Hiatus, not quite

AGAIN! The last entry is October last year, since then we have a New Era, the Obama Era. I watched the Inauguration with colleagues and students at Juilliard's concert hall projecting live CNN (after all Itzhak Perlman, a faculty performed). Everyone stood up for national anthem, adding multiple chords. It was a joyous but solemn event and I saw some students crying. I have pitch-tracked Obama's various speeches for fun and interest. His oratory is very pitch and time based--very musical, I find :) The best one musically so far is still that 2004 DNC keynote speech, the "Audacity of Hope" speech. Anyway I am very happy for my two American children.

As for my work, I haven't been really hibernating although it feels like it in this snowy NYC this winter, which kids are enjoying so much. When it snows, my daughter will go out at 7:20AM waiting for the school bus in front of our building, making smily faces on all the cars parked in front. I stay inside the lobby in front of a radiator enough to watch her. I guess I used to be a little girl who loved snow and cold too!!! What happened to that?! :) My husband does better in the cold, well he is 1/4 Swiss after all! He even made an Igloo in Central Park which turned heads.

On January 15, 16 I did a performance of the first version of my collaborative work Lucid Possessions by media artist Toni Dove, at a performance space in the Village called HERE.org.
I was using the Augmented Violin system, interacting with the video and robots made by LEMUR's Leif Krinkle and Luke Dubois who programmed Toni's software. Their complete command and professionalism are the shining examples in the Max-world (the software I use) and I learned so so so much just hanging around with them! Anyway, this has been a huge project for me, the very first time I have ever done anything to do with spoken text. Also there were a lot of parameters--violin, text, video, robot, motion sensor etc etc. I am usually just using violin and computer, so I took some time trying to focus on what I really want to do than what I can do. Another topic for another day...

This is a very busy semester for me. In less than two weeks I'm going out to California for the first time in a very long time. I know I should do more traveling to the west coast... I'm playing at UC Irvine and Stanford Univ. Then in March I am playing the Music From Japan festival in NYC, DC and on tour, which music I'm finishing right now--I'm playing several pieces as well as my own. So there are a lot on my plate. I also registered my kids to After School programs, so my son is taking cooking, computer, science and gym (all his own choice except gym). At 5 yrs old he is still clingy, and sometimes I have to leave him in the morning in his classroom crying for mommy. His grief is so real (to me, the mommy, at least) he looks nothing less than a lead character in a Wagnerian opera or a Greek tragedy.

The picture at the top is a scribble my husband and I just made yesterday; the Music Editor from the STRINGS magazine and I are trying to work out a notation system for Subharmonics. It is rather complicated as I have various Subharmonic intervals (octave, 3rd, 2nd all applying slightly different pressure of the bow) and I have double stops where I play normally on D string while playing Subharmonics (of different kinds) on the G string. How to accurately notate this is really a pain and I haven't spent any serious effort since it was only me who has been playing it! Now that my laziness has caught up to me and it's time for explaining to the world.... Graham (editor) is so very patient with me and guiding me through all this. My husband made some suggestions, and being a mathematician, computational geometry specialist who has the credit of being the principal violist at Princeton Orchestra at one time, he is always right. How can you argue with a mathematician?

Subharmonics etc .... continues :)

This is Max Mathews, a pioneer of computer music, who visited Juilliard last week to take some of my Subharmonic samples in front of a class (of a colleague, Mike Czajkowski in the photo). I am going out to California in February so probably drop by at CCRMA at Stanford where he is a prof. Emeritus, and visit his lab for a further study... Max is in great shape mentally and physically. I truly respect his unrelenting pursuit and the power and willingness to go as far as you can at any age. My own father is 75 also and now thinking of building a new solar house in Japan. I really hope I'm going to be like this when I'm 80, scratching my violin away! :) The sad news is that Prof. Bill Bennett, mentioned in the last entry, had past away this summer in June without finishing his music acoustics book... I miss him very much.

Since the last entry, my son went into an emergency room cutting just below the eyebrow getting 13 stitches (he fell inside a city bus), my husband had a deviated septum operation (and didn't get a plastic surgery as Hollywood actresses do), I went and came back from performing in a very nice international festival held in Oaxaca, Mexico called Instrumenta (and brought back an excellent bottle of Mezcal for my husband--without worms inside--they said "that's for tourists"), then baked a cake for my son's 5th birthday the day after I came home.

At the moment I'm trying very hard to finish mastering a new album with my subharmonic works, coming out from Lovely Music. It is going very slow with all the distractions coming my way one after the other. Now with my son in a wonderful Kindergarten (where people buy real-estate to be zoned for) I have chunk of free time in the morning for the first time in like 7 years. What a change---maybe I will start to get some work done!?

SUBHARMONICS: How the word gets spread

OK, this is the reason why I am generally staying and called a HERMIT. Which is what my French husband called me, when we first met: "Mari why do you live like an hermite?" (rhyming with "termite" with a silent 'h' French style :) I find myself to be peculiarly in self-imposed exile. I like creating and performing, but generally staying quite neutral. Combined with raising two small children and the daily chores, maybe I am not as busy as I should be. Maybe later, when my son is older.

Just a few days ago, I noticed that my YouTube entry on my interactive performance with a Guitarbot (musical robot) received 2,000 views in one day, also coinciding with various blog posts on my Subharmonic technique. I thought just responding to some of the messages in case some people might find the way over here. As I write everywhere that I first played Subharmonics in public in my solo recital debut concert in Merkin Hall, NYC 1994, the initial public interest peaked about that time. I have been expanding, improving the technique ever since, namely writing works for myself so that I would get better at it. Now all of the sudden this week, the 'buzz' is hot. Even my French sister-in-law send me a short article on yahoonews in French.
UPDATE: I found out the reason for the sudden burst of hits. The site called Noiseaddicts published a very nice article on my technique entitled "The sounds that shouldn't be" :) It generated tons of hits, thus even my sister-in-law finding a snippets on a French news :)

I find it interesting how news gets propagated and distributed. The Norwegian visit was in May 2006 when Dr. Alfred Hanssen at the University of Tromsø requested that I come there to record for his research. I gave a small concert there as well as an interview on Norwegian radio. It was never really reported at all, but later it got reported to Physics Today that year (I think it was). Then I saw several news picking them up, and I also was contacted by researchers from various countries as well. Then nothing, really, except for occasional questions from random people. So how did this 7-22-08 Subharmonic buzz started? No idea :)

To answer those who mentioned George Crumb, I had an opportunity to speak with him back in early 90s at a Kronos concert. He does notate those low notes as "pedal notes" and the principle is the same. Except that I have yet to hear a successful production of those notes. My technique is quite a bit more controlled. I do produce not only one octave below (Crumb's pedal note), but major 7th, minor 9th, major and minor 3rds, and on the good day, perfect 5th. It is combined with very controlled placement of the bow as well as the pressure---it doesn't take too much pressure as some seems to believe. It just have to be just the right amount---also the bow speed.

Some wonders why I am 'getting all the credit' for doing this, but honestly I don't think that is my fault :) There were some scholars claiming that Paganini did it first--very likely he was able to do it better than I---but please show me a piece that he wrote FOR Subharmonics--there is none. As far as I know, I am the first one to really push and use Subharmonics as the legitimate violin range, not as a mere sound effect, or a musical 'joke' that violinists have been doing for centuries it seems. I like to imagine that the first person to do it was probably an old gypsy man, a few hundred years ago, by a camp fire who was fooling around with the instrument trying to scare kids with a weird sound :) I have never claimed that I was the first one ever to do this technique---on the contrary, I was taught a variation of this technique by my old Belgium-Jewish-Russian teacher named Armand Weisbord, who was an old family friends with Heifetz. This technique derives (for me personally) from a bowing exercise called Son Filé, a slow soft sound to be played on the bow as long as possible. It is a practice to steady your bow and improve the sound production. I just took them very far, which became part of my technique for musical expression.

OK, back to my hermite life, got to put the kids to bed :)
Oh the picture is my violin, hooked up with transducer mic and some measurement viewer, by Dr. Bill Bennett Jr at his home. Before Dr. Hanssen, Dr. Bennett, the Professor Emeritus in Physics at Yale Univ., contacted me to include me in his musical acoustics book published by Princeton University Press.

Where am I from?

This summer seems to be the time to catch up to everything, as I'm in the process of upgrading everything from hardware to software. It's tedious! This is an email I sent to a friend, and I have been sending to several people about it also. It seems I should have put it up on the blog here long ago. I went to Japan to visit my family in March, and this is about a performance I saw.
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"The day before I left I saw an extraordinary performance of a Kabuki actor (female character) Fukusuke Nakamura. I'm collaborating next year with one of the Shamisen master named Mojibe Tokiwazu IV, who organized the event; as I am curating the Music From Japan festival 2009 (March in NYC and DC). Mr. Tokiwazu arranged the music of Chopin for his Shamisen orchestra (!), and Mr. Nakamura danced to the music in Kabuki style wearing a full-fledged Kimono costume (they said they chose Chopin to suit their recent Paris performance). It was so shocking; I (heterosexual female) was completely convinced of his femininity, which is free of vulgarity of any kind such as 'drag queen' here. He was so feminine in all his movements and character, while projecting with a force of a male--this must be very akin to what a Castrato was. Usually Kabuki actors dance to the music of Kabuki, but the fact he danced to western Romantic music, really threw me off balance :)

Then I realized it was only me who was flipping out; no body in the audience of a full-house, both Japanese male and female, seems to flinch. Then I realized my sensibility has become completely 'Americanized', being somewhat scandalized or shocked by such a gender-bending and artistically superb display in public performance. Have I become so puritan living in the USA for too long?? I just wondered :) Seriously Mr. Nakamura would put the most convincing American drag queen to shame. They said they had a fantastic reception in Paris, but I imagined how would general American audience take this. When I went backstage, Mr. Nakamura, who was still in his costume, was still in his female character greeting people as a 'woman'. It was kind of hard to imagine him being heterosexual, but he got a wife and children, so did his father who was also a 'female' actor. I really would like to collaborate with him some day. They said he is one of the only traditional Kabuki actors who are adventurous, open-minded and willing to go avant garde like this. (dancing to western music)

Also, I saw some female audience wearing Kimono 'professionally'; i.e. professional women = Geishas. Being a Geisha also means that she has to be an accomplished dancer, singer, an instrumentalist to entertain her clients. The Geishas come to Kabuki, I was told, to LEARN HOW TO MOVE LIKE A FEMALE from the male Kabuki masters such as Mr. Nakamura. The picture is Mr. Nakamura in the costume of "Musume Dojoji".

The performance was in Tsukiji, Hama-Rikyu Hall ('beach palace residence' of the Emperor) attached to the headquarters of the Asahi News paper, very close to the fish market where tourists go to see the fish auctions at 4AM in the morning.

Life goes on--and going on!

OK, this is not good! It has been too long. Too busy, too much stuff going on. I see my last post was October (!). In late October my son had a perforated appendicitis, and the episode included my first ambulance ride, spending Halloween in a hospital, followed by not-so-easy recovery at home. My 4 year old son was a trouper, who called his very small incision "WOOF" because he didn't know the word 'wound'. It completely stopped my life most of November.

At the moment I am working on mastering my new solo album; I had finished Vitessimo, my first work for bowing sensor Augmented Violin, developed at IRCAM. The picture above is my version, called the Augmented Violin Glove, fitted with lace glove so I am completely wireless. Visit www.marikimura.com/Vitessimo.html for details. In the course of it, I have been rethinking about bowing a lot, and the relationship between functional movements (bowing) and expressive movements (such as conductor's arm). Is expressive movement really necessary for the audience to 'see'? to understand music? My answer is a 'conditional' NO. Would audience need to SEE the expressive arm movement to 'understand' music? Then how do you explain Karl Böhm's miniscule batton movements generating gigantic sound out of Berlin Philharmonic? Got to go, but not finishing the thought... To be continued...

POLYTOPIA questions

This is the cover art of my new CD, POLYTOPIA which came out from Bridge Records in September. I love it and so grateful my mother in Japan didn't hate it! (in fact she LOVED it, too)

Anyway, many have asked about my title piece of this CD, POLYTOPIA for violin and signal processing and how it was done, so here are some pointers. I am using an interactive computer music program MaxMSP (Cycling74.com) which has been the main tool I have been using for more than a decade. I basically only use two techniques in this piece; pitch shifting and delay. I am using SIX independently controlled pitch-shifters in MaxMSP (harmv2~) and delays, and also they are independently panned, as it was originally (still is) conceived as a Surround 5.1 piece. My visual image was that if it were a real-life situation, 6 vioinists will have to be running across the hall really fast without tripping over, while playing like mad: it's kind of a funny picture!

If you would like to know more about nuts and bolts, here are some nitty-gritty details:
When there are chords in unison, I make sure that the 6 voices are not exactly aligned--I make sure that they are about 5-50 milliseconds apart, as it would add a 'fuller' or 'real' feel as if those chords are played by humans. No REAL six human players will ever exactly come in absolutely the same time, zero milliseconds apart! I also make sure that these 'artificial delays' in unison is not always the same--i.e., if delays on each voices are: voice#1 = 0ms, #2 = 10ms, #3 = 50ms, #4 = 30ms so on, then the next chords I switch the delay times to 20, 36, 5, 54ms so on, so the chords don't sound uniform.

I had also made my own tuning table for my pitch-shifting, thinking that the string tuning is very different from equal temperatment--so I built my own pitch-shifting intervals by ear. Then, I listened to the result and it wasn't as 'beautiful' as I thought it was going to be, aside from the fact that I am not staying in one key (which would have made sense). So, I bravely discarded my 'beautiful' tuning table which took HOURS to build, and went with equal temperament tuning (1200 cents devided by 12). I often find that even in acoustic composition, just because you spend many hours on something, doesn't mean the result is good, and I need my courage to say NO :)

In my opinion, the 'death' of computer music can be easily achieved by your LAZINESS :) I try to vary as much details as I possibly can, since I think audience is acutely aware and sensitive to monotony---if they catch on something that is exactly the same, you would be surprised how fast you can lose their interest. You have to keep them wondering---besides if the details vary you can also react more musically, as well as amuse yourself and keep yourself fresh :)

Time to read some Japanese books for my son since he brought me one... a GOLDEN opportunity for a poor boy whose parents are trying to raise him trilingual... more later...

Risset Concerto premiere in Japan

On Sept. 5th in Tokyo, I had one of the best musical experiences in my life, giving the world premiere of Jean-Claude Risset's violin concerto written for me at Suntory Hall in Akasaka, Tokyo. I also played my own cadenza which Jean-Claude let me write --- I am so very grateful for the honor. The concerto is the first one in the world using Subharmonics all over the place, aside of my own Concerto I wrote and played in 1999 for a Mexican orchestra. (I like the first 2 movements but desperately need to rewriting my 3rd movement. And exactly when do I have time to do that....)

I said in a speech I gave at a small toasting backstage after the concert that Jean-Claude made a history in violin concerto literature that night.

If you are a violinist you might shiver hearing what I am about to tell you, but the day before my big Concerto premiere in Tokyo, the tip of my bow BLEW OFF. The ivory that holds the hair simply came off. I was loaned a wonderful bow, but at the end I had to use my own second bow priced Canadian $5 bought in a flea market about 20 years ago! It has a fake "Tourte" engraving---but somehow I felt I could control it better. But all worked, although it was SCARRRRY!

Anyway, my biggest challenge was to create a Cadenza worthy of this monumental concerto (it's nearly 25 minutes long), compositionally sound so that I don't ruin Jean-Claude's music (!!) but also, as a violinist composing my own cadenza one needs to SHOW OFF your ability, right? So what I did was in fact -- believe or not -- first systematically making a list of what I want to show off (!) unrelated to the concerto itself---I want to show that: 1) I can play one octave below on the G string, while playing normally on D string thus creating a ultra-wide double-stop like diminish 18th :) etc; 2) I want to show that I can play the Subharmonic 3rd--which is to say if I play an Open G I get the E (3rd below); 3) then I want to show that with those Subharmonic 3rd I can still play normal notes on D string, so again a double-stops with Subharmonic 3rd nobody has ever done before, etc. etc. Then I went back to Jean-Claude's 1st movement and went through it compositionally, picking materials that I can use or modify and made the 2nd list. When I combined these two lists, I pretty much had put together the Cadenza.

Also, since Jean-Claude Risset is world famous for using Shepard Tone: so-called "un-ending glissandi" in his compositions, I made my version of an extremely long glissando from one octave below open G (cello's G) all the way up, SIX octaves up on the E string while switching the fingerings seemlessly as possible, and sliding up on the fingerboard at the same time. It is quite tricky but again, "Wow" factor + "Homage to Risset" factors both accomplished. I thought first that this is where the orchestra should come in to end the 1st movement. Then I had thought that coming in after the long glissandi must be a bit unnerving for the orchestra+conductor, and also I wanted NOT to be jumped or cut short of this glissandi by accident. So I added a three-measure pizzicato phrase using both hands (in 4 vs. 3 rhythm, in homage to the melodic segregation technique Risset uses, I did the rhythmic one--plucking in 4 with the right hand, while plucking in 3 with the left hand on the fingerboard) after the glissandi, a kind of a way to 'get back to reality' from the Cadenza, back to the final part of the 1st movement. These are all the compositional creative process. Then I moved onto my performance process, which is an entirely different one. In any performance, even in improvisation, I typically frame myself with some kind of an 'emotional logic', to be able to deliver the music to the audience while I remain emotionally committed but also able to be objective -- that is to say that I will not break down and cry or laugh while performing since that is the job of the audience :) -- it's what I learned from reading Stanislawski's "Actor Prepares". But this is a topic for another day....

This must be hard to understand without listening to it, so when I get a recording I will try to post it somewhere... But I got so much reaction from this Cadenza and people really liked it, and so says ever-gentle and kind Maestro Risset... in any case I thought that those who really liked the cadenza maybe interested in how I composed it.

Another news is that my new solo CD of electronic music for violin came out from Bridge Records, officially on 9/18 in the US. (http://bridgerecords.com/pages/catalog/9236.htm) In fact I was able to sell nearly 50 copies while in Japan already, thanks to YAMAHA which came and opened a little booth for me at the concerts in Tokyo. I guess I work so slowly in terms of recording -- everything in this CD was recorded in 2004-5 (!) but it was like a baby that I couldn't give birth waaaayyy past the due date :) It took me forever and ever to finish mastering. My resolution (as if that means anything!) or my hope is to start working a little faster, a faster turn-around on recordings which I really want to do a LOT more in the coming years... It was such an honor, pleasure and a learning experience working with everyone at Bridge. I had never really understood the art of recording, which I am absolutely convinced now that it is a very, very different art from performing live.... I learned SO MUCH from working with the wonderful recording engineers for this project.