Ternary Patterns for Insomnia @ Tramway

I don't actually believe that applying the Bateson/Goffman parameters for play is an effective way to review an event. For that matter, I don't believe that Bateson's observations of otters at the zoo were of play in the first place. I think he was watching an educational process (the otters teaching other otters to fight, or at least rehearsing it -and with a pedagogical process that human teachers could well learn from).

But I am trying to get to grips with Goffman's idea of the frame (which I think is the way in which context is recognised by a performance). So buckle up, it's round two!

A great deal of repetitiveness occurs.

Throughout Ternary Patterns for Insomnia, certain musical forms are repeated throughout the Goldberg Variations (an arrangement for string ensemble provides the soundtrack to the dances). And there are repetitions of movements, some props are re-used, including a big tube and some rope. 

However, I can't accept this as a frame for play, performance or pedagogy. It might have been different in Bateson's day, but life is pretty repetitious these days...


When more than one participant is to be involved, all must be freely willing to play...

Again, I struggle with this... it needs so much clarification. I'm dumping it, calling bullshit. This is no help at all.

Frequent role switching occurs during play, resulting in a mixing up of the dominance order found among the players...

I'm cheating by ignoring a detail, but this does free me up to comment on Ternary. At various points in the production - notably during the Aria, the musicians dance about, taking on a new - and pretty often clearly unfamiliar role. There is even a dance solo by a viola player.

In that instance, a dominance order is broken. It's a relatively subtle order, but the viola tends to hold a supporting  position in an ensemble (not only and always, mind). But then there is another break, of the musician usually being defined by their instrument.

Throughout the evening, there is plenty of cavorting by the musicians - perhaps the dancers could have had a crack on the violins at some point. The contrast between the physicality of the dancers and musicians is very evident.

The play seems to be independent of any external needs of the participants, often continuing longer than would the actual behaviour it is patterned after.

Yeah, this is thin stuff now. Time for bed.  
  

Variatio 20. a 2 Clav.

Variatio 19. a 1 Clav.

Beethoven tells you what it's like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it's like to be human. Bach tells you what it's like to be the universe.
Douglas Adams (author)

Like almost all Baroque music it's all based on Dance rhythms - the cello suites and the suites in the partitas are filled with Gigues, Sarabandes and Allemandes which spring from dance modes of the time and beg to be danced to.
Mark Morris

Bach is Dance music - even in pieces like the preludes and fugues there are minuets, bourees, gigues, passepieds - all the dances are there, you just have to recognise them.
Angela Hewitt 

 

Variatio 7. a 1 ô vero 2 Clav. al tempo di Giga: Tipping Point @ Sonica

Will future generations mistake Kathy Hinde's Tipping Point for a religious ritual? Consisting of six pairs of glass vessels containing water, it generates sound from the rising and falling of the water in each vessel (using gravity and a mechanism that shifts water between each vessel in the pair).

 
Placed in a darkened room, during the long hours it stands as an installation, the mechanisms randomly adjust the water level: Hinde also performs on the machinery, demonstrating the tones and how they shift and twist. It produces a hushed, darkened atmosphere, an Orphic cave that encourages a reverential meditation on water. 
  

The variation is in 6/8 meter, suggesting several possible Baroque dances. In 1974, when scholars discovered Bach's own copy of the first printing of the Goldberg Variations, they noted that over this variation Bach had added the heading al tempo di Giga. 

But the implications of this discovery for modern performance have turned out to be less clear than was at first assumed. In his book The Keyboard Music of J. S. Bach ^[5] the scholar and keyboardist David Schulenberg notes that the discovery "surprised twentieth-century commentators who supposed gigues were always fast and fleeting." 

However, "despite the Italian terminology [giga], this is a [less fleet] French gigue." Indeed, he notes, the dotted rhythmic pattern of this variation (pictured) is very similar to that of the gigue from Bach's second French suite and the gigue of the French Overture. This kind of gigue is known as a "Canary", based on the rhythm of a dance which originated from the Canary islands.

 Bach rendered into Jazz evokes improvisation, technical virtuosity and style... does this come closer to the spirit of Goldberg Variatio 7 than any number of classical recordings? Certainly, this version brings me closer to restful ease than the challenge of listening to, say,  the Glen Gould recording. Nice.

A time signature of 
6/8 means count 6 eighth 
notes to each bar. This is 
also a very often
-used time signature. You 
would count the beat: 1, 2, 
3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 
3, 4, 5, 6, and so 
on…

Now you will wonder why can’t 
you just reduce 6/8 
to 3/4? After all,
they add up to the same 
amount. One reason you 
might pick one time signa
ture versus the other 
is how the music is 
organized. 6/8 is 
grouped into 2 groups
of 3 eighth notes. 3/4 
time would be grouped in
to 3 groups of 2 eighth
notes. Depending on the
structure of the bassline
or song, it may make sense 
to group it one way in
stead of the other. So
6/8 feels more like two:
3/4 feels more like three.

Variatio 19. a 1 Clav

Sir John arrives at better answers by closely scrutinising the work. He discovers a wealth of hitherto unseen invention and ingenuity. But in the end, he finds, it comes down to an act of faith. Other composers, among them Monteverdi, Beethoven and Mozart, have achieved greatness in various ways, “but it is Bach…who gives us the voice of God—in human form.”

This business about Bach's music expressing the voice of

God, or the divine structure of the Universe? I'm out. Much as I would love it to be true - imagine how cool it would be to hear God talk - the contemporary argument for such hyperbole comes mostly from the number of religious works he composed. This goes against Jamie James' assertion that the words don't matter that much - not the best source, I admit, but I can sing rude words over the top of Figaro without making it a celebration of playground humour. 

Okay, this is a rather lovely  transcription of The Goldbergs for guitar. Have a listen. As always, the aria is the best part, because once Bach gets to work, it's the usual busy baroque business. If this is God, sounds like the One Above All likes to gossip on the telephone.

Bach's status as a composer is largely the result of a hagiography written at the start of the Romantic era, and the subsequent enthusiasm for 'the genius'. Bach, who worked really hard (his job allowed him to slap out a new tune every week), became an archetype of the genius for a country (Germany) that liked genius. 

None of this really demeans Bach's actual compositions, but it has made approaching the Goldberg Variations a proper pain. Time to strip away the theology, and see what is left.


Time for another bit of YouTube Bach: a quick warning though. The video footage that accompanies this version of Variation 19 is.. well, I'd say its use is inappropriate and sexist. The p0em's worth a listen, though.

 

Variatio 29. a 1 ô vero 2 Clav

Jamie James' disappointing The Music of the Spheres seems to serve a dual purpose: a slightly more intelligent historical survey of an underground philosophy, and an explanation of why music these days isn't very good. Kicking off with a study of Pythagoras' fusion of mathematics and music, it postulates that before The Industrial Revolution/The Birth of Modern Science, music was composed as a reflection of divine mathematics. These mathematics, identified by Pythagoras and Plato, then recognised by a variety of familiar Dead White Males, including Bach and Newton, provide the structure of the Universe.

The Romantic movement, with its emphasis on 'the genius' ruined all of this, leaving contemporary classical composition obscure and overly-intellectual: he names Xenakis as a prime culprit. 

In spotting a paradigm shift between the music of Bach and Beethoven, James makes a fair case for a change in the function of composition. Bach, and even Mozart, held down jobs and churned out tunes for cash. Beethoven, Paganini and Liszt sold themselves as artists, and for the later, relied on their superstar status to pack out venues. 

Without examining the cultural and social shifts in any detail, James does describe the movement from the composer as employee to the composer as entrepreneur. That's worth noting, but his scholarship is frequently limited - for example, he recounts the myth about The Goldberg Variations having been named after a particular player. Even Wikipedia questions this. 

But the idea that the variations - alongside much of the music composed before those bloody Romantics ruined it - reflect a universal set of values - is common place.  James' problem is simple: although he rejects the idea of the 'romantic genius', preferring to create a mathematical harmony as the gold standard for composition, he plays into the idea of genius by ascribing hidden wisdom to Mozart, Kepler, Plato, Bach and the boys. 

Even before I get to the similarity of The Music of the Spheres to stupid hidden history books, James fails to rid himself of the taint that he claims is ruining music (his last words are 'how we long for silence.').

And the role call of Great Men will be very familiar to fans of the Masons. Hermes Trimegistus gets a shout out, so do Newton's alchemical writings, the scientists who defended heliocentricity (reflecting the barbaric authority of the church, natch).   

Variatio 22. a 1 Clav. alla breve: I get By With a Little Help From My Friends

From Will's website:

When I’m gone, if people talk about me at all, they will probably talk about the piano.

That’s probably because, more than anything else, I am a piano player. I cannot recall not being able to play the piano and cannot imagine what it must be like to not be able to play the piano.

I do remember that I have always enjoyed reading between the lines and changing things, adding notes, altering rhythms, disrupting melodies, mutating harmonies and generally getting muddled up. Latterly, I have learned to call this improvisation.

I am an improvising pianist by make-up. I religiously practice Bach fugues, Beethoven sonatas and Brahms intermezzi, not with the intention of performing these great works (I simply don’t have the discipline to attempt this), but rather to feed a never-ending quest for musical vocabulary and depth in my own inventions.

My melting pot is brimming over with influence from Fats Waller stride, Sousa marches, Victorian parlour tunes, the Great American songbook, Gilbert and Sullivan, Methodist hymns, Beatles’ songs and so on.

I am not a jazz pianist; not by its contemporary definition anyway. Still, I do tell people I am a jazz pianist. Firstly I do this because I need to tell them something and secondly, because it hopefully gets up the nose of the jazz fraternity with their intellectualised, exclusive approach.

I enjoy words, and stories, and characters. I am drawn to the absurd and ridiculous. I respond to colossal upheaval with dismissive ease and react to the tiniest issues with incandescent rage. My storytelling, my verse, my shows and my blogs most likely reflect this.

Variatio 30. a 1 Clav. Quodlibet Pissed Up or Pissed Off

Jeremy Denk has a word....

Varario 25 a 2 Clav; Donne and Dusted

Variatio 2. a 1 Clav: Like Dancing Around Architecture...

Variatio 1. a 1 Clav: Take That and Party

Cut it out, Johann, I'm trying to be a tragic romantic poet over here. I liked it in the Aria, when it was all slow and sorry, like a voice gasping for breath before speaking softly. And now this: a jolly little tune that marches up and down the keyboard. 

There's a guy in the studio next door who is either rehearsing a gritty Glaswegian drama or having a serious row with the voices inside his head. I'm nursing a hangover (not so much from alcohol but at the shame of not getting into the Art School), and he keeps shouting at someone to fuck off. Meanwhile, Varatio 1 is rolling over and over like a clockwork machine. 

Apparently the player does cross-over hands and everything, like Liberace or Bobby Crush. According to Wikipedia, some critic says its a polonise, a dance which now gets illustrated with pictures of old people doing a conga line. And, yeah, it's got that forced jollity about it.

If you put it on repeat, it slowly drives you insane. After the restraint of the Aria, it's like opening a window and looking out to see thousands of cartoon characters performing task-based choreography. 

Here's a version on the harpsichord, which really gets that mechanical pulse... although the visuals could be a little migraine inducing.

Aria: Can Music Save My Mortal Soul?

When I am not behaving like a character from a Tom Wait's song, I'll run towards the past in vague hope of finding succour for my battered heart. The alternative is shaping my life as a bitter anecdote, which is funny for about as long as it takes to listen to the Aria  from the Goldberg Variations.

Funnily enough, my anecdotes usually go through thirty versions until returning to their original form (only now imbued with the soul-crushing misery of a mind that has been trying to use words to disguise a clear repeated motif of melancholic despair). And that is just like the Goldbergs. I am the J.S. Bach of romantic failure.

I associate Bach with the baroque - a twiddly, over-ornate and under-emotional era of music, in my dumb précis of the eighteenth century  - but The Goldberg Variations are more sly and tentative. The theme - an aria,  but without singing, just a solo keyboard - echoes the melancholy of the great miserabilists (Dowland, Children of God era SWANS), with the distinctive trills hesitant, and the melody picked up over a steady bass. 

In former Olympic weight-lifter Kimiko Douglass-Ishizaka's interpretation (the one that is free on-line), it is as if the melody is being pushed reluctantly onwards by the almost aggressive bass.

Apparently, it is all about the bass: it's based on the sarabande, a dance that was banned in Spain and was popularised by dancing ladies with castanets. Check out this filth...

What's all this about Goldberg, anyway?