Friday 28 August 2009

From Occult to Mimesis

In Doctor Faustus (1947), Thomas Mann (1875-1955) suggests that perhaps music is not meant to be heard, but to be contemplated. What he has in mind is a musician's pleasure of beholding a score, on which there lies a matrix of mathematical signs that can be translated into a sweeping sensation, a cosmic time capsule in which one escapes the chronometric predictability of our factive universe--a possibility that has yet to be realised.

I had a distaste (or perhaps put psychologically, phobia) for writing orchestral music until recently. I must confess that there is something magical to see the score unfold like a fabric that is woven out of many organic layers that have gone through the process of imperfections, anticipations, and reconfigurations. The greatest joy for me, as always, is to contemplate the various ways contrapuntal relationships fall into a certain harmonic structure. Whenever it happens, it always means that there is a mathematical principle that somehow remains constant in every inversion, retrograde, permutation, and transposition. I am not a serialist, and perhaps because of that, the moment I found myself moving into a realm in which that certain principle is found, I am always moved by this somewhat occult quality of the art of composition.

Because of this occult quality, Mann wrote in his novel, through the voice of the "thing," that Mediaeval and Renaissance theologians had the most perverse idea of mobilising it to serve "God." Nevertheless, "perversion," in this sense, is best understood not as a form of deviation; rather, it is the site at which seemingly conflicting ideas are revealed to us as the core of the truth: What Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55) calls the Paradox that makes up every philosophical question, or in fact, every possibility that makes definite the form of being. In the case of music, the very Paradox is, precisely, the meeting point between what we perceive as rationality and irrationality; the vacation of this very tension is possibly where the "God" of Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) dwells.

About a month ago, I read a comment on my friend's article. In the comment, the reader rather hastily defines music as an organisation of time. For me, a composer does not organise time, she/he creates time, not the mundane and predictable chronos, but a time-image in which chronos is put into play, so that one may contemplate one's relationship with it. Put within the framework of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), in music, one becomes conscious of one's Profound Boredom, i.e. one's awareness of one's being in time. If we push it further with Giorgio Agamben's analysis in The Open (L'aperto, 2002), this moment of a human being's entering into consciousness of her/his relationship with time does not mark her/his difference from animal; rather, such moment opens up the paradoxical relationship between her/his state of boredom into which she/he is completely absorbed, and her/his consciousness of it that seems to stand "outside" this state of absorption, thus breaking down the distinction between human and animal.

Music, in the human imagination, is often associated with the end of time (the eskhaton). If music were to be an organisation of time, such association would certainly be inconsistent with the cessation of temporal perception (although in theory, such cessation is incapable of being sensed, thus we, by definition, will never know when time ceases). The only theological and philosophical explanation, in this light, is the idea that music creates a new "time," by which we no longer sense time the way we do. In this sense, we simply enjoy the pleasure of "being with" gods and animals as one.

In the end (or chronologically, in the "beginning"), perhaps Plato has not thought far enough, that music is, after all, about mimesis; it is an imitation of something that our eyes alone have yet learned to imitate.

Wednesday 19 August 2009

Simon Rattle's Beethoven


I must confess that I am very satisfied by Simon Rattle's 2003 recording of the complete Beethoven's symphonies. I find his interpretations have addressed some of the interpretative impasses from the past. Besides, the precision in time and dynamics of the orchestra literally produced harmonic phasing. Till now, I have not listened to a recording that has combined such mathematical precision with elegance and, frankly, cultural familiarity.

Some online users-commentators complained about the lack of warmth in these recordings, largely based on two counts: (1) Rattle's interpretation emulates the texture and techniques of the orchestra of Beethoven's time, with less vibratos, a thinner touch in the contact between the players and their instruments, a more subtle brass section, and a stronger emphasis on the woodwind; (2) the recording enhances these features by creating the impression of a more three-dimensional space; this is done by the engineers' strategically planting the microphones not necessarily close to every orchestral section, but at a distance that can convey the spatiality of the stage.

I was not a great supporter of playing music with the aim of emulating the performing style of its historical period. The idea of performing Renaissance and Baroque pieces, for example, with period instruments, was still not a popular practice when I studied at music school in the early 1990s. I once told a salesperson at the Virgin Megastore on Sunset that I did not care for period performances of Bach (and I still admire Glenn Gould, who, ironically, treats the piano as a giant harpsichord). Almost two decades later, however, we do know better, and we have better performers who understand how to control these instruments, as opposed to those performers in the early 90s who simply allowed the instruments to control them.

Having the performers controlling their instruments, however, brought about a different set of issues. For example, even though these instruments are not tuned according to equal temperament, their fingering inevitably conforms to our perception of tuning, thus instead of replicating a period performance, many of these recordings have made it easier for us to swallow what could have been considered as "out of tune" or "disorganised" modes of performance. Moreover, recording engineers, with the development of 125-bit technology (one that finally surpasses the faithfulness of analogue sound), have learned how to take advantage of the new dynamic and frequency ranges to create a more three-dimensional and stereophonic impression of space. The result is an emerging new aesthetics in recording spatiality, sectional balance, and timbre. As a consequence, orchestral sections are balanced not according to the way a 17th- or 18-th century Baron von XXX would have perceived the music in his private chamber, but how we expect it to sound in an acoustically well-tuned space. This new aesthetics is definitely not one that embraces warmth, but mathematical precision.

Rattle's performance is certainly driven by our new knowledge on period performances, the more controlled techniques of these performers, and together with new recording techniques (frankly, not so much technology, for, after all, our CD's still play back these recordings with good-old 16-bit decoding, the same that we used to listen to "Beat It" in the 80s). The most important thing, however, is a subtle change in our expectation that accompanies this epistemological and technical shift: we now expect recordings and performances to be cleaner, more precise, and more faithful to our historical knowledge (again, not necessarily historical "truth").

More important, however, is an ontological shift in our musical perception. The recordings of Karajan and Berstein, considered retrospectively, represent the grand finale of the trajectory of European Classicism and Romanticism, with their emphasis on unity, integrity, and expressivity. The recording technique of the time emphasises not spatiality, but perceptual unity. Engineers usually used the front-and-back or the side-by-side technique of two-channel microphone placement in order to capture a unified sonic image of the orchestra, and maintain a balanced "phantom centre" for the ears (i.e. one gets the impression that the sound is more or less coming from the centre). Up until the early 21st century, most self-proclaimed digital recordings were still made on analogue tapes with Dolby SR noise reduction. As a result, the timbre conforms to the performance with the engineers' intention to achieve warmth and perceptual oneness.

We are now, however, on the other side of the ontological scale. With our Web 2.0 informational and perceptual landscape, and more subtle philosophical shifts in our ways of perceiving the world (both intellectually and vernacularly, e.g. in photography, cinema, academia, literature, journalism, etc.), we are no longer used to that kind of integral monolithic perception. Rather, we are constantly aware of our relationships in space, and the multiplicity of our sensorial stimulants, and most important, the mobility of both our bodies and these stimulants. In this sense, Rattle's recordings can be understood as a response to, and a symptom of, our new mode of perception and ontological sense of being.

Listening to the mid string section of the orchestra swelling to the foreground in a way that a Karajan or Bernstein recording could have never done (an instantiation of our mobile ears), I must say that I can no longer be satisfied by being bound to an imaginary chair and listen to an essentially mono recording under the disguise of stereophonic sound.

Tuesday 18 August 2009

California Dream


My ontological principle in my iTune is, unfortunately, very conventional: alphabetical order. As a result, after a whole day of listening to Béla Bartók, I am now humming to the tunes of the Beach Boys while having a Heineken. Meanwhile, as Stella (Thelma Ritter) says in
Rear Window (1954), the summer thunderstorm in New York does nothing besides making the heat wet.

The Beach Boys always bring me to the PCH, with the ocean on my left, and an anticipation of an afternoon on "my" beach (no secret here, the private part of Point Dume Beach to be exact). I first listened to the Beach Boys with my mother, who usually played for me hours of American hit songs from the 1950s and 60s, though I did not start enjoying their songs until having read about Murakami Haruki's favourite character Watanabe (in his earlier novels), who always did his chores with the Beach Boys in the background. No one can possibly deny the power of their songs to summon the ideal image of Southern California, but a rather peculiar chicken-and-egg issue surfaces: Did the Beach Boys idealise Southern California?

Murakami's representation of the Beach Boys' California (often being compared with Wong Kar-wai's use of the song "California Dreamin'" in Chungking Express [1994]) is often considered as an example of how American idealisation of "itself" (or a piece of "itself"), once exported to a different cultural context, became a synecdoche of the version of freedom, beauty, youthfulness, and para-modernity (notice that the Beach Boys stand precisely at the threshold between the modern and the pre-modern) that the "nation" itself wishes to represent to the "outside world." The problem with this argument, besides the simplicity of its theory of a dominant power overdetermining the semiotic structure of its imagined other, lies in its presumed dichotomy between "America" and the "outside world," as though the US has never belonged to it (a takeoff on Haun Saussy's idea of "China" and the "World" here). Is the ideal image of Southern California so much bound by "national boundaries?"

Contextulised within its historical setting, the music of the Beach Boys can be considered as the last attempt of the LA music industry (in 1961) to offer clean, homey, and wholesome entertainment for the young generation. The idea of listening to these young men expressing their sexual desire under the blessing of their "parents" renewed the already broken connection between the older and the newer generations in American families in the 1950s in popular music and cinema (Elvis Presley, Rebel without a Cause, On the Waterfront, etc.). The Beach Boys tried to portray a Southern California as a home that was desirable to live, precisely in a decade in which neighbourhoods were torn down and freeways were constructed for the purpose of building a futuristic model city. This whole picture, if we study it more carefully, is one gigantic paradox, for not only that family relationship was seriously in question by 1961 in urban California, the state itself was considered as the epitome of such systemic collapse. The intended conservative agenda of Capitol Records was therefore quickly turned inside out, and the Beach Boys were also seen by Americans and non-Americans alike as the representatives of the carefree, discrete, new generation who celebrated sexual freedom and individualistic lifestyle in "liberal" California.

In this sense, it was not that California was indeed "free" (from the perspective of pre-Civil-War international law, maybe, but that would be a different discussion), nor did the Beach Boys idealise California; rather, a "California," detached from its geographical boundary, became an imagined free agent that acted as a cohesive force between conflicting notions of an ideal life: familial harmony versus individual freedom, celebration of sexuality versus cleanliness and health, nonconformism versus observation of social boundaries. The curious thing about all these contesting notions, however, is the imaginer's oblivion to political troubles. In other words, with the Beach Boys, the social body is tactfully detached from the political body, and are thus allowed to mediate these conflicting notions "outside" the political boundaries, in a world "outside" our physical world.

No one can possibly resist the very ideal of being carried away by a surf, against the sunset off a golden beach. Despite my abstract analysis here, those beautiful beaches indeed exist.