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~ Boulder Bach Beat hopes to stimulate conversations about the ways Bach’s music succeeds in building bridges between populations separated by language, culture, geography and time.

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Tag Archives: digital game

Richard Powers on Music

12 Friday Dec 2014

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Successors, Bach's Works, Books, Interviews

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Tags

bacteria, brain, computer programmer, Darwin, digital game, English, Galatea 2.2, genetic code, Genie, Goldberg Variations, MacArthur Fellowship, Messiaen, music notation, musicology, New York, Orfeo, Peter Els, Richard Powers, Stanford University, Steve Reich, television, The Echo Maker, The Gold Bug Variations, The Origin of Species, The Wall Street Journal, Twitter, video game

Richard Powers

Richard Powers

Did you ever read a book review and realize that you have to get your hands on a title you’ve never heard of? That happened to me years ago, when I read a review in The Wall Street Journal of The Gold Bug Variations, a new novel by Richard Powers. In one sense, the plot was a love story about two different couples. It was also about many other things, including the intricacies of the genetic code, and composer Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations [BWV 988]. Powers immediately became one of my favorite writers.

Known as a brainy literary fiction writer – he won a MacArthur “genius” grant in 1989 – Powers has attracted an intense following. The former computer programmer and physics major (he later switched to English) always puts in a great deal of research into science, musicology and other disciplines, but his novels also explore the pleasures of romantic love, music and literature. His ninth novel, The Echo Maker, won the National Book Award for fiction. The main character has suffered a brain injury in an accident, but while you’ll learn a lot about cognitive science, the judges also must have been impressed with the clever mystery story that showed off Powers’ ability to construct a good plot.

Powers’ latest novel is Orfeo, about a modern classical music composer who attempts to obtain an immortality of sorts by rewriting the genetic code of bacteria, thinking that his biological “compositions” will live on when his music is forgotten. Instead, in the current atmosphere of fear about terrorism, he is labeled the “bioterrorist Bach” and becomes a fugitive from the US government. Ironically, the bad publicity finally allows his music to become better known.

Powers is the the Phil and Penny Knight Professor of Creative Writing in the Department of English at Stanford University in California. He answered my questions after flying back from New York City, where he did a reading at a concert that featured music mentioned in Orfeo.

Tom Jackson (TJ) One of my hobbies is listening to modern classical music – not a common pastime – so when I read Orfeo, I had a weird feeling that one of my favorite novelists had written a book for my personal enjoyment. Were you worried that a novel that discusses Steve Reich, Olivier Messiaen, etc. would lack mass appeal?

Richard Powers (RP) Well, I was sure that it wouldn’t have mass appeal! But then, in a time when there is so much creative work in all forms, and when the audience for books is dwarfed by those for film, television, games, and the Internet, I’m not sure that “mass appeal” is a meaningful goal for a literary novelist. The book itself takes art and connection as one of its subjects, and the life of Peter Els (the book’s hero) is a constant exploration of the trade-off between the expressive potential of music and the need to connect with large numbers of people. Orfeo is in part a meditation on the difficulty of making art in the age of “mass appeal” and the diversity of art that still gets made in obscurity. So I was pleasantly surprised, having written a story about a composer whose performances always have more people on stage than in the audience, at the numbers of people who bought, read, and wanted to talk about the book. A lot of people who thought they could never hear and enjoy “difficult” music discovered new sounds as the result of reading the book, and that thrilled me as much as any larger audience could have.

TJ Do you listen to music when you write, or do you prefer to work under silence?

RP Several of my eleven published novels have featured music of one kind or another in a starring role. One of the reasons I have come back to that subject again and again is that it gives me the chance to steep myself in listening, during the years that it takes to write a book. I can’t write at the same moment that good music is playing; the sounds are too interesting to concentrate on anything else! What I do is alternate, all day long: an hour or two of writing, then half an hour to an hour of intense listening, for refreshment and inspiration. It’s a great, two-stroke engine. When I wrote The Gold Bug Variations, I must have listened to one or another of Bach’s gems thousands of times.

TJ The Gold Bug Variations, Genie and Orfeo all discuss the genetic code. Do you view the genetic code as the primal code behind all other codes, such as language and musical notation?

RP Self-replicating molecules have set every living thing in motion, and that pattern-making impulse, at the inanimate level, is, in some profoundly mysterious way, the mother of all animate pattern-making and pattern-seeking urges. Of course, there are a lot of changes in nature as you move from molecules up to neurons and then to social institutions. But kinds of natural (and unnatural!) selection are at work all the way up and down the great hierarchy. Meditation on our molecular roots is tremendously inspiring, and thinking about the journey from the first self-replicating molecules to the pinnacles of human achievement is the deepest kind of spiritual reflection. As Darwin said at the end of The Origin of Species, “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

TJ Did you find that readers of Galatea 2.2 assumed that the character “Richard Powers” was in fact Richard Powers? If they assumed that, were they largely right?

RP Readers (and even some sophisticated critics) often confuse a central character with the author. Our high school English teachers tell us not to, but we can’t help it. And when the central character has exactly the same name, age, and biography as his author, the invitation for conflation is pretty strong! Galatea is me having fun with this most basic of reading fallacies, as a way of reflecting on the power of fiction and imaginative reinvention. Nevertheless, the Richard Powers at the heart of that story is himself an invention and one who finds himself in the heart of one of the oldest fictions in the world: the one where a person’s creation – in this case, an artificial intelligence program – comes alive.

TJ If we are waiting for you to pop up on Twitter, will we have a long wait? (Orfeo includes Tweets from the book’s protagonist).

RP I’m afraid so!  I’m a long-form guy. I need space. But I did once write a six-word novel: “Lie detector eyeglasses invented; civilization collapses.”

Tom Jackson – Sandusky Register

2014 NextNOW Fest

10 Wednesday Sep 2014

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Works, Music Education

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Brandenburg Concertos, Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, College Park, dance, digital game, jazz, Johann Sebastian Joust, motion controller, NextNOW Fest, slow motion, theatre, University of Maryland

Playing Johann Sebastian Joust

Playing Johann Sebastian Joust

The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center [at the University of Maryland in College Park] is kicking off its season with four days of fun and frolic. The NextNOW Fest is asking its audiences to discover the next big thing in small, intimate and surprising environments: sonic massages, subway buskers, Terptastic jazz, deep theatre for short attention spans, dance mysteries, late-night art explosions, food frolics, an arts tailgate, and toast . . . and then something curious . . . and then . . .

On Thursday, 11 September 2014, between 7 and 10pm, everyone is invited to gather on the Front Plaza of “The Clarice” to play Johann Sebastian Joust. During the digital game, up to seven participants with motion controllers will compete to the sound of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos (BWV 1046-51). When the music speeds up, things will get frantic! Go slow-mo, though, when the music is slow.

NextNOW will run Thursday through Sunday with a costume sale, a performing arts library sale and more. Most events are free. All events are freeing.

– 2014 NextNOW Fest

Echoes of Medieval Angst

07 Tuesday Jan 2014

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Predecessors, Bach's Successors, Bach's Works, Music Education

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Atari 2600, cadence, chorale, digital game, harmony, hymn, Karen Collins, limbo, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Matthew Guerrieri, melody, MIT Game Lab, mode, Nick Montfort, O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden, Phrygian mode, scale, St. Matthew Passion, Television Interface Adapter, The Boston Globe, video game arcade

The Atari 2600

The Atari 2600

This week, 6-10 January 2014, the MIT Game Lab presents Push Button: Examining the Culture, Platforms, and Design of the Arcade, a series of lectures and workshops exploring that onetime American cultural locus, the video game arcade. The focus is on cabinet-based arcade games (the series is a prelude to a contest to develop games for cabinets installed on the MIT campus), but on Tuesday, Nick Montfort, MIT associate professor of digital media, considers how such games were translated for home video-game consoles, including one of Montfort’s own research specialties: the fabled Atari 2600, first released in 1977.

The immense success of the Atari 2600 came despite profound technological quirks – which included its musical capabilities. Sound was controlled by the Television Interface Adapter, the same chip that governed the console’s graphics, and the tuning was inconsistent and variable. Music for Atari games thus gravitated toward particular pitches and patterns, avoiding combinations that would be rendered too distractingly out-of-whack. Canadian scholar Karen Collins has analyzed one interesting commonplace: a lowered second scale degree, a distinguishing feature of the scale that Medieval composers would have recognized as the Phrygian mode.

The various Medieval modes often carried specific connotations; Phrygian could signal heightened tension, or themes of lament and death. Collins admits that Phrygian-tinged Atari game tunes were a product of programming limitations, not a conscious channeling of Medieval angst on the part of the programmers. But the old modal implications were not entirely out of place.

Take, for instance, one of the most familiar Phrygian tunes in the repertoire, the Lutheran chorale sung to the words O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden. J. S. Bach famously used it throughout his St. Matthew Passion (BWV 244b), usually harmonizing it as to disguise its modal instability; but the final iteration of the chorale in the Passion closes with an open-ended cadence true to its Phrygian outline. In a 1994 dissertation, David S. Hill surveyed other Baroque harmonizations of the tune – setting a variety of hymn texts – and found that arrangements meant for texts emphasizing condemnation over salvation were more likely to use harmonies amplifying the Phrygian modality.

That led Hill to suggest that Bach’s choice of cadence for that final Passion chorale was theologically deliberate, producing an ending – after Christ’s crucifixion, but before the Resurrection – suffused with uncertainty. That is a limbo familiar to any arcade denizen: the game is not over, but the outcome is anything but assured. Bach and Atari games, after all, were exploring some of the same subjects: pitfalls, leveling up, the possibility of extra lives.

Matthew Guerrieri – The Boston Globe

Johann Sebastian Joust Coming to PlayStation

14 Wednesday Nov 2012

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Works, World View

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Tags

Brandenburg Concertos, digital game, Doug Wilson, Game Developers Choice Award, Johann Sebastian Joust, motion controller, PlayStation, Sony, Sportsfriends, Windows PC

A game festival hit even as a prototype, no-graphics motion-controlled playground game Johann Sebastian Joust has finally been approved by Sony for a PlayStation release. The game tasks players with jostling their opponent’s motion controller to eliminate them while at the same time keeping their own steady, and recently won the innovation gong at the Game Developers Choice Awards. It is based on playground games common in Denmark.

During the game, selections from J. S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos (BWV 1046-1051) play, and when the music’s tempo slows, the controllers become extremely sensitive to movement. The game provides no further rules, allowing players to decide what constitutes an acceptable way of disrupting opponents’ controllers.

To raise the cash necessary to tweak the game for a PlayStation launch, creator Doug Wilson has begun a Kickstarter campaign with three other indie developers called Sportsfriends to supplement money he received from Sony’s Pub Fund. Should the Kickstarter reach its US$150,000 goal, those who contribute will receive a copy of “JS Joust,” along with three other “joyfully fun local multiplayer games” for PlayStation 3 or Windows PC.

– Gameplanet

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