A Note on Moment Form

I have been playing and composing in moment form for almost forty years. Good heavens! That's longer than Mozart was alive. But it turns out that moment form is not so easy to understand for players or composers. Let's do a little history. Here is the definition from Wikipedia:

In music, moment form is defined as "a mosaic of moments", and, in turn, a moment is defined as a "self-contained (quasi-)independent section, set off from other sections by discontinuities."

Heh! Like the definition of "ontology" in philosophy, that confuses as much as it clarifies! Ontology: the study of being qua being. Heh, again. The Wikipedia article has some background, but it is still confusing. Let me give my take on the subject. The first moment form piece I played was, as I said the other day, Night Rain by Tony Genge. In this piece each player has several little "cells" or "moments" meaning little melodic fragments or phrases. How they come together is different with each performance and so there is no rhythmic co-ordination. However, the two players are listening to one another and shaping how they play and what moment they choose according to the context. The effect is of an open, floating kind of atmosphere. You can't get this effect by writing down notes in a row in a rhythmic pattern.

One piece by Stockhausen that I always found interesting is his Klavierstüke XI which is described as follows:

Klavierstück XI consists of 19 fragments spread over a single, large page. The performer may begin with any fragment, and continue to any other, proceeding through the labyrinth until a fragment has been reached for the third time, when the performance ends. Markings for tempo, dynamics, etc. at the end of each fragment are to be applied to the next fragment.

This is rather different from how his other moment form pieces are structured and also rather different from how Tony Genge's is structured and how mine are structured. What they all have in common are two fundamental things: there is no fixed linear "narrative" and the performance will be different on every occasion. For me, the appeal is that instead of marching through the piece in a measured way, the feeling is of being in a space where events are occurring in somewhat unpredictable ways. Why this is appropriate for my string quartet movement is that I am trying to re-create a specific, unusual atmosphere that I experienced in an Old Growth forest. You are surrounded by enormous trees, like being in a great, natural cathedral, and you hear various levels of sound: a very indefinite soughing of the wind in the trees, the occasional creaking of branches, an isolated bird song and so on. The light is subdued, like dusk, as the sun rarely breaks through to the forest floor.

I am structuring this movement in certain ways so it is largely free within organized boundaries. What I am trying to do is cultivate the right atmosphere but doing it within a harmonic structure.

I hope this helps a bit to understand what moment form is all about! Oh, one final thought. Moment form brings out an interesting ambiguity in the concept of musical notation. Notation in Western music got established when Guido de Arezzo came up with the idea of orienting the notes around a line that specified a pitch. This developed into the five-line staff we use today. The idea is that standard musical notation, sometimes called "vocal" notation, is a kind of transcription of what a performance will be. Oh, those are the notes they are playing! But there are other kinds of notation, particularly tabulature. This looks like vocal notation because it uses staff lines, but instead of dots there are numbers or letters. Tablature, used by the lute and guitar, shows you where to put your fingers, but it does not show what sound will result. So tablature is a set of instructions, not a transcription. Moment form notation, which looks like regular notation, is in a sort of grey zone: it is kind of a set of instructions to the players: you do this and you do this. But it does not show what the result will be. There cannot be a moment form "score."

Here is the aforementioned Klavierstüke XI by Stockhausen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxLMtP8ejKA

The Quartet Progresses

I need to get a good part of the new quartet to the performers sooner than I thought so I have been working daily and two movements are pretty much finished. A violinist and violist friend came over on Sunday and we went through the two movements in some detail. We fixed all sorts of little details that otherwise would have led to an embarrassing first rehearsal! For example, I tend to put phrase marks everywhere they seem relevant, but I learned yesterday that if you put phrase marks over passages in pizzicato for bowed instruments, they are likely to think you are an idiot and there will be titters. I didn't know that! I guess that the concepts of bowing and phrasing are very close for string players. As a guitarist, pretty much everything I play is pizzicato and phrase marks are normal for me. Interesting...

But I had a little win in another movement. The second movement, titled "Forest" (the quartet is inspired by the geographic beauty of the Vancouver/Vancouver Island region) is in moment form. This was invented by Karlheinz Stockhausen in the 1950s and taken up by many others since. My first encounter as a player was with a piece called Night Rain by Canadian composer Anthony Genge. It is a lovely piece for alto flute and guitar. The score has three pages, each divided into a top and bottom half and each page is a separate movement. The flute part is on the top and the guitar, the bottom. Each part consists of ten or fifteen "moments" or brief cells that may be played in any order. Some of the cells are rests. You play each moment once in any order. The trick is ending each movement roughly together as there are no musical signposts. We discovered, as we played the piece, that we quickly developed an intuitive sense of where we were and when we recorded it, we did so in one take. Here is our recording:

We always enjoyed playing that piece because it had a mood and atmosphere quite different from anything else. I wrote my first "moment" piece decades ago for guitar orchestra. It consisted of a kind of flow chart with the different moments in little boxes. Each row was numbered and lines showed where you could go next. What is not on the page is how I conducted the piece. I created the form during the performance by cuing certain players to, for example, return to the "snare drum" box on level one. Other performances could take a different course. So the score is like a box of materials to construct a performance. Here is page one of the score:

(Just a note to future scholars: my original name for this piece when I wrote it around 1978 was Forms. When the Swedish publisher Guitarissimo issued it in a collection with two other pieces of mine for guitar orchestra I changed the title to Long Lines of Winter Light. That title I had, many years before, given to a piece for string quartet (not a regular string quartet, but one with mandolin, guitar, banjo and double bass or something like that!). That piece never got beyond a brief sketch, so I re-used the nifty title. Much later, as in just a few years ago, I revived that idea and put a great deal of time into a new version for violin, harpsichord, harp and guitar. That piece has never been performed.

Here is a recording, with ten guitars, of the original piece under the title Long Lines of Winter Light:

One section of my new piece Dark Dream uses moment form. Each player has a number of moments, to be played in any order, but that whole section is then repeated. I haven't posted the recording of that piece yet, but I will.

The new quartet, adventurously titled String Quartet No. 2 as there was an earlier quartet, is in three movements. The first, titled "Mountain" is just a sketch so far. The second movement, "Forest" is in moment form, but I have organized it quite differently. The moments are in a fixed order and spiral out from the center to the periphery. Then the player returns to the center. However, the player can play each moment several times if so desired. There are four "signposts" which are four whole notes. The four instruments each have a different note and the four signposts together outline a chord progression. When a player reaches a signpost, he or she waits until all four performers are there, then they all continue. My violinist was extremely skeptical about this so I suggested we just play through it. We both arrived at the signposts at nearly the same time! Actually, the piece is designed so it is really not possible to have ensemble problems. In fact, I would prefer that the four instruments arrive at the chordal signposts at different times allowing the chord to "bloom." Here is what two of those parts look like:

Click to enlarge

I rather enjoy the ontological question of how many pages there are. This is the first page of the two pages this movement takes up in the score (which shows all the parts together). Now, of course it is not a normal score where the parts are aligned vertically. To the listener, this movement only has one page as all four parts are played simultaneously. However, when I print out the parts for each player, there will be four pages. So, how many pages are there? As I mentioned before, you start in the center, move along the spiral to the periphery and then return to the center.

There were some scores by George Crumb that used spirals back in the 60s, but apart from that I am pretty sure this is a fairly original idea.

The last movement is a hard-driving finale in 10/8.

Well, Bach...

I have posted a lot about Bach, of course, but there is always more to discover. Here is a clip about the canons in Bach's Goldberg Variations:

Why do I say there is always more to discover? Because even now, two hundred and sixty-nine years after his death, we are still stumbling across things he did that hadn't been noticed before. For example, in the clip David Louie points out that the theme to the Goldberg Variations is 32 measures long and this is reflected in the piece generally. Of course we have always known that each of the 30 variations uses the same bass line from the theme. But Louie points out that all the variations are either in triple (3) or duple (2) time. AND if you look at how many variations are in 3 and how many in 2, they turn out to be in a ratio of, yep, 3:2. If it were anyone else, you might just shrug it off to coincidence. Another example: I was at a talk on the Mass in B minor once and the scholar pointed out that there are exactly 2345 measures in the Mass AND that the Dona nobis pacem, the only music that is repeated and that also ends the work, the theme opens with the notes D E F# G, which, if you use fixed doh solfege, are the notes 2345. Again, if it were anyone else but Bach...

In 1974 Bach's own copy of the score of the Goldbergs turned up and lo and behold he jotted down fourteen more canons on the theme. As Wikipedia notes:

When Bach's personal copy of the printed edition of the "Goldberg Variations" (see above) was discovered in 1974, it was found to include an appendix in the form of fourteen canons built on the first eight bass notes from the aria. It is speculated that the number 14 refers to the ordinal values of the letters in the composer's name: B(2) + A(1) + C(3) + H(8) = 14.

I'm sure I have told this story before, but when I took the graduate seminar called "Fugue" I had something of an epiphany with Bach. First of all, the professor prefaced the course by saying that the entire content of the course would be on Bach and only Bach. Despite the fact that many composers wrote fugues and fugue-like pieces before Bach and an enormous number of composers have continued to do so since Bach (a short list: Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Saint-Saëns, Brahms, Bruckner, Bartók, Shostakovich, and so on), none of them were worth taking time away from Bach to cover. By the way, there are not and have never been any other musical forms or genres that have been dominated by one composer so completely as Bach dominates the fugue. All the other guys? Not even worth discussing. But what really made me fall off my chair was when I realized what he had done with the so-called "mirror" fugues (I wrote a post on them here). A pretty good composer can use what is known as invertible or double counterpoint, where one line can be transposed above another without causing any awkward bits. A really good composer can maybe do triple counterpoint which is the same thing with three voices. Bach could write a four-voice fugue that could be completely inverted and it would still work perfectly. As far as I know, no other composer even tried that.

Now in the Goldberg Variations, every third variation is a canon. Ok, cool. But remember, all these canons have to fit over that same 32 measure bass line. Oh, and each of those nine canons is at a different interval. No, you don't have to have the second voice start in the same place, it can be a second above, a third above, a fourth above, a fifth above and so on. Which is exactly what Bach does. For nine different intervals. Over the same bass line. Those of you who know a bit about music theory are now gibbering insanely, aren't you?

Watch the whole clip as it is interesting to see how Nahre Sol, composer, approaches Bach.

The Wit and Wisdom of Adam Neely

I put up a clip of Adam Neely the other day talking about tuning. But he has a whole bunch of clips out and some of them are very funny. Here is a favorite, about musical trainwrecks:

This reminds me of a couple of my trainwrecks, though mine were rather minor in comparison. I was accompanying a choir in a performance at church once. The choir had a fairly long section where they sang unaccompanied and then we ended together. Or sort of! Turns out this choir had an unfortunate tendency to sink in pitch if they were singing a capella. So when I came back in for the coda, it sounded as if I were about a semitone sharp! Agh! That horrible feeling of being appallingly out of tune even though you are not. But at least I didn't have to play uptown funk afterwards...

Here are a couple of other clips from Adam Neely:

(Caveat: there are some secrets to busking, as I discovered touring through Europe one summer, but none are revealed in this video.)

Hey, dude, that's nothing. When I was nineteen I played bass at a gig at an air force base with a soft rock/calypso group. On acid.

Friday Miscellanea

Here is a fun item explaining some curious things about the viola including why there are so many viola jokes: Why Is the Viola the Butt of So Many Jokes?

These jokes are nothing new, and so firmly cemented in many musical communities that the topic “Viola Jokes” earned its own Wikipedia page. Violist and Indiana University of Pennsylvania professor Carl Rahkonen’s article No Laughing Matter: The Viola Joke Cycle as Musicians' Folklore notes that while soprano jokes often play on the diva stereotype and conductor jokes poke fun at the maestro god complex, viola jokes mock trial (perceived) musical incompetence. Since effective humor hinges on the unexpected, Rahkonen argues that these jokes have ceased to be funny, and essentially serve to enforce a musical hierarchy, and violists are always at the bottom.

The article goes on to discuss the interesting history of the viola and some particularly nice repertoire.

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Looks like I might be in the Vancouver area next May as that is when we are planning to premiere my  new string quartet. It will be dedicated to the Pro Nova Ensemble who will give the first performances in North and West Vancouver. I will let you know the dates as soon as they are decided. I don’t know how many readers of the blog are in that general area, but whoever you are, I extend a general invitation to either or both of the concerts. There will probably be CDs available for purchase. If anyone is interested why don’t we schedule a meet-up? I’m sure there would be lots of suitable places!

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A whole bunch of posts over at Slipped Disc about the Tchaikovsky competition, but perhaps the most striking is the one about the concerto reversal. One stage of this grueling competition asks the pianists to play two big virtuoso concertos back to back. The Chinese contestant was expecting to play Tchaikovsky, then Rachmaninoff, but instead the order was reversed and announced, only in Russian. So when the orchestra began he was absolutely flummoxed. Here is the clip:

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Also at Slipped Disc an item about a last minute change of pianists:

Gabriela Montero had bought tickets to hear Martha and Maria Joao Pires play four-hand in Hamburg and had booked her flights from Barcelona. Last night at one in the morning, the phone rang. ‘Gabrielita,’ said Martha, ‘Pires has had to cancel on Wednesday night. Will you play the Schubert F Minor Fantasie with me? And could you do some improvisations?’.

Gabriela says: ‘So, that’s where I’ll be tonight. Not sitting in the audience, but sitting onstage next to my dear Martha bringing to life these gorgeous 20 minutes of other-worldly inspiration.'

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And again at Slipped Disc, notice that one of the Salzburg concerts that I have a ticket for that was to be conducted by Mariss Jansons will instead be conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Should be quite a treat as I have not heard him conduct. Jansons has cancelled all his engagements this summer due to illness.

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Canada has a new singing star. Jeremy Dutcher is an indigenous member of the Wolastoqiyik tribe from New Brunswick. Here is a story in the San Francisco Classical Voice:

Interviews with Jeremy Dutcher figure among the new demands on a Canadian First Nations (indigenous) singer-pianist who’s risen rapidly to international attention. The 28-year-old Toronto resident needs now and then to take a break from the clamor, to return to something like the pastoral pace of his raising in the Maritime province of New Brunswick, as a member of the Wolastoqiyik [pronounced Wuh-last-o-key-yik] tribe.

I first witnessed Dutcher a year ago, at the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal, performing on piano and singing in his tribe’s native Wolastoq language (the word denotes ‘the beautiful river’; renamed by the colonizers of New Brunswick as the St. John), in the basement of a church, a beautiful historical landmark. He hadn’t yet won Canada’s prestigious Polaris Prize, nor its Grammy-equivalent Juno Awards. Both of these wins would recognize his debut self-produced album, Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa, translated as Songs of the People of the Beautiful River, tracks from which were presented in Montreal and will be heard here this Saturday when Dutcher appears at 1 p.m. at the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival.

Dutcher incorporates in his live and recorded music an unusual and affecting act of legacy, playing transcribed wax recordings from 1911 by an early anthropologist of a tribal elder singing and speaking, and following the melodies with his own heldentenor voice and mellifluous keyboard compositions. The method and quality of his approach derive from his training, including classical voice with Marcia Swanston at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

That sounds fascinating! Let's have a listen. This is his performance of Sakomawit at this year's Juno awards (Canadian equivalent to the Grammys):

Ooph! Well, the costuming is certainly unusual. Was that a mesh t-shirt over short-shorts underneath the cape? Canada has been fetishizing their native peoples for decades now and this looks like the perfect fulfillment of that project done as a 70s rock ballad. And no, that's not a heldentenor voice, at least not one that would ever get a job singing Wagner.

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I have probably told the story of Artur Schnabel before. He was one of the greatest pianists of the first half of the 20th century, particularly known for his Beethoven. For many years he simply refused to record the Beethoven piano sonatas because of a fear that someone, someday would listen to the recording while eating a ham sandwich. Yes, by today's standards, just a tad elitist! I have similar feelings when I realize that if I issue a CD people might be listening to it on a laptop. Even worse, no-one listens to CDs anymore so it will be streamed over an iPhone and listened to via earbuds. Shudder! Here, via ShellyPalmer, is the story of how we got to where we are:

The world of recorded music was irrevocably changed in October 2001 when Apple introduced the iPod. While it is well remembered as a stepping stone to the greatest comeback in American corporate history, the iPod is less well remembered for dealing the final, almost fatal, blow to sonic quality.

The iPod came with the iconic white earbuds. The wired version was prominently featured in the equally iconic iBod campaign. As pretty and expensive ($29 if purchased separately) as earbuds were, the transducers (the little speakers in each ear) probably cost Apple 29 cents. I’m pretty sure Apple spent more on the packaging than it did on the hardware. To say that earbuds offered the least emotionally satisfying audio experience possible would be a compliment.

When you combine “lossy” compression with 29-cent earbuds, you get the world of recorded music as mass marketed by Steve Jobs. You also get the death of sonic quality. The funny thing is, nobody noticed.

Hey, I noticed! Read the whole thing.

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For our envoi today, let's pay some homage to the viola. This is Mozart's lovely duo concerto for violin, viola and orchestra, the Sinfonia Concertante. The soloists are Wolfram Brandi (violin) and Yulia Devneka (Viola) and the Staatskapelle Berlin is conducted by Daniel Barenboim:

The Universe of Music

I remember the exact moment when I decided not to switch my major from music to philosophy. This was when I was in my second year as an undergraduate at the University of Victoria. My first couple of undergraduate years at university were a wonderful time for me. It was the first time I had the opportunity to participate in the world of higher learning and I took to it like a duck to water. Apart from my course work in music, English, linguistics, German and philosophy I read an appalling amount: a multi-volume history of philosophy, Dante's Divine Comedy and a bunch of other stuff. I also was a voracious listener. Back then, pre-Internet, the only place you could find a really extensive collection of music to listen to was in a university listening library with their thousands of LPs of everything from Beethoven, to Javanese gamelan, to Machaut, to Stockhausen. It is hard for us to imagine now how limited the opportunities to hear music were before YouTube and iTunes and Spotify. If you wanted to hear, say, the Symphony No. 2 by Beethoven you had four choices:

• buy a recording
• wait for the local orchestra to program it
• read through the score yourself on piano
• take it out from the listening library

And if, as I did before attending university, you lived in a small town with no listening library--or orchestra!--and if you didn't happen to have the score, then you simply had to hope the local record store had a copy! So during my undergraduate years I took out several records every day from the listening library.

But back to my story: as I was saying, I remember the exact moment I decided to stick with music. I had taken a summer course in the philosophy department. It met every Friday afternoon for three hours, like a graduate seminar. The course was Philosophy of Mind, taught by the chair of the department. This was his specialty and it was a pretty high level course, 300 level as I recall. We started with readings in Descartes and moved on to Quine, Strawson and others in the British analytical tradition. Some of the things I learned stick with me to this day such as the concept of "category error" from Quine. But for the most part I felt lost at sea! The course was a huge challenge. There were only three students in the class and on one occasion both of the other ones didn't show up so I had to converse by myself with the professor for three hours. After that my head hurt! At the end of the course the professor gave me a little verbal evaluation, saying that he thought that I was sensitive to a number of the important distinctions. Sounds pretty half-hearted, or so I thought at the time! But it probably was not a bad comment. What was telling for me was that philosophy was utterly a thing of the mind or intellect. Even the professor's body language was indicative of this. He hardly seemed aware he had a body.

While I loved philosophy, it always seemed partial to me--just a slice of the universe. Music, on the other hand, was a whole universe in itself. There are the most abstract levels of pure thought in music theory, and at the same time, the most concrete and practical considerations in the playing of instruments. Your own body is an instrument if you are a singer. Well, that is also true of instrumentalists. Guitarists' fingertips are the source of sound for them as are the lips of trumpet players. The whole of your being goes into playing music and you are constantly dealing with bows, rosin, strings, fretboards, humidifiers, and on and on. Music history delves deep into the past while acoustics delves deep into science.

Music has a lot of eccentricities as well. For example, I just ran across this fascinating clip exploring whether A = 440 is wrong and it should be A = 432.

Of course the reasoning is flawed: we do not have a deep connection to the vibrational frequency of the universe! That's just a bit of scientific mumbo-jumbo. But tuning is one of those areas where obsessive eccentrics have been promulgating weird theories for the whole history of music. Incidentally, Adam Neely, who did the above clip, is a very clever fellow and in this clip explains how to tap 7 against 11:

One of those tuning eccentrics was the American composer Harry Partch who not only invented his own tuning system, but also all the instruments needed to use the system. Here is his Castor and Pollux:

New iPad Air

Looking around for a compositional tool, I vaguely recalled a commercial Esa-Pekka Salonen did for, of all things, the iPad. I also ran across a YouTube video demonstrating a lot of amazing things you can do in GarageBand on an iPad because of the touch screen. Glissandi, for example. I have a problem with glissandi. I use them a lot on string instruments (including guitar) but Finale, my notation program, really hates them. When I put in a glissando any one of the following might happen in the audio rendering:

• Nothing might happen—not only no glissando, but no sound whatsoever
• There might be a scale instead of a glissando
• There might be an actual glissando

And if I have glissandi in all four instruments at once (my string quartet) then I will get all of the above possibilities! In GarageBand you can easily do glissandi in string instruments. I am just getting started on using the program though. Apart from its complexity, the issue for me is that the program is designed to use in the composition of pop songs so there are a lot of built in defaults I have to figure out how to work around. For example, the program assumes you are going to be in a particular key (though there are some exotic scales available, for non-Western instruments at least).

One very intriguing area is percussion. There are a lot of interesting instruments available and I can’t wait to see what I can do with them. You can also record directly into the program so the possibilities are really enormous. GarageBand is kind of a smart synthesizer, recording studio, and digital production program. About the only thing it doesn’t do is notation and maybe I just haven’t found that section yet!

Anyway, I just got the iPad and have barely scratched the surface of GarageBand so we shall see. The  iPad, with an add-on keyboard also makes a nice, small laptop so I may take it with me the next time I travel and do my blogging on it. I am writing this post on it!

Before I was asked to write a string quartet, I was just about to write a piece for violin, guitar and percussion. Here is a piece by Lou Harrison for guitar and percussion that is nothing like what I have in mind.