I'm going to be sneaky today. This diary isn't REALLY going to be about Albinoni. But enjoy the Albinoni anyway. And read where I'm going with this below.
Adagio by Albinoni, arranged for solo guitar, performed by Denian Arcoleo
I knew that as soon as I posted that, two things would happen: People who often ditch Thursday Classical Music would stick around. People who frequent our diaries would do a facepalm.
Why? Because the Albinoni Adagio is such an overplayed old chestnut. Back during the seventies, you couldn't watch an Italian film without either seeing Marcello Mastroianni, or hearing the Albinoni Adagio -- or both. Particularly interesting was a Laura Antonelli/Marcello Mastroianni flick that I can't remember the name of where Antonelli whacks off and has lesbian sex to Albinoni while Mastroianni peeps on her. It's a great introduction to Albinoni. However, you know something has reached the "overplayed" category when you start to hear it in Olympics ice skating choreographs.
It's still beautiful, though.
And it has an interesting story to it, which I wasn't aware of until about an hour ago. Apparently it was arranged into the form we all know by
Remo Giazotto based on surviving fragments of the piece he discovered (allegedly) in the ruins of the Saxon State Library in Dresden after the great fire-bombing of Dresden. As such, it constitutes then a 20th century composition. It's debatable how much is Albinoni and how much is Giazotto. Other fragments of it have been discovered since then, so we know Giazotto didn't just pull it out of his ass.
Speaking of overfamiliarity and pulling things out of one's ass...
My sister had a horse with constipation. She invited me to come watch her pull the horse turds out of the horse's ass, per the vet's instructions. However, after a minute, she complained that her arms were too short to get the tough ones. We ended up doing it with her baby-talking the horse so it wouldn't kick me in the nuts while I had my arm up to the shoulder in that horse's ass pulling out its turds. Now, normally, horse shit smells bad. Not too bad. You get used to it when it's everywhere. Let me tell you: constipated horse turds have their own odor, and in a totally different class. The point of this anecdote is this: Once you've had your arm up a horse's ass, as much as you may otherwise love an animal, you do lose a certain amount of respect for it.
I just had to share that.
I still love Albinoni's Adagio, but I've heard it more than most people, so it does make me cringe a little. There are some really awful versions of it out there, like the singing family-Euro-pop versions. And there's the awful Doors version, which I won't link to, and God knows, I love the Doors. Google it yourself. In fact, all the rock guitar versions of Albinoni's Adagio (yes, there are, and there are many) of it are just awful. It's like encountering an old high school chum, and he's panhandling or beating his children in public. Just embarrassing.
But I promised you something in the title: The Albinoni Adagio #76 by Emily! And thus the bait and switch intent of the diary commences.
Albinoni Adagio for Strings #76. Composed by Emmy
I love it. I went through a number of clips on David Cope's site before choosing this one. I think it's beautiful.
This piece of music is titled an Albinoni Adagio for Strings... but it says it's composed by Emmy. Who is Emmy? Emmy is EMI, Experiments in Musical Intelligence, a program written by composer David Cope. Emmy is able to listen to complete collections of compositions by a composer (more likely, Emmy analyzes digitized scores rather than listens), and then she ferrets out the various structures that this composer uses that are typical of his style: the types of rhythms, types of motifs, types of harmonic progressions that are preferred, etc... And at the end of this, Emmy can then produce a totally new piece of music of a type similar to that which the analyzed composer might produce.
Cope's site has examples of Emmy's compositions emulating Bach, Mozart, Grieg, Beethoven, and Mahler. Many of these are for sale on Amazon. Here's Emmy's production of a Mahler-type piece.
I can hear little bits and pieces of things I can recognize, like pieces of Knaben Wunderhorn and the First Symphony. It's not so jumbled as to be a word salad of Mahler music phrases. If I didn't know that this was by a computer program, I'd probably think it was either a very early Mahler work or a new work by somebody imitating Mahler. It doesn't have the same sense of direction, though, and that's probably the harshest critique I can make of Emmy, that Emmy's compositions tend to ramble. It's less noticeable in the Albinoni piece.
I'm going to try to keep this short. I usually have multiple agenda when I write these diaries. This one has a common agenda for me, though.
David Cope's work raises the question of WHAT IS MUSIC? There is a great deal of controversy surrounding this.
I'm not as interested in that question. The one I keep posing and worrying to death is this:
1) Does Beethoven's Ninth Symphony exist?
and more importantly,
2) WHAT THE HELL does a question like that even mean?
I've asked question #1 on here before. It can easily be changed now to this:
Does the Albinoni Adagio for Strings #76 by Emmy exist? And what the hell does THAT mean?
I've used this image before to make parallels between the Rorschach inkblots and music.
People see different things in it. I see two dancing bears. Other people see butterflies or bats. I stick by my two dancing bears. I even think that if I talk about them long enough, you'll see the two dancing bears and start to believe that they are there, too.
It's easy to look at that and say, well, this is all fine and dandy, but it's REALLY none of those things, that those things are just reflections of whatever crap is going on in the mind of the person looking at it. Because, really, it's just an inkblot, an impersonal thing made by folding a piece of paper with some spilled ink on it. It's not really a PAINTING of bears or butterflies or bats by somebody with an intent.
In that sense, Emmy's composition becomes closer to the Rorschach because we have totally eliminated the issue of what the intent of the composer was. Any meaning that we get from listening to an Emmy composition is totally manufactured by us in response to the image, just as I manufactured the two dancing bears in response to the Rorschach image.
Big deal, right? We'll see.
There was a long interesting (I think) thread in one of Dirkster's diaries on this subject of religion last week in which I fleshed some of this out. Dirkster seemed to find it interesting and suggested I read Niebuhr and that I'm going in a similar direction with all this. Too busy to read Niebuhr, but I'm familiar enough with the name to know that's a compliment.
My point is something like this, and I still labor over it somewhat obsessively, I guess. Does Beethoven's Ninth exist? Does what I hear when I listen to Beethoven (or Emmy) exist at all? Is the fact that the Rorschach test is REALLY just an inkblot, and that Emmy's composition is REALLY just a series of musical sounds produced with the help of an algorithm and a random number generator, does all that diminish the importance of what I experience when I listen to a great piece of music?
Because I tend to think that when I look at that Rorschach test and I see the two bears, I CREATE two dancing bears. We impose meaning on that Rorschach test, just as we sort and impose meaning on the 70 long minutes of sonic blasting that is the Beethoven Ninth Symphony, or impose meaning on the Emmy composition. That CREATION of the two dancing bears may have been a product of my mind and imagination, but it is a real thing of some substance and worth.
To a certain extent, I think the process whereby humans listen to music and create their own narrative for the music is a more important one than the one whereby somebody like Beethoven creates the Ninth Symphony. Oh, Beethoven is one of the great jewels of the human race. But the process by which we listen to Beethoven's Ninth, all that music, and we make something out of it in our heads, is the other half of the creative miracle that takes place between the composer and the listener. And since the composer might not even really be essential for this process, as Emmy demonstrates (albeit weakly) it doesn't even have to be a two way street between composer and listener.
This is about more than just music, really. I think that asking the question Does Beethoven's Ninth exist is equivalent to asking whether you or I exist. And whatever the hell that means. Just as when you listen to Beethoven you must create your own narrative to put all that sound in order and make something out of it, we do the same things when we create these constructions that we call our selfs. (I have deliberately split that word).
And about this point it starts to feel way too cosmic and I'm at risk of losing people, so I'll bail here.
Next week: We'll see. I think I'll be cursed if I say what I'm going to post.