture. Working with the actors is in the foreground who, in a consistent picture and costumed consistently, are to act consistently.

Stage is however not inferior towards film in every respect. The restriction of a room, or a finite number of rooms, which are obviously "made", the physical presence of actors who obviously "act" - these factors highlight the fictional character of the whole matter. The consciousness of fictionality can be utilised, and theatre has gained considerable mastery at this. Nobody wonders why there is a musician sitting on top of a guitar amp or at a piano right in the middle of the stage, even if he does not intervene at all. At the movies, the reception attitude, just because film can do, is more like diving into a world, what suggests to ask about the role of a figure and renders the establishment of a non-acting musician amidst all the action more challenging.

Yet there are hundreds of films which are capable of producing claims offside the realistic plot: finally, reception attitude is no hard limit for stage music. I meant to show that, instead, these consist in, on the one hand, problems with sound mixing on stage, impeding music below speech, and on the other hand music lacking space on stage which speechless narrative forms made possible by the camera open up easily.

Topoi of Mainstream Rock-Pop

2010-01-23T08:48:00.001-08:00

I've been publishing an analysis of German Rock-Pop mainstream lyrics on the German mirror of this Blog: Topoi des Mainstream-Rock-Pop - since the lyrics are all in German I refuse to translate this post :-)

Earworm Torture

2009-12-30T15:09:00.001-08:00

Perhaps the United Nations when, in 1997, they sanctioned relentless exposition to loud music as torture method, thought it too complicated to brand the exposition to bad and catchy music as torture too. For a fatal effect, a nasty melody does not need to be repeated particularly often, let alone loud. It entrenches itself easily into the lamentable victim's head and eats along all by itself. Probably the venerable organisation would find itself in a permanent lawsuit with pop song producers whose achievements were ostracised by the respective UN committee as potential torture music. Probably this very committee would have to give up at the task of identifying which music would be suitable for agonising which men, regarding the enormous differences in reception preconditions, and to proscribe it accordingly. Probably this top-class committee would give way commenting that, just like a knife is not only a suitable means to cube onions but also to kill somebody, virtually any music can be misused to torture somebody until his "will is broken" (see link list below).

Inhabiting an island of of carelessness which, to this extent, rarely occurs both historically, geographically, and socially (German in Germany, financially and socially situated, no risky profession as, e.g., soldier) I have of course never encountered real torture. In every day language, however, "torture" is used as hyperbole for arbitrary unpleasant situations which one cannot escape in the short run, in particular if someone has imposed such situation on oneself exactly because of that: "Please stop torturing me and tell me what we will have for dessert!". The torment caused by a, say, involuntary imagination of music conceived as bad has been of such a big impact on my life that, for myself, I would rank "earworm torture" somewhere in the middle between the rhetoric and the literal meaning of "torture".

When I was at school I gained money by playing in show bands, rather than wait at table or find a holiday job. Friends I used to play with in classical music ensembles and jazz bands were also sitting in, and we developed sort of an ambition at the challenge of covering song classics. The repertoire reached from songs I liked quite a bit down to the lowlands of schlager, with some of the most penetrant earworms following me to sleep. After a gig where the bandleader - a high school teacher, i.e. an authority for me then - in an unbearable act of anticipatory obedience, enforced "Adelita" again, it happens: completely exhausted by the show going on until long after midnight, packing up our stuff, heaving it into our bandleader's house, leaden way home, I am finally lying in my bed at dawn. Eyes wide open. Adelita doesn't stop playing. The feigned gaiety of the song pushes me on the edge of despair. I get up, go to bed again, read something, listen to some Miles Davis - nothing helps. My sweet Adelita. I wait until 10 am, I am no brute. Then I call the bandleader and cancel the band.

I do no ballroom dance since, no matter how nice or harmless the context, no matter how short, no matter how rudely threatened with the party killer verdict, even though, when I was sixteen, I did the advanced level dancing course and even won a silver medal at the end-of-course dance. Yet my schlager trauma is of more import for my work as band and theatre musician: whenever and why ever schlager, kitsch, trash, bad taste, "bad but funny" or the like remotely comes up, sunny me all of a sudden becomes unexpectedly complicated. The showband leader has not remained the only one I have cancelled for this kind of reason, and my dearest musical friends do not even ask me for projects suspicious of kitsch anymore.

On music as torture instrument (without earworm aspect):

+ Bad Vibrations
+ A History of Music Torture in the "War on Terror"
+ Music As Torture: War Is Loud
+ Music As Torture / Music As Weapon
+ Statement against the use of music as torture

On earworms:

+ Can't Get It Out Of My Head (without torture aspect)
+ Wenn einmal der Wurm drin ist (with torture aspect)

The Birth of Mainstream from the Spirit of Protest

2009-12-08T08:34:00.001-08:00

For reasons which will have to be addressed later I have been listening to the CDU (Christian Democratic Party of Germany) Song for the 09 election "Wir sind wir" ("We are us" or something).

Written and produced by Leslie Mandokie, has-been singer of "Dschingis Khan" scary (for those who do not dare to click the link: sounds like the arithmetic means of Rosenstolz, Xavier Naidoo and all music from recent German TV soaps, sorry, very German, this post!). The song reminded my of a question which had been on my mind when working on the stage music for Judith von Shimoda back in 2008. Which is the music of the Mitte ("middle of the road"; Mitte is a very common notion in the German political sphere), where everyone ought to be part of if they do not want to be cranks or even deviators. Which is the music of the market, to which laws everyone ought to submit oneself to if they do not want to be party poppers or even prohibit economic growth? In other words: which music is today, in the middle of Germany, used for propaganda purposes?

Preliminary note: in western democracies, as opposed e.g. to totalitarian regimes which used to reside in Germany, there is no such thing as a dedicated propaganda music as a genre anymore. If only the structures ceased to exist out of which such music tradition could emanate from. For instance, military music is completely marginalised. The political parties (as the CDU song reveals), unions and similiar organisations do not output specific music either.

Instead, it holds: "There's nothing more successful than success" (is there a saying like that in English?). A self-reinforcing mechanism is continuously normalising a mainstream which very slowly and carefully evolves with orientation towards chart success and recycling in tv series, soaps and ads. Composition and production closely follows what the markets have washed ashore. Medial exploitation on all channels massages the music into the mainstream brains with the result that it is commercially successful - and the cycle starts over again.

The pabulum this yields (yes, this metaphor is an allusion to McDonalds & Co.; it works the same) is not ideologically in the intention, but innocuously trimmed to maximal market success at minimal risk. Nonconformism is not verboten anymore, it simply gets lost in the information overload and the much higher marketing power of the mainstream productions. Everybody can do what he wants to do, or listen to. Noone will protest, but one can ignore, smile away, refuse to buy.

In the Judith production, the music was attributed to the protagonist who is outlawed because of her nonconformism. Therefore, the music was not about deconstructing mainstream but rebelling against the constant stream which, so to say, enforces consensual conformity. Do not accept to be brought into line! Non-consumption! Protest!

Yet which music would incorporate this protest? Surprising finding: this is not too easy! Practically every protest turned music is creepingly assimilated by mainstream in the course of the time. The sheer volume of the drums and the 68th's distorted guitars used to be a torch - today it feels at home in every VW Golf. What used to be "Independet" or "Gangsta", is today shrinked a Indie-Rock-Pop or Shiny-Suit-Rap, respectively, into the majors. In ads for sportswear, cars and mobile phone providers the breeze of savagery ultimately degenerates to an attitude.

In the Judith production the task was to give the protagonist a music where one could not imagine easily which product or which party could be advertised with it. Sounded like this:

Judith-Medley by fritzfeger

The CDU goes for the insignia of pseudo-youthfullness in order to reach as many as possible and to alienate as few as possible. The song features pseudo-tough drums, pseudo-protest distorted guitar, pseudo-cool vocal phrasing and pseudo-emotional belting voices. This is Schlager, this is
Kitsch. To pluck the lyrics into pieces has already been done by others, e.g. here, here and here (all in German).

It is highly interesting to compare the CDU song, concerning both the lyrics and the music, with this work of Rosenstolz:

One year ago I had noted: It need not be shown anymore that this kind of mainstream is bad, in the first place. This is commonly known, and everybody knows what it refers to: nothing. This is, nothing which can be deconstructed in the course of its destruction. I have changed my mind. Normalised music stimulates and reinforces normalised emotions. It wraps whitewashed cotton wool around our heads to make us feel good - and to put us into working order as customers and electors. It is important to understand why this music is so well-suited for the self-reassurance of the Mitte. This is also Marcel Reich-Ranicki's opinion:

[…] die Mehrheit des Volkes liest keine Literatur, jedenfalls keine, die sich ernst nehmen ließe. So konnte die herrliche Literatur der Weimarer Republik mit Thomas Mann an der Spitze politisch (gegen den Nationalsozialismus) nichts bewirken. Es gehört übrigens zu den Sünden der Literaturkritik, daß sie sich damals um die Trivialliteratur, beispielsweise die Romane der Hedwig Courths-Mahler, überhaupt nicht gekümmert hat. Man hätte zeigen müssen, wie das Zeug gemacht ist. […]

Just in case noone will read this critique it could be helpful to try to "make mainstream impossible from the inside", i.e. to create music with the surface aesthetics of mainstream with abysses. Well then.

Neuropop?

2009-11-18T15:29:00.001-08:00

After having lunch with my wife and neuroscientist Axel Lindner speaking about our common presentation on Saturday at Schnittstelle Mensch, I associatively point to a website recommended to me by bat sonar researcher (yeah!) Hans-Ulrich Schnitzler: neuropop.com. Their James Bond-like self-advertisement:

"NeuroPop uses the math behind the mind to create weapons grade sound design. We use our proprietary Neurosensory Algorithm (NSA) technology to modify any sounds or music to activate specific parts of the listener’s brain and get the emotional responses you want."

On the basis of results of recent neuroscience research, any sound, i.e. also music, can be modified in a way that it causes certain neurophysiological effects. For example as "sonic branding" a subconscious recognition effect, stress reduction, sleep inducing, attention direction or inducing particular emotions. The armory of sound design would thus significantly go beyond established psychoacoustic methods.

On their website there are some "Toys" from which I cannot see the great leap forward compared to pre-neuroscientific times. I do not doubt that e. g. one sound event immediately stimulates neuronal processes correlated with psychic relaxation, while another sound event maybe induces a feeling of threat, given the same conditions. But I doubt that these effects remain significant when conditions vary, if e. g. the same brain region is to be stimulated by "Neurosensory Algorithm (NSA) technology" in two pieces of music which differ, if only slightly, in expression.

It is of course a massive scientist's PR exaggeration to claim that it is possible to "get the emotional responses you want". This can be done for certain impulses (and by no means for any emotional response you want) with electrodes placed directly into the brain regions in question. But with sounds? Concerning this, I am very much looking forward to the talk of Eckart Altenmüller of the Institut für Musikphysiologie und Musikermedizin Hannover on "Music as a universal language of the emotions?" Friday eve at Kupferbau in Tübingen.

Twelve Tone And Serial Music And Neuroscience: A Polemic

2009-10-18T02:44:00.001-07:00

This weekend the Zeitklänge-Festival for Contemporary Classical Music (Neue Musik) takes place in Kempten (Germany). There are concerts, workshop concerts and scientific presentations. The science journalist Christoph Drösser from ZEIT weekly newspaper reports: Zu schräg für unser Gehirn (Too Crooked For Our Brain). I seize the opportunity and reason about the neuroscientific investigation of music perception and the attempts from this direction to explain the unpopularity of Neue Musik (I use the German expression for contemporary music by the likes of the later Schönberg, Webern, Stockhausen, Boulez, Nono, Cage, Penderecki, Kagel, Ligeti etc. because there is no proper name for this particular genre in English).

In short, from the neuroscientist's perspective Neue Musik lacks structures which a) can be recognised and b) cause feelings of happiness or joy. This, so they argue, could not only be achieved by consonants absent in the dissonant Neue Musik, but also by the "game of fulfilled and disappointed expectations", which seems to be big fun for human beings. As Neue Musik does not feature recognisable structures it already lacks the prerequisites for this game. To the neuroscientist's lights, Neue Musik refuses reference to the "grammar" of musical styles which the listener is already familiar with and from which she could acquire something new. The gap is too big. In the spirit of Adorno who ranted about the emotionality and agreeability of jazz and pop music, and called for maximal innovation instead, the typical composer of Neue Musik is eager to avoid such appeals to the "pleasure principle."

This analysis is correct but incomplete. From the musician's perspective, critisism of the lacking reference to familiar structures which are comprehended as musically meaningful can be further sharpened: a composition following rigid formal principles as, e.g., in serialism, does not have a musical syntax any more, it has a non-musical syntax. It shares only the sound aspect with music, but its syntax follows mathematical principles. (From an outside perspective, the widespread traditional morphology brought about by the use of traditional classical instruments has a comic effect at times). Therefore Neue Musik cannot be deciphered by the method normally used to comprehend music, which is, well, listening to music. Similiar to that many an exhibit of modern art is in truth superfluent because everything which can be comprehended can be read in the catalogue, Neue Musik is fun only if one reads along the partition, or even studies the partition in silence, supplemented with the composer's or an insider music critic's remarks.

This leads me to the second point I would like to make. It is the question what someone who writes Neue Musik intends to communicate (or rather someone who writes a felt paradigmatic Neue Musik; this genre is of course by no means homogeneous and includes many works and composers to which nothing of what I am writing here applies). If a composer decides to compose something in non-musical syntax, she could as well write an essay and attach the partition and her diverse calculations. This would be more to the point and much cheaper. Put differently: what is a typical work of Neue Musik about?

The focus on neuroscientific aspects of music reception distracts from another aspect which is not less important: at the same time, music is a cultural code. It is not a quasi levitating technique to stimulate the cerebral system of human beings as effectively as possible without any cultural reference. Music does that too in having a musical syntax rather than a non-musical. But music also means something. (I silently pass over the philosophical question of a semantics of music, i.e. how musical syntax can carry meaning in the first place). A choral by Bach invokes a historical period, a religious attitude, indeed a whole world outlook in the listener's mind which of course largely differs from what is conveyed by a Beach Boys song. Our precision in relating music to a historical period and a milieu proves the richness of meaning music is capable of conveying - in musical syntax, nota bene. Musical syntax and, technically speaking, its neuronal correlates is the enabling condition for comprehensive music, but the effective stimulation of certain brain areas is not sufficient for meaningful music (see however NeuroPop). This makes the neurocientific investigation into music enormously complicated.

Nevertheless I believe that the unpopularity of Neue Musik is not only due to its neurological dysfunctionality. When we listen to something which is presented to us as music we apply musical patterns of interpretation even if the composition does not feature these, or if the composer was at pains to avoid musical syntax. At best this yields a music which, sometimes to the composer's dismay, perfectly fits horror movies, say. At worst we read a world outlook into the sounds which resembles the composer's outlook to a surprising extent. If I have not been polemic up to this point, now here it is: the world outlook which seems to be encoded in many works of Neue Musik is sectarian, presumptous, constructed - and above all anti-pleasure by purpose. Why should we do something like this to ourselves?

Book Review: Edgar Istel - The Art Of Writing Opera Librettos: Practical Suggestions (1922)

2009-09-12T02:51:00.001-07:00

Not that I have been researching weeks and weeks, but until today (since 1922) there is no other book on exactly this topic - opera librettos. Moreover the German original is not available, not even antiquarian, from which this Dr. Thomas Baker has translated it. Odd. Without wanting to rain on Amazon's parade (hardback / paperback), the full text is available online and free over here.

In one word: the book is very, very good. Back in 1922, the intellectual's and artist's world was entirely all right in Germany, it has never been that way since. Istel's book is therefore moist with a spirit of brilliance, precision, self confidence - this man plays in a league which nowadays resides somewhere else, and also in other genres. Istel regards himself (and rightfully so) as member of a network of composers and other intellectuals/artists which show the world the ropes, at least in classical music. Gluck, Mozart, Wagner, this all is still almost presence, and Istel and his friends and colleagues know the problems involved in writing operas of such a weight first hand.

This can be seen, for instance, from the fact that Istel is at no point reluctant to tell what is working and what is not. Not a trace of weakspirited or relativistic-postmodern "do it this way, or do it that way, but in the end everybody has to find his own way". At the same time, of course, not schoolmasterly, there is always the awareness that it could nevertheless be done in a completely different way. Thus one is not too much disturbed by his exaggerated adulation of the grand masters.

I give just an example for his clear advice: more that four or at maximum five leading parts are too much for the listener, and the support parts may not be psychologically complex. Support parts are types, the act always the same, never surprising, and they do not develop. Period. Or an example for a rule how to avoid dramatically dysfunctional libretti: the plot must be intelligible without comprehending the lyrics, just visually. This means to write not only with the ears, but also with the eyes. This is helpful.

Leitmotifs in NOWHERENOW #2

2009-09-08T15:58:00.001-07:00

In the NOWHERENOW soundtrack not only the (but two) figures entertain a signature melody. Instead, I have attached motives to the figure's returning emotional states, central goals and character traits.

One of the professor's character traits remains musically uncommented, namely his queerness. The bizarre labatory of the mad professor is so unaquivocally visible that I didn't want to cap it all, and thereby reiterate the obvious.

The first leitmotif denotes the journalist's loneliness. The latter is not consciously felt by him initially, but the music is meant to conceive this view to the recipient. The motive is presented with the first fade-in in a straightforward manner:

+ The Journalist.mp3

The "loneliness motive" appears again in, e. g., Euphory, Triumph, Fight from bar 99 played by the Glockenspiel, where it contrasts the journalist's decision to support the professor by following him into the water in order to stop him. In the Final, bar 25 ff. or letter B, respectively, the process of insight of the journalist from his own failure to diving into the professor's phantastic vision is driven by this motive.

A necessary condition for being a leitmotif is its repeated appearance, in order to construe the reiteration of a thought. This condition is not quite met by the motive for the journalist's cynisism; it is a guitar lick consisting in no more than one repeated note emanating from his headphones:

+ Headphones Music.mp3

The "Where Do I Begin" of NOWHERENOW is played by four celli, put in 9/4 time signature, which is the motive for the professor's vision:

+ The Professor's Vision.mp3

This motive appears whenever the professor's eyes are shining. This is the case, e. g., when he explains the spaceship's function to the journalist, or (at double tempo) when he finds the spaceship's key after all, and performs a jig. In the Final the motive becomes the accompaniement for the "fantasy triumphs over cynicism"-melody, whereby we have reached the final leitmotif.

The ending of the film remains quite open. By contrast, the music unambigiously sounds like a professor who is hovering on air (Final, bar 42 or letter E ff., respectively):

+ Accomplished.mp3

In the middle of the film the professor already feels as if the start was a success. From bar 89 in the "Triumph March", the motive is (in slight modification, because of different harmonies) passed through the brass voices, subdivided into half bars.

What film music can do

2009-08-13T06:25:00.000-07:00

On this year's Summer Academy of Forum Scientiarum I have been presenting excerpts from the short film NOWHERENOW. The snippets were underlayed with different pieces of music in order to show how drastically perception of what is seen on screen can be influenced by it. This posting includes part of the workshop material.

To begin with, here's five different soundtracks for the first one and a half minutes of the film. As the snippets are meaningful in this blog posting only, they are password protected. The password for all videos simply is: blog.

The first example features the original soundtrack, on which I've been posting recently:

The illustration music beginning with the fade in is meant to introduce the journalist as a rather pitiful character, in spite of his arrogant appearance and his indifference towards the sublimeness of the sea (at first, he pees, then he puts up his headphones). The music on his mp3 player, in contrast, is no comment but what the guy on screen is in fact listening to: too complicated, cold, pretentious.

To approach the possibilities slowly, the second soundtrack is children's music (first from Die kleine Hexe, secondly from Pinocchio). Here, not more is to be shown than our inclination to accept even such a contrast.

The music establishes a children's film, and if we'd zap into something like that it would not occur to us that this is no children's film. Naturally, in the next scene a girl with a Pippi Longstocking outfit appears. We buy into the music even if the picture does not match.

The next music added turns the film into a whodunnit:

A suspense atmosphere with threateningly billowing surface and a Harmon mute trombone (from Früchte des Nichts) is anxiously asking which terrible thing is going to happen soon, and on the headphones there is a "battleground the morning after" music (aus Die Judith von Shimoda). Interestingly, the headphones music does not seem to be what the protagonist is in fact listening to, but one commenting on the horror of the oncoming deed from the audience's perspective. I would not be surprised if the man, a hitman rather than a journalist, would, after voicing "excuse me!" produce his automatic pistol.

The next music added is one more step into the same direction. Instead of a hitman we here might have a serial killer:

The sacral illustration music (from Novemberszenen) does not match the totally un-meditative scene, so that it thwarts the interpretation of what can be seen. The putatively reserved arrogance is then best reinterpreted into mania. Such a contrasting has been widely used since Hitchcock. Now, the headphones music seems more like his actual mp3 player: he stimulates himself. Instead of the clean pistol the professor is more likely to be assassinated with a more emotional thing, maybe a wire sling or an axe.

My favourite example is the following one (with a world hit by Burt Bacharach and a snippet taken from D'Angelo):

The illustration music is obviously not "into the scene" any more, but an explicit comment. The journalist all of a sudden is a likeable rascal dogged by bad luck. On his mp3 player he fancies music which is so cool as he wants to be.

Finally I have to offer three different music additions to an "action" scene from the same film. To begin with, there is a classical (Tchaikovsky symphony) dramatical music which has been heard like this thousands of times as accompany of action scenes since the times of silent picture:

Because important details of the scene do not yield action seriousness (the calm see, the professor's measured treads, the professor being an old fogey and not Bruce Willis - consider however the shaky hand camera and the 100% action compatible journalist), the music has an ironical impact. The sequence reminds me of a Monty Python film.

Conversely, it is easily possible to make the scene part of a comedy in spite of the fisticuffs, the hand camera and the drama on the journalist's face and in his acting. Here's the same sequence with Schützenfest from Die kleine Hexe:

To conclude, consider the same scene again, now with the jazz standard Unforgettable, sung by the unforgettable Nat "King" Cole:

Matching the winking Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head version of the beginning, we here have the jinx back again. To me this sequence is like from a Woody Allen film. Technically speaking, this music does not emphasise one of the visible aspects of the scene and makes forget the rest, but adopts a third attitude of its own.

Expert's positions on intellectual property and the future of music

2009-07-20T01:17:00.000-07:00

Some plain text by OLG Düsseldorf judge (in German, sorry):

Elektrischer Reporter – Thomas Hoeren: “Der Kampfbegriff Geistiges Eigentum ist falsch.”

Did I mention that my pityfulness with the music industrie has its limits...

Highly relevant: the Blog of David Kusek, one of the authors of The Future of Music, which is the standard treatment on the future of the music industry in the light of digitalisation and globalisation. The man is vice president of the Berklee School of music and co-developed the MIDI standard decades ago.

Thought from behind - the first minute in NOWHERENOW

2009-07-18T12:41:00.000-07:00

Well, the short film has already been presented to a conservatory audience last week... but for the final DVD and festival application version there will be additional brass recordings with Philipp Haagen. I affirm to uploading more music then! For now consider some text and a couple of sound bites around the beginning of the film.

NOWHERENOW begins with a fade-in of the journalist standing at the beach, somewhat lost, and relieving himself. He is looking for the professor whom he plans to interview. As he cannot locate him, tramping along the beach, he puts on the headphones of his mp3 player and listens to - well, he listens to what? He listens to some hard, analytic, urban, over-ambitioned, difficult music which is no fun but which he is anxious to like. That is, something like the music of Steve Coleman / M-Base ;-)

It would be a lost opportunity if the mood music for the first shot which is, volume-wise, below attention threshold and thus introducing the journalist as a loner on a subconscious level, and the loud and thus consciously perceived mp3 player music were unrelated and juxtaposed just like that. Could not these two pieces of music in fact be one and the same, only having totally different impacts when listened to individually?

Like this one: on Michael Brecker's disc "Now You See It, Now You Don't" there is a track named Escher, which, guess what, deals with Escher's picture puzzles. A triplet swing part (i.e. each quarter note is subdivided into a quarter triplet and an eighth triplet) is overlaid with a binary funk part which quarter notes correspond to the quarter triplets of the swing tempo (thus the swing is 33,33% slower than the funk). Those two grooves integrate to one song, with each meter.

The NOWHERENOW headphones music and the initial mood music can play simultaneously and melt down to an integrative piece although they are totally different, listened to individually. However, departing from Brecker, they both have the same meter. The Escher effect is instead accomplished by reinterpreting the harmonies of the journalist's mood music by different bass notes put forward in the headphones music. Here is the mood music:

+ The Journalist

The descant and a counter voice are performed by remote and heavily filtered solo celli which are, in their unsentimentally crotchety melancholy, inspired by Wayne Shorter's soprano saxophone play. Totally different: the poser music the journalist burdens himself with:

+ Headphones Music

In order to present the two pieces as non-accidentally belonging together I do not simply turn up the headphones music's volume. Rather, putting up the headphones exactly matches the first beat of the first bar of the form, and the subsequent cut exactly happens on the first beat of the ninth bar of the form. Hence the cut determines the duration of the eight bars. It follows that, given the 7/8 time signature of the music, the tempo of the song must be 111,7 BPM.

This is how both pieces sound together (you are in the journalist's shoes, that is, the headphones music is softly present with the headphones put down, but with headphones on the music is so dominant that background noise is completely masked):

+ Track 1

Just for fun, consider the headphones music with the synth solo I originally planned but which turned out to be to "fiddly" and, above all, in too good a temper. The guitar has no crunchy sound anymore accordingly. The track is longer; it lasts until the headphones are put down again:

+ Track 1 alt

(Drums: Christian Jung. All other instruments are played or programmed by me)

Music as a public good

2009-07-13T14:35:00.000-07:00

On the occasion of the reading of this newspaper article (Tagesspiegel - Die Ideen der anderen- in German, sorry) I finally awoke to that, concerning the question of copyright violating pirate copies of music in the internet I am on the side of the pirate party. This applies to peer-to-peer networks as well as the illegal up- and download of copyright protected material on YouTube, MySpace, last.fm, iLike and so on. As a musician, I am of course torn, because I am making money out of my work’s copyright. The GEMA beautifully collects royalties for my stage music, and if I were more active in the music business this could be similiar for radio plays, CD sales and concerts with original compositions.

1) Neither, so it seems, it is possible to cut off illegal use of music, nor an understanding that it is unlawful or even morally objectable can be generated, at least on the factual level. I only have to start with myself: of course I listen to whatever I find interesting, of course I watch videos on YouTube which impossibly are legal, of course I trade and copy without limits and concerns.

2) I am reluctant to regard the use of any available music without acquirement of a license as morally objectable. The only thing that bothers me is that copying music is illegal, i.e. that I infringe upon applicable law. Apart from that my intuition is that music, at least good music, should be listened to by as many people as possible, especially by low income people of all nations. Music belongs to everybody, just as knowledge belongs to everybody. I shall belabour this analogy for the rest of this posting.

3) As it is also argued in the article: the artists are by no means the main profiteers of copyright but the media industry. Even if many an artist has made a fortune by royalties, this is a minor point all in all - at least for the vast majority of artists who not (yet) dominate the charts or the like. My pity on the media industry is limited, in particular as the big players are responsible for how mainstream everything got. In the area of knowledge (the analogy!), the scientific journals are even the only ones who make money: the scientific author does not get any money for his text.

4) If the scientist does not make money from his copyright: how, after all, does he make a living, and what does this mean for musicians? The scientist, if he succeeded, has a position at a university or research instituion. Good and sufficiently many publications are a prerequisite for a successful application, so that his economic existence is very well due to the quality and quantity of his published texts. In most cases his salary is paid by the public authorities, which is justified by that his work as a scientist (and academic teacher, ok) benefits commonality. Expressed economically, the state’s funding corrects a market failure, namely that the free market does not produce enough knowledge, from the society level.

Now if the society needs more or better music, what I take for granted, and if the society does not accept that music (leave aside the happy winners of a place in the sun of a shrinking music industry) is produced in the leisure time by music school teachers, taxi drivers or freeloaders relying on their life partners or parents, there is the need to think about structures transferring money from the tax payer to musicians as effectively and as target-oriented as possible. Musicians would thus be put into the position to focus on their work without being forced to the choice of day job or precarity. Thus reimbursement of copyright would be substituted by a „culture flat rate“ with income tax progression (that is, justice) on the revenue side.

How could, on the distribution side, quality and quantity of the musical output could be guaranteed, how good is the university analogy? Grants? Who is in charge of the decision, who sits in the jury? Is this an idea: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_du_spectacle?

New ways of marketing music

2009-06-20T01:01:00.000-07:00

Here's a, to my lights, quite inspiring keynote by Mike Masnick at the Leadership Music Digital Summit in march 2009 about music marketing off copyright and author's societies, and indepentently from major record labels:

Leadership Music Digital Summit 2009 - Entire Mike Masnick keynote presentation, 3/25/09 from Leadership Music Digital Summit on Vimeo.

This makes one feel like giving it a try, what do you think?

Sibelius 6 Update #2

2009-06-16T13:48:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had not quite foreseen how drastic the Sibelius 6 update workflow enhancement is. That is, today I have combined embedding Sibelius’ audio output into Logic and using Logic’s software instruments in Sibelius via MIDI and the operation system’s IAC bus (howto). Thus, an instrument which is to remain a software instrument also in production (i.e. which is not recorded by microphone or through a guitar cable) can be played back with the very same sound including all effects and automations by Logic as well as by Sibelius. Composed passages are jotted down in and controlled by Sibelius, and improvisations or rubato passages can be input directly in Logic and edited there using the piano roll/matrix. Hence an arbitrarily fine-grained distribution of voices and passages to Sibelius and Logic is now possible; notation and recording can be combined wildly and in any sequence of production.

The screenshot shows an electric piano passage in Sibelius; from bar 6 it should be played freely on a certain harmony. In the Logic window top the first 6 bars are empty, then the chords recorded there follow. Both parts are played with Logic's EVP88 in one and the same slot.

Prior to the Sibelius update there was always the critical question when work leaves the composition environment Sibelius and migrates to the music production environment Logic. I have always postponed this step further and further to be able to continue to use Sibelius’ excellent visualisation of music and its composer friendly tools as long as possible.

The drawback that the music never sounds better than Sibelius’ MIDI sounds I have put up with gnashingly. Not only that demos and layouts tax the receivers fantasy all too much: which theater or film director is capable of imagining on a MIDI vocal track how this eventually sounds when recorded by a real singer? How many of my propositions have been rejected simply because the demo sounded just too bad.? Also, this has also taxed my own fantasie. How much more vividly one can imagine the effect of a string accompaniment if the real singer is audible!

After the migration to Logic the other way round: good-sounding software instruments, effects, automation, real vocals, strings, double bass etc. - and then a new cue, shorten, lengthen, alter. This is more nicely done in Sibelius which has, prior to the update, effectively been foreclosed by the tedious importing procedure.

Sibelius 6 Update #1

2009-06-15T01:02:00.000-07:00

The most recent update of the notation software Sibelius to version 6 yields, by integrating ReWire, a workflow enhancement I have been really waiting for. ReWire is, so to say, a virtual audio cable between two programs. The audio output of Sibelius is sent to a DAW (digital audio workstation) like Apple Logic. Thus I don’t have to save the notes written and more or less agreeably MIDI-listened to in Sibelius, import them into Logic and then supply them with Logic sounds, only to use this as playback for substituting one track after the other by recordings. Instead, Sibelius and Logic now playback in sync.

Thereby not only a tiresome and, regarding music, totally superfluent working step is now obsolete, but also its repetition in the case of an alteration of the notes. Until now one had the choice to apply changes directly to MIDI in Logic and repeat the same changes in Sibelius, or to make the change in Sibelius and repeat the save import process. Now, a „work in progress“ workflow is possible where notes are altered in Sibelius and audio material is edited in Logic constantly without the need to double-perform the respective steps.

What is still missing is the same channel-wise as audio or MIDI. This means, not only the sum of Sibelius’ audio signal reaches Logic, but rather every single instrument, be it as audio or as MIDI. The audio signals could then be edited track by track with Logic’s effects. But much more important, the channel-wise transmission of MIDI data would make it possible to provide each instrument with a Logic software instrument as if the MIDI data were from Logic itself. This is up to now only possible in a quite tedious manner with Apple OS X IAC busses. Were it possible by ReWire, then Sibelius could quasi be used as Logic’s score editor. The two of these programs then were an integrated workstation.

Jazz Standard Interpretation: A Philosophical Analysis

2009-05-26T06:23:00.000-07:00

This is what I am going to tell on the 30th of May as an introductory note to the discussion of Jerrold Levinson's paper Jazz Vocal Interpretation: A Philosophical Analysis. This is part of the workshop Aesthetics and Ethics in Music at the Department of Philosophy at Tübingen University, where Levinson (one of the world's leading philosophers of aesthetics who teaches at the University of Maryland) is discussing with Tübingen staff and students for three days. It is easily possible to comprehend my text without any knowledge of Levinson's paper. Since it is not published I do not put it online. But drop me an email (mail(at)fritzfeger.de), and I'll send you a copy!

Introduction

In order to fuel discussion I shall make two points against Levinson, one of them minor and a bit technical, and one contradicting his framework of philosophically assessing jazz vocal interpretation. I shall attack his claim that the parameters or dimensions of song interpretation are, first, what the interpretation conveys about the song, and, secondly, what the interpretation conveys about the performer's personality, or rather about his performing persona, i.e. the implicit fictional figure performing the song. Instead I shall spotlight another aspect: music, and thus song interpretation, is about the world.

What is the original version of a jazz standard?

Levinson's paper deals with the question of how to analyse the vocal interpretation of a jazz standard in aesthetical terms. In order to pin down the parameters or dimensions of jazz song interpretation he distinguishes an interpretation from what he calls the "original composition" or the "song as written or standardly taken". Leaving aside the special case of a homage or parody where (in most cases) another interpretation of the song serves as reference, the singer is, according to Levinson, "adding to, subtracting from, or altering in" the original song and thus creating an interpretation.

However obvious the idea of an original of a song, it is not straightforward to tell what the original of a song is. Think of the so called Historically Informed Performance movement in classical music where the idea is not only to recover old ways of interpreting classical compositions to make them sound just better. This movement is also called Authentic Performance which reveals that at the same time there is an ongoing dispute on which interpretation comes closest to the original composition.

But I would like to go one step further: the substance or essence of a song, that is its melody and chords, to keep it simple, is no original version. Not even the composer herself has the privilege to define the original version: if she puts her musical thoughts into sound, if she performs her own composition, she produces an interpretation. If you ask me if I know My One and Only Love it is of no significance if I have the Hartman/Coltrane version in mind or Doris Day or Sinatra or Nancy Wilson or Sting or Rickie Lee Jones, or the non-existent "original" performance of the composer/lyricist team, or if I have only read the Real Book chart. If I whistle the first two bars, however neglectfully, you know that I know this song. The song, at least this is true for jazz standards, is melody and chords stripped from any tempo, transposition, sound, phrasing, articulation or whatever interpreational means.

Now, what follows from this? At first, only a slight rearrangement of the conceptual framework. Instead of an original we have perhaps a canonical interpretation which might at the same time be the first one published and authorised by the composer, but this need not be the case. Most jazz musicians and jazz listeners do not know the "original" broadway musical versions of now jazz standards, and in many cases they do not miss much. In most cases the canonical interpretations of jazz standards which provide the reference for new interpretations are a handfull of recorded versions by jazz heroines and heroes from the thirties to the fifties. But it is perfectly possible and absolutely common that someone sings a remarkable interpretation of a jazz standard without ever having heard any other version of it before, just by reading the chart or by some band member teaching her the song by humming the melody and scribbling the lyrics down.

But this rearrangement is also linked to the other, more substantial point I am going to make, namely that an interpretation of a jazz standard, in the first place, does not convey something about the song nor something about the singer's personality. These aspects are derivative to the interpretation's genuinely being about the world.

Interpretation is not about a song, it's about the world

The question that is of most interest to Levinson is the following: "How can one distinguish between what a singer, in interpreting a given song, is conveying about the song, and what the singer is conveying about herself?" (p. 9). I am inclined to counter that the connaisseur, the collector, the musicologist and the eager musician might be interested in what is conveyed about the song, and that the singer's friends, family and fan club and lovers of celebrity culture or biographies of "interesting" people might be curious to find out something about the singer. But the listener who belongs to none of the above special interest groups is likely to find all this boring. She would probably like to hear something about the world, about life, about people, about herself. To be more specific, as the vast majority of jazz standards (and pop songs) lyrics is about matters of love, she would probably like to hear something about love, solitude, jealousy, lust, alienation, faith, conciliation and so on.

In contrast to a novel where, on hundreds of pages, a detailed picture of the surroundings, the protagonist's characters, the plot and so on is elaborated, song lyrics usually invoke a typical love scenario, say seeing someone for the first time and being electrified, or confessing one's love, or finding out that your lover is unfaithful or that it is over. Everyone has been in any of these situations, or at least longed for or feared of it, so that it is easy to empathise, to relate to own experiences or longings or fears. When a singer has "beliefs about the song" (p. 10), implying that she thinks that the song must be performed this way or that way, I figure this is because she thinks that it is the right way to express her view on the world, life, people, herself, and love, given the song.

Is a good song more than a vehicle to create such a scenario and its complex and yet focused emotional evaluation in the minds of the singer and the listeners by performing it? I don't think so. This is particularly plausible with jazz standards since the practice of producing ever more and more interpretations of the same canon of songs entails a selection process driven by the song's quality of giving rise to inspiring performances. That's why some songs have been recorded more than a thousand times and sold millions of times, whilst other songs from the same musicals or by the same songwriters are buried in oblivion.

Interpretation is not about a persona, it's about the world

It is less obvious that the listener might not be interested in the singer, or rather in the singer's performing persona. Of course it can be rewarding to gain insights into the thoughts and emotions of a charismatic personality. But is listening to a jazz singer another way to learn about and empathise with her, or her performance persona, just like watching her being interviewed on TV, like reading her biography, or like asking her personal questions after the show at the jazzclub bar? Even if a singer deliberately builds and explicitly relies on her persona for song interpretation I hold that this is more a means than an end in itself.

For the reception of the music as such, it does not make a difference whether the intoxicating interpretation of My One and Only Love I have just listened to on the radio turns out to be sung by a black drug addicted matron from Chicago South Side in the early sixties or only recently by a posh twentysomething from Norway educated at Hilversum conservatory. In fact, I've been wallowing in the poignant ballads of Little Jimmy Scott several times before I learned that this is no female voice but a man suffering from Kallman syndrome and thus being only five feet / 1,50 m tall and equipped with a pre-pubertal high voice. This knowledge certainly adds on to the overall impression from an interpretation, and as soon as something about the singer's personality is coming out it melts into the idea of the music. Yet, at least in my experience, this usually does not do too much to what a particular song interpretation means. In any case it is, in theorising about jazz vocal interpretation, possible to discriminate between what is conveyed by the music and what is conveyed by reference to the performance persona. With respect to the music itself, the singer's personality traits, appearance, voice etc. merely restrict the range of possible interpretations. Though not in a serious manner, as I shall now elaborate.

Certainly a performing persona, be it conscious or not, is an important element of artistic expression for a jazz singer, and a dimension of reception. If, as I have claimed above, the interpretation is about the world, life, people, love etc., this implies that something is conveyed about the singer's persona too -- but only through conveying something about the world. On the one hand, the performer's perspective on love, solitude, jealousy, and so on is an inextricable part of what the music conveys about the world. It is her view of things. This is why a good interpretation, i.e. an emotionally deep, insightful and truthful view of a typical scenario in matters of love, produces a feeling of authenticity in both the performer and the listener. On the other hand, the performer is of course free to pour his contingent mental states into the music. After all, the performer himself is also part of the world. But, at least to my lights, this is likely to be at the expense of the music's exemplary character, and that is at the expense of it's quality.

Evidence for this view is provided by the observation that it is not the most promising road to becoming a good singer to "search one's own voice", to try to match music and personality, to look inwards in order to find one's genuine self and then find or develop a style and song interpretations expressing one's genuine self. This is frustrating for the performer and wearisome for the audience. A good performer, so it seems to me, is more concerned about whether her musical output meets some imagination of "how it ought to sound". This genuinely musical ideal, as I would put it, is identical with a successful expression of the performer's view of a typical scenario (here: in matters of love). The music ought to sound exactly like how it feels to be loved or left or cheated at. The performance is the better the more musical mastership is incorporated in making the expression successful, and it is the better the more exemplary the expressed view is. Now this is why it is no serious a restriction to be, say, a middle aged slender white bourgeois from Germany with a clean, metallic bass bariton rather than a wild black hipster from Chicago South Side with a timbre between James Brown and Marvin Gaye. This definitely restricts the performing personae available to the singer. But it does not prevent him from developing an emotionally deep, insightful and truthful view, an exemplary view of any typical scenario, and it does not prevent him from acquiring the musical means which enable him to produce a successful expression of that view. There are so many ways to excellence.

Unlike e.g. the novel or representative painting which can contain very explicit references to things in the real world, music is more abstract by construction, as one might say. What music conveys about the world is more like a general emotional world outlook, the mood which a typical scenario puts me into. It conveys an exemplary way to feel about the world, about life, about people, about myself. In a song interpretation this is focused on a specific scenario by the lyrics. (The lyrics, of course, function at the same time as an artistic expression which is inextricably entagled with the music).

While up to here I have merely appealed to intuition, I shall now conclude by giving an argument for the view that the interpretation of a jazz standard, or rather music in general, is mainly conveying something about the world, and not about the performing persona or the composition. "Intrinsic musical thinking", as Jerrold Levinson has put it elsewhere, need not entail "any suggestion of recognizable extramusical action" (Musical Thinking, JMM 1, Fall 2003, 2.11.). Nevertheless, so he states in the same paper, "music is rather inextricably embedded in our form of life, a form of life that is, as it happens, essentially linguistic" (ibid, 2.4). It is a means of communication.

Granted that music is essentially linguistic: is it really the most obvious consequence that "one cannot fail to be struck by the mind manifested" (ibid, 2.12.) in a brilliant piece of music? The analogy to verbal communication points into a different direction. Verbal communication mainly serves the purpose to communicate about the world. It at least requires an extra argument to establish that each communicative act conveys something about the speaker. Yet even advocators of this claim would not credit the implicit manifestiation of the speaker's mind with general priority over the explicit predication about the world. Intrinsic musical thinking is explicitly about the world, and only implicitly about the composition and the performer's persona. Intrinsic musical thinking is about exemplary views of the world, life, people, myself. To say it with Jerrold Levinson's words about Stan Getz's famous solo on The Girl from Ipanema: "music that in the span of a mere 40 bars manages to suggest a whole way of being - for my part, I have often wished to live some of the time as that solo sounds."

Percussion for Orpheus and Eurydike

2009-03-16T16:05:00.000-07:00

The Orpheus und Eurydike project by Chronique de notre vie has been idle since 2006 - until last week! After years with the percussion of Philipp Haagen's (still unfinished) "chamber opera" being merely hinted at by undignified MIDI sounds, Philipp and I now recorded Stuttgart-based drummer Bernd Settelmeyer. See and hear how he drives himself to delirium:

Thus, the following pieces are done:

On Hirtenlied, a wealth of latin shakers can be heard, and Bernd is taking a solo with cymbals lying on the floor (if not done yet: look at the video embedded above). Moreover there is Caxici, Becken, Cajon und Dholak. Orpheus is now enriched by a log drum which reminds me on Tom Waits. On Lasciate ogni speranza, Bernd celebrates some marching band party using the bass drum and a crash cymbal, whilst Eurydike is performed with a soft cymbal and a snare drum played with bare hands. Oh yes, in addition Bernd excels on the waterphone; I definitely beg your pardon for we did not take any photographs of this bizarre entity producing even more bizarre sounds. It is a vessel half-filled with water an equipped with thick wire tentacles, engaged by a double bass bow.

There are some more pictures on Chronique de notre vie@MySpace/Fotos
With the old soundtrack, Chronique@MySpace still has the Eurydike video featuring Claudia Renner, directed by Volker Schmitt
Philipp Haagen's homepage
Bernd Settelmeyer's MySpace-page

Philipp Fritz

WDR Lokalzeit (German TV Broadcast)

2009-03-05T08:27:00.000-08:00

On Monday I got company by WDR (West German Broadcast). Kurt Gerland produces a small three and a half minute TV broadcast about music by me for the (German) Lokalzeit. They shot at the Hühnerstall (chicken shack; this is my little studio), outside and in my flat. There are some interview bites and five songs:

Die kleine Hexe Exposition from Die kleine Hexe
Piano Sonata 2 by Chronique de notre vie (comp.: Philipp Haagen)
This Guy's in Love With You from my old trio repertoire (comp.: Burt Bacharach)
Traum from sic
Mimi from Minna von Barnhelm

The song titles are linked to the audio section of my homepage. There you can listen to the tracks as .mp3 audio files. This is the team; you can see Kurt Gerland top left...

Trau is built from no more than four samples. We shot the production of the samples: a blown half-full beer bottle, the starting sound of a vacuum cleaner, a pattering shower and the squeak of the foot in a half-full bath tub. In interaction with the filmed computer monitor where you can see the arrangement in the audio software it is revealed how sample based electronic music can be made!

See it on TV at April 16, 2009 during Lokalzeit on WDR 3 at 7:30 p.m. or on April 17 at 10:00 a.m.

And here is the result:

Leitmotifs in NOWHERENOW #1

2009-02-22T07:37:00.000-08:00

For the music for NOWHERENOW (a film by Volker Schmitt, cf. also my previous posting) I would like to have a go at the construction principle 'leitmotif'. After Carl Maria von Weber, Beethoven, Berlioz and others, Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss, in particular, have gained complete mastery in the use of leitmotifs or 'musical refeferents'. An exceptionally enlightening example is Sergei Prokofiev's splendid Peter and the Wolve. Leitmotifs are also quite common in movie scores; among the most quoted examples is John William's Imperial March from Star Wars which is associated with Darth Vader. But even in a genre as much committed to the song form as pop music, leitmotifs can be heard, e. g. on concept albums like Genesis' double LP The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.

Leitmotifs are an attractive option for NOWHERENOW as the music will presumably play during the whole film (almost a quarter of an hour) without interruption. Fitting a song to each scene is thus not available. Lukas, the cynical, hip journalist gets a beatbox rhythm as leitmotif which recalls the Ibiza compatible lounge music he is likely to prefer. The manic professor is supplied with a complex network of strings reminiscent of Hindemith's, Bartók's, and other 20th century composer's string quartets. It will mirror his complicated calculations and his vintage metering devices.

Departing from Peter and the Wolve and most other musical instances, the NOWHERENOW music will not only provide figures with leitmotifs (especially as there are only two of them...), but also certain aspects of their personalities or certain emotions. For instance I am considering to coin a motive for the enthusiastic belief in the impossible (i. e. that in a moment a spaceship with a water drive will take off). It will be heard every time when the professor gets into his vision - and, at the end of the film, it will also touch Lukas when he is sitting in the sand and listens to the professor cheering the successful start at the can phone.

Leitmotifs cannot only help elaborating the 'psychograms' of the protagonists - Igor Stravinsky, following Wagner critic Eduard Hanslick, ridiculed leitmotifs as 'cloakroom numbers' of the figures, identifying them all too rigidly. They can also be used to retrace the evolution of the characters. This is the more manifoldly so with leitmotifs which are not attached to figures. Yet the do secude one to write a film music closely along the scene, an illustrative music without a message of its own by construction, contrasting what is seen. But this dose of Hollywood is allowed this time...

NOWHERENOW

2009-01-26T12:53:00.000-08:00

This week I am taking up work on a score for a short film by Volker Schmitt named NOWHERENOW. A scientist claims to have built a spaceship with a pure water drive. He is interviewed on the beach by a cool metropolitan journalist. Is the queer professor mad?

Emotional Landscapes? #2

2009-01-18T13:05:00.000-08:00

The second reason why I name the blog Emotional Landscapes consists in my notion of what music is. Musik, like all other forms of art, seem to me to be a picture of the world that depicts aspects of the world which cannot be captured by other means. An artistic picture differs from a scientific treatise or a newspaper article in that objective properties of the depicted and subjective evaluations merge in such a way that they are impossible to disentangle.

This view looks plausible in an obvious manner for representational painting or prose - but for music? What in the world should music depict? To me, it seems as if it is located at the abstract end of a scale reaching from "concrete" to "abstract". Even with explicitly representative music as, e. g., Richard Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel, it does not derogate regalement to be ignorant of the programme. Music effectively depicts the whole world.

If, therefore, the object is always the same, the focus lies entirely on perspective. Perspective in turn comprises the emotional attitudes towards the world, the listener's as well as the composer's / musician's / producer's. Music is about one's emotional grasp of a situation in life or a whole conception of life, where the possible experience is so much in the foreground that the "external" situation in or conception of life disappears behind the "internal" experience. Those landscapes painted with musical means are internal landscapes, emotional landscapes.

Emotional Landscapes? #1

2009-01-05T05:08:00.001-08:00

Why that title? My first answer is: Björk. In her song Jóga, which I find very inspiring, it goes:

You don't have to speak
I feel emotional landscapes
They puzzle me, confuse