FOUR AUDIO FILES Ever wonder what music looks like? I don't mean music notes on a page - most of you have seen bits and pieces of sheet music and pages in hymnals and the like - but rather the contours, the shape of music. We know visual artworks have contour and shape, or at least they can suggest contour and shape, because we see them do it. And in the case of a sculpture, maybe we can even touch it to feel smooth lines or jagged edges. But music? How can something so intangible and fleeting possess qualities that we've come to associate only with things we can see and touch? It dawned on me recently that there is a way I can show you - truly visually - the shapes, contours and dimensions of music. We radio people work all the time with sound editing software that allows us to see how a recorded musical work looks in all its digital glory. Sound editing software displays every musical work as a waveform, a graphic representation of the dynamic peaks and valleys and textural richness encoded in a musical recording. I looked at the waveforms of some of the best known classical works and was delighted by the pictures they painted of the music - so delighted that I thought I'd share some of them with you. In composing his incidental music to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Mendelssohn knew he was writing music for the bard's famous "play-within-a-play," whose fairies and other outlandish characters confuse our sense of what's real and what's imagined. Puck eventually does tell us at the end of the play that the whole thing was a dream. We might expect that some of Mendelssohn's music to convey dreaminess. Frankly, I've never heard it that way, but see (hear) for yourself: [audio:mendelssohn_overture.mp3] (Recording by the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century under Frans Brüggen) The waveform of the beginning of Mendelssohn's Overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream might, however, make me change my mind:
The four opening chords (shown in green) appear here as puffy clouds, the ethereal stuff of dreams, floating in the blackness of slumber. Or a mind at once more poetic and more literal might make the case for pillows, calling to mind thick, fluffy blankets and warm slippers and  . . .  sorry. Dozed off there for a moment. If the Mendelssohn waveform suggests sleepytime, the beginning of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony looks anything but restful. This is arguably the most famous opening gambit in musical history, but one can never hear it too often: [audio:beethoven_fifth-symphony_opening.mp3] (Recording by the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique under John Eliot Gardiner) Here, fate knocks with the brash self-entitlement of a door-to-door political organizer. Were we still slumbering to the Mendelssohn, this Beethoven would be a rude awakening. Beethoven was famous for the voluminous revisions he made to his compositions before deeming them finished. Though a genius, he was also a plodder who subjected his flashes of inspiration to the rack, to the wheel, to the cat o' nine tails - to the various instruments of torture that were the tools of his seemingly laborious compositional process. And yet he was as human as could be, prone to awakening (and, if his letters are to be believed,  experiencing) every emotional reaction dormant in the Shadow Self. One can imagine Beethoven sitting at his desk before a page striped with staff lines, quill in hand. He blots the first notes of his symphony on the page, then in a fit of frustration - "It's not right, it's just not right" - whisks the paper off the desk, crumples it up and, with a histrionic swoop of the arms, lances it across the room where it lies wasted in the corner. Don't the beginning and the end of this waveform look as though Beethoven's music - the very sound of the opening of the Fifth Symphony - has been wadded up, like a tectonic plate has crushed land up into mountains?
Whatever you might say about the Beethoven, it's alive. Pretend for a moment that the waveform is the read-out of a heart monitor. You know how it works (or in any event, you know at least as well as I): regular, mid-sized blips on a heart monitor are good, anything big and scary, or irregular or flat is bad. Beethoven's waveform might give Marcus Welby himself a heart attack. But at least there might still be hope. The ending of Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony is a different story. Here's what it sounds like: [audio:tchaikovsky_sixth_symphony_ending.mp3] (Recording by the Kirov Orchestra under Valery Gergiev) Gloomy stuff. Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony has been associated with the composer's death since its premiere, which Tchaikovsky conducted in the fall of 1893 nine days before his death. The symphony's subtitle-"Pathétique"- and the morose character of its final movement, along with the suspicions that immediately arose about the cause of Tchaikovsky's death, have shrouded this work in a mythology of mortality. And as nihilistic as Tchaikovsky's ending (that sounds ominous, doesn't it?) sounds, had St. Petersburg been able to see how it looks in digital form, the composer's death might not have come as such a surprise:
One need not have a medical degree to know that whoever's attached to this heart monitor is on his way out. The pizzicato notes in the double basses sustain a pulse for a little while, then flat-line into nothingness. Lights out. Goodbye, cruel world. But that's no way to end a blog post, so let's pick it up a bit. One of the wonders of the world is how the dozens of musicians in an orchestra can create a wall of sound. You know what I mean, the sheer loudness, tempered with (ideally) a richness and tastefulness of tone, that is the stuff of exciting, inspiring grand finales. Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition has an ending like this, a movement entitled "The Great Gate of Kiev." You've heard it before, now you'll hear it again: [audio:mussorgsky_gate_of_kiev_ending.mp3] (Recording by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Fritz Reiner, arguably the most accomplished wall-of-sound builders in orchestral history)
The volume of sound doesn't let up, even for a moment. Viktor Hartmann's design for a gate for the city of Kiev shows a massive stone structure with rounded arches, Byzantine filigree and a pointed bell tower, and Mussorgsky's music (based on Hartmann's design) is as solid as any gate could be. Its waveform stretches into a wall with ornate peaks and valleys along the top and bottom for visual appeal (an interesting and, obviously, wholly unintended mirror of the ornamentation on Hartmann's gate), breached not even by a momentary "gate" of silence:
What to make of all this? There have always been endless possibilities for how to imagine music, and in this realm we can revel in unadulterated relativism: no way of imagining music is a wrong way. Since technology now allows us to see music in a way previous generations could not, why not look at music, as well as listen to it? A thousand notes can paint a picture. And vice versa. - Jennifer Hambrick
