Sunday, December 22, 2019

Visualizing the First Two “Razumovsky” Quartets

Having spent this past Friday writing about how Quatuor Ébène approached the performing (and recording) of the first two of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 59 (“Razumovsky”) quartets, I decided to revisit Stephen Malinowski’s YouTube playlist of his visualizations of the Beethoven quartets to take a look at how he approached both of these quartets. Since this involved material with which I was familiar through both recordings and concert performances, I was curious as to how his videos would have an impact after one set of recorded performances was still fresh in memory. Once again, the experience had assets and liabilities.

Perhaps highest among the assets is the extent to which these visualizations provide a representation of one way in which the marks on the score pages may be parsed. It is important to bear in mind that there is no reason why any composition by Beethoven (or any other composer) should be parsed in a single way. Indeed, from a grammatical point of view, performance itself is a means of expressing a particular approach to parsing. In that sense Malinowski’s video interpretations take a syntactic structure arising from a recorded performance and add a second layer of parsing in the visual domain to the one that performance has established in the auditory domain. If nothing else, this is a highly inventive approach to how, with the proper tools, one might be able to document a listening experience by working in the same time-based domain that provides the foundation for listening itself.

This suggests that each of these videos reflects a highly personal interpretation. This is not meant as a criticism. Rather, it suggests that it identifies strategies that others might consider when trying to account for their own respective listening experiences, not necessarily by creating their own visualizations but, rather, by coming to appreciate what those visualizations express and then finding other means to express them.

Nevertheless, there are certain aspects that concern me because they might distract when they should be indicating. From a personal point of view, I find the frequent use of blurred images to be an almost painful distraction, even though I realize that, from Malinowski’s point of view, it is simply one of several means to express the variety of different approaches to performance. On the other hand I appreciate that Malinowski’s approach to “scrolling through time” does not always provide all “future information.” Every now and then events simply “spring out of the void;” and, from a rhetorical point of view, they tend to have the same effect as that of certain abrupt introductions of thematic material in the score itself.

Still, from an information theoretic point of view, there is an almost overwhelming abundance of content in both of the quartets being visualized, meaning that every movement, even when taken on its own, serves up considerable “bandwidth,” which then requires equally considerable “processing effort” on the part of the viewer. I would postulate that such effort is far greater than what is engaged when one watches the members of a string quartet perform these pieces. My explanation would be that the visual experience of performance reveals cues about how the performers are taking their “parsing of the score” and realizing it as a listening experience. They are not providing a blueprint. They are providing their impressions of that blueprint, and it is through those impressions that those of us on the audience side come away with an absorbing listening experience.

Thus, to return to the issue of a “fatigue factor” that continues to occupy my appreciation of Malinowski’s visualizations, I would say that the bandwidth of a concert experience is more manageable that that of watching those visualizations, particularly if one wishes to experience a single quartet from start to finish (as it would be performed). Mind you, the same issue arises when one is trying to follow the score. There are just too many bits on the printed page for mind to keep up with the steady flow coming in through auditory sensation. Thus, when we follow a score during a performance, we tend to select where we look because we want to look for certain features for the sake of understanding how they are interpreted. One cannot be that selective when viewing one of Malinowski’s visualizations; and, to be fair, I do not think he expects his viewers to approach his work that way.

Still, I have to grant that any one of those visualizations almost always calls my attention to a variety of features that have always registered with listening but may not have been appreciated for the full worth of their contributions to the overall design. There is no doubt that, for any of the Beethoven quartets, there is always likely to be more than “meets the ear,” whether the ear is in the concert hall or listening to a recording. Malinowski consistently provides insights into what that “more” may be. Sometimes, however, those insights tend to overwhelm the viewer, tempting him/her to close his/her eyes and just get “back to the Beethoven.”

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