End of Season: Lotteries, the Earth, and...something new

So here we are after yet another long hiatus, back to blogging again. Now at the end of the academic year, a lot has happened in the past 6 months! Good news: I won two 'lotteries', a 2010 Composer in Residency in musical research at IRCAM in Paris, and 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship in music composition. Bad news: I got 3 herniated discs in my neck and took 6 long months of physical therapy and traction to put it back together. The picture above is my co-fellow this year, composer/Korean Komungo virtuoso Jin Hi Kim at the Guggenheim Foundation reception this week.

At the Guggenheim reception, I got to speak with many interesting people from many different disciplines which was very inspiring. Many guests were this year's Fellows, but there were some old-timers. One person I had an interesting conversation with, was a person named Dennis Hayes, Prof. Emeritus at Columbia Univ. in the Dept. of Earth and Environmental Science. He is now at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and observing the earthquakes, volcano etc around the world. Prof. Hayes was very interested in my subharmonics, string frictions and torsion of the string etc. and wanted to learn more. He asked me to send him some stuff. I have been thinking the earth seems to be twisting lately. Anything that my little violin would help the earth research...

We are leaving NYC in early June until early September, putting my two kids into French public schools thanks to their hosts, my parents-in-law. This is the sink-or-swim, learning French summer for the kids. I'm very anxious how they would do but it's for their own good! Or so I hope... I will be working with the Realtime Musical Interaction Team at IRCAM, finally getting to sit next to those very bright people and try to get the bowing tracking issues advanced. I will post my progress periodically, I promise myself!

A last note: there is something I think I can 'announce' pretty soon :) or so I hope. I think I'm achieving a new Subharmonic interval. I have been working on it intensively for the past few days and it seems to be coming fast. Still unstable and not presentable... That means my poor husband has been putting up with my annoying practicing day in and day out. I'm sure it is not pleasant to listen to!

New: adding to the last note, after the Guggenheim reception, Jin Hi Kim invited me to join her for clothes shopping, to the designer she is wearing in this photo, Nadya, since I thought it was very beautiful. Nadya was showing in a hotel room at Beacon Hotel so we came back to the Upper Westside and both allowed ourselves to buy our celebratory items, for PERFORMANCE use! (deductible!! :) Then Jin Hi came over to my home nearby for a take-out Indian food. A very nice time spent together on our special day.

Look and Feel

OK, I stop complaining how I'm NOT posting regularly anymore. It seems Facebook has taken over my posting, but I think this is still important to continue... Anyway, the above picture is the new Augmented Violin glove, this time designed by a professional fashion designer in NYC named Mark Salinas. I played a concert at the Issue Project Room a few weeks ago, where I debuted this new design. In March, I performed at the Merkin Hall in NYC, in a concert I helped curated for the Music From Japan festival 2009. Mark was in attendance and saw my DIY glove; he approached me and proposed to design it. My "DIY" glove was seeing its limit: it was made of too-soft lace that kept getting loose (that I had to put a rubber band around my wrist), and the black balloons that housed the sensor/batteries kept sliding off, once during a concert. I had never worked with fashion professionals before, and this is such a wonderful discovery that really made my year. I appreciate the aesthetics and discipline of design so much, and have such respect for designers how they go about the process of constructing a project from scratch. In my case, Mark had to take in account that my index finger and my middle finger CANNOT be fixed together (to hold the bow and play flexibly), nowhere on my hand can feel too tight, nothing should be shaking, sensors have to be fixed on the right spot etc. etc. He did all that and this is our first prototype. A new friend I met through Dave Soldier's concert also at IPR, Cellist Ha-Yang Kim suggested that I need STUDS :) and Mark came up with sewing sequin that would sparkle, and also stay fixed without being glued. The fabric is a thin spandix, and it fits perfectly, not too tight, not too loose. I could perform my non-computer music pieces without even thinking about it, as 4 out of 5 of my right hand fingers are uncovered. I would really like to thank Mark and again, it was such a pleasure working with him.

ps. Regarding the previous entry on the STRINGS magazine article about Jean-Claude Risset's Violin Concerto "Cadenza" I wrote using Subharmonics, the wonderful music editor Graham Pellettieri patiently worked with me and this is what we came up. I didn't want to make this into a 2-stave system, but with the concert pitch, fingering positions and different kinds of subharmonics it was too complicated and had no choice. I think this is the clearest option and I am so grateful for all the support. You can read the entire article here and see the entire score here and here.

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...