Research in Music Series - Talks by Chris White and Max Mielcarek
Thursday, Oct. 22 @ 11:00 am, Bromery Center Room 421 (Arts Bridge); Free
Research in Music Series: Talks by Prof. Christopher White & Masters student Max Mielcarek
Prof. White's title: Music theory, technology, and our future: how we hold moonbeams in our hands
Max Mielcarek's title: Positional Space on the Double Bass Fingerboard
Prof. White's abstract:
As many scholars have noted, music theory is constantly mediated through technologies and objects. Musical activities and experiences resist the stability required of a measurable, analyzable object—an ephemeral social act that fades with its sound waves and lives on only in human memory. Music theory has therefore always worked through proxies: the objects and technologies that make music possible, that remain after the music dissipates, and that trace the human presence within music-making. Greek nomenclature, Guido’s staff, Franconian durations, music boxes, player pianos, vinyl records, digital spectrograms, statistical corpora, generative computer programs, and even written descriptions of musical experiences. Each of these has given us something durable to examine, and have provided the foundation of our field.
But, as many scholars have noted, music theory’s true focus is the visceral, hedonistic experience of music. We read one another’s scholarship, revisit historical treatises, and connect with our students because music theory deepens our musical lives. Because a chart, a spectrogram, or a graph can show us how to listen more deeply, feel more fully, and open a musical experience to a wider audience. Plus, music theorists are well attuned to identify and criticize these technologies’ benefits, limits, and failings. Through a series of case studies—medieval neumes, a player-piano roll, and a computational model of music cognition—my talk will trace the tension between the observable object and felt experience within our field’s analytical capacities.
Generative AI systems are, I will argue, music theory’s newest analytical objects. In one sense they are simply the latest entries in this long lineage. Like notation and recording before them, they are relics of how humans make and understand music. But AI lodges into an object something earlier technologies only gestured at and never achieved: musical creation itself. I will trace the lineage of music theory’s exposure to this idea through dice games, statistical analysis systems, and simple generative programs. My talk suggests that our next frontier is critically and skeptically applying music theory’s oldest skill to this newest technology: analyzing musical AI systems as relics of the human thought and creativity of which they are the automated evidence.
Max Mielcarek's abstract:
Recent embodied transformational studies of string instruments operate through a fretboard-based model in which individual pitches separated by semitone are traversed by the hand. This generalized system of fretboard space poses several issues for the double bass, whose large size and unique history of pedagogical development calls for a distinct embodied hand-position logic.
The Simandl and Rabbath systems, the two dominant pedagogical methods currently taught to bassists, divide the fingerboard of the bass into discrete positions which encompass all available pitches to a single vertically static placement of the hand. Unlike an equidistant system of pitches on a fretboard, these positions vary in their size, placement, and frequency both within and between the Simandl and Rabbath schools, meaning that these bass-specific systems align neither with pitch-based instrumental spaces nor with each other.
This paper proposes models of positional space on the double bass fingerboard derived from the Simandl and Rabbath methods. Through modelling and contrasting embodied transformations within Rabbath’s “Breiz” and an excerpt from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony across these distinct positional interval systems, I argue that the methodological system a bassist uses fundamentally changes their instrumental space. The insights offered by transformational analysis within a positional interval system contextualize physical choices which impact the embodied experience of the performer and the timbral experience for the listener. This offers an alternative system to pitch-based embodied transformational analysis which centers instrumentally-specific theoretical systems, allowing for both a more precise analysis of the experiences of instrumentalists, as well as the potential for a new generalized view of physical motion.
Free and open to the public.
Pictured above: Christopher W. White and Max Mielcarek