Musical Voice in Virtual Space
Mozart: Quintet in G minor, K.516, Mvt. 1
By Tim Summers, Violinist of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra
The decision to begin our spatial sound project with a movement of the Mozart Quintet K.516 was fortunate. In the dread-filled summer of 2020, we chose it simply as a favorite piece, for the then-rare occasion to have a focused, exploratory, and sociable musical project. What we could not have expected was how the medium and techniques which Henrik Oppermann was exploring would resonate with some of the strongest characteristics of Mozart’s writing. Above all, we could not have conceived how the simultaneous interdependence and independence of voices — qualities which define both the coherence and the anarchic energy of his music — would appear in such clear relief.
Hearing and seeing music given in this virtual space brought out concrete musical values. Principal among these: such music is best when it is played by people. What emerged was not only the sculpted landscape of the score, but also the participatory and personal character of playing instruments. In this — admittedly odd — VR format, the internal and external spaces of music seemed to intertwine, and the effect was transporting. The patterns of this quintet, clear even for a casual observer to see in the manuscript (above), came forth with unusual strength as a kind of social fabric. In that way, this seemed a different type of recording altogether — something which recorded not only our sounds, but also our listening and our interactions.
Whether ‘chamber music’ is public or private is one of its sustaining uncertainties. But it is in any case aimed toward collections of people with common interests. A chamber music score sits full of information upon a library shelf until it is taken out and read by hand (that is to say, played), by some curious and appropriately skilled group. In VR, the built-in multiplicity and sociability of chamber music jumped immediately to the foreground: five separate voices, miked close, could weave a complex coherence in the space, showing the myriad choices, incidents and interactions of performance. It was particularly gratifying, also, to realize that such a representation seemed to defy — even nullify — the idea of a definitive recording, replacing it with a networked, contingent, and human act. This dense digital record of participation — infinitely rich at every moment and every choice — seemed full of possibility and chance. ‘Liveness’ appeared in the audible complexity of the activity being represented, as something we could bring to a viewer.
It worked very much to our advantage, also, that Mozart writes with a powerful — and quite literal — understanding of what it may mean for music to ‘come alive’. There are a few famous and easy-to-reach examples of things-coming-alive in his operas, most notably the “Magic Flute” whose tiny tune serves as a protector against danger, and the statue of the Commendatore, who drags the unrepentant Don Giovanni to perdition. But it goes deeper: every musical instrument is a metaphor of liveness, and he knew how to bring this out.
A musical instrument is a kind of object that lets people know how it is being touched, suggesting that its resonant emptiness may contain something like a voice. Mozart took advantage of this not only in operatic tropes, but in his sharp characterization of lines. The strange digital theater of VR brings this dialogic activity to the front: VR never stops asking the question embedded in it: is something there? With this music, the question answers itself, as the sound itself seems to say yes, by telling you strange wordless tales with multiple characters. The lines come to life not only because they have something in themselves, but in that they speak to, and listen to, one another.
It’s a long way from a Mozart manuscript to a 6DOF audio recording in a virtual environment, but there is a connection. Even a cursory glance at the manuscript tells you that this is an object which might well come alive. Musical encoding has a strange power. It is not audio, not mixing, not a wickedly expensive instrument, not frequency or amplitude; it is just a few lines and dots which can suggest incredibly much more than they have any right to. A few symbols, points, and curves, plus a small heap of assumptions… and suddenly there is so much to do, and so much to hear. The powers of a two-dimensional score and a high-dimensional digital representation met with surprising ease and completeness.
And so we began this project with Mozart. There was nothing radical about that except insofar as Mozart, whatever his real human limitations (mortality not the least of them), seems to have had contact with some of the root possibilities of musical meaning. We could not have found a firmer foundation for treating this strange new medium; it can clearly handle fundamental ideas of musical perception in a rather new way (‘things coming back to life’ not the least of those). ‘Presence’ is no trivial category. We were lucky to have had so much of it written into the score from the start.
The Unanswered Question in Virtual Reality
Musical Composition, Digital Realities, and Spatial Meaning
The Unanswered Question (‘A Cosmic Landscape’) occupies a special place in the history of experimental music. Aaron Copland admired it deeply, calling it ”among the finest works ever created by an American artist.” Leonard Bernstein made it the centerpiece and title of his 1973 Norton Lectures at Harvard University, and György Kurtág wrote his own response to it, The Answered Unanswered Question, in 1989. Suggestively titled and powerfully atmospheric, The Unanswered Question continues to appear on concert programs worldwide. Now, with the advent of spatial audio and high-dimensional media, Ives’ 1906 work seems especially interesting in its treatment of space and distance as a primary compositional ingredient. More than 100 years later, The Unanswered Question still raises questions.
Inevitably, when The Unanswered Question appears on a program, a question arises about what exactly this ‘question’ might be. Following that comes a realization that this question, too, will remain unanswered: there is, at root, something unreasonable going on. Ives writes in his ‘Note to Performers’ that “the trumpet intones ‘The Perennial Question of Existence’,” which is very specific but utterly baffling. He also writes that the strings “are to represent ‘The Silences of the Druids — who Know, See and Hear Nothing’,” which is perplexing not only because the strings are clearly not silent, but also because of the unexpectedly theatrical appearance of ‘druids’. The flutes, “Fighting Answerers, … begin to mock ‘The Question’,” and one can hardly blame them. Whatever it may be, ‘The Question’ itself is not to be known — and insofar as it is even to be asked, it evidently can only be asked in music. Ives’ own notes on the piece can seem cryptic, naïve and even sophomoric if taken at face value. Nonetheless, his ideas do have proper roots in American philosophy, and they are far cannier than they may first seem. The title is in all likelihood a reference to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem The Sphinx: Drawing by C.P Cranch (c. 1836), from Illustrations of the new Philosophy Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite spaces, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God R. W. Emerson — ‘Nature’
Thou art the unanswered question;
Couldst see thy proper eye,
Alway it asketh, asketh;
And each answer is a lie.
And whatever one might make of Transcendentalism (which was archaic even in 1906), there is something weirdly impenetrable about the fact that, in the end, Ives’ musings are musical rather than verbal: the ‘proper eye’ seems to require an ear. In this way, Ives manages (like the trumpet) to deflect refutation: there are no theses, no antitheses, no syntheses. Instead there are calls, responses, and a sequence of misunderstandings between characters who evidently occupy different realities.
Digital media have a way of accentuating the extent to which we all experience different realities. And ’Virtual reality’ in particular is a medium which forces us — with a kind of brutality — to confront the extent to which we live in our own minds. The illustration of the famous ‘transparent eye-ball’ from Emerson’s Nature (above, from Christopher Pearse Cranch, 1836) is not coincidentally reminiscent of a person venturing into virtual reality: the accompanying quote from Emerson describes a disappearance into the miracle of the American landscape which sounds curiously like a VR viewer disappearing into a digital one.
These visions of transcendence are also visions of isolation. In each, there is a viewer and a landscape, and a new relation to that landscape, but there are no other people. In The Unanswered Question, separateness is absolute for all but the druids — and they are not (for lack of a better word) ‘real’ people. The space of Ives’ work is a space to experience the fact of separateness. VR can recreate that kind of space — and its profound isolation — with real force.
In this context, a strong sense of space becomes crucial to the progress and meaning of Ives’ composition. He is explicit on the point that the musicians should be meaningfully located. The strings, he writes, should be ‘off stage’ or away from the trumpet and flutes, and so unreachable for all others. The trumpet part is usually performed from a distance, and is in any case made distant by his implacable question-intoning. So with or without the odd qualities of Ives’ transcendentalist drama, it is evident that a meaningful presentation of social separateness is at play. How (or even whether) individuals can create resonant connections over distances is here made an audible drama. In the brief, flickering world of The Unanswered Question, presence itself is far from self-evident, and distances seem unbridgeable.
Amplifying the qualities of ‘difference’ amongst the musicians, Ives not only divides types of instruments into different physical spaces, but also gives them markedly different musical materials. The concordant music of the strings defines the atmosphere, and presents the ‘druids’ as the only participants who aren’t merely tangent to one another. The trumpet stands alone, at tonal, physical and philosophical remove. Meanwhile, the flutes’ grow increasingly discordant with one another. The difference between the expressive trajectory of each group, and each type of music, is clearest to see in the dynamic markings:
Strings: ppp (con sordino) > pppp
Trumpet: [ p ] [ p ] [ p ] [ p ] [ p ] [ p ] [ pp ]
Flutes: [ p > ] [ mp > ] [ mf <> f ] [ f < < ff ] [ f < ff < sf (pp) ff << fff < < ffff ]
The strings are unaffected the whole time, fading into ‘undisturbed solitude’; the trumpet remains as he is, diminished only by his passage through time; and the flutes push harder and harder. Tempos function similarly: the strings move fantastically slow; the trumpet remains steady; the flutes accelerate with the increase of their rage. That is to say: the distances between performers are not only in space and sound, but also in time. Difference is one of their only shared experiences. And yet there is a kind of coherence.
In The Unanswered Question, we can find a kind of non-fictional embodiment of simplistic metaphysics, given in a way which succeeds precisely where words fail. Aided by the unnamed meanings of music, philosophy-ish ideas can appear in this work, and especially in VR, as a kind of primitive, preverbal encounter with our own sense of our own presence. In the vast, emerging landscape of digital media, some basic questions will always remain, and some will show more clearly than ever. We might all do well to find a naïveté which allows us to follow our questioning of this new space wherever it will lead.
Sommernachtstraum in English, in German, in Music, and in Virtual Reality
Illusions of theater translated into a digital medium.
Are you sure That we are awake? I
t seems to me
That yet we sleep, we dream.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
—Act 4, scene 1, 181-183
Shakespeare’s doubled and doubt-filled visions of the theater of human behavior have much to say about ‘virtual reality’. Our new digital media mirror and manipulate memory, consciousness and imagination, and that’s a fairly theatrical thing to do. Immersive VR physically suspends your disbelief, taking over some of the most basic elements of perception. The mechanisms of this sort of thing have been the subject of all sorts of art-making for millennia. In A Midsummer Nights’ Dream, for example, the bottomless ambiguity between consciousness and unconsciousness, between reality and virtuality, defines everything. It drives the plot, baffles the characters, and even describes its own creation:
And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown,
the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Act 5, scene 1, lines 12–18
So, in this spirit of making something from nothing, we are building a small theatre for sound in the hard plastic and silicon of the digital device, where a world may be tilted by a pendulum, and where every act and sound may be considered both as an activity and as an act of mind.
In a way unimaginable even just a few years ago, we can make palpable digital things, with real-world consequence, out of patterns and shapes. We can make life seem to appear where there may be none, in a land of ones and zeros (somethings and nothings). We can deceive eyes, we can call out to ears, and we can fill the atmosphere with unbelievably believable shapes. It must only all appear, and sound, as though it is made of matter to have real significance.
Of course, this is what musicians (and artists of many types) have always done. Immersion and the vagaries of belief have always been our business. But lately the affordances for illusion-making are accelerating. We need only look at a subway full of people immersed in their telephones (if we can manage to look up from our own) to see that the borders between virtual and actual reality not only porous, but completely full of holes. With digital devices we are building surprisingly complete and dynamic waking dreams. With VR in particular, we can make illusions of entire dynamic spaces. These spaces don’t seem to end when we look away, and sound, in particular, gives indications of an entire world of activity at the edges our consciousness.
What it all may come to mean is anyone’s guess. But we are not here to think about things that have meaning. Samuel Pepys famously described A Midsummer Night’s Dream. ”the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life,” and there’s something rather reinforcing about that. As artists we rely upon the reality and consequence of a certain amount of nonsense. There’s plenty of foolishness, for example, in wearing VR goggles. But that doesn’t make it wrong or uninteresting: to take an example straight from Midsummer Night’s Dream: you might be wearing something funny on your head, but Titania the Fairy Queen won’t mind, even after she returns to her proper senses. We’re all pretty blinkered, and sometimes it shows.
Nonsensical though it may be, A Midsummer Night’s Dream also has a fair amount of Serious German History behind it, and that history brings us to the Mendelssohn and the Mendelssohn family. The translations of August Wilhelm Schlegel (from 1797, including Sommernachstraum) brought Shakespeare’s theatre to the heart of continental Romanticism. It’s very hard to say (especially these days) what anyone might ever have meant by ‘Romanticism’, but it is still clear that Schlegel’s translations did have at least one extraordinary creative consequence: the 17-year old Felix Mendelssohn (whose aunt was married to August Schlegel’s brother) found inspiration in them to write a completely spectacular concert overture in 1827. He was 18 years old.
The Mendelssohn/Schlegel connection is so direct that one can reasonably imagine that the sounds of the woodwinds at the beginning of the Overture are a sonic manifestation of Shakespeare’s ‘airy nothing’. Furthermore, given that the young Mendelssohn was embarking on a creative-poetic career, it makes some sense to consider that Schlegel’s fresh-translated text served both as personal inspiration and model to the Felix Mendelssohn, newly embarking on an artistic career:
Und wie die schwangre Phantasie Gebilde
Von unbekannten Dingen ausgebiert, Gestaltet sie des Dichters Kiel, benennt
Das luftge Nichts und gibt ihm festen Wohnsitz.
(Schlegel-Tieck)
The contours of Mendelssohn’s Overture seem to follow this passage to the letter. ‘Airy nothing’ in the woodwind section gives way to a carnival of identifiable motives throughout the orchestra: Royalty, Fairies, Donkeys, and, it seems, the fourth Beethoven Piano concerto. Beethoven Piano Concertos were certainly on Felix Mendelssohn’s mind, since he played the fifth one in Berlin (his own Wohnsitz) the night before before traveling to Stettin for the Sommernachtstraum premiere.
As for the other pieces in the suite: sixteen years later, in 1842, Mendelssohn received a commission from Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm IV to write incidental music for a production of Midsummer Night’s Dream. In this explicitly theatrical circumstance, the connections of music with text are clear as day — they are there to read in the score, embedded amidst the notes. The Scherzo is clearly attached to the words of a ‘Fairy’:
Over hill, over dale,
Thorough bush, thorough brier,
Over park, over pale,
Thorough flood, thorough fire,
I do wander every where,
Swifter than the moon’s sphere;
And I serve the fairy queen,
To dew her orbs upon the green:
Even more concisely, the score of the Intermezzo contains stage directions among its notes, and these are clearly dramatized in the orchestration: (Hermia seeks Lysander everywhere, and loses herself in the wood.)
So the relationships between music and text are clear. Every one of the works in the incidental music serves as an explicit bridge between acts and scenes, each with its own context and setting. But then, on second thought, the mirroring mechanisms between music, mood, and image remain mysterious. The invisible images (!) of music become one of Mendelssohn’s sharpest imaginative tools. Like Hermia in the wood, we chase their source, seek their meaning, and perhaps even discover what we intend… or, on the other hand, taking Shakespeare at his word, we may just as well lose ourselves. There are no guarantees.
This is some of what we can offer in the strange new theater for listening. Sound is evidence of a physical disturbance and thus of real presence. If we can use sound as an indication of something beyond behind the visible, and if we can work to re-frame real-world hearing on those terms… then we may find a fruitful digital path. Sounds with an indication of intention, such as those an orchestra makes, show a great deal about how people interact. If we are to build a brave new world, it should have such people as an orchestra contains, listening close to how things just might make a bit of sense. Or, better yet, a whole lot of spectacular nonsense.