Onsdag: A little more park, a little less action; Torsdag: Guitorsdag and music analysis 101

Hej igen!

6/6:
If I found Wednesday to be a little underwhelming (don't get me wrong, it was still fun, I haven't even told you about it yet!), then Thursday made up for at least three days of action! I'm pretty exhausted, even as I write this blog entry (hopefully I will finish it sooner than I have previous entries). Anyway, back to Wednesday.

For those of you who didn't know (and, really, who would outside of Sweden?) Wednesday was a national holiday in Sweden. In fact it was the national holiday, or, rather Nationaldag. Staffan had forewarned me of this at our meeting on Tuesday, so I was well-prepared for the abundance of Swedish flags flapping everywhere. Staffan had also given me a conveniently sized map of the city and told me about a few of the attractions I might not yet have seen. One of these was the Malmöhus, an old fortress which had been converted into a museum, surrounded by parks. As I had nothing else to do (my first music lesson being on Thursday), I thought I would explore a little more before business set in. And while I was out, so I thought, I could pick up a guitar. I don't have any sort of instrument at my apartment, which is a little problematic for composing. Not insurmountable by any means, but it's nice to have a point of reference for your ear, and for some harmonies which are less than familiar.
"But wait!" I hear you cry, "Trey! I didn't know you play the guitar!"
I don't. You've caught me red-handed. But I do know something about guitar. My close and valuable collaboration with Blair School of Music Aural Studies professor and guitarist Joshua McGuire has given me a competent theoretical understanding of the instrument (hopefully this has been evidenced in some of my guitar compositions, such as Mar de Lurin, for Oboe and Guitar) Now all I need to do is teach my fingers how to play the darn thing.
I also faintly hear you say, with raised eyebrow evident from the tone of your voice "But if it's a national holiday, won't most stores be closed?"
Well, yes, but I was led astray. As we shall see later on. For now, Malmöhus.

 Yet another gorgeous park surrounding Malmöhus. There was also a small river which people were paddling boats in (for those Cincinnatians among you, thing of the paddleboats at Coney Island). Of particular note in this park were the poppies which bordered the river. Just beautiful. I had to take a picture or two.

 Poppies in June! (please forgive the shameless plug. Too good to pass up, though)

Poppy, like the name of the new dog my family will be getting (right, gang?!)

 A statue in the park: Pjölk med Gåss (Boy with Geese). Even immortalized in bronze, geese are still ill-tempered.

 A truly beautiful park.

 A windmill also present on the grounds of Malmöhus. Unfortunately, it was closed, and I couldn't read the sign on the door.

Malmöhus itself was more of a general Swedish culture museum than it was a museum devoted to one genre (the way I usually think of a museum, as being dedicated to Art, Natural History, Modern Art, etc.). It had a section tracing the history back to the Viking times, as well as an exhibition of flapper-dresses and fashion pieces from Sweden's roaring 20's, and a chronological gallery of paintings and furniture from the baroque period up to the 30's. Two things I noted in particular: first, the number of paintings by artists I had never heard of, but who were participating as much in the art of their time as any other artist. Cubism had not escaped Sweden, but perhaps it is Sweden's lack of proximity to cultural meccas like Paris which explains the lack of coverage of Swedish artists in art history books.

Malmöhus.

Obviously, as it was a museum, I didn't take any pictures. Well, I took one. In the Malmöhus chapel. Don't forget that Malmöhus was originally a fortress. And quite a chapel it was! The picture I took only captures the central portion of an enormous mosaic!

 

Sorry for the blurriness. Didn't want to get in trouble, so I didn't risk a second picture.

Sadly, with that picture, most of the excitement of Wednesday ended. I tried unsuccessfully (twice!) to find a store that was open to buy a guitar. Staffan had told me on Tuesday that, while some shops would be closed, it was mostly business as usual. Well, I guess the music stores were more patriotic than the other shops, but, after making two separate excursions, both met with failure, I decided to call it a day. I took a nap, ate dinner, and went to bed.

6/7:

I woke up this morning with one thought in my head: I'm going to get a guitar, and nothing is going to stop me. And I did. For all of the hecticness of the day before, it was a bit anti-climactic to walk into 4Sound (one of Malmö's music stores), pick out a guitar that fit my price range (not much point in me buying a particularly high-quality guitar, I'm just starting out. Maybe if I actually get good I'll upgrade) and a hard case for the flight home, and then head back home.

Some things you may or may not be wondering about purchasing any string instrument: tuning (the battle of all musician's lives anyway) is especially going to be a battle when you're starting out. I'm not talking about intonation in particular, I'm talking about the strings staying in tune. The tuning pegs are just not used to being subjected to the tension of normal tuning, so they often slide out of tune very easily until they settle in. So, while I tried to make a first attempt at practicing, I mostly tuned. And retuned. And retuned. In fact, after I'm done with this blog entry, I'm probably going to take the guitar out again and retune it for the evening. Also, starting out on any instrument, your body needs to adjust to what you're asking it to do. In the case of string instruments, this usually takes the form of callouses on the left hand's fingers (the hand which presses the strings down against the fingerboard). It's not the most pleasant feeling to press against a really tight wound wire or strip of nylon, but with practice comes familiarity.

As the music store didn't open until 11, by the time I got home, tuned the guitar, retuned it, started preliminary practice, retuned, ate lunch, messed around a bit, it was almost 3 o'clock, and time for my music less at the Musikhögskolan (music school). I dashed out to the bus (which then took forever to arrive, no doubt just to mock my sprint to the busstop), and arrived not long after at the Musikhögskolan, which is right next to Helleneholmskolan, a local Gymnasium (the equivalent of our high-school). This is an important point, as it will affect my evening excursion later.

A brief aside, before we get to the music. It is currently graduation season the world over, including in Sweden. Unlike my personal experience in high-school, it seems that (this is a trend which has only begun to occur over the past decade or so) here in Sweden, now that the kids are out of school but not yet graduated, they've been going around the city in big busses or trucks, running around in posses, all dressed in formalwear, wearing sailor's hats, blowing whistles and vuvuzelas, and making a general hullabaloo. I'm not kidding about any of this. There were a bunch of kids making an awful din on the public transit bus I rode this morning. Almost no one else batted an eye. A few old people looked disgruntled, and I'm sure everyone else wanted to be as old so they could look how they felt as well, but it seems generally accepted.

A photo I stole from Google Image Search. It looks like a production of Anything Goes... Apparently the sailor's cap is sort of a mortarboard for the Swedish Gymnasium.

Back to the matter at hand. Facing the music.

I met Staffan outside the Musikhögskolan, and he led me inside, introduced me to the receptionist and several other faculty members, and gave me a tour around the facility.  I will hopefully have access to it during the work week while it is open. While there are apparently going to be some times when it is closed, I believed it is going to open this whole coming week.

My lesson plan has been split up into two separate sections: Listening lessons and composition lessons. The first will hopefully help with the second. Today we looked at some of the works of Witold Lutosławski (pronounced: Loo-toe-sw-off-ski, though most people pronounce the ł like an l, so Loo-toe-sl-off-ski is also accepted) one of the most important Polish composers. In particular, we examined one of Lutosławski's claims to fame, his work in aleatoric (indeterminate) music. 

For those unaware. Here's a crash course in indeterminate music. While all music which is performed live could be said to be indeterminate, 'aleatoric' music leaves at least one aspect of the music up to a force besides the composer. Many different composers have approached this, and through different routes. Among them are Morton Feldman, John Cage, Kristoff Pendrecki, Tōru Takemitsu, and Terry Riley. In Lutosławski's case, his version of aleatoric music is one in which he has written out all of the notes and rhythms he wants each player to play, but the individual players are allowed to choose how fast or slow they want to play a section. Also that they repeat these sections until 'cued' by the conductor to move on to the next section. 

 An example of Lutosławski's indeterminate style, from his work Mi-Parti, you can see how the parts don't line up where they end, but each line ends with a repeat sign. Then everyone switches together to their next phrase (cued by the conductor) where all of the parts do line up.

In this way, Lutosławski, while sacrificing some 'control' of his piece, usually achieves a kind of rhythmic complexity which might actually be more difficult to accomplish if every rhythm were written out specific. The first piece in which Lutosławski did this was his Jeux Venitiens (Venetian Games), for orchestra.

 As is not uncommon with the development of new systems, rarely does the first attempt result in the best outcome. Cf. Thomas Edison and getting the filament for the lightbulb right. This video is the first 3 of 4 movements of Jeux Venitiens. Not my favorite piece by Lutosławski, by far. A significant piece, all the same, if only because of the influence it had on other composers.

Another piece in which Lutosławski used this technique was his Mi-Parti for Orchestra.

I will admit, it is not the cheeriest piece in the world, but I certainly think its drama is effective. Staffan pointed out (and I think it is interesting to note) that there is a general role reversal in Lutosławski's works. In his music, the stasis of slow-moving ideas is actually the motion of the piece, propelling it from one idea to the next. In contrast, the dense, aleatoric, motion-filled sections of his work are usually moments of stasis. The amount of motion results in a form of sensory overload, and it feels like the motion is in fact the most extreme form of arrest. I hope this piece endears you, the listener and blog reader, to Lutosławski's music a little more than Jeux Venitiens might have done. In particular, I find the climbing string passage at the end to be absolutely gorgeous.

As far as my music goes, it seems to me like this lesson was a further extension of the Royal Academy of Music Exchange Program I took place in this March (the progenitor of this current trip, in fact!). A lot of that trip was also a discussion of the amount of trust a composer can put in his performers and to what extent can that trust result in something even more surprising and dramatically effective. Aleatoric elements have been creeping into my music, but usually in the form of virtuosic passages, which the performers can execute at whatever speed they wish. But the sort of simultaneous freedom which Lutosławski gives to his performers (and large groups of performers too) is something I've never tried. It certainly is food for musical thought, and I'm excited to begin working on my piece, even if the ideas of this lesson don't make their way into this specific project (I really don't know yet). It is of note that, as Lutoslawski's career progressed, he used this indeterminate technique more and more sparingly. Compared to his Symphony No. 2, which is mostly constructed from aleatoric material, his Symphony No. 4 (written near his death), contains only small passages in which it is present. Moderation in all things, even if we don't know how fast or slow those things will be going, I guess.

After my lesson with Staffan, I went to meet a friend-of-a-friend (well, now just a friend, since I officially met her) who will hopefully help me a little in trying to start speaking Swedish. My good friend and talent violist Emma Dansak is a member of an online forums which discuss names. One of her friends, Terese, lives in Malmö, and was kind enough to meet up with me this evening. We went to a restaurant in the old part of town called Mondo Piccolo. I had a beef risotto with vegetables which was very good (but not particularly Swedish. If you couldn't tell by the restaurant name, the theme was Italian).

 I was really hungry! I forgot to take a picture until about halfway through, oops...

 The square where we ate dinner. Near Gustav Adolf's Torg.

Terese has lived in Malmö for about 7 months now, and she will have to forgive me because at the moment I can't remember exactly what her job is. We had a delightful dinner, though, and, sometimes unknowingly, was a great assistance in helping me get a sense of how to say things in Swedish as well as what to say in Swedish. There were a few instances where she had amendments to make to my Berlitz book, which has shaken my faith in it a little. It's served me well so far, but as a guide to pronunciation, it's hard for text to capture human inflection. In return for her kindness (hopefully she didn't think of it as revenge for me correcting her) I explained (very reductively) musical analysis. She seemed to understand very well and was enthusiastic. "It's fun to learn things!" she said, and I sure hope my students this fall at Stony Brook take that same approach. Terese has a little background in music, but really I think the thing that helped the most was that she had a very open mind about the whole thing. She caught on really quickly, and it was a lot of fun sharing what I've learned at Vanderbilt with other people. Hopefully Terese and I are going to hang out again some time! It's good to be making friends over here. The first few days were a little lonely, but it's good to know there are people I know around the city. Staffan also told me he'd try to get me in touch with any other student composers from the Musikhögskolan who would be around this summer.

Tomorrow, I do laundry and head back to the MHS (Musikhögskolan, my arbitrary acronym seems faster though) to do some composing!

Godnatt!

-Trey

P. S. I just realized! I never explained about Helleneholmskolan. It was a giant kerfuffle trying to get over to Gustav Adolf's Torg to meet Terese, there was some sort of celebration or graduation ceremony going on a Helleneholmskolan. Police were directing traffic and there were so many pedestrians it took forever to get where I needed to go. That's all!