Technology and Humanity(s)

A student walks into my office and begins her exam: "tap this rhythm while you count the meter, one, two three." She messes up in measure four; just can't keep the beat. "OK, try it again; notice that the third beat goes like this . . ." On to pitch: "use your tuning fork and find an E flat from A 440, then sing an E Flat Major scale." Again, some difficulty, another repetition, some improvement. (Finding E Flat Major from the pitch A can be difficult; give it a try). Each student who comes in for their exam has some special difficulty -- call it a disability. How do these encounters have anything to do with the humanities or with technology? In teaching basic musical skills, we are directly confronted with human capability. So much of our experience today is mediated through technology, but the technological aids do not remove the necessity of developing our individual abilities. I teach basic musical skills in addition to conducting choirs, teaching composition, and teaching electronic music. In all these endeavors, I'm struck by the fact that the spectacular development of technology necessitates not less, but more attention to our individual skills, our actual human embodiment. There are many technological aids for teaching musical skills, and I try to make use of as many as I can. For students who have trouble matching pitch, for instance, the "Magic Keyboard" app on the iPhone can show the students immediately what pitch they are singing, and can literally help them find their voice. --But the task of finding your voice remains, and it takes individual effort and attention. The technology doesn't take away the human need and desire for embodying music, for making music on our own. As I think about what it is that the study of music gives us, part of the answer seems to be this individual ownership, this personal involvement.

In the 20th century, a certain modernist trend in music presupposed that the human organism would develop in a way that paralleled the stunning progress in technology. We began to think that people would walk around humming 12-tone melodies because the human organism would somehow become more capable--just as the passenger jet replaced travel by ocean liner. It's a ludicrous thought when it is expressed so openly, but nonetheless it was an underlying assumption for many, many decades. The field of choral music, my field, definitively disproves this idea that human capability will develop in tandem with technology. Although a professional orchestra, with the technology, so to speak, of highly developed instruments, is capable of producing complex, rhythmically irregular, atonal music, choral singers, professionals or amateurs alike, relying solely on their bodies without technological assistance, have enormous difficulty in performing disjunct melodies that have a rapidly changing scale (or what some call a rapidly changing macroharmony). This inability is not due to any conservatism on the part of choral organizations, or a general lack of ambition (even if orchestral musicians may suspect that this is the case); it is surely part of an unchanging characteristic of our organism. Call it part of our humanity. So as a choral conductor, I am directly confronted with issues of humanity, of human limitations. The issue simply can't be avoided; sometimes it can be ameliorated, but it can never be sidestepped by technological development. We use technology in so many ways to enhance our art, but it is delusional to think that technology can transform human capability itself. This is one contribution among many offered by music-making (that is, not just passive listening, but the challenging endeavor of making music ourselves): it helps to develop individual agency; it helps to develop skills at a time when it is very likely that technological development, despite its great usefulness, can easily lead to an unfortunate decline in independent human capabilities.

Anything Can Happen

Next April, the Grinnell Singers will be presenting the world premiere of Mohammed Fairouz's commissioned work, "Anything Can Happen." Mohammed Fairouz is composing this work for choir and solo viola to be premiered by the Grinnell Singers, in a consortium with four other ensembles across the country: the Marsh Chapel Choir and the Back Bay Chorale in Boston (Scott Jarrett, conductor), Cantori New York (Mark Shapiro, conductor), and the Mid-Columbia Mastersingers in Washington (Justin Raffa, conductor). In coordination with this commission, Mr. Fairouz will travel to Grinnell for five days to meet with student composers and other groups prior to the premiere. It also appears likely that Fairouz will appear with the Grinnell Singers at several of their concerts on their tour of the southwestern US in March.

Mohammed Fairouz is a truly phenomenal, prolific, twenty-five-year old composer. He has already been commissioned by some of the country's premiere ensembles and performers. There's a lot to say about this project and about this remarkable young man, but for the purposes of this posting, I'd like to focus on the text that Fairouz has chosen for the commission. It further heightens the experience to have the opportunity to ponder the poetry before we begin work on Mohammed's music. Fairouz happens to be a family friend of the Nobel Laureate, Seamus Heaney, and he has chosen to set a set of three Heaney poems, which I will paste in below. (There is some likelihood that Heaney will be in attendance at the premiere). The first poem, "In Iowa," was written when Heaney was in Iowa for a poetry reading in the early 1990's. The last poem, "Anything Can Happen" is an adapted translation of an Ode by Horace. Although the Horace original was written centuries ago, it is remarkable how the Heaney translation seems to be eerily applicable to the tragedy of the Twin Tower attacks. I wouldn't want to speak for the composer, but in our conversations, Mohammed has communicated that he intends for the last movement to constitute the main thrust of the work. Mohammed experienced the trauma of the September 11 attacks firsthand as a teenager living in lower Manhattan. and that world-altering event profoundly influences his artistic work. I should add that Mohammed may be interpolating additional texts in Arabic and Hebrew between these three poems--the work is still germinating, and the entire text is not yet completely determined.

So as we look at this poetry prior to encountering the music, perhaps we can consider together: What themes link these three movements? What are some of the responses that you have to this poetry? What kind of music do you think this poetry might engender? I am eager to hear your thoughts. For myself, I find the selections in "Anything Can Happen" to be powerful in surprising ways. I was in Iowa in 2001, and I remember the clear, blue, jet-free sky. The purity of the sky was beautiful and alarming. I gather from these poems something like that alarming sky -- the sense of being situated in nature, but distanced from it and unconsoled by it, disturbed all the more by the knowledge that all is not right with the world or with myself. I sense a multiplicity of layers, the feeling that many stories are left untold, that the speaker is sometimes taking on a prophetic voice, sometimes confessional -- all the while remaining a real person living in today's world. At one moment it draws on biblical themes, at another it refers to geological time, or to the ancient world -- and all of these images are brought back to the moment that is as immediate as the beating of a windshield wiper, or the condensation on the inside of a jetliner window. It's hard-hitting poetry; it does not shrink back from difficulty or tragedy, and it does not offer easy consolation.

I. In Iowa

In Iowa once, among the Mennonites

In a slathering blizzard, conveyed all afternoon

Through sleet-glit pelting hard against the windscreen

And a wiper's strong absolving slumps and flits,

I saw, abandoned in the open gap

Of a field where wilted corn stalks flagged the snow,

A mowing machine. Snow brimmed its iron seat,

Heaped each spoked wheel with a thick white brow,

And took the shine off oil in the black-toothed gears.

Verily I came forth from that wilderness

As one unbaptized who had known darkness

At the third hour and the veil in tatters.

In Iowa once. In the slush and rush and hiss

Not of parted but as of rising waters.

II.Höfn

The three-tongued glacier has begun to melt.

What will we do, they ask, when boulder-milt

Comes wallowing across the delta flats

And the miles-deep shag ice makes its move?

I saw it, ridged and rock-set, from above,

Undead grey-gristed earth-pelt, aeon-scruff,

And feared its coldness that still seemed enough

To iceblock the plane window dimmed with breath,

Deepfreeze the seep of adamantine tilth

And every warm, mouthwatering word of mouth.

III Anything Can Happen

Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter

Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head

Before he hurls the lightning? Well just now

He galloped his thunder cart and his horses

Across a clear blue sky.. It shook the earth

and the clogged underearth, the River Styx,

the winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself.

Anything can happen, the tallest towers

Be overturned, those in high places daunted,

Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune

Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one,

Setting it down bleeding on the next.

Ground gives. The heaven's weight

Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle lid.

Capstones shift. Nothing resettles right.

Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away.

Here are a few web materials on Fairouz:

http://www.mohammedfairouz.com/

http://www.operatoday.com/content/2010/09/mohammed_fairou.php

Here's one that happens to be written by my daughter Helen Stuhr-Rommereim:

http://www.almasryalyoum.com/en/node/491681

(Helen is working in Cairo as a reporter for the English-language newspaper, Al-Masry Al-Youm)

About a minute into this one, there is a great interview about Mohammed's opera:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bfUzSGgc1w

Virtual Spem

News flash: we're going to create a Grinnell Alumni Virtual Choir performance of Tallis's 40-voice motet, Spem in alium. I'll be making a conductor's video, and we'll be using the one of the Grinnell Singers' performances as the master audio track. We will provide access to the scores, and develop instructions to enable singers to send in individual You Tube performances; eventually we will combine the videos to create the virtual choir. I hope to have the basic package put together soon.

On Gjeilo and Variation

The opening to "The Spheres" by Ola Gjeilo, slowly reveals a simple series of rich minor chords. Splitting the ensemble into two choirs, Gleilo overlaps the entrance of each chord with the next, which blurs the harmonies. The gentle, unaccented entrances discourage the perception of a sense of pulse, of groundedness, and encourage the sense that the vocal sounds are floating in space as the title suggests. The effect is rather like that of a written-in "reverb" -- or you might imagine that the composer is playing the choir like a piano with the sustain pedal held down. Only at the very end of the piece do we hear the opening material presented with a clear pulse, sung by the entire ensemble together, with a full sound, as if this ethereal music has now been brought down to earth, into the human realm.

The overall form that Gjeilo creates is something like a reverse variation: the varied form appears first, and only at the end do we hear the theme clearly stated. I've been meditating on how basic and powerful the idea of variation is. To vary something is to change it, but change is only part of what happens in variation. If something is to be varied there must be some element, some attribute that is kept the same. In defining that unchanging attribute we contribute toward a deeper understanding of the theme. Each variation retains some essential attribute of the theme and in holding up those attributes, we are creating a sort of wordless analysis of the theme. When we hear the fughetta of the tenth Goldberg variation, or the inverted canon in variation fifteen, we hear musical structures that are rich and complex in their own right; only on reflection and with careful study do we realize that they project some essential kernel of the aria, the theme. If there were no connection whatsoever we couldn't really say that the theme was being varied. If the connection were to be too obvious, we would fault the composer for lack of invention. In the case of the Goldberg Variations, the invention is so rich, the connections so subtle, the musical structures so complex, that it as if the theme is an opened door that can lead almost anywhere.

This is such an obvious, obvious, basic concept, and it may be ridiculous to point it out, but I'm fixated on it: Variation is everywhere in nature. All of life on earth uses the same genetic code. It is not possible for one life form to leap to an entirely new one without a connecting link. It may be possible to produce music that is entirely, radically, completely new, devoid of any reference to any previous form of expression or known sound structure -- but it would probably not be perceived as human music. Mere change (something new with nothing retained of the old) is exceedingly rare. Variation -- keeping the wings, feathers, eyes, basic body structure, but changing the beak -- keeping the harmonic pattern but changing the surface texture and the tempo -- keeping the descending bass line, but transforming almost every other feature of the theme and building entirely new, bewilderingly complex structures over it -- variation is the very nub of life and of art.

Jonathan Dove "Ah, Sunflower"

Here's the Blake Poem from Songs of Innocence and Experience that Jonathan Dove sets in the fifth movement of his choral cycle, The Passing of the Year:

Ah, Sun-flower! weary of time,

Who countest the steps of the Sun,

Seeking after that sweet golden clime

Where the traveller's journey is done:

Where the Youth pined away with desire,

And the pale virgin shrouded in snow

Arise from their graves, and aspire

where my Sun-flower wishes to go.

_______________________

I was curious about the poem, especially the reference to the "pale Virgin" and the "Youth" pining away with desire. With a little googling, I found the mythological story of Clytie, who was transformed into a sunflower after falling in love with the sun god, Apollo. Much of the imagery of Blake's poem refers to the Ovid story. Here's the story of Clytie from Ovid's Metamorphosis, translated by Lawrence Eusden:

Clytie was enamoured of Apollo, but unable to touch the heart of the deity, she pined away with grief, and was changed into a Helotrope, (or Sunflower,) which still turned its head towards the sun, in token of her love.

Now scornful Phoebus from fair Clytie flies,

Nor listens to the maiden's mournful sighs;

All day, all night, in trackless wilds alone

She pined, and taught the listening rocks her moan.

on the cold earth she lies, her bosom bare,

Loose her attire, dishevell'd is her hair.

Nine times the morn unbarr'd the gates of light,

As oft were spread the alternate shades of night;

So long no sustenance the mourner knew,

Unless she drank her tears or pearly dew.

She turn'd about, but rose not from the ground,

Turn'd to the sun still as he roll'd his round;

on his bright face hung her desiring eyes,

Till, fix'd to earth, she strove in vain to rise;

Her looks their paleness in a flower retain'd,

But here and there some purple streaks they gain'd.

Still the loved object the fond leaves pursue,

Still move their root the moving sun to view,

And in the Heliotrope the nymph is true.

Amusia and the composer

I just finished reading Oliver Sacks' 2007 book, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (New York: Knopf, 2007). It was one of those books that looked interesting when I bought it, but I forgot about it and left it on my shelf for three years unread. I'm glad I finally picked it up; there are so many ways in which this book can change our understanding of music's role in our lives. The subtitle is suggestive of the books' open-ended character; it is a loose collection of stories that reveal the connections between music and our functioning as human beings at all levels.

In one of these many stories, Sacks tells of a distinguished composer in his late sixties who developed a strange distortion in his hearing; he began to perceive the pitches in the upper octaves of the keyboard as being sharp by as much as a minor third (told in Chapter 10, "Pitch Imperfect: Cochlear Amusia"). He thought at first that his piano had been tuned wrong; when others checked the tuning, he was shocked to find that the problem was in his own perception of the pitch. The problem appeared to be caused by a distortion of the tiny inner hair cells that serve as auditory receptors. He had had some hearing loss in the higher frequencies, and the pitch range of his hearing loss roughly corresponded to the range of the distortion problem. I can't imagine how disturbing this would be to have your craft as a composer threatened in this way. He couldn't conduct his music because he was unsure if his perceptions of pitch were correct; he couldn't compose music that used the higher notes with any confidence. One overall theme that emerges in the book is a disturbing sense of the ways which our capabilities erode as we age. On the one hand, this story of the composer's hearing loss and distorted pitch perception reminds us of the fact that once our hearing is degraded, the physical structures are lost forever, and we can't regain them. Our hearing is a delicate thing, and we need to protect it. On the other hand, there is cause for hope in the flexibility of the mind, and in our ability to adapt and compensate for deficits we may have. The chapter has a remarkable happy ending, as we hear the composer relate how, through diligent, sustained effort, he was able to overcome this problem:

To my disbelief, . . . I started to notice, as I worked at the piano or synthesizer, that my amusia was ameliorating. Not consistently -- some days it was worse again, some days better -- some tonal areas better than others, then a different set of anomalies the next day, or even next moment! -- but generally improving. Sometimes I would check it first thing in the morning, and it was almost normal at first, but within a few seconds it would jump back to the aberrant norm. But then I would try to "correct" it with a effort of will and/or by playing the same note an octave or two lower to help bull it back in to accuracy, and I found I could do this more and more often. . . . This improvement seemed to start happening right after I was composing, producing, conducting, and trying to hear -- both in my inner and outer ears -- harmonically and texturally complex music with an extremely wide tonal range. Perhaps it was like doing extensive musico-neurological calisthenics, and I was gradually strengthening whatever mechanism of will exists in the old gray matter that can be focused on this problem. [1]

It seemed to be at least partly the composer's engagement with a rich sonic world, a world of "harmonically and texturally complex music with an extremely wide tonal range" that enabled him to compensate for his hearing loss, and to retune his ear. This story, and others like it, make me think more intentionally about how I am spending my time and expending my effort as a musician. What are my deficits and how can I overcome them? How we work, the sounds we seek out and surround ourselves with, our daily musical habits, all this certainly has an impact.

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[1] Quoted in Sacks, p. 141.