German Joys

German Joys Review: Branford Marsalis and the Duesseldorf Symphony

Last night I saw a concert at the Duesseldorf Tonhalle, home to the Duesseldorf Symphony Orchestra.  The program (g) was Ravel, ter Veldhuis, Glazunov, and Scriabin.

But before I spend a few words on that, I thought I'd talk about the building itself, the Duesseldorf Tonhalle. Built in 1926, it was once the world's largest planetarium.    The problem is, a planetarium dome is a terrible thing to put over an orchestra -- it reflects sound in ways that create "ghost knocking" effects at points within the building. 

People somehow lived with this until 2003, when the local government hired the Dutch acoustic-consulting firm Peutz and the architects at Hentrich-Petschnigg Partners to find a solution.  The solution they found, shown in a diagram from from this article (g/sub) in the journal Bauphysik (Construction Physics), is below.  I don't know exactly what the arrows mean, but it looks cool, doesn't it?

The dashing engineer/architect duo coated the inside of the dome with a layer of acoustically-transparent metal panels (they hide the red portion in the above diagram).  The panels conceal a complex network of reflectors which solve the acoustic problem.  Hanging from the top of the dome, in a circular opening about 15 feet wide, are a series of shiny, bepimpled oval-shaped metal objects. 

All of it -- the rhomboid panels covering the entire top of the dome, the metal eggs clustered at the apex -- glow with an ethereal aquamarine light.  The overall effect is extraterrestrial.  I wouldn't have been surprised if the eggs had slowly descended and opened to reveal glistening, Giger-esque creatures.*  And the acoustics are damn good.  I've seen several concerts in the pre-renovation Tonhalle (which was prettier, since the interior of the dome was coated in burnished wood), and the sound is now clearly better.  Although the friend I went to the concert with heard some creaking noises coming from the panels.  The aliens, probably.

Oh, where was I?  The concert!  That's right!  First up was Part 2 of Ravel's refulgent Daphnis et Chloe Suite.  A difficult piece, but they pulled it off pretty well.  Not to carp or anything, but I thought the brass was a bit too dominant. Then came something completely different: the 'Tallahatchie' Concerto for saxophone and orchestra by the contemporary Dutch composer Jacob ter Veldhuis, or Jacob TV for short.  Jacob TV, a committed tonalist, started in rock music, but now straddles the line between pop and classical music, sometimes creating elaborate multimedia shows.

What's your take on contemporary classical music that sounds pretty, you're asking?  Happy to oblige!  I try to be ecumenical when it comes to the tonal/atonal debate.  Let a thousand flowers bloom -- composers should use whatever medium calls to them.  Immediately dismissing tonal contemporary music as 'reactionary' is just snobbery.  On the other hand, a lot of it's pretty dull. I can think of many tough, spiky contemporary pieces that are more soulful than any given stretch of Michael Nyman tootling.  Birtwistle, Maxwell-Davies, Ligeti, and Stockhausen at his best come to mind.  Not to mention Anton Webern, the ineffable diamond-cutter.  Every music lover should wear a black armband on September 15 to commemorate his accidental shooting at the hands of an American soldier on that day in 1945.

But back to ter Veldhuis.  The 'Tallahatchie' concerto was pretty to listen to, in a film-music way.  The first movement, a slow, dreamy evocation of a river's rhythms, featured a spare, yearning solo line above shimmering chromatic string chords. The second movement was a series of moto perpetuo motives for the saxophone with syncopated accompaniment in the orchestra.  It held my interest, but didn't really grip me.  Too Nyman/Glass-esque, and with the signature faults of those composers -- no real tension between the soloist and the orchestra, and insufficient thematic development. 

The next piece was a German premiere of a saxophone concerto by Glazunov which I'd never heard of, and which was pleasingly autumnal.  Marsalis played with a wonderful quicksilver tone and just enough well-judged vibrato to tingle the spine.  He played a bebop piece as an encore, with spontaneous accompaniment from a bassist in the orchestra. 

The piece de resistance was Prometheus, Poem of Fire by that fascinating nutcase Scriabin.  Prometheus, his last work for orchestra, isn't performed very often, because the full version actually calls for a "light-piano" which illuminates the concert hall with fields of particular color during the performance.  Scriabin himself enjoyed the gift of color synasthesia -- the perception of sounds as colors.  Thanks to the renovation of the Tonhalle, it was actually possible to realize the piece.  Different sections of panels above our heads did, in fact, light up in various colors during the tone-poem.  And during the finale, the entire audience was bathed in intense white brilliance.  Scriabin has always been a bit too confused and soupy for my tastes, but I have to say, it was a pretty impressive experience.

Overall, it was an adventurous program.  If you live anywhere near Duesseldorf, you should absolutely make the trip to the next concerts on Sunday and Monday.  After all, when's the next time you're going to be able to experience a "light-piano"? 

* What happens when the aliens descend? I, of course, would have been the guy who sits, transfixed by the eerie spectacle, while the other concert-goers run screaming for the exits.  This would either result in me being accepted into the aliens' sticky-but-fascinating community, or flayed by their razor-sharp molybdenum tentacles.

Zoom into the Tarantula Nebula

Courtesy of the European Southern Observatory, this crisp, zoomable image of the Tarantula Nebula. A description of the Tarantula Nebula from the invaluable Astronomy Picture of the Day:

The largest, most violent star forming region known in the whole Local Group of galaxies lays in our neighboring galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Were the Tarantula Nebula at the distance of the Orion Nebula -- a local star forming region -- it would take up fully half the sky. Also called 30 Doradus, the red and pink gas indicates a massive emission nebula, although supernova remnants and dark nebula also exist there. The bright knot of stars left of center is called R136 and contains many of the most massive, hottest, and brightest stars known. The above image taken with the European Southern Observatory's (ESO's) Wide Field Imager is one of the most detailed ever of this vast star forming region. ESO has made it possible to fly around and into this detailed image by clicking here.

It's images like this that make me kick myself for not becoming a natural scientist.

Zoom in into Pelican Nebula

Follow this link to travel from Spain "into the constellation of Cygnus, pas[t] the dust structure [to] the Pelican head [nebula] housing unborn stars." The Youtube page is here, the original higher-quality .mov file, from Astronomy Picture of the Day, can be found here:

Practical Tips for Black Hole Explorers

Apropos nothing in particular, this fascinating article, which tells you how to maximize your remaining time if you accidentally cross the event horizon of a black hole:

Falling into a black hole is a strange affair. Because the hole's gravity distorts space-time, a far-off observer watching an object crossing the event horizon sees time for that object appear to slow down — a clock falling into a black hole would appear, from the outside, to tick ever slower. At the horizon itself, time stops, and the object stays frozen there for the remaining lifetime of the Universe.

But this isn't how things seem to the in-falling object itself. Indeed, if the black hole is big enough, nothing noticeable happens when a spaceship crosses its event horizon — you could stray inside without realizing. Yet once inside, nothing can save you from being crushed by the hole's gravity sooner or later.

Santa Claus, Liquefied

In January 1990, the American magazine Spy convened a panel of scientific experts to answer the question whether Santa Claus exists. 

Their conclusions, although somewhat dry and technical, have become a heart-warming Christmas classic.  I reprint it here to add a little dose of analytical objectivity to warm Christmas feelings:

1)    No known species of reindeer can fly. But there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not completely rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.

2)    There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. Since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total - 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's at least one good child in each.

3)    Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc.

This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man- made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second - a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.

4)    The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that "flying reindeer" (see point #1) could pull ten times the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload - not even counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison - this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.

5)    353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy. Per second. Each. In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.

In conclusion - If Santa ever did deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead now.