ballet music

4dancers · May 17, 2013

by Allan Greene

Let me get this out right up front: if you go for Arvo Pärt, you’ll love the late works of Franz Liszt.

I’ve played and loved the late Liszt since I was kid. It was in the late Sixties on a trip into Manhattan to the old Schirmer’s that I found a newly published Schirmer number called The Late Liszt. I was thirteen or fourteen and I had been composing atonal music for a few years; but as a piano student, Liszt, the Romantic, was my god. After going to considerable trouble to master his Liebestraum No. 3, I was taken by surprise that late in his life Liszt had composed these spare, non-bravura morceaux. That some were nearly atonal, un-moored from traditional harmony, made me even gladder.

All these years I’ve accompanied dance I’ve used pieces from that collection in classes. I have never, with one unhappy exception (Sir Frederick Ashton’s Mayerling), seen choreography to this music. This volume held, and holds, such meaning for me, its contents might almost be my autobiography. I’ve been troubled me all these years that I haven’t seen great dances to this profound music.

And then, while researching a column on Arvo Pärt, who is wildly popular with choreographers, it hit me.

Late Liszt is late Pärt. I mean, really.

Do they have a spooky, supernatural, counter-intuitive relationship, filled with seemingly strange coincidences? Let’s see. Liszt was Hungarian, Pärt is Estonian. Their native tongues are both members of the the Finno-Ugric language group. Both had an affinity for the avant-garde from the very beginning. Both suffered mid-career life changes that sent them into a quasi-religious bout of self-examination.

Except for the “dark night of the soul” that each went through, the coincidences don’t prove much. Liszt was a very public figure who set the People Magazine standard for celebrity and scandale in his day; Pärt is a private person, thrust into the public eye by his success translating his privacy into music. He has a stable home-life and a happy family.

But it is extraordinarily interesting to me these two composers more than a century removed from one another cross paths at a very particular point in their artistic journeys, after having gone through depression and soul-searching. The fact that Pärt has become so popular among choreographers and Liszt is not tells me something is wrong.

I’m going to right that wrong.

Initially, I’d like to suggest that Pärt may have led us to the edge of an age of Radical Diatonicism, much as Liszt blazed a path to radical chromaticism 150 years ago.

Diatonic versus Chromatic

It is a bit easier to follow my thesis if we understand the historic relationship between the diatonic (white-key) scale and the chromatic (all the keys on the piano) scale.

The diatonic scale held absolute power in Western music at least as far back as the 12^th Century, when the earliest surviving notated music, that of the monk Perotin, was composed. Music was organized around seven tones, what we today call A, B, C, D, E, F and G. Music was characterized based on which of those seven tones dominated the melody. Depending on which tone it was, the music had a certain sound, called a mode (modus). What we today call a major scale was called the Lydian Mode. What we today call the minor scale (or natural minor scale) was called the Hypodorian (or Aeolian) Mode. There were eight modes, the most dissonant being the Phrygian and Hypophrygian or Lochrian.

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4dancers · February 17, 2013

by Allan Greene

(If you haven’t read Part I of this two-part series, please start here)

The case of Scott Flansburg

Having improvised fugues and constructed them on paper piece by piece, I have a pretty good sense of what mental operations are required to make one. It’s not a knee-jerk assumption to assert that arithmetic operations are central to assembling a fugue. The first voice “sings” the motif for x number of bars, the second voice enters with the motif for x + (x ± 1)bars at the interval of a perfect fifth, then the third voice repeats the entrance of the first voice, an octave lower; in the meantime, the other voices are doing separate melodic figurations which are in harmony with each other and the third voice… and this is just the beginning (of a three-voice fugue). Some restatements of the motif are of a duration of x/2 or 2x; some passages have voices in parallel at the interval of a major third or a major sixth; some passages have voices moving in contrary motion (Voice 1 moves +1, +2, +3, -3, -4, +1, while Voice 2 moves -1, -2, -3, +3, +4, -1). You get the idea… a lot of arithmetic.

music notes 2 — Illustration 2: What contrary motion looks and sounds like. Note that the motif is in the soprano voice.

So the areas of the brain that are involved in addition and subtraction are engaged in the creation of fugues. My conjecture, building on Ramachandran, is that some neural wiring is shared by arithmetic-processing areas and music-processing areas of the brain. So I went in search of Brodmann areas identified with the two.

According to the Wikipedia, “Together with left-hemisphere B[rodmann]A [rea]45, the left hemisphere BA 44 comprises Broca’s area a region involved in semantic tasks. Some data suggest that BA44 is more involved in phonological and syntactic processing. Some recent findings also suggest the implication of this region in music perception…”

the brain 2 — Illustration 4: Frontal view of the location of Brodmann Area 44

From The calculating brain: an fMRI study, a 2000 article in Neuropsychologia by T.C. Rickard, et al, of the Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego: “For the arithmetic relative to the other tasks, results for all eight subjects revealed bilateral activation in Brodmann’s area 44…Activation was stronger on the left for all subjects, but only at Brodmann’s area 44 and the parietal cortices. No activation was observed in the arithmetic task in several other areas previously implicated for arithmetic, including the angular and supramarginal gyri and the basal ganglia.” (My boldface in both quotes.)

So in most test subjects, music and math undergo processing in at least one shared area, possibly. But what about Bach’s instantaneous mental picture of the completed fugue?

A clue to the answer to that question is further down in the Wikipedia article. Under the rubric Trivia, we read: “Scott Flansburg of San Diego, California is a “human calculator” who can perform complex arithmetic in his head. Interestingly when his brain was scanned while doing complex calculations using fMRI; which was recorded for the show Stan Lee’s Superhumans; his brain activity in this region was absent. Instead he showed activity somewhat higher from area 44 and closer to the motor cortex.”

I looked at the clip on YouTube. Mr. Flansburg, a rather ordinary-looking middle-aged guy from Herkimer, New York who has the extraordinary ability to mentally calculate dates, arithmetic operations, square- and cube-roots, and who-knows-what-else faster than any computer, is tested while being recorded by an fMRI at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. The surprise in the results is that Mr. Flansburg barely uses Area 44 when doing his mental calculations. The imaging shows the brain activity during his calculations mostly in areas of visual processing, areas that are unique to human brains and have appeared very recently in the evolution of the human brain.

scan of brain — Illustration 5: fMRI image of Flansburg’s brain doing a calculation. Note how different the area of activity (in orange) is from the location of Brodmann Area 44 in the previous illustration.

Is it possible that the lightning speed of Scott Flansburg’s calculations and J.S. Bach’s fugue-composing related to the same brain activity as normal human visual object recognition? Is one aspect of musical genius caused by a rare variant in neural activity?

Modern Dance and Imitative Counterpoint

This was Louis Horst’s insight about composing dances: that since they are intimately entwined with music they should be constructed as music is constructed. This belief led inevitably to Bach. It is Bach, after all, whose 335 four-part hymn arrangements form the model for all the theory and all the rules for writing musical voicing. It is Bach who pretty much wrote the book on writing music in all tonalities (The Well-Tempered Clavier, Books I and II). It was Bach who invented the piano (keyboard) concerto (Brandenburg Concerto No. 5). It was Bach who in 1736 suggested improvements on the very new keyboard instrument called a piano e forte which set it on its course to take over all of Western music. Bach’s innovations could fill pages. Bach was, and is, considered by many to be the fountain from which all subsequent music sprang.

As such, many subsequent “rules” for how to write music are based on autopsies of Bach’s works. In a simplified way, Horst adapted these rules to dance movement. He called choreography “dance composition”. His results were remarkably successful. His Wikipedia listing gives an idea of his influence: “…Apart from being a personal friend and mentor to [Martha] Graham, Horst worked and wrote scores for many other choreographers, including: Ruth St. Denis, Ted Shawn, Helen Tamiris, Martha Hill, Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman, Agnes de Mille, Ruth Page, Michio Ito, Nina Fonaroff, Adolph Bolm, Harald Kreutzberg, Pearl Lang, Jean Erdman [and] Anna Sokolow, Horst’s assistant and demonstrator.”

Uncut Diamonds in the Scanner

Are there in the wide world of dance today current or future choreographers whose minds are wired in meaningfully different ways from those of the preponderance of their colleagues? Uncut diamonds who compose or will someday compose dances fully-formed in their heads, of such beauty as mathematical logic?

We should be on the lookout, brain scanners at the ready.

Contributor Allan Greene is a New York-based composer, pianist, teacher and musical director who has collaborated with dancers for 33 years. He has been Company Pianist with Dance Theatre of Harlem and Aterballetto (Italy).

He has worked with many distinguished teachers, beginning with Valentina Pereyeslava, Leon Danielian and Patricia Wilde at Ballet Theater School; Hanya Holm, Doris Humphrey, Janet Soares, Kazuko Hirabayashi and Hector Zaraspe at Juilliard; Alvin Ailey and Judith Jamieson; and Arthur Mitchell, Karel Shook, and Bill Griffith at Dance Theatre of Harlem. At Princeton University he worked with Ze’eva Cohen, Elizabeth Keen and Jim May. He worked with Merce Cunningham at his studio in Westbeth. At New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts he has collaborated with Gus Solomons, Jr., David Dorfman, Tere O’Connor, Joy Kellman, Jolinda Menendez, Liz Frankel, Cherilyn Lavignano, Jim Sutton and Jim Martins. At the Joffrey Ballet School he has played for Francesca Corkle, John Magnus, Eleanor D’Antuono, George de la Peña, Michael Blake, Mary Ford, Alexandre Proia, Diane Orio, Brian McSween, Davis Robertson. Then there’s John Butler, William Carter, Maurice Curry, Gabriela Darvash, Agnes de Mille, Robert Denvers, Tina Fehlandt, Eliot Feld, Frederic Franklin, Cindy Green, David Howard, Stephanie Marini, Mark Morris, Dennis Nahat, Patricia Neary, Irina Nijinskaya. Francis Petrelle, Christine Sarry, Victoria Simon, Paul Sutherland, Glen Tetley, Violette Verdy, Michael Vernon. There are many others, including many Russian names he transposes with one another. Dvoravenkos, Messerers, Jouravlevs, Koslovs; and Alexander Goudonov, and now I think I’ve spewed enough.

Mr. Greene holds degrees in music (B.A., Carleton College) and architecture (B.Arch., City College of New York). He worked as an architect briefly, from 1993-1996, specializing in computer-aided design and drawing. He studied and charetted at the Instituto Politecnico of the Universidad de la Habaña in Cuba. He was awarded fellowships for musical composition by the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, and the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. He holds a New York City #6 Boiler Operator’s License. He studied orchestral conducting at Mannes College of Music.

He has been Musical Director for several Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway productions, and has scored one film.

He has completely forgotten to mention his myriad musical compositions, many of which have been created for his wife, the violinist Juliana Boehm. Here are some of his funny titles: Talas (“rhythm” in Sanskrit), Uneasy Dream, Liebestod, Core Piece No. 1, ...awake, December, An Island in the Moon. Although there are a great many others, Mr. Greene prefers not to dwell in the past.

Mr. Greene is currently on the staffs of the Joffrey Ballet School, the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School at American Ballet Theater, The Juilliard School and NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. He is also working on a 24-year project, his sons Oliver, 9, and Ravi, 6.

In summary, Mr. Greene draws this life-lesson: Raising kids sucks up most of one’s available oxygen; fortunately, Art returns most of it.

Try www.balletclasstunes.com for your ballet and modern class music… download individual selections or complete classes directly to your mp3 player, smart phone or computer. Visa/MC/PayPal.

4dancers · February 16, 2013

by Allan Greene

Bach: Antipathy, Sympathy, Neuropathy

I recently was hired to play some classes at the Juilliard School. Even though I’ve been playing for dancers in New York City on and off for the last 34 years, I hadn’t really worked at Juilliard since my early days, the winter of 1980, when I was taken aboard to play Janet Soares’ dance composition classes.

Since the 2006-2009 expansion and renovation, Juilliard the physical plant has shed its insular, monastic feel and opened out to the world. It’s become a contemporary palace with a continuous view of its fiefdom, the collective components of Lincoln Center. Where in the past all you could see from inside was a bit of daylight from clerestory windows in each of the perimeter studios you now see the city and all its bustling creativity. This is important, because historically the inwardly-focused Juilliard (music) community had, intellectually and psychologically, largely lost touch with the world around it.

Back in 1980, I was exposed to the predominant choreography pedagogy of the time, which had sprung from Louis Horst, a dance accompanist, long-time companion of Martha Graham, and, for many decades, teacher of how to make dances at Juilliard. Mr. Horst taught that one could compose dances the same as one composes music, as an abstract language made of gestures manipulated in musical periods of time.

The style of musical composition that Mr. Horst’s approach most closely approximated was that of the Baroque contrapuntal masters, above all, Johann Sebastian Bach. This led to a lot of modern choreography set to imitative counterpoint, much of it very good. Horst had certainly discovered something.

As the accompanist to many of the new dances, I had to come up with a lot of Baroque material. Frequently, the length of the dances did not fit with any particular piece, and I had to improvise. I got pretty good at improvising in most Baroque forms, and especially in three- and four-part fugues. I never really thought that much about it, because I just sat down and did it. No big deal. Baroque music wasn’t all that interesting to me, and most of Bach’s music I found emotionally stunted. I really didn’t get what so many others seemed to get out of it.

A couple years ago, I was working with Alexandre Proia, the great New York City Ballet dancer and now teacher and choreographer. He had asked me to play from Bach’s Goldberg Variations so he could create material for a class. The exercise and the class went quite well, and afterward Mr. Proia was waxing eloquent about how wonderful Bach was. I confessed to him my feelings about Bach, and he gave me that “I can’t believe it” reaction I had seen so many times from Bach fans.

I decided then and there that I was going to find out what it was I wasn’t getting. I read a book of pop musicology about the Six Unaccompanied Cello Suites (The Cello Suites: J. S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece by Eric Siblin). I bought a big book (Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician) by the pre-eminent contemporary Bach scholar, Christoff Wolff, and read it slowly from cover to cover. I listened to many works he praised that I didn’t know or found uninteresting in the past. I started going over the Well-Tempered Clavier again, after ignoring it for three decades. I devoured a book written about the political and cultural context in which Bach composed his Musical Offering (An Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment by James R. Gaines). One anecdote in the Musical Offering book that stuck in my mind was this. Bach was apparently so adept at composing fugues that he could look at a few notes and plan in his head how the entire piece would turn out, in such detail that he could say at what measure what particular event would have to happen.

Bach wrote an astounding amount of music, made the more so because he had some pretty demanding day jobs (married twice, father of twenty children, Kapellmeister for a number of Thuringian courts, head of the music school at the Church of St. Thomas in Leipzig, regional publisher and distributor of his and other composer’s works, consultant on organ construction and repair). Hundreds of fugues poured out of him.

Constructing a fugue is not for amateurs. It has many working parts that simply must fit together, and the way the parts fit is dictated by the mathematics of the fugue melody and different for each fugue. I consider myself a pretty good fugue improviser, but to write fugues with the variety and perfection of form that Bach did is on another level altogether. Bach, I have come to believe, must have had something wrong with him.

The Neural Architecture of Creativity

I got interested in Bach’s brain. I knew a little about current models of how the brain works, and I thought I might be able to gain some insight into how Bach’s worked.

The human brain is rife with nerve cells, called neurons. A recent (2009) study calculated the possible average number of neurons in the human brain at 86 billion. The neurons are linked by pathways called axons, each of which ends in a little bundle called a synapse. The synapse at the end of the axon is an incredibly tiny distance from another synapse, connected to another axon and another neuron. Small amounts of electrical current pass through the neuron network by jumping across the gap from synapse to synapse. The network among the 86 billion neurons is, in the normal brain, complete, like a highway system with no dead ends (although plenty of lightly-traveled right-of-ways).

The modern science of neurology started in the years after the Civil War. The use of firearms resulted in numerous skull injuries, and there were many survivors who sustained less severe physical damage. Doctors observed that some of the wounded who had lost pieces of their brains were impacted in specific functions, and began mapping the affected areas of the brain. In the early years of the twentieth century, Korbinian Brodmann mapped the brain based on the locations of different kinds of cell structures, and correlated these areas to differing functions (hearing, body sensation, emotion, taste, memory, motor and vision). There are fifty-one of these “Brodmann areas”.

What’s interesting to me is how the neural network passes in and out of the Brodmann areas, enabling differing brain functions to “light up” in an infinite variety of sequences. This enables us to have complex thoughts and perceptions. (Allow me to be enormously simplistic for the sake of clarity.) Just as there is an infinite variety of individuals all called human beings, there is an infinite variety of ways that the neural system can grow inside the brain. From before birth, the neural system is growing. Neurons are connecting to other neurons in all sorts of sequences, in all sorts of areas. The neurons of the part of the brain that allow us to understand words develops prior to the area that enables us to speak words, and only after more than a year outside the womb do the neurons of the infant reach each other from both areas so that speech and understanding language can begin.

Now we can begin to talk about synesthesia. Synesthesia is a phenomenon that was first noted by Darwin’s cousin Sir Francis Galton, but until recently not been the subject of serious study. Synesthesia is the experiencing of two linked senses simultaneously and habitually. As an example (of grapheme→color synesthesia) there are many people who see numerals as specific colors, 7 as purple, 5 as a rust color, 2 as a throbbing white (I’m just assigning random values here, because each synesthete’s palette is different). There are people who hear specific tonalities (not pitches, but tonalities) as specific colors (known as sound→color synesthesia): c-sharp as blue, d-natural as yellow, and the like.

There are many categories of synesthesia: grapheme→color synesthesia, spatial sequence synesthesia, sound→color synesthesia, number form, ordinal linguistic personification and lexical→gustatory synesthesia. Those who have spatial sequence synesthesia see numbers as occupying specific locations in three-dimensional space. Ordinal linguistic personification is a condition in which an individual experiences actual personalities for ordered numbers, letters, days, and the like. (An example from Richard Cytowic’s 2002 study A Union of the Senses is a woman who says, “”I [is] a bit of a worrier at times, although easy-going; J [is] male; appearing jocular, but with strength of character; K [is] female; quiet, responsible….”)

What’s going on here, suggests the neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran, is that neural connections that run through adjacent functional areas of the brain, which are “trimmed” by the activation of certain genes in most people, are not trimmed in synesthetes. Instead of the normal separation of sound and color, for example, they remain neurologically linked, their connected synapses remaining active when most people’s don’t.

In my own experience, at the piano, I associate the feeling of different tonalities (what we usually refer to as “keys”, like C major or E-flat minor) with “personalities”. These are “personalities” not in the Jungian sense of highly-developed modes of thinking and behavior, but rather personages who embody a range of potential behaviors. As I play them, whether as an interpreter, improviser or composer, I am aware that I’m interacting with them as I would be with real people. When I start to play, I begin a “conversation” in which there’s a give-and-take between the piano keys, the particular tonality I’m in, and me. The fact that there’s an E-flat in the middle of the keyboard isn’t important in itself. If, however, I play a melody in which that black key, that E-flat, is central, then whether I’m in the tonality of E-flat major, which requires three black keys (E-flat, A-flat and B-flat) to play a diatonic scale (making the E-flat an important member of the family), or in the key of C major, which uses no black keys to play a diatonic scale (thus making the the E-flat an intruder), is a critical difference. And I’m in a constant mental dialogue with the keys and the tonalities as the music develops over time. I’m trying to shape a message, or a mood, or an experience, while the sound and the ivory are sending me suggestions as to how to proceed.

Improvising a fugue is another matter again, introducing several higher levels of complexity. First off, it is defined by a very particular beginning, middle and end. The beginning is defined by a melody (usually called a motif) that is sequentially repeated in all the musical lines (usually referred to as voices). Secondly, although harmonic modulation is typically one of the factors that gives a fugue its variety, the modulations as the voices enter in sequence in the beginning must be simple and fairly obvious. Anything too chromatic starts sounding like the middle, called the development section. The middle may introduce new melodies to create more variety. The motif may be played twice as slow or twice as fast, or even upside down or backwards, in the development section. The end section almost always features a device called a stretto, in which each voice performs the motif in a sort of one- or two-beat delay, creating something like an echo effect. The effect is more like everybody deciding to jump into the pool at almost the same time. It makes a big sonic splash, in other words. And the end almost always features broad final chords, called a perfect cadence, that telegraph the end of the piece to the listener.

Add these considerations to the relationship one already has with keys, harmonies and tonalities: one can start to appreciate the enormity of Bach’s astounding output. (And on top of all this, some scholars have detected coded messages in his motifs. What was he, the Mata Hari of Saxony?)

V.S, Ramachandran, the neurologist, has suggested that since synesthesia is many times more common in creative artists than in the general population that there is a link between the two. He hasn’t gone so far as to suggest that synesthesia is a pre-condition for artistic creativity, but you know that’s where he wants to go.

I would, on the other hand, say that in addition to synesthesia, there are many other “mutations” in the way the mind processes information that enable the kind of mental agility that results in, say, improvised fugues.

What really got me going on this jag was an account I read of Bach orally outlining how a given motif could be made into a three-part fugue. The incident, as described by James Gaines in An Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment (2006), concerned “Old Bach”, as he was called by his kids, sixty-two years old, brought to Berlin to meet the King of Prussia (and fellow composer) Frederick the Great. Bach’s second son, Carl Phillip Emanuel, was the court composer and the keyboard stylist in Frederick’s orchestra. Possibly to amuse themselves by making fun of the aesthetically old-fashioned J.S., C.P.E. and Frederick hustled the old man to the palace and thrust a weird, specially-composed motif at him and commanded that he improvise a three-voice fugue on it. Bach reportedly looked at it and described exactly how he was going to do it, including such improbable details as in which measures (he could say which by number) the various devices I described above as integral to fugal form would occur. Then he sat down and played it. (Bach apparently brooded about this incident afterward. Three weeks after returning home to Leipzig, he produced one of the great works of the eighteenth century, a compendium of eighteen fugues, sonatas and canons based on that weird motif, which he called, collectively, A Musical Offering. He bound the work in a gold-leaf volume and sent it off to Frederick, who never acknowledged it.)

Most composers have to sit down and methodically construct their fugues like a carpenter constructs a table. Apparently Bach did not have to do this. In fact, the evidence suggests that, similar to Mozart and Tchaikovsky, the music just “appeared” in his head, fully-formed. How could this be?

Check back tomorrow for part two of Opus 5…