Friday, March 29, 2019

Rachmaninoff and the Eternal Return of the Quantum Phonon: his favorite prelude that I played in church, when I was 17

Fascinating dialog - Moiseiwitsch about him and Rachmaninov - From "The art of piano"

So as usual - someone had posted a Rachmaninoff Prelude - and so I commented that I had performed Prelude number... in church when I was 17. At first I thought it was number 9. No, it was Number 10.

 so 9/8 as the major 2nd originated as 9/4 (the octave higher 9th) in order to hide the fact that the double octave system was required to cover up the noncommutative phase origin. So the 3/2 as Perfect Fifth is squared as 9/4 but in actuality the 8/12 is the 3/2 with 9/12 as 3/4. So 9/8 is actually from the double octave of 12/6 with 8/6 as 4/3 from the octave of 0 to 8 as the 1. In other words 12/8 is 3/2 as geometric magnitude with 8/6 as 4/3 as geometric magnitude (NOT as time-wavelength/frequency ratios). This was done by hiding the original cover up of changing the value of the root tonic from 0 to 12 and 0 to 8. And this is why 9/4 from the double octave is then "halved" back into the octave as 9/8 even though 2/3 as 8/12 has a different 1 root tonic then 2/3 as 6/9. So then by using 6:8::9:12 - this hides the noncommutative origin of the Perfect Fifth whereby F as 2/3 subharmonic Perfect Fifth has a 3 value with C as the 2 from the 1 while G also has a 3 value with 3/2 as the overtone harmonic of the 1. So that F=3=G as noncommutative phase (or complementary harmonics of natural nonwestern resonance music).

Every human culture uses the octave, perfect fifth and perfect fourth as 1:2:3:4 but only in the West is the secret of complementary opposites then covered up by the logarithmic equal-tempered tuning, thereby creating the Greek Miracle of exponential math (as the inverse of the logarithmic function).

So as I posted the link - then I discovered - WOW - this was Rachmaninoff's FAVORITE prelude.

Then as I read the comments - I realized I was not alone - people saying how they got the chills from this piece, how they cried, how some got very emotional.

Some people think this piece is sad, but as the above link explains, for Rachmaninoff it was about "The Return" -and so the center part of this piece is very strong with big bass chords. This is why I liked playing this piece.

Moiseiwitsch plays Rachmaninov Prelude in B minor

Now - this was Rachmaninov's favorite performance (interpretation) of his composition...

Can we all just admit that such depth no longer exists?
says one comment. Indeed - when I performed this - I thought I was all alone. I can't remember how I discovered it - maybe my teacher played it for me. She would sight-read pieces better than I could every play them after practicing.

New Playlist of just the Rachmaninoff Prelude, no. 10, opus 32

Someone said they wanted this on infinite  repeat. There you go Youtube!!

Someone else said "such and such" OWNED this piece. well - I was young when I performed this. No one told me to - I just WANTED to - I really liked the piece. I didn't know anyone else who liked it. I did have people approach me after my performance to thank me. This was very flattering to me. So I realized that the emotions I felt while playing it were then also felt by the people listening to it.

I'm sure if I had recorded it - then it would be very embarrassing. IN fact I have nothing saved from my piano lessons and performances. haha. but I have some nice memories.

And listening to all these different versions - it's nice to hear that people have a very wide range of "interpretations." there's even a wrong note in one performance - that everyone notices.

So people fixate on the technical difficulties of this piece. Yes I guess it is "advanced" if you want to play it "perfectly." But not only am I not a perfectionist but I'm against equal-tempered tuning!! haha. Still it is flattering to me that I performed a piano piece that others deemed too challenging....

 Rachmaninoff was inspired by Arnold Böcklin's painting "Die Heimkehr" ("The Homecoming" or "The Return").[1] This is the second work of Rachmaninoff's to be inspired by one of Böcklin's paintings; the other being Isle of the Dead.[1] Rachmaninoff also stated, to pianist Benno Moiseiwitsch, for example, that this was his personal favorite among his preludes.
So some of these versions are "amateur" - and it's not the technical level that bothers me - but the emotional interpretation. I consider the emotional feeling behind the music to be the most important.

So when I performed this piece at 17 years old - obviously my emotions were intense. I was fairly solitary - and as a "teacher class" of the piece states - this piece takes you "deep within."

OK I figured someone MUST have written some academic analysis - sure enough - a Ph.d. thesis on this Prelude and painting?

 OK it's not just on that piece...

Still 20 pages of analysis on just that piece!!

I'm not into that "Programmatic" interpretation of the music.

People feel the need to translate the music into words or images. I just go straight for the feelings without words or images.

So it's not that anyone's feelings are "wrong" - just different.  https://www.robertbuxtonpianist.com/writing/the-return-a-study-of-memory-and-the-creative-process-in-rachmaninoffs-b-minor-prelude-involving-the-ideas-of-henri-bergson

In a filmed interview, the pianist Benno Moiseiwitsch (1890–1963) revealed that Sergei Rachmaninoff’s (1873–1943) Prelude in B Minor Op. 32 No. 10 (1910) was inspired by Arnold Böcklin’s (1827–1901) 1887 painting Die Heimkehr (The Homecoming).  Böcklin’s painting depicts a man returning home, apparently overcome with a flood of memories.  The mood of Die Heimkehr resonates with Rachmaninoff’s own nostalgia for the Russia of his youth, which he expressed in his letters and correspondence.  The philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941) developed a useful vocabulary to articulate the subjective experience of memory depicted in Die Heimkehr and the Prelude in a systematic manner.  In this study, I will use Bergson’s concepts of duration and spontaneous (now termed episodic) memory as a lens with which to explore how musical material in the Prelude turns back on itself in recurring remembrances of its past, in a process that mirrors themes from Die Heimkehr and Rachmaninoff’s writings.

............................................
 Detecting the birth and death of a phonon
 These photons are witnesses that the phonon was still alive, meaning that the crystal was still vibrating with exactly the same energy. This is in strong contradiction with our intuition: we are used to seeing vibrating objects progressively lose their energy over time, like a guitar string whose sound fades away. But in quantum mechanics this is "all or nothing": the crystal either vibrates with a specific energy or it is in its resting state; there is no state allowed in between.
The existence of the non-local, non-commutative quantum phonon is revealed, empirically.

Photonic quantum correlations mediated by individual phonons

S Tarrago, N Kipfer, M Anderson, K Seibold, V Savona… - iciqp2018.lip6.fr
We report on a new experimental scheme to perform heralded optical preparation of non-
classical vibrational states, specifically the n= 1 Fock state, and its readout after a
controllable time delay [1]. A single-phonon state is prepared probabilistically by …
 


It can also be refined to create more exotic vibrational quantum states, such as entangled states where energy is "delocalized" over two vibrational modes. And all this can be performed in ambient conditions, highlighting that exotic quantum phenomena may occur in our daily life -- we just need to watch very fast.



















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