Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet

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I almost couldn't get tickets for this Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet concert... The tickets sell out frustratingly early. All the retirees in the area buying up season tickets months in advance!

It was amusing to see the only gal in the group (may or may not be the youngest?) holding the biggest stick (i.e. bassoon). Their program was refreshing, spring-like, and most of all whimsical. Only musicians of their caliber can pull this off! I had a lot of fun visualizing dramatic scenarios during the pieces...

W. A. Mozart (1756-1791), Fantasy in F Minor for a Mechanical Organ, KV 608 (Arr. by Michael Hasel): Mozart being the timeless classic he is, I had no salient mental imagery other than the abstract notion of spring and joy. This seemed to be their warm-up piece, as I felt they were tweaking some intonation along the way. I know this because once the air inside the instrument gets cold, it takes a few minutes to warm it up and get the pitches right again! Mmm wave physics.

Kalevi Aho (b.1949), Kvintetto (2006): Wild safaris with cave spelunking, scuba diving, jungle trekking, and desert traversing. Along the way, the travelers encountered a pair of elephants lumbering in heat, a mixed chorus of howler monkeys and macaws, a near-death experience of almost crashing into a cliff in a propeller plane, and an explosive symphony of color-shifting corals, tropical fishes, and octopi. The last movement starts with the flute, oboe, and clarinet playing offstage, and then they come back. And then the French and bassoon leave and play offstage until the end. Curious stage effect.

Jacques Ibert (1890-1962), Trois Piecès Brèves (1930): A lovely garden in the height of spring with serene fountains, butterflies dancing among the flowers, birds chirping amidst the arboreal foliage, and squirrels darting around the branches and tree trunks in their vibrant acrobatics.

Darius Milhaud (1892-1974), La cheminée du roi René (1939): Young Franciscan monks hiking in an ancient and pristine forest, seeking enlightenment. Magical spirits visit them every once in a while to commune with the monks and make fun of how little they know about the wisdom of the forest.

Jean Françaix (1912-1997), Quintet No. 1 (1948): The Marauders (may or may not include Lily Evans) pulling a Ferris Bueller by ditching their Hogwarts classes for a day, solemnly swearing they're up to no good. They must be constantly looking out for people who might recognize them, but that doesn't stop them from going to a bar and drinking a bit more than they can handle. James and Lily (or Sirius and Remus or some combination thereof) danced around in awkward and silly moves, before Remus reminds everyone they must head back pronto or they would really be in trouble. The next day, while passing time during a boring class hungover, they're planning their next adventure.

The quintet did an encore of a folk song medley that included "Oh Susana" and "Yankee Doodle" among other tunes I couldn't immediately recall :-P I wonder if they have an encore book of folk tune arrangements from every country they've performed in?

I wanted to ask them if any of them can circular breathe, but sneaking backstage seemed to be tricky. Too bad!

Visitations: Theotokia and The War Reporter

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One of my recent conversations discussed the following proposition: when attending an avant-garde opera, instead of dressing up in the usual evening formal attire, one could don the hipster gear of thick-rimmed glasses, hoodie, brightly-colored pants, converse sneakers, and mismatched socks. I'm really milking my grad student status for all it's worth.

As quoted from the concert program:

Visitations presents a pair of tender and powerful dramas about individuals haunted by inner voices. The first, Theotokia, takes the audience inside the consciousness of a man who, beset by hallucinatory voices, is taunted and seduced by the mother of God. The work illuminates the experience of Leon, a schizophrenic who is possessed by ritualistic and religious hallucinatory delusions and suffers from obsessive, ritualistic behavior.  

The second opera of the set, The War Reporter, depicts the true story of the inner struggle of Paul Watson, a war reporter who believes he is being haunted by the spirit of the desecrated American soldier he photographed in the streets of Mogadishu in 1993 (a photograph that won Watson the Pulitzer Prize shortly thereafter). Although the libretto's narrative traverses six geographical locations, the actual drama is set entirely in the psyche of the reporter as he struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder. 

I was totally mesmerized by the juxtaposition of Gregorian chant (parallel fifths and octaves) with augmented/diminished fourth/fifths, major/minor seconds reminiscent of the soundtrack from North by Northwest and Inception. The St. Lawrence String Quartet really pulled out all the chords and shook them in pizzicatos. The texturing of various percussion instruments and the alto flute was particularly effective. Kudos to the composer and the entire "pit" orchestra! (There's no real pit on stage in this concert hall.)

The New York Polyphony gave a fantastic rendition of all the angst and nuances. The countertenor (who played Leon and one of Paul's inner voices) sang with the delicate tension of stretched pizza dough, constantly stringing my ears along with the anticipation of delicious harmonies and suspension chords. It was amazing how high his range can get! The baritone (as Paul) swept me away with all the power of crashing waves on a stormy shore. The soprano's singing (Theotokia: Mother Anne, Leon's mother, Yeti Mother; The War Reporter: Paul's boss, Paul's inner voice) soared like an albatross surfing in the mountain wind.

The set design once again evoked an abstract sense of unsettling, as per Rinde Eckert's signature in his works. The visualization in Theotokia reminded me of fertilized cells dividing...

... and ferrofluids morphing...

I also enjoyed how the vocalists took over the role of the stage crew, rearranging props while doing choreographed interpretive dance moves that illuminated plot elements. This aspect of the performance was implicit and understated, letting the audience make the conceptual leaps, a fresh contrast to the special effects overkill in contemporary cinema. :-P

At some point, I wondered about the anachronistic superstition that upon taking a shot, the camera would extract the subject's soul... or perhaps the photographer's?

Chronicling personal history via music playlists

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Listening to my playlists reminds me of of my personal Zeitgeist as I was compiling each playlist... I also strongly associate certain songs with specific moments in space-time.

Brain Pickings is the most intriguing and illuminating website I've visited in a while

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io9.com is a close second. Together this makes for my shortest blog entry with the most number of tags.

I particularly should check out these collections of books... on the left panel on the main page. I already read a few of them and heard about a few more, but hmm... haven't read real books in a while. Too many things are happening lately...

Sherlock (BBC TV series) is making me an insomniac

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I could theoretically go on and on about the character analyses... will have to leave that for another day. Right now I can't get these tunes out of my head... anyway, Fruity Loops (FL Studios) is too much fun...

Fruity Loops (FL Studio 10) Producer's Edition... random songs

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Songs I recently wrote. I seem to like to write chill and loopy music.

The percussion for this one was a little hard. But I had fun with the sound effects. And the guitar. I totally heart the guitar. My personal favorite part is from 4:08 to the end. The piano part was fun to write too.



The percussion for this one was much easier, because I used the built-in beats! And more fun with the vocal tracks. And more sound effects mwahaha. Plus a nice deep bassline on the piano. What more is there to ask for... just kidding.

Composers' self-indulgence (?)

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These are the type of songs I usually write. They tend to exhibit looping motifs and certain types of chord progressions that I happen to particularly like.

(1) The same kind of unresolved progression (i-VI⁷) as in Dido's "Thank You".

(2) An example of the Andalusian cadence. You can overlay Turtle's "So Happy Together" on this... assuming they're in the same key of course. Seriously.

(3) Here I blatantly ripped off a melody from Dvořák's Cello Concerto. And didn't do much with it.

(4) "Turkey trot" vs. Mozart's "Turkish March"... I could not resist.

(5) Now, here is something I normally wouldn't write. This was pro bono for an online friend.

Goes to show that an amateur composer can afford to be so very self-indulgent yet still unsatisfactory on every level.

Debussy apparently had a wild temper. One can't really tell from his music... or shall one say, it's because he had wild tempers that he had to write such flowing and calming music? Although his music was probably the most effective pick-up line that started his numerous romantic relationships.

What about Shostakovich's angsty grunts and ooomphs? Were they disguised primal screams from being denounced and abandoned repeatedly?

On conducting (and perhaps parenting, among other things)

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Charles Hazlewood - #TEDGlobal "Conducting is like holding a bird in your hand – too tight, you crush it. Too light, it flies away..." (quoted from Sir Colin Davis)

It's really about the trust. If that is granted, all else follows. (... borrowing from George Orwell again) The lack thereof begets hatred and contempt.

I admit it is very very difficult for me to completely trust another. But I guess there're still safeguards that keep me from degenerating into a sociopathic criminal...

Associative Musical Visual Intelligence

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Take the quiz here. I thought the analogy between musical phrases and geometrical shapes is interesting but has room for interpretation. I got one question "wrong" out of twenty. I also had to listen to each one 2-3 times. So meh. Although I suspect the average score would be significantly lower if they don't have the replay button. I wonder if they take into account how many times something is replayed or how fast the tasks are completed.

Solmire MIDI to MP3 online converter

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It's rather fun to experiment with all the sound fonts and channels for my numerous MIDI song clips. They take on various textures. Just like typography...

The MIDIs were generated via Hyperscore, though the tunes themselves were written quite a while ago...

"Music between nature and architecture"

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Being the pan-aesthetics enthusiast that I am, I went to this talk (blog title) by Leon Botstein. I can see why he gets to be the president of a preeminent liberal arts college... I can almost imagine him in a Count Dracula cape, working semantic and symbolic abstraction magic with his dramatic intonations and lexicons. He would have made a terrific orator in the Greek tradition. :-P

This is his ongoing project, and not so surprisingly, he started with mostly German composers and architects, stemming from his German-Hungarian (Jewish) background. Here are the main associations he made -

(1) Architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel :||: Composer Felix Mendelssohn, based on their style that is evocative of 19th Century pastoral Romanticism. Schinkel did paint some rather magical Gothic cathedrals nestled in beautiful forests (below), and Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture is demonstrative of the spirit of nature (I played this with an orchestra and also happen to really like this piece).

(2) Architects Otto Wagner & Joseph Maria Olbrich :||: Composer Gustav Mahler... Initially ornate, Baroque, rectilinear and true to traditional form, later on more subtle and philosophical. I'm not as familiar with Mahler's music (will listen to his symphonies at some point). The Vienna Secession movement seems interesting to look into...

(3) Architect Eero Saarinen :||: Composer Jean Sibelius ... The connection is fairly obvious here because these two were good friends, and their styles influenced each other -- with organic, iteratively evolving themes. I could hear this in Sibelius's violin concerto. I like Saarinen's buildings, especially the staircase. I am drawn to staircase designs...

(4) Architects Le Corbusier & Frank Lloyd Wright :||: Composers Edgard Varèse & Igor Stravinsky ... Neo-Classical, functionally aesthetic/ aesthetically functional :-P Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring was definitely a neo-shock at the time. And Varèse wrote this wicked difficult piece "Density 21.5"... One of Le Corbusier's buildings reminded me of Simmons Hall and another of the Green Building, huh. I didn't know he also designed the Carpenter Arts Center @ Harvard, which Botstein said was "hard to find an angle that actually looked attractive".

The Q&A session was illuminating as well. It gives a window that glimpses into Botstein's persona (at least in public...) which I find to be cogent, eloquent, uncompromising, territorial, and domineering. :-P

The first question was how did Botstein made the associations he did, i.e. what basis, and whether other scholars in the field would make the same associations. Botstein replied that these connections are not arbitrary as he approached these from a historical point of view, based on actual contacts between the architects and the composers. Since they were contemporaries, they were therefore subjected to similar social influences and Zeitgeist of the time. (Thank you, GRE vocab list...)

The second question was from another musical scholar, who asked about the influences of the French Revolution on the arts/architecture, i.e. pre-revolution being more formulaic and post-revolution being less so... Botstein said that he didn't quite agree with this, although I don't recall the details of what he said after that...

The third question was from an architect, who wondered about how to reconcile the improvisatory nature of some music with architecture, which is very planned. Botstein answered that these architects were also very much painters and sculptors, so their creative process involved lots of sketching in the beginning. The editing part was what he drew parallels to.

He also commented on concert halls and how their design influence the sound, which reminds me of David Byrne's TED about music and the architecture of concert halls. Botstein quipped that it's much harder to build a concert hall in a rural area, e.g. Bard College than in an urban area... hence Carnegie Hall is "unremarkable" and Lincoln Center is "an abomination"... har har har...

Well, it was a great talk for sure. I look forward to see how he'll continue this project.

Electric keyboard music synthesizer... and random kindness from strangers

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Went a few stops on the train (extra stop on weekends, which I didn't realize...) to get my synth today. It was not an impulse purchase, but the act of actually going out and getting it had been... somewhat impulsive. I was stupid and got off one stop early, which I promptly realized after I got off the rather crowded (sardine/farmed salmon/or any farmed animal) train... Dodger's game, apparently.

I then proceeded to walk to the next station, which I gave up after about 20 minutes of walking approximately north, because I had no map and the roads were unfamiliar and too confusing. I did pass through a rather nice residential neighborhood just around that station... front gates, large (expensive) houses, expansive yards, sequoia trees... right outside the town limits though was a ghetto-like area, which I decided not to venture into and therefore turned back and waited for the next train.

When I got off (at the right stop this time), I found the main road pretty quickly. However, I had a fake memory that the street number started with a 3 and has four digits... so I walked in one direction and realized the numbers were decreasing... and turned and walked in the other direction... for ~15 minutes... before realizing that I must have remembered the wrong street number. So I turned back... and sure enough, my original path was in fact correct... as the music store was pretty close to the train stop.

The actual process of buying the synth was a lot faster than I expected... because I got the only model that was around my price range ~$300. There were many models that were 3 to 7 times that... seriously professional :-P.

I asked around the AC adapter and the foot pedal, and the store staff recommended the "survivor's kit" that included the adapter, foot pedal, cheap headphones, 2 CD-ROM guides, and 2-year warranty "for free"... the kit was originally about $40, but since I was getting that synth plus the stand (~$20), the store staff essentially gave me a "rebate" of sorts. And I mentioned that I'm a semi-local student, haha.

He asked another store staff to cart everything to the train station. (That was unexpected.) I asked them to tape all the boxes together before that :-P They were quite nice. I think I'm going back there again... if only because in my excitement I forgot to tip the guy for carting my synth...

Shortly before the train came, a random dude asked me if I needed help carrying *that big box* hahah... he looked like a late-undergrad or early-grad student. And yes, he was very familiar with the whole geek-kid-trying-to-relearn-piano deal. That help offer was also unexpected, but very welcomed since after moving it myself... I could definitely use some help... So he and I carried the box on the train and off the train. He had to get back on the train because he was going to a later stop than I was.

After getting off my stop, I carried it by myself for about five minutes and... met another person who offered to help me! Turned out she was also a student at the Farm, and was just going grocery shopping so "had plenty of time to spare" :-P She majored in a science during undergrad (that *other* school), and did some lab work for a few years, and then... decided to major in history/philosophy of science/technology for grad school. Fascinating huh. We had a great convo, and I think I might drop by her research group's office because for some reason she's not in the email system. I do know her full name though. Maybe she goes by a different name... oh well...

Hahaha, quite an adventure for this one today. And it's been a very long time since I was this excited... months? :-P wow that sounds sad, ooops.

Random thoughts

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(1) Healthful food is very important. I feel my brain power increase by 30% when I have such food vs. when I don't. The local farmer's market is awesome.

(2) I should remember to listen to certain music when I'm angsty, rather than defaulting to TV shows. Although for me, watching TV is a response to events in life, and the kind of TV shows I watch is highly correlated with the kind of event that has occurred.

(3) I'm sketching again. I wonder if that's good... I mean, TV show fandom :-P

(4) I need to feel extreme angst or extreme ecstasy in order to be able to write inspired poetry. This is of course conditioned on my ability to be coherent, with attention span longer than about 30 minutes at a time. (I like this poem. I like most poems by this poet, actually.)

(5) The reader can probably tell that my research has been stagnating.

The joy of being an orchestral conductor

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Wahaahahahahahahhaha...

Techie jokes

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A biologist walks into a bar...

I challenge anyone to make jokes about theoretical math. The Klein Four Group does the best job I know of.

Auditorium: the game

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Play the online demo version.

It's a puzzle game with an aesthetically dynamic interface -- sleek, clean, minimalist color scheme. The object is to direct a photon beam via adjustable force fields in order to initiate various instrumental voicing simultaneously... and generate a symphony.

It's a festival of topology, visual arts, music, with physics references. Not much else I can ask for in a puzzle game!



The music is Hans Zimmer/Philip Glass-style hypnotic. In Act 2, the chord progression of i-VII-VI-V in C# minor works quite nicely with the elegant black background and bright particle beams. The visual and the audio together convey a sensation of cruising in space -- with an MP3 player and headphones.

I'm sorely tempted to get the full version of this.

Baaad Apple!! (Warning: Really really catchy)

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Music video (subbed lyrics)



(Piano version)



Elegant and fluid motion. The dichotomous hues are suggestive of light and shadow with all that they imply, and the minimalism conjures up wandering thoughts about abstractions.

One can catch glimpses of fantasy elements -- a mage's hat, angel's wings, reaper's scythe, various head gears... like rabbit ears. Going down a rabbit hole? Perhaps this is a representational fairy tale. More like a dystopic fairy tale...

Not sure how good the translation of the lyric is, but the inflection reminds me vaguely of Romanticism and Gothicism. Expressive angst! One reason to learn languages is to appreciate works of literature (and songs!) in their original form...

Totally dig the punky jazz piano with major-2^nd chords. Great pacing too, with the lyrical section in the middle. The counter-melodies around 1:27 and 3:14 are reminiscent of gliding over clouds -- pure exhilaration. The recap section at 2:12 could use some more subtle textures, as the percussiveness is a bit jarring. But overall a nice rendition. That last few seconds of Philip Glass-like periodic motion about sums it up.

These videos are based on a game called the Touhou Project. I'm not familiar with the game, but the creator seems like a highly interesting character...

(Alternate variation... Russian-style)



The music actually goes with the visual pretty well :-P

Parodical homage of classical music

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Apparently a lot of songs follow the same progression! Oh man, those descending fifths. ROFL.



This is rather silly... Perhaps Igudesman is bow-poking fun at the dual Russian/Ukrainian tradition of violinists and balalaika players running in families? Aside from the example in Dr. Zhivago. And the people in the video are actually violinists :-P

Classical music needs people like him and his buddy Richard Joo... check out more of their performances on Youtube. I would go for their live concerts.

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And there is of course Victor Borge, who's a classic on his own... (more Youtube videos!)



I particularly liked the Beethoven and the Mozart versions. Spot on. I was hoping for a good Liszt version, sigh... too bad. I suspect his Hungarian Rhapsody has seen many renditions of randomness in Tom and Jerry already. Aaaand we have the circle of fifth again in the J.S. Baaaaaach version at 3:15...

In Perfectly Imperfectly Parallel Motion

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Upon the windowsill where dreams
Reach out for the branch
Descend into the mainframe
Into the symmetry of space and time

When my poetry muse has a freaking bad case of ADHD.

Why is that Touhou Bad Apple!! music video so addictive... So. Addictive. It's the E^b-minor techno thing. Emo, daaaahk and mysteeeriousss. Just like the characters in the video, even though I'm not familiar with the game. And the lyrics. I mean, yeah. Emo with a vengeance.



Need. To. Surf. Down a hydrodynamic band potential, flyyyy over the forbidden gaps, and accelerate until velocity saturation. Way too much device physics, and apparently not enough...

Going over quantum mechanics pset with a bunch of crazy people until almost 2AM does funny alterations to my state of mind, which has degenerated into a superposition of confabul-conjugated modes... none of which makes sense on its own...

Greensleeves, classic

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That opening line on the flute and harp takes my breath away every time. I actually think it'll also sound amazing on an oboe-clarinet sequence. I think this originates from my affinity with bodies of water where I can see the shores. And tall grasses waving in the wind.