Webern's Ricercar; Frankfurt Radio Symphony

Another lovely performance of Webern's Ricercar arrangement, by Antonello Manacorda with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony. By the way, you should all have the ability to post things on this blog - if you think there is something worth sharing with the rest of us, please go ahead!

Ricercar a 6, arranged by Webern

And here is Webern's famous arrangement of the Ricercar, with a wonderful score and analysis by Emusicarte España. The performance is by the late, great Pierre Boulez with orchestra. I think this is the kind of youtube project that, done right (like this one is), would be a really worthwhile final project (but watch out for copyright).

Ricercar a 6, arranged by Ensemble Sonnerie

Most of the ensembles performing the Musical Offering just play the 6-part Ricercar on harpsichord or organ. It took me a long time to figure out why - I think it's because most of these groups don't have 6 people! Ensemble Sonnerie is a happy exception, and it might be fun to listen to how they make their choices - not unlike the Igor Markevitch string arrangement of the opening Ricercar that we listened to in seminar today.

Assignment for February 5

We're going to keep diving into the Musical Offering (or "musical sacrifice"?).

3-part ricercar - Will
Canon perpetuus - Guilhermo
1. Canon cancrizans - Elisa
3. Per motum contrarium - John
4. Per augmentationem, contrario motu - Ralph
5. Fortuna Regis - Qi
Fuga Canonica in Epidiapente - Matt
Ricercar a 6 - Dakota
Quaerendo invenietis - Mike
Canon a 4 - Tori
Canon perpetuus - Steve

Maybe we can have our flutists, keyboardists and Guilhermo play through some of the Sonata sopr'il Soggetto Reale? Or that could wait til next time.

Please analyze the piece you've agreed to above; and if you are so inspired, go ahead and make an arrangement of it for the following instrumentation. Or, if you can find friends to come in and play, you can write for them too. I'll be posting some videos of arrangements, as well; the most famous is Webern's orchestral arrangement of the 6-part Ricercar.

Flute/Piccolo: Elisa, Tori, Kerrith
Tuba/Euphonium(?); Matt
Horn: Steve
Viola: Ralph (needs an instrument)
Cello: Guilhermo
Bass: Dakota
Piano: Qi, Will, Tori
Accordion: John

Finally - as we discussed, let's continue with Evening in the Palace of Reason; try to get through at least chapter 2. And if you're so inclined, please keep reading in Gödel, Escher, Bach. It's the kind of book that rewards random browsing, but it's also worth it to read straight through. Chapter 2 is easy enough to get the gist of the logic and philosophical systems he introduces later on; chapter 3 is a little harder, but my ears always perk up when he mentions music (like p. 70, "Figure and Ground in Music"). And the dialogues are almost always great - let's make sure to spend time with one or two of them next Friday. Have a great weekend!

Musical Offering - Jordi Savall

Bach, A Musical Offering

Course schedule

Week 1, January 22
(This schedule is tentative, and open to suggestions from everyone in the seminar)

• Intro to sonification
• Bach, The Musical Offering, and canons

Week 2, January 29

• Gaines on Bach, gematria and musical encryption
• Analyzing canons and fugues

Week 3, February 5

• Musical Offering concluded
• Art of the Fugue

Week 4, February 12

• Art of the Fugue concluded
• Hofstadter & representation

Week 5, February 19

• (ST out of town)

Week 6, February 26

• Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals
• Music and neuroscience
• Infant-directed speech, pet-directed speech

Week 7, March 4

• Mithen, Fitch on evolution
• Ligeti, Kubrick & 2001: A Space Odyssey (and film music in general)

Week 8, March 11

• Program music
• Hatten & topics
• Wagner & leitmotifs

Week 9, March 18

• Presentations on program music & musical representation

Spring Break

Week 10, April 1

• The Sonification Handbook

Week 11, April 8

• Tom Johnson, Looking at Numbers

Week 12, April 15

• Sonification & SuperCollider, other programs

Week 13, April 22

• Sonification & Max

Week 14, April 29

• Preparation for final presentation (or concert?)

Assignment for January 29

For next Friday, please go to the library and read Professor Nettl's definition of music in the 2001 edition of the New Grove. Also, please read the Introduction and "Three-Part Invention" from Hofstadter's Gödel Escher Bach; I have uploaded a scan of it here, but I think the book is excellent and well worth the cost. Also please pick up a copy of The Musical Offering and Art of the Fugue, and listen to the former; then finally, please start in on Evening at the Palace of Reason, which re-tells the same story as Hofstadter, but in a much darker light. Very interesting! Come to next Friday's session prepared to discuss the two readings.

Finally, I would like you to try composing a canon of your own; the subject can be either an existing or original melody, and you can write it in any style. We'll talk about how to go about doing this.

Course Syllabus

Fridays, 11:00 am - 1:50 pm
Music Building room 4033 (CAMIL computer lab)
- at 1 pm, we move downstairs to room 0360
Stephen Taylor, office MB 4030
office hours Thursdays 2:30 - 3:30 pm, and by appointment

Course Description

Music and representation, from Bach to sonification. 2 or 4 hours. The final project can be either a research paper or an original data sonification; if you take the course for 4 hours, I will ask you to do both.

Topics

1. The big picture: What is music? Why do we do it? Bruno Nettl has written perhaps the best definition of music, in the New Grove Dictionary (2001). In this seminar, I'm interested in how musicians use music to represent ideas: this ranges from program music (like Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony), to musical cryptograms (like Berg encoding the name of his lover into his opera Lulu), to data sonification. This brings up the relation of music to language (see below).
2. Bach's music and representation. Bach wrote what could be called "program music" or "tone painting," with vivid descriptions of the Crucifixion and other topics. He also used gematria, a kind of numerology, to encode messages and numbers into his music (some scholars have gone overboard with this). And he famously used his own name in his final, unfinished fugue from the Art of the Fugue. Analyzing Bach's music to see how he did this will give us some hands-on experience with one of the masters of these techniques. From a strictly musical point of view, I'm going to argue that Bach's canons are a special kind of musical encryption: an individual line encodes itself, at other points in musical space and time (not unlike DNA, actually). Bach's late masterworks, the Musical Offering and Art of the Fugue, are full of these ingenious canons.
3. The evolutionary origins of music and language. The first question, what is music, raises other questions: who do we make music? What is the difference between music and language? Is music the "language of emotion"? How can music represent extra-musical ideas, if it's just a series of abstract sounds? Current research into the evolution of both music and language provides some fascinating insight into these questions, and we will sample some of this rapidly developing research. A related topic is the philosophy of music and representation - this can get quite technical, but also worthwhile.
4. Sonification. In some ways, data sonification can be thought of as an updated version of program music, or maybe even better, musical encryption. We'll read The Sonification Handbook, to see what the current best practices are for sonification. One really interesting aspect, at least for me, is that sonification straddles the line between "music" and "sound design," as practiced in video games and film. This gets into electro-acoustic music, musique concrète, etc. etc.
5. Original contributions. My fondest hope for this semester is that we make a beginning towards a contribution to "program music" and sonification. I suspect that current research on music and evolution can give us ideas about Beethoven, Debussy, Xenakis, etc. etc. And for sonification, I'm getting some data sets from colleagues on campus for us to mess around with. We may do some work in SuperCollider and/or Max. It's still a developing field, and I think there are things we can do both in thinking about sonification, and it actually doing it. Also - and this is my own idiosyncratic idea - I've always been inspired by Bach's inscription at the end of his pieces, "Soli Deo Gloria." In other words, his music had a purpose beyond itself - as the American composer Tom Johnson says, it's about more than "autobiography". I'm trying to write pieces these days that have a purpose beyond the sound itself, a kind of double meaning (although really, at the end of the day, you could argue that there is no higher purpose than the sound itself, and listening, and playing). Anyway, this is the kind of stuff I'm wrestling with, and it's one of the reasons I wanted to try this seminar. It's definitely the kind of class where we are all exploring together.

Required texts

• J. S. Bach, The Art of the Fugue & A Musical Offering (Dover, 1992) ($14)
• James Gaines, Evening in the Palace of Reason (Harper, 2006) ($12)
• Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals (Harvard, 2007) ($21)
• (optional) Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Basic Books, 1999) ($17)
• The Sonification Handbook (free pdf)

(I think the library has an interesting Chinese translation of the Hofstadter.)

Grading

The grading will be based on discussions, presentations and the final project; there aren't any tests, since it's more of a discovery and exploration, rather than a mastery course. Although I may have us write some canons for practice.

Final project

The final project will be either a research paper (at least 2000 words), an original sonification project (for either electronics or live instruments), or both. If you are taking the seminar for four hours, I will require both.