Vi Hart on Stravinsky's Atonal Compositions [video]

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/07/09/vi-hart-explains-stravinsky/

by ColinWright • 13 years ago

172 55 13 years ago

rfnslyr• 13 years ago

So this website does what exactly? Summarizes things? I'm discarding it as blog spam. Link the actual video not an article with a loose description begging for page views based on somebody elses content, and then they ask you to donate at the bottom of the page.

joshu• 13 years ago

Not sure why you are being downvoted; this is correct per the site guidelines. This is blogspam.

ColinWright2• 13 years ago

Probably because his comment also does not conform to the site guidelines, which say that if you feel something doesn't belong then you should simply flag it and move on.

Having said that, I probably should've done my usual and clicked through to find the original source, rather than being lazy and using the bookmarklet to submit it. Mea culpa. I would delete, do my research, and submit the original, but this now has points and comments, so to do so would look like karma whoring.

In other words, too late.

ximeng2• 13 years ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4niz8TfY794

th0ma5• 13 years ago

Yes, I consider the site to be a little disingenuous. I actually did a disingenuous thing myself, and watched the site owner queue up posts one time at a conference, and it was a mad dash of anything interesting and about 100 tabs stacked, popped, and restacked.

Now, it could be a cool site with links, but the astounding overhead of all of the JS and crud that comes with the site, and the dubious opportunistic way in which it operates is pretty tough for me.

There are some ties to people like Jer Thorp who also manages to somehow mention his own Twitter handle in tweets as if it might get lost out there that he indeed tweeted whatever it was, anyway, it gets very tedious to watch the the rolling wave of new people that get suckered in to the scheme. Some seem to pick up on what is going on and move on eventually.

I wish I could articulate better ways to call out these kinds of abuses but they're so subtle, and the echo chamber so new to the thing themselves, that it is hard to get the message through.

stcredzero• 13 years ago

the echo chamber so new to the thing themselves, that it is hard to get the message through.

So are you saying the echo chamber is like "Eternal September" generally, or in a particular context?

leephillips5• 13 years ago

Not only does it add nothing to the original (amazing) content, but what it does try to add is kind of a mess: the "cue" of C? Try to catch her "sleight" against copyright?

EDIT to add: I wouldn't call any article that summarizes or comments on other content "blogspam", although this one probably qualifies. It would seem to depend on whether the commentary actually adds anything. Also, HN's guidelines recommend doing this kind of thing if one wants to include some commentary with a link.

jamesbritt3• 13 years ago

The actual Youtube page was previously posted (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5982647) but got no traction.

But re-posting via some blogspam site shouldn't be encouraged.

ColinWright2• 13 years ago

Indeed - I hadn't seen that, and it was only after the complaint was made that I found the original. And again, mea culpa - I apologise.

That said, it was this link that turned up in my feed, and when I thought the HN crowd might like it I clicked the bookmarklet, so submitting it. The blogspam aspect was not intentional.

dennisgorelik• 13 years ago

I think HN web site penalizes direct links to youtube. That's why blogspam links win.

msluyter• 13 years ago

Tangential:

Back when I was studying music, I took a class by the brilliant David Noon called "Stravinsky," on... Stravinsky. Dr. Noon presented a very early work of Stravinsky's (when he was in his early 20's, I believe) and noted that it was incredibly unpromising -- amateurish, banal. Note, 20 is really old by typical composer prodigy standards, so it's somewhat amazing that within a decade or so, Stravinsky went on to write masterpieces like The Firebird, Petrushka, and Rite of Spring.

Another fascinating thing about Stravinsky is that he re-invented himself several times, moving from his brilliant early Rimsy-Korsakoff like style to spare neo-classicism, and then on to atonality. As someone who's moved from music to software development, I find that inspiring.

I mostly mention this to encourage those who may have started down their paths in life atypically late.

mkl• 13 years ago

Vi Hart is fantastic; I recommend watching all her videos [1] (though skip the very early music-only ones if that's not your thing). Particularly good are the hexaflexagon ones [2] and the plant spiral ones [3].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/user/Vihart/videos

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIVIegSt81k

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahXIMUkSXX0

dnautics2• 13 years ago

the snail one is uh, amazing, too.

leephillips5• 13 years ago

She deserves the Nobel Prize of the internet. Her Pythagoras video[0] is one of my favorites.

I was awestruck at the end of this one, after seeing the musical shapes. A well-spent 30 minutes.

I would only disagree with her listing of Stravinsky as an "atonal" composer. Although he did mess with 12-tone composition a bit very late in his career, he is not usually thought of this way, as he very much dealt with tonality in the vast majority of his work.

[0]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1E7I7_r3Cw

stephencanon3• 13 years ago

Even Stravinsky's serial compositions aren’t so much atonal as they are post-tonal. There are relatively few composers whose work can be genuinely called “atonal”.

ximeng2• 13 years ago

"Silence won't be in the public domain until 2062" - hah

eccp• 13 years ago

In the meantime there's a wonderful version of John Cage's "4:33" here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoAbXwr3qkg

BoppreH• 13 years ago

"The uploader has not made this video available in your country."

leephillips5• 13 years ago

Since this superb video mentions both Stravinsky and John Cage, I think it would be in order to bring up what the former said when the latter's "Silence" piece was described to him. There are many versions of the story; my favorite has Stravinsky replying something like "I look forward to hearing works of major length by this composer."

aaimnr• 13 years ago

Actually the name is not Silence but 4' 33" and it's important, because the piece is not really about a silence, but about a various random sounds you start hearing in the audience when an artist is not playing.

mdellabitta• 13 years ago

True, "Silence" is actually a book: http://www.amazon.com/Silence-Lectures-Writings-Anniversary-...

mrbrowning2• 13 years ago

So, I want to preface my comment by saying that I think this video is really well-made and entertaining, and that it's a decent attempt at making serialism accessible to a wider audience than it's traditionally had.

That said, it's littered with inaccuracies that I don't think we would tolerate if this were one of Vi Hart's math videos. Most egregiously, I think, is that she wrongly ascribes some of Schoenberg's dogma to Stravinsky: Stravinsky never had much to say about the desirability of conditioning children to understand dodecaphonic music intuitively (Schoenberg may not have either -- if I had my copy of Strunk's Source Readings in Music History on me right now I could verify this, but if I remember correctly it was either Webern or an unrelated third party who promulgated this particular vision of the ascendancy of avant garde music), nor was he particularly committed to using all twelve tones in his tone rows -- Agon, one of his most famous serialist works, employs a seventeen-tone row at one point [1]. Early on in the video, she selects a tone row at random and sort of dismissively asserts that no one would be able to tell the difference anyway. This is frustrating, because masters like Schoenberg did in fact order their rows to ensure not only structural but sonic coherence, using techniques such as hexachordal combinatoriality [2]. Now, that's not to say that these considerations are audible to most listeners -- one of serialism's greatest failings, in my opinion, is that much of its content is only discoverable on paper even by highly trained musicians -- but it's certainly audible to some, and it's worth noting that this runs counter to her assertion that musical lines don't have meaning until they're embedded in a harmonic context: it's not even true with serialism as practiced! It's certainly the case that many melodic lines can make sense in multiple harmonic contexts, but the idea that melodies imply their supporting harmony has been a foundational concept in Western music since at least the Baroque, and to counter otherwise is absurd -- otherwise we would be unable to comprehend the harmonic movements of e.g. a solo flute piece. This gets at my major frustration with this presentation, which is that to present serialism as merely a fun and basically arbitrary means of constraining your artistic output is deeply hostile to the reasons for why the technique was developed and the music that people made with it. Maybe you're rolling your eyes at this level of nitpickery, but the fact is that it's reasonable to expect someone who's posturing as an educator to have a better handle on the source material than I see here.

I've gotten flak from people for pointing out problems with her videos on music before, and I wonder if it's just because we don't have enough respect for music as a discipline to want to hear it when someone gets things wrong. For that reason I want to reiterate that this my criticism here isn't hostile, it's not meant as a takedown, but as someone with stakes in the material being presented I don't want to see it being presented inaccurately.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agon_(ballet)#Music

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatoriality#Hexachordal_co...

tankbot2• 13 years ago

You are correct. But, you are also boring.

You are also not the target audience of Vi Hart's videos.

The point is to make this stuff accessible to people who would otherwise never be exposed to it and hopefully inspire them to further investigate. Hart accomplishes this by being entertaining and generalizing some of the material.

Complaining and nitpicking the details of this video is like watching a movie with someone and calling bullshit every 5 minutes. It's irritating and it makes you look like an ass who can't relax and have fun.

gruseom2• 13 years ago

No, he is not boring, and your comment is (way) out of line for being personally disrespectful.

sanoli2• 13 years ago

Well, I come to Hacker News exactly for this. It helps filter out all the bullshit I don't want to waste time putting up with. And please remember that he's criticizing the video on Hacker News and not on her website or youtube page. I personally can't stand Vi's style of explaining things, but I know I'm also not the target audience. The comment you're calling out for being boring, however, goes quite nice with HN's crowd.

Luc2• 13 years ago

We now await the comment from an even more pedantic professor of music picking the details of _your_ comment apart.

(Instead of criticizing, you could have framed this as interesting elucidation and additional info instead, and let people make up their own mind)

adamdavis3• 13 years ago

Take it easy, friend.

stephencanon3• 13 years ago

His comment was an interesting elucidation. It offers both meaningful criticism and valuable historical context.

stephencanon3• 13 years ago

This is a really excellent comment. I would go further and point out that it’s slightly missing-the-point to apply harmonic variation to a tone-row structure. Serialism, as practiced by the big three, represented in part a rejection of harmonic variation and a renewed focus on counterpoint instead of harmony (especially the primacy of the tone-row variational operations of transposition, inversion, and retrograde motion, which seem to be ignored entirely in the video—or at least in the first 12 minutes, which is all I’ve made it through, admittedly).

None of this is to say that one can’t build tonal structures over a tone-row, or engage in harmonic variation; some of my favorite compositions do exactly that. It’s just worth keeping in mind that this has relatively little to do with serial composition as practiced by it’s originators, who really were trying for a genuinely atonal approach.

(If I had to guess regarding the quote, I would say Berg or Webern, but I don’t have an actual reference available either).

kroger• 13 years ago

"Serialism, as practiced by the big three, represented in part a rejection of harmonic variation and a renewed focus on counterpoint instead of harmony"

This is true, specially in Webern's compositions. The canonical (pun intended) example is Webern's Symphony op. 21, which is a four voice cannon:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKD_tZr-ZpY

Webern was greatly influenced by Renaissance composers such as Heinrich Isaac:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqpXLTJDsWg

On the other hand, Schoenberg and specifically Berg have a more harmonic approach to their compositions as we can see in Berg's violin concerto:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqSSHwFEn_8 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violin_Concerto_(Berg)

leephillips5• 13 years ago

I would have to watch the video again with your comments in mind, but before I find time for that I want to say that I'm not sure she made the assertion that musical lines don't have meaning until they're embedded in a harmonic context, by which it seems you take a context explicitly supplied by the composer. She seems to be saying that there is no meaning, anywhere, without some kind of context, which I think is inarguable. As you say, the harmonic context can be implied, or, in other words, supplied by the listener's brain.

I think she failed to point out that the goal (or a major goal) of serialism was to create lines without tonal centers. But there is a trenchant objection to the serialist program by a famous composer (I forget who), which is that the listener never hears a line floating free of tonality, but his brain insists on supplying one; the outcome being that one hears a constantly shifting tonal center, rather than atonality, and so the 12-tone technique fails in its goals.

mrbrowning2• 13 years ago

Well, that's how I understood the comment about listening to people sing on the subway -- she casts it as though the uninitiated listener isn't going to be able to pick out the harmonic context of what the people are singing and will therefore find it semantically void. That definitely happens, but in most cases it's the result of bad singing and not lack of context. Most pop music lines are designed to project a tonal center pretty well, if only by the relatively crude means of just harping on the tonic and related chord tones rather than strictly cadencing, so I think even your average non-musician would have a good sense of the key if a single person with decent pitch were singing such a line in public. But I think we agree on that already!

As for the composer who said that, I think it was Walter Piston? It's definitely an interesting and arguable assertion, especially because it's theoretically testable. I think we probably currently lack the neurological understanding to reliably gauge by any means what tonal context a listener is holding in their mind, but to this layman it seems like a surmountable challenge.

adamdavis3• 13 years ago

Regarding the conditioning of children to understand dodecaphonic music intuitively, I seem to remember hearing a storyof how Webern would make the claim that in the future children would be whistling his music in the streets. If that is considered to be true, it was most likely he who had serious thoughts about this subject.

dnautics2• 13 years ago

"Early on in the video, she selects a tone row at random and sort of dismissively asserts that no one would be able to tell the difference anyway."

I took this that she was saying this in the voice of the critics, setting it up to be dismissed, because later on in the video she plays a serialist piece of her own composition and you CAN hear the patterns quite easily.

everettForth• 13 years ago

Have you ever tried watching James Burke's "Connections"? A lot of facts are wrong, and connections are weak, but it's still more entertaining and educational than 99% of the stuff out there. I could say the same thing about the "Radiolab" podcast.

If you really want to help these people (and all of us), why don't you email Vi Hart, and offer your fact-checking services for her next video?

I'm sure her production team is quite small (~1). I love her videos, but I'd also to be happy for them to be more accurate.

dusklight3• 13 years ago

Keeping in mind her "pi = 4" and similar videos, isn't it better for the audience to always be questioning and always be fact-checking than to blindly trust that what she says is correct?

dusklight3• 13 years ago

Keeping in mind the section of the video about sports and kids on the train talking to each other, is it possible that she is not wrong, but that you misunderstood what she was trying to say? If there was some misunderstanding of communication, it is at least partially her fault because she made the choices of communications medium and communications distribution, but keeping in mind the overall tenor of her channel, who do you think she is trying to reach and what do you think she is trying to say?

mlopes• 13 years ago

Vi from Altitude? :P

JonnieCache• 13 years ago

For those of you who find Schoenberg's work interesting but ultimately unlistenable, I suggest checking out some Takemitsu. He uses a lot of similar ideas, but you don't get the same feeling of contempt for the concept of music that one sometimes gets listening to hardcore serialism. (I know that's not at all how schoenberg thought but it's hard to avoid feeling like that on occasion.)

Rain Tree Sketch is a good place to start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD01g6q3zPo

graycat• 13 years ago

I watched the whole video.

She has very pretty hands! To play all that atonal music with such facility, she is at least really good with piano. That she can sing that atonal music so well is astounding. And her drawing is amazing: The art she gets in her drawing, e.g., the little cup with legs, is surprisingly good; it looks like she could effortlessly be a famous cartoonist.

Beyond her talents and skills, her knowledge of music is amazing.

But, then, as far as I can tell about what she was intending to say about music, heavily I don't believe her. It appears to me that somewhere, at home, at Stony Brook, somewhere, she got a view of music that throws out the baby and drinks the bathwater. From what I can understand about what she is saying, I believe that she is missing most of what is really important in music. She seems to have some formality overwhelming reality.

It appeared that one of her main points was that music before atonality was somehow merely tonal and, thus, by 1900 or so played out, over with, and needed a new direction, e.g., atonality. I don't believe that.

For an analogy, from all I can tell, what she is saying is that everything that can be said in the English language has already been said so that, to say anything new, we need another language. Next, the content is not really in what is said anyway but just in what the reader reads into what is said. So, it's enough just to say random things. So, that we don't confuse with English, we will say the random things in a new, undefined language of gibberish no one has seen before.

Nonsense. We are not anywhere near the limits of what can be said in English. The bottleneck is having something to say, not the language to use to say it.

Well, there's a language in Western music. Here is a little of it: Pick two keys on a piano that are right next to each other; it may be that both keys are white or one is black and the other is white, but in any case they are next to each other. Then to a good approximation the fundamental frequency of the key on the right will be the twelfth root of 2 times the fundamental frequency of the key on the left. That frequency ratio is a semi-tone. A frequency ratio of the sixth root of 2, that is, two semi-tones, is a whole tone. If start on a note and go up tone, tone, semi-tone, tone, tone, tone, semi-tone, then have gone up in frequency by a factor of 2 (interval of an octave) and have played the notes of the major scale of the note you started on and ended on -- that note is called the tonic of that scale. You will be playing the notes of the major key of that tonic.

Of course for historical reasons, nearly all those frequency ratios are surprisingly well approximated by perfect tuning via ratios of small whole numbers. In particular, as at Google,

     2**(7/12) = 1.49830707688

which is close to 3/2 which is 7 semi-tones, called a perfect fifth, and how the main string instruments -- violin, viola, cello -- in an orchestra are tuned.

If you start on the note C and go up the major scale, then you will play on only the white keys and will be playing in the key of C major.

If you want to play some simple music, then pick a note as the tonic, start on that note, play the other notes in the major scale of that tonic but avoiding the tonic, but, when want to end, return to the tonic. That's done so often in Western music that everyone will quickly detect which note is the tonic (or one step more advanced, which notes are candidates for the tonic) and notice that when you return to the tonic the music has finished something and maybe just ended. All that is part of the language of Western music. And there's much more such language that we have all learned if only by association from lots of exposure.

But atonality largely discards that language. Then, someone who knows only English or is writing for people who know only English, discarding English essentially stops communications, and that's why it's super tough to hear any communication in atonal music. Yes, the music is new and different but so would be dropping a pile of brittle dishes on the floor, and in both cases the sound is new only because before everyone was smart enough to avoid making such a sound.

For music, yes, it mostly doesn't mean anything definite, specific, and unambiguous literally. Mostly. But, of course, in the Sibelius Finlandia or the R. Strauss Ein Heldenleben it is fairly unambiguous what is being said, including the machine gun fire in Finlandia and the personality of the girl in Ein Heldenleben.

For something still with meaning but more ambiguous, in the D major section of the Bach Chaconne for solo violin, there is a lot of use of repeated notes, especially A and D, three notes or four notes, and finally some repeated chords.

But what to make of the repetition? One approach is to regard them as insistent, increasingly so during the section, underlining the short passages between the repeated notes, passages that are similar but with some variation. It could be music from impassioned speaking, saying much the same thing over and over, more and more strongly, with the repeated notes/chords between as insistent emphasis.

At one point, the music suddenly changes, as if exhausted from the passion, and plays just some more consonant major thirds (D and F#, that is, an interval of two whole tones) with some short descending passages. Then the drama increases again with some repeated chords to the climax of the piece before a D minor section that starts with a confused catharsis.

So, for an interpretation, the music is from something intense going on, building up, becoming insistent, somehow trying to get some resolution one way or another, finally, with a big effort, doing so, and then receding to a catharsis.

One view is that the music is screaming out to the heavens about the intensity of the human spirit. Some might guess, but I don't see a good fit, is that the music was a representation of Bach working to add one more to his family. Either way, it's passionate music; the closest of anything else I know of is the Chaconne of Vitali, and it is quite different. No, I don't find Stravinsky's Le sacre du printemps close.

There is an old story that composer Castelnuovo-Tedesco regarded the Bach Chaconne as the "greatest piece of music ever written". I can see many issues in interpretation in that music, but I see nothing that suggests that the level of art in the music was constrained by tonality.

Net, I don't see that tonal music, even the quite old version of it Bach used, either inhibited or exhausted new musical expression.

To understand better, we need to back up from just keys, tonality, chord progressions, etc. and notice that heavily music is art as in the classic definition the communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion. So, the listener gets a vicarious emotional experience or sometimes in particular something that speaks to part of their life, that is, confirms that others have faced the same things, or at least similar emotions, thus, confirming, possibly comfortingly, for the listener that they are not alone.

When Rostropovich first went to Berlin to play with von Karajan, for just what was meant in how Rostropovich started the second movement of the Dvorák concerto I don't know, but he, von Karajan, and several soloists in the orchestra seemed to have the same musical communications in mind, and that communication speaks effectively and directly to me about some parts of my life. So, Rostropovich achieved an effective communication in a universal language.

With this definition of art and with the essentially endless range of human experience, emotion, there is an endless range of music to communicate, interpret, new music, not written yet, including with tonality the same as used by any of Vivaldi, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Rossini, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Puccini, ..., Wagner, J. Strauss, R. Strauss, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, and more. Great, new music is no more limited by tonality than new information is limited by English; being atonal is no help for good, new art in music but, like replacing English with gibberish, a nearly insurmountable obstacle.

There is a lot of quite good art available mostly in just performance, with very old tonality; can get plenty of communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion, awash in passion, pathos, poignancy, sympathy, empathy, identification, etc.

E.g., there is the Kelly Pickler I Wonder:

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb9mvkxE5Ww

That with her hair, face, and figure, with the right hair stylist and dress selection, in places she is able to look a lot like Marilyn Monroe is nearly irrelevant. Instead, this music is a heart rending portrayal of a pretty, young woman, who still regards herself as a "little girl", suffering from feeling neglected by her mother. It's endearing. Standard emotional reactions include sympathy, empathy. Men, in particular, are supposed to feel protective, but some will see weakness and dependency and sense an opportunity for an easy score. And the music works, well. There is no end to such human experience, emotion to be interpreted, communicated.

That Kelly Pickler art really is new: Sure, the tonality is old, really old, and the harmony may be just a cliche; in tonality we're certainly not listening to Wagner's "Prelude" to Tristan und Isolde; still, I assure you from my many stacks of recorded music from vinyl to CDs and the Internet, from Vivaldi through Rachmaninoff to the present, as art that Pickler video is new and at least good.

So, even recent popular music, with no pretensions at serious music, and using old tonalities and cliche harmonies, can still be good as art. Net, it's still quite possible, even in Nashville popular music, to do good art with old tonalities.

The main point is the art; tonality is not a limitation; and atonality is no help to better art.

tshadwell• 13 years ago

This is the third time I've seen brainpickings.org: would it not have sufficed to link directly to the video?

Vi Hart on Stravinsky's Atonal Compositions [video]

Related Stories