Third Day in India

On Monday morning I again woke up around 5am, but I did not feel tired. I used the time to try the USB stick again, and it worked great! I uploaded all pictures I has so far onto Flickr, and responded to emails.

This day would be devoted to music. We wanted to show to the same class as yesterday the music which I had written for the Rivers Movement: "The River Aire", after a poem by David Wilders. The students should then try to find words which were embedded in the music. This was a very interesting experiment, especially becaise these were Indian children, and the music had been written in a Western classical style. The schedule for the day changed a few times, but it was finally set that this lecture/performance would be given from 14:00 - 15:00. In the meantime I prepared a video of this music, with the corresponding words from David's poem shown synchronous to the music.

The internet worked fine, no need to exchange the USB 3G stick.

The lecture in the afternoon at 14:00 started with me switching on my laptop computer, connecting the audio to the speakers, and then playing the wav file with the recording of "The River Aire". 95 Indian English teacher students are the very first people on this planet who hear this music being played. They are being told to write down words and impressions of this music. After 10 minutes it is finished, and they "report" threir impressions. it is amazing how well they were able to capture the spirit of this, not having seen the original poem by David wilders on which this music is based. They mention words like "storm", "calm", "serene", "raging", "animals and plants" (how did they get this one? pretty good!). This shows that music is a cross-cultural language, even if it has some local "dialects". Later we listen to a recording of Indian music about rivers, played with flute and sitar. and yes, you can hear the river there as well, with its waves and flow.

The video of the music is here:

It is to note that this is still an incomplete draft - when I am back from this travel I will add the missing 11 words, and I will revise the instrumentation and composition to make it more consistent.

At 15:00 Surendra and Falguni take Gina, Deborah and me to a tribal village school outside of the town, which is away a 45 minute drive. We see children in their classes, and Gina and Deboray talk with their teachers. I document with camera and video the activities. When the classes end at 17:00, all the children walk out and wave to us. Then we take a walk around the willage. Small mud houses, surrounded by farmland. Women carrying fire wood on their heads, men plastering house walls, and everybody smiles friendly when we walk by. It appears that everybody wants that we take pictures of them - so we do. And it appears that the polite thing to do is then to show them their picture on the camera screen. Thank goodness for digital technology!



Already during my last visit to India two years ago I was wondering why almost everybody there was so keen to have their pictures taken. I came up with a theory: when a picture of them is taken, their image goes onto a journey. They themselves may not have the opportunity to see the rest of the world in the near foreseeable future, but their picture will. Their own eyes will not see the world, but the world will see them on their image - so in a way they do travel and get connected to the rest of humanity, to whoever sees their image. So I keep taking pictures of them, to fulfil their dream of being seen by the world (or whoever has a look at the pictures).

In the evening when we return to the HM Patel Institute, there is a group of young students from Surat, supervised by Ashok. They are also very keen to have their pictures taken.

Opening of Exposition in Barnsley

On Friday the "River Dearne Project", one project of the "Rivers Movement", opened an exhibition in Barnsley at the Emergence Pod 1. The expo shows paintings by artists and photos by photographers. In addition, a whole month of activities is been organised at this venue:



One of the expo pieces is an installation of Huddersfield University artist Lee Gascoyne: "Stillness". See his blog for details. I collaborated in this installation by writing software for visual tracking: a USB camera is pointed at the entrance to the installation room; when people move through the entrance, the software notices the change in the captured images and controls the replay of a video recording which Lee made of his creation of an art outside artwork. These changes in those camera capture stream influences the video replay (WinAmp) and makes the video "jumpy", going back and forward seemingly random. Only when the audience comes to a rest, that is when nobody enters or leaves the room, the video is played properly. The software which I developed is the same that is powering our Headingley Caedmon Webcam.

In addition, I also exhibit there four of my photographs - see below.

Narmada River in Gujarat, India

Lake near Hadrian's Wall

Malham Cove, Source of the River Aire

Sound of Barra, South Uist, Outer Hebrides

On Tuesday, 23.February, Brian Lewis and other painters will paint for 24 hours paintings, related to their age (he will paint 73 pictures in 24 hours). I have agreed to participate in this as well: I will compose a music piece which is 46 bars long. Still need some inspiration for this (ad)venture... I might actually also be there in the evening, bring my newly built MAESTRO-2 PC (have a look at the story of building that PC) and improvise a bit with all those fabulous Garritan Personal Orchestra instruments.

Getting Ready for Conference

This night I will have to get up before 3am... for a flight to the US. I will attend over the coming weekend the Mathematics and Computing in Music (MCM) Conference 2009. Have a poster there, about the Riemann Tonnetz. My contribution was to determine a numeric parameter of this model, but I made an assumption that was critisized by the reviewers of my submission: I put out the theorem that Major and Minor third are equivalent in their "tonality consonance". I put forward some argumentation for this, but there remained some doubt... I hope to be able to convince the experts that this is a valid approach that I proposed. The consequence would be a metric for determining the degree of "consonance" in a music piece, allowing to judge the melody or the harmony for consonance in quantitative terms. This may be useful for analysing / searching / retrieving online digital music.

Tan Dun: Internet Symphony "Eroica"

A few weeks ago, in our Leeds Met VC's daily reflection he pointed to the project Internet Symphony, where composer Tan Dun invited musicians to upload a video of themselves playing an instrument as part of a virtual performance of that symphony, with the instrumentalists participating through their video. I found that idea very interesting and planned to do my own contribution there, using computer instruments and synthesizers for this performance. This would not be eligible for the competition, as they only want solo instruments. But I could always extract a solo instrument from the whole score.

The deadline for submissions was this Wednesday. I had somehow thought that it would be Friday, 30.1. but since my entry would not be eligible anyway, it did not matter. And today in the morning I completed the MIDI rendition and recorded a few videos. Stitched them together, not a really creative or original video... I tried to record myself when editing, but that proved not feasible, as I made many "typos" and mistakes on the music keyboard. So I only recorded the PC screen, with different parts of info showing. Surely one could have done a better job...

Well, here it is, my first music video:

Esa-Pekka Salonen in Leeds

This Saturday, the international concert season in Leeds started with a concert of the Philharmonia, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. I was very much looking forward to hear again this conductor, as he had been for years the director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Sometime in winter 2005, he had given a concert of his own compositions in Thousand Oaks, which I attended. I had wanted to ask him then re. a joint project about computers and music, but I had been too slow in pursuing a meeting, and he had already left.

On the program was the Symphonie Phantastique by Berlioz and two works by Beethoven: the 2nd Leonore Ouverture, and his 4th Piano Concerto. I had not listened to any work by Beethoven in many years, as I felt quite familiar with his overall style. Yet at this concert I was quite surprised to hear the astonishing musical consequent compositional structure, which makes so much sense. In contrast, I still have difficulty following the musical thoughts of Berlioz. His orchestration may be brilliant, but I am not able to hear "what he means" by his compositions. Somehow like listening to someone who speaks a different language: I hear the sounds, but they do not make sense...

A problem interrupted the 2nd movement of the Piano Concerto: someone in the audience, sitting behind the orchestra, fell ill and fainted - the concert was interrupted, and medics carried the person out. The movement was not continued, instead the orchestra went rightinto the finale - and a few minutes later another one fainted, but this time without interruption of the music. There is a review of this concert in The Guardian (1.Oct.)

Opera in the Park

In Temple Newsam, in the south-east corner of Leeds, an open air event took place: "Opera in the Park", with the Opera North. Several ten-thousands of spectators grace the large lawn, throughout sunset from 20:00 - 22:30, and listen to excerpts from operas. The event ends with Borodin's orchestral piece "Polovtsian Dances". Gives me inspiration to re-work my own rendition of this music, which I had done back in 1994 (actually, I only had worked on the very first part of this wonderful piece).

Concert in Leeds Town Hall

This Saturday, one of the last concerts of the Leeds International Concert Season took place. I really have enjoyed this season, attended many great concerts. This one today, the Budapest Symphony Orchestra under conductor Tamás Vásáry played four "war-horses" of concert pieces, that is very well known popular music which did not pose any risk of the audience not being receptive. The Leeds Town hall only had a few empty seats, it was almost fully booked.

The term "war" would apply to the first piece in a bit of a negative sense: Liszt's "Les Preludes" is a wonderful music as its own, but it has in my mind a negative connection: the joyous victorious fanfare theme that appears twice in it, was used from 1941-1945 in the German Wochenschau (weekly news reel) as the introductory "theme music" of the war against the Soviet Union. And since I have been very interested in history, this music theme creates in me an uneasiness, whenever I hear it. Poor Liszt - had he only known what his music had been abused for...

The 2nd piece in the concert program was the "Cello Concerto" by Antonin Dvorak, one of my all-time favorites. I never had heard it in a live concert before, I only knew quite well since the early 1990s the recording with Cellist Mischa Maisky and the Israel Philharmonic. When cellist Nina Kotova started to play her solo after the orchestral introduction, it seemed as if the acoustic properties of the Leeds Town Hall were not really supporting the sound of a cello - compared to the orchestra, her Stradivarius cello sounded a bit faint and had trouble to stand out on its own. However, the brilliant and emotional play by Nina was shining through anyway. Once I got used to the quieter than expected sound, it was a pleasure to listen to her phrasing, the vibrato, the wonderful singing music written by Dvorak for this instrument. At some times, the orchestra had a hard time to catch up to her interpretation.

During the break, a CD was sold with a recording of that Cello concerto (with the Philharmonic Orchestra under Andrew Litton), and Nina did sign the CD and concert programs. I briefly mentioned to her my interest in computer music and the integration of human artists with synthesizers - maybe there could be a joint work some time in the future...?

After the break another popular piece: Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite No. 1. I knew this piece quite well, during my days in high school I had played some of it on piano in a transcription. The part "In the Hall of the Mountain King" was one of my more successful computer-synthesizer-based MIDI renditions back in 1999.

Then the last piece was Stravinsky's "Firebird Suite". I never had heard this piece in a live performance, but I knew it very well since more than 25 years. A splendid work, colorful, dynamic, with quiet and melancholic parts, and then with outbursts of energy. The orchestra translated the score very well into sound, and the conductor did his part on energizing the orchestra with intense gestures.

After the performance, three encores were given, the last one from Dvorak's Slavic Dances. In 1981 I had played this piece with my music teacher, on 4-handed piano. And in the years after that, I had also played it with my grandmother on her piano, when her hands were still a bit more flexible than now.

A great concert evening, with many memories for me back in time!