Deconstructing Music

deconstruct |ˌdēkənˈstrəkt|

verb [ trans. ]
analyze (a text or a linguistic or conceptual system) by deconstruction, typically in order to expose its hidden internal assumptions and contradictions and subvert its apparent significance or unity.


"You employ stone, wood, and concrete, and with these materials you build houses and palaces. That is construction. Ingenuity is at work.

But suddenly, you touch my heart, you do me good. I am happy and I say: "This is beautiful." That is architecture. Art enters in.

My house is practical. I thank you, as I might thank Railway engineers, or the Telephone service. You have not touched my heart.

But suppose that walls rise toward heaven in such a way that I am moved. I perceive your intentions. Your mood has been gentle, brutal, charming, or noble. The stones you have erected tell me so. You fix me to the place and my eyes regard it. They behold something which expresses a thought. A thought which reveals itself without wood or sound, but solely by means of shapes which stand in a certain relationship to one another. These shapes are such that they are clearly revealed in a light. The relationships between them have not necessarily any reference to what is practical or descriptive. They are a mathematical creation of our mind. They are the language of Architecture. By the use of raw materials and starting from conditions more or less utilitarian, you have established certain relationships which have aroused my emotions. This is Architecture."
- Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture 1927

The technical aspect of any kind or art, wether its painting, composition, architecture, or even sport, will only take you so far to create something that others may call art. There is this hidden quality that differentiates drawing from painting, muzak from music, building from architecture, or aerobics from sport.  A musician once told me that this hidden quality is attitude, two soloist can play the same exact musical phrase, but one possesses a certain "emph" in his playing, maybe using dynamics to accentuate some notes from the rest, allowing the phrase to be much more rhythmic than it actually is, while the other player, but not adding anything to the mix, is just reciting a bland musical phrase. Even if two gifted soloists play the same phrase, each with the right amount of attitude, the outcomes would be entirely different, as each would perform the phrase to reflect their own soul. That's why ever time you hear tchaikovsky's Swan Lake by a different orchestra and conductor it sounds slightly different.

The question becomes, staring from conditions more or less utilitarian, how do you turn lines, colors, and shapes into art; notes, chords, and rhythm into music; structure, material, and space into architecture; dribbling, kicking, and passing into sport. My thought is that there should always be an intent towards a work of art, even if the intent is to capture specific moods or spontaneity of the artist at that specific moment. A narrative or overriding story (or plan of attack in sports) that is not explicitly spelled out within the work of art, but could be understood through cycles of deconstruction. A level of abstraction is need to break the tangible artifact from its bonds of reality (from the frame off the wall) into a realm of conceptualization. It is then when you can start to translate, or transpose, one work of art into another.

Deconstruction is often mistaken for Synesthesia. The main difference between both is while Synesthesia may be post-rationalized (depending on the level of Synesthesia, the direct levels often could not be post-rationalized), it never is pre-rationalized. Deconstruction entails a 

preemptive analysis of the subject matter, which means a certain degree of intellectualization is needed at the beginning, as opposed to the sensory reflex action of Synesthesia. That is why many believe that artists like Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Scriabin are not Synesthetes as had been previously noted, but are Pseudo-Synesthetes, those who rely on association and memory rathen than the sensory reflex action of Synesthesia. In Point and Line to Plane, Kandinsky discusses how musical ideas have influenced his art, specifically mentioning his painting Little Dream In Red. He discusses how dynamics and sounds of musical instruments influences his choice of line weight and color. Although this is very much akin to a synesthete's perspective, Kandinsky states that although some of his correspondences are founded upon his own personal "feelings", others are founded upon cultural biases and mysticism.

Schematization of the correspondences between colors and musical timbres according to Kandinsky:

Colors   Musical timbres Yellow   Trumpet; Sound of the fanfare Azure   Flute Blue   Deep sounds from the organ Dark blue   Cello Very dark blue   Bass Green   Middle tones of the violin White   Temporary pause Black   Conclusive pause Grey   Lack of sound Bright red   Fanfare; Tuba/Horn Crimson red   Drum-roll; Tuba/Horn Cool red   Medium and deep tones of the cello Bright cool red   Other tones of the violin Orange   Middle bells of the church; Strong cantralto voice; Viola Violet   English horn; Bagpipe Deep purple   Deep tones of the woodwinds; Bassoon

There is more to these correspondences than just these Synesthestic reflexes. Some architects took specific events within a musical edifice and used that to as a conceptual bias for their architecture. Steven Holl used Bella Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta as his inspiration for the Stretto House, "(the edifice) has a materiality in instrumentation which the architecture approaches in light and space." Both the piece and the building are formed in four sections, consisting of two modes: heavy orthogonal masonry representing the percussion, and light curvilinear metal roofing representing the strings. 

Daniel Libeskind drew inspiration from Arnold Schoenberg's "Moses und Aron" for the Jewish Museum in Berlin. He was particularly interested in the sudden break of the music in the third act of the operetta, after two acts of fairly complex music, the music abruptly stops in the second act, allowing the silence to act as a figural element just as the music. Libeskind goes on to say that the unwritten third act is actually one of silence, allowing sounds from the audience to come into play. Whether Schoenberg actually intended that is highly questionable, but his contemporary John Cage "composed" 4'33'' based on that idea; not letting the musicians play their instruments for 4 and a half minutes, allowing the sounds from the audience to compose itself into the piece. Libeskind says that his "void" spaces within the museum are placed to achieve the same effect; a disorienting phase to allow the visitor to become a participant in a space allowing contemplation and reflection.

How people dance and sway to rhythm is subjective, but they do move to it nonetheless. The following series of exercises, done in Professor Michael Ambrose's ARCH670 class at the University of Maryland, attempts to deconstruct Extreme's "Get the Funk out". The song is an upbeat catchy, funk-rock/funk-metal tune. The objective of the project was to deconstruct the rhythmic sensations of the song. I asked former tap dancing state champion, Martiena Schneller, to improvise a routine for the song, and I analyzed her body movement accordingly. 

Architecture as a Stimulus for Movement pt1

The title "Building as a Stimulus for Movement" comes from Kent Bloomer and Charles Moore's "Body, Memory, and Architecture" (the chapter "Body Movement" is actually a contribution by Robert J. Yudell"). The chapter asserts that the movement of our bodies is affected by the animation of space, and thus the spaces we create, tend to embody our own natural rhythms of movement.

"The ebbs and flows, weights, rhythms, and surges that emanate from us are inherent in the body and its movements. Try to walk in a precise and even measures. Even if you succeed in doing so horizontally, as in a march, there will still be complex rhythmic events in the vertical dimension (the raising and lowering of the chest with breathing and the changes in the relative alignment of body weight), not to mention the internal rhythms of heart and pulse.

Given this rhythmic richness which we all possess, and the fact that patterns as mundane as pavement cracks and picket fences can elicit complex haptic responses, we might well wonder why any building cannot be as good as the next in generating a body response."

- Robert J. Yudell

Yudell goes on to criticize today's repertoire of movement, saying that our bodies are increasingly becoming immobilized. While automobile and transit technology have been able to connect places and open up vast landscapes of space we would have never thought of treading before, it is slowly turning us into what Yudell calls "frozen bodies". The idea of the procession and promenade of pilgrimage is diminishing, so in a sense, it could be argued that we don't appreciate our spaces as much as we used to. The end location is becoming much more important that the journey that we go through to reach such a location. In Topophillia, Yi-Fu Tuan talks about this end-location mindset:

"Walking purposefully from A to B is felt as leaving so many steps behind and as having much more ground ahead to cover. Change the environment by introducing band music and, objectively, one still marches from A to B with seeming deliberation. Subjectively, however, space and time have lost their directional thrust under the influence of rhythmic sound. Each step is no longer just another move along the narrow path to a destination; rather it is striding into open an undifferentiated space. The idea of a precisely located goal loses relevance."

- Yi-Fu Tuan

Pamplet Architecture's "Architecture as a Translation of Music" cites numerous examples of how musical rhythm can affect one's movement and awareness of space. Elizabeth Martin introduces the subject-matter, saying that while "architecture represents the art of design in space; music is the art of design in time." If one flattens the dimension of time, into a 2D surface (in the same way sheet music does), one could really play arround with different rhythmic patterns onto the surface. Mannerist Facades often compose their surfaces that way, using some kid of parts to serve as the metronome (datum) and other parts to play up these rhythmic changes. The Renaissance ideal of harmony gave way to freer and more imaginative rhythms. Giulio Romano (1499-1546), one of the first promoters of Mannerism, used the triglyphs on the facade of Palazzo Te in Mantua as the metronome element, where all the spacings are equal, while the intervals of the intercolumnination differed creating a rhythmic pattern on the facade. Looking closely to the image below, one could read the facade giving an ABABAC rhythm, and more specifically, if one imagines each triglyph forms a 1/16th note, one could read the columns forming a musical rhythm of 1/8th - 1/4th - 1/8th - 1/4th - 1/8th - 5/16th.

Le Corbusier's La Tourette covenant also uses this same play of rhythm in the architecture. Iannis Xenakis, Le Corbusier's right hand man and internationally well known 20th century composer, designed parts of the facade to correspond to some of his musical compositions. The seemingly irregular window mullion intervals of the lower levels, juxtaposed with the pompous window openings of the upper levels (which serves as a datum, or metronome, for the irregular mullions below), creates a phenomenological play of light and shadow in the interior. The rhythmic intervals of the La Tourette facade is alot more complex than that of Romano's Palazzo Te. This is mostly due to the fact that Xenakis bases his musical intervals on mathematical ideas like the golden section and fibonacci series (more on that when I blog on Xenakis work within the next few weeks).

In Professor Noonan's seminar "Sensing Architecture: Body & Place", Ritsaart Marcelis and I worked on a project draft together that talks about this issue of musical rhythms that affect promenade. The following animation investigates how a procession through a colonnade could be altered using different musical rhythm patterns to dictate the intercolumnination. 

The criticism presented in class was that the animation seemed to rigid, and unmusical. This animation lacks two very important aspects of music: layering and attitude. While the animation is a direct translation of rhythm written down on sheet music, audible music is seldom played with one layer of rhythm. Even the most mono-rhythmic music, you will find multiple layers within the rhythm to give it a more powerful output. The animation above is the equivalent of a guitar student, playing a rock riff acapella; you dont have the rest of the band (datum) to fully grasp the idea of the music.

 Attitude (dynamics and cresendo) is also a very important aspect in music. This is why a classical musical piece would sound different when it is being led by one conductor than another, as each conductor would understand the whole mood of the piece subjectively. This is also why many blues guitarists are considered to have "soul", as the selection of what notes are important to be emphasized and attacked, while what notes are known as leading notes. The same solo, if played without the emphasis on these select notes, would also feel unmusical. 

The notion of attitude and poly-rhythmic layers is also found in architecture. The use and hierarchy of Michelangelo's "Super-order" on his facades could be read as the visual correspondence of a multi-rhythmic compositions. Looking at Palazzo dei Conservatori, at the Campidoglio, the balustrades on the roof serves as the metronome (it could be argue that the dentils of the cornice has the same effect), with the Giant Corinthian pilasters serving as the hierarchical rhythmic stomps. The intervals between each Corinthian pilaster and the other is equidistant, as opposed to that of Palazzo Te, which means in auditory terms, the musical rhythm would be that of a pounding heartbeat (imagine a POMP - POMP - POMP musical piece). The intercolumnination of the ionic columns on the lower floor, and the smaller Corinthian columns on the floor above to support the window openings, are what provides the variations in the rhythmic patterns of the facade. So in drumming terms, if you would take the giant Corinthian pilaster as the booming bass drum, the ionic columns on the lower floor as the lesser impact Ionic column as the loud yet lesser impacted snare drum, and the variation of window openings and division of balustrades as subtle playing on the hi-hat, then Palazzo dei Conservatori has been transformed into a simple drum rhythm.





This idea that Palazzo dei Conservatori is analogous to a modern drum rhythm is an interesting one. As classical music of that time is much more melodic based as opposed to rhythm based, it is worthwhile to find out if that analogy has any correspondence to the evolution of music in Europe around that time.