Eva Dale 0:00 From the heart of the Ohio State University on the oval, this is voices of excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences with your host, David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work being done by faculty and staff in the College of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University. From departments as wide ranging as art, astronomy, chemistry and biochemistry, physics, emergent materials, mathematics and languages, among many others, the college always has something great happening. Join us to find out what's new now. David Staley 0:32 My guest today is Anna Gawboy, Associate Professor in the School of Music at The Ohio State University College of the Arts and Sciences. Her work explores the intersection of music theory, cultural history and multimedia with a special focus on visualized music. She is the author of nearly 200 pedagogical videos in music theory. She was a co founding associate editor of SMTV, the first videocast journal in music, as well as a co founding editor of engaging students essays in music pedagogy. Welcome to voices Dr. Golf boy. Thank you. So first, begin by telling us about your latest project. Prometheus actually has a longer Title I think, yeah. Anna Gawboy 1:16 The work is Prometheus poem of fire. It is a very early example of multimedia or intermediate composition by a Russian composer Alexander Scriabin. It was composed in 1910. And the composer's vision for the piece really exceeded the technological capabilities of the time. He was very interested in combining lights with music to generate a particular type of audience experience, something that would be outside the normal experience of sitting in a theater listening to music, he wanted to create something that was awe inspiring and even transcendent. But he really lacked the practical capacity to carry this out. But he left us with a manuscript filled with annotations, that now successive generations of realizers can use to try to bring this piece to life using modern technology. David Staley 2:23 So and I understand we're talking about something that's visual, and I want you to try to describe it in words, but when you say lights what was a concert goer to see and experience. Anna Gawboy 2:31 So the work is a symphony, and it is written as a traditional symphony and Scriabin premiered the work as a symphony without lights, but it has a light part written into the score. Scriabin wanted to use 12 colors that were paired with the 12 notes of the chromatic scale, but then also add a host of special effects like sparks and tongues of flames. Prometheus is the Greek fire Bringer after all. And he wanted to be a multimedia experience of otherworldly proportions, something that might even result in the entire concert hall being set aflame and disintegrating in this fiery apocalypse. He really wanted to do something above and beyond what was possible in his time period. David Staley 3:21 But it was never realized. Is that what I'm hearing you say? Anna Gawboy 3:23 Yes, so there was a small instrument that Scriabin built with the help of a friend, an Electrical Technician named Alexander Moser, and it consisted of a small circular board with 12 light bulbs stuck in it, and a series of buttons that would turn the bulbs on and off. Well, this was completely unsuited to equal the power of the music that Scriabin wrote, The symphony is composed for a large orchestra with chorus and organ, and a full percussion, battery and eight horns. So he wanted the sound to be big, and he wanted the lights to at least equal the sound of the orchestra. And it was immediately clear to him that this small instrument just could not do justice to the light part that he had envisioned to accompany and complement this work. David Staley 4:17 And when you say an instrument, it was to be played like a, I don't know, like a piano or something like that, Anna Gawboy 4:21 Yes, played live along with the other instruments directed by the conductor. So this instrument had just a row of buttons. This was created for the premiere, which would have been in 1911. In 1915, there was a premiere of the work in New York City. This was the American premiere of Prometheus poem of fire, and it was paired with a lighting apparatus designed by Edison testing laboratories. And so it took the power and inventiveness of Edison to tackle this piece at the time. And this instrument was a little bit more sophisticated. It was controlled by a piano keyboard, it had capacity to dim and brighten the lights with the music. And it could project a play of colored lights on a screen behind the orchestra. But even this, which was state of the art technology for 1915, could not equal the musical experience. And so the critical reaction was pretty lukewarm. David Staley 5:26 That was my next question. How was this received by critics? Anna Gawboy 5:29 Well, there was a lot of excitement about the idea of pairing music and lights. This was an idea that captivated the imagination of many artists and creative types across the board in the early 20th century. But the result was, I think, very disappointing. Many critics thought that the lights were distracting, they didn't see any relationship between the lights and the music. And in my research, I've found that the conception that's grabbing had created this very close and intimate connection between the lights and the music. But it was not apparent to the audience at the time, given the technological realization that they were capable of producing. David Staley 6:15 Does that conclusion, your conclusion, does that come from an analysis of the manuscript? And I took that to mean that the lights were almost a kind of a score or line of music within the score? Anna Gawboy 6:26 Yes, the lights are written in musical notation. No kidding. Interesting. Yeah. So what is very interesting about this piece is that Scriabin was a musician. And he was really treated the lighting design as another musical element. So he translated each color into a pitch, which then he notated on the score, the pitches written in the score refer to the fundamental of the harmony that's in play at any given time in the piece. So they do reflect the harmonic content in the piece, even though to some extent, I would say that screen bobbins association with color and pitch is arbitrary. It's unique to him, he established the system, according to his aesthetics. And so it's not necessarily something that a lot of people would intuitively understand or share. But he established the system and he employed it very strictly. And then, over this line of color, he wrote all of these very expressive indications for changes in intensity and showers of sparks, tongues of flames, things that could really accent and highlight motives that were happening in the music. And I would say also, the general theme of the work referring to Prometheus, the fire bearer, and the way that that myth was interpreted in some of the metaphysical readings that's grabbing was into specifically that the Asafa Chol, writings of Helena Blavatsky. David Staley 8:03 As a theorist, are you able to apply the same sorts of techniques to the multimedia presentation? In other words, are there formal properties of the multimedia that you can explore? Anna Gawboy 8:15 Yes absolutely. In fact, one of the interesting things that I've discovered in analyzing this piece is that there are ways in which the lighting design actually shapes the hearing of the piece. I think that Prometheus is a very challenging work to understand from a listeners perspective, it's a very challenging piece to analyze from a theorists perspective. But the lights actually serve a clarifying purpose. The piece is divided into seven large scale color changes that impose a formal structure on the work so you know, what phase you're in it sort of groups, formal segments together by default, because they're all going to be colored blue, for example. And it even creates, I think, a sense of formal return and that there's a dark blue segment at the beginning of the work, and then some themes returned transformed, but they're also colored blue. And so you can sort of relate the transformation to the original statement because they are in fact, the same color. David Staley 9:22 How common was this? At the time, were there other musicians or other composers working with white was Scriabin the only one doing this? Anna Gawboy 9:29 Well, in one sense, he is very unique. He was a very unique mind in the field of music, and I think also in this emerging inter media movement. In another way. I think that his interests and preoccupations reflect a broader interest in figuring out the relationship between visual image and music. Particularly you In the early days of film, moving images, the development of film was very exciting to a number of artists because finally there was a medium that allowed images to move in time, just as sound moves in time and music. So I think that he fits into a context. But this is a very unique piece and a very unique example of the working out of these ideas. David Staley 10:24 Or I'm thinking of like Wagnerian opera that was intended to be multimedia, maybe not lights necessarily, but didn't Faulkner and others talk about like the total work of art? Anna Gawboy 10:35 Exaclty, and Scriabin comes directly out of that tradition. He had a very complicated relationship with Wagner. He admired the accomplishments immensely as many modernists did. But there's also this very self conscious distancing from the work of the past and Scriabin and his colleagues who worked in contemporary theater would try to distance themselves from the Wagnerian enterprise and they would try to point out all vogner his failings he talked about artistic integration, but he failed because the music would always be dominant. And they were very preoccupied and trying to equalize different artistic elements within the work by composing them as a total musical fabric. David Staley 11:24 So in addition to studying and analyzing Prometheus, you've actually staged it now as you say, with technology that Scriabin didn't possess, tell us about this restaging of this symphony. Anna Gawboy 11:37 Yes, so my first attempt at restaging was in 2010. And this came out of my doctoral dissertation work, I was very fortunate to be paired with lighting designer Justin Townsend, who now works on Broadway and is a professor at Brooklyn College. He really took this challenge very seriously. And we had a year's worth of conversations leading up to the first performance, we weren't really sure what the outcome was going to be. I just knew that if I was going to write about this piece intelligently, I had to see it as well as, look at the manuscripts score, I had to try to recreate it. And I think Justin was the person who really brought this piece to life artistically. I think that a lot of the strength of our realization comes from the scholarship, but also his ability to translate that into a compelling visual design. I'm now currently working again with Justin on a brand new realization working from the same manuscript sources, but with a different set of technology in a different Hall for the Royal concert cabal in Amsterdam. This is a very exciting performance, because it is the first time I've worked with an orchestra of that caliber. It is also interesting from a design perspective, because they have in recent years, they have installed an immersive lighting system for their main concert hall in the hopes that they will program more works that include different lighting elements. I think that this work is unique because it is really a symphony of color, as well as music. And perhaps their typical offerings might use colored lights to set the mood, or to help transition between different looks that are paired with individual pieces of our concert program. But they were interested in collaborating with me because this is such an iconic work of color music in the literature. And now they have this very advanced technical system to realize it within the very short constraints of a professional concert house. David Staley 13:56 Is your restaging going to have sparks and fire? Anna Gawboy 14:00 It will absolutely have sparks and fire not real fire of course, because there are safety codes but we will be evoking sparks and fire. David Staley 14:09 So, you're also working on a collaboration on Quora ORFs Carmina Burana: tell us about this project. Anna Gawboy 14:16 Yes. So this was a project that I did with Alex Allah Shecky from a CAD and theatre here at OSU in 2018. And it was really the brainchild of my colleague and music Christina McMullen, who was the Associate Director of Choral Activities at the time. And she had this idea of bringing together all the choirs of Ohio State University, plus percussion ensemble and two pianos amounting to over 300 musicians on stage and then pairing this with a some kind of a multimedia presentation. Carl Orff had envisioned Carmina Burana as some kind of a multimedia composition. It's very different than the Scriabin in that he did not specify what kind of media would be paired with the music. And from the available evidence, it seems very likely that this was a Magic Lantern slide show that there would be images projected, along with the music that were static. Since that time, there have been many different approaches, there was a film made, I think in the 1970s. What we decided to do was really use Alex's expertise in media devising and video projection, Alex was able to design a system that paired up to three videos with each movement, and then connected this to an interface that a musician could play in real time. So we could alter different parameters along with the music, we could bring a video up, we could fade in crossfade, we could alter the rate of the video, we could manipulate different properties of the video, depending on on what types of effects we wanted. And so it ended up being a very musical experience, even though we were essentially using these pre recorded video clips and pairing them with the music. Janet Box-Steffensmeier 16:18 Did you know that 23 programs in the Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences are nationally ranked as top 25 programs with more than 10 of them in the top 10. That's why we say the College of Arts and Sciences is the intellectual and academic core of the Ohio State University. Learn more about the College of Arts and sciences.osu.edu. David Staley 16:40 You have said of I think Prometheus, if I'm reading this correctly, you've talked about the professional value of public facing scholarship. And I wonder if you could tell us more about what you mean by that in this context? Anna Gawboy 16:54 Yes. So in the arts, all performance is public facing, by definition, by definition it is. But what I've found is that one of the essential elements of that public dissemination is the framing of the performance. But then also making sure that evidence of the work is somehow archived and housed online. This enables it to find a wider audience, especially audiences that may not be local to the performing venue. I think in 2010, I just had no idea what professional opportunities would arise from the fact that Yale University decided to make a video of my dissertation performance, I have had more invitations to participate in academic conferences and this invitation to collaborate with the Royal concert cabal that have arisen from that video, that single video has been more impactful than any one of my published articles in the music theory journal. David Staley 18:02 And a video you mean just like put up on YouTube or something? Anna Gawboy 18:05 It's on YouTube, one of the things that I've learned from this experience is that there doesn't necessarily have to be a separation between scholarship that is public facing and scholarship, that is also things that generate additional professional opportunities that the university might value in, let's say, a promotion and tenure case that these things can be one in the same, they don't have to necessarily be different. David Staley 18:35 And we draw those distinctions nevertheless, right. So what got you interested in music and music theory? Anna Gawboy 18:42 I've always been interested in the why questions of music. There's a tendency in certain traditions of performance, to focus solely on the sound. And I think that I was fortunate to have teachers that always encouraged me to look beyond the sounds themselves and to think about the history and the context and the structure of the piece. I really got interested in musical multimedia because of Scriabin and I was not intending to touch the media aspect of Scriabin at all in my dissertation. But as I got deeper and deeper into those why questions that were arising from looking at the music itself, it naturally led me to look at how he was applying musical principles to non musical elements to essentially visual elements. And then what that ultimately said about his musical thinking, I think that looking at his design for the lights, teaches us so much about the way that he was thinking about the music and my future work is really going to look at this in a lot more detail. David Staley 19:59 So in listening to all this and listening about how you're exploring the relationship between the sound and the visual or the lights. One of the things that has come across in your research is this idea of audio visual counterpoint. And so I'm interested in that whole phenomenon. Anna Gawboy 20:13 Yes. So we know from empirical studies in audio visual psychology that there are certain intuitive pairings between visual design and music that seemed to make sense, and many of them are based or grounded in metaphors that we already use to describe music. So we talk about high sounds, that's a spatial metaphor, low sounds motivational is a high sound, a high sound is actually a sound that has a frequency that is very fast, but we talk about it in terms of a spatial dimension of height. And this is fairly universal across several different language groups. And so when an artist is looking at composing visual media for music, a natural tendency might be to pair high sounds with images that are high on the screen or potentially light colors. And the theory of audio visual counterpoint would suggest that perhaps that is a valid choice some of the time, but it doesn't always have to match there can be expressive possibilities and audio visual dissonance that will go against our natural expectations for audio visual congruence. David Staley 21:37 So when you say dissonance for instance, what does that mean to a musician or to a composer dissonance? Anna Gawboy 21:43 So dissonance is the spice of music. Dissonance is harmonically it is defined as something that may be outside of a given chord. And it has a tendency to really drive the music forward, because musical tension results from these patterns of feelings of rest or resolution and motion towards a goal. And a dissonance is one of the prime drivers of this feeling of motion or momentum. And in the audio visual domain, it's a little bit different because there aren't really standard, a standard definition of audio visual consonants. Aside from these very, I would say knee jerk associations that we all sort of tend to have. And so I think that there's a lot of room for audio visual artists to create their own definitions of Consonance and dissonance and media design. We certainly played around with these ideas both in Prometheus and in Carmina Burana, and Prometheus, a lot of it comes out of scribbins notes and in the score, and I've read his writings, and he was very interested in finding ways to incorporate audio visual dissonance. For example, there is this moment when the piano has this beautiful and striking entrance. But instead of blowing up all the lights, which is what you might expect, you know, here's this entrance of this new instrument and all the lights are focused on the piano. Scriabin calls for all the lights to come down. So the sound enters in near darkness. And I think that it has the potential to be even more expressive than doing what you might expect, which is to focus on the performer and the sound source. David Staley 23:30 Is that what you mean by a counterpoint audio visual counterpoint? Yes. I'm interested in your teaching. But I'm especially interested in the 200 pedagogical videos that you've done. Tell us more about these. Anna Gawboy 23:45 I'm currently the coordinator of second year music theory, which is a lower division undergraduate course. And it has many different sections, small sections that meet with a graduate teaching assistant. And I was really struggling with coordination of content across these different sections. And so I began to read a little bit about flipped or inverted pedagogy and the use of instructional videos to help prepare students before a class period that would mostly be centered around working on problems and collaboration and asking questions and getting feedback. And this was just like a light shining in the darkness for me when I first began to implement this in 2012. And it was very successful in achieving the objectives that I had set for it at the time. This ended up spinning out into publishing contract with Norton. I had created videos that are now attached to a textbook written by pony Burstein and Joe Straus. And that's now moving into its second edition. But an interesting byproduct of this change of instructional methodology is that it really caused me to rethink the content of what I was teaching in some interesting ways. And I'm curious now, I think that there was a buzz around flip pedagogy in 2010 2012. And we're a little bit past that there are still people who are using this. But I am curious to know if other people had a similar reaction that I did, where a few years after the rollout of this technique, it really caused me to rethink everything that I was doing in the classroom, right down to the day to day content of what I was teaching. David Staley 25:39 In what ways what sorts of things did you alter? Anna Gawboy 25:44 Well, I think that music theory, pedagogy tends to be very tradition bound, we have many elements of our curriculum that were laid in place in the middle of the 19th century. And employing the flip pedagogy really caused me to rethink a lot of that curriculum and focus on Well, what really is the value of this particular piece of content? And can we achieve the same objectives without relying on these 19th century models? Can we incorporate more recent music, more recent classical music, more recent popular music in order to still get students talking about form and identifying different formal areas and formal functions, different harmonies, how the balance of tension and resolution works in musical counterpoint? This is an ongoing project. I haven't solved any of these questions. But the videos provided me the freedom to experiment with different curricular content that I would not have otherwise had. David Staley 26:48 What classes do you teach? What sorts of classes? Anna Gawboy 26:51 Well, I will always be teaching core undergraduate theory, that's something that I'm very committed to, I think, both because of the creative challenges that it presents, and also, because I think that it is, for a music major, sometimes one of the more challenging classes, and they really want to make sure that we do it right here at Ohio State. I also teach courses in music theory pedagogy, because that's become an area of interest. Since going through all of this curricular development with the flipped classroom. I taught a course on the analysis of visualized music in 2017. And this was a graduate level course, it had six different degree tracks represented in it. And I used for the very first time I used a contract syllabus, this was a technique that was suggested to me by one of the facilitators of the course design institute, that was offered through the formal UKCAT. I believe it's ui t l now, and I knew that it would attract students from different degree tracks. And so I really wanted to make sure that they had the freedom to apply course content to their own professional goals and contextualize it within their own professional training. And the contract syllabus allowed me to do just that. I set the learning objectives, but then the students came up with their own plan of how they would show me evidence that they had achieved these learning objectives. And it resulted in all of these creative projects that came out of the class. And some of them ultimately did move quite far away from the actual content of the class. But there were two dissertations that the initial seeds were generated in that class. The two students involved one first and second place in the haze Research Forum. Last year, there was a collaboration between a composer and a conductor on an original multimedia piece that was featured on the composer's degree recital, we had a standalone recital of different multimedia pieces that the students had composed in the class. There were also a handful of student papers that ended up being conference presentations and things like that. It was very generative. And I think the contract syllabus really allowed this sort of to take flight. David Staley 29:22 Tell us what's next for your research. Anna Gawboy 29:24 Well, I'm currently planning of book on the analysis of visualized music largely coming out of the work that I did for this class. And looking at different audio visual relationships across a wide range of media that really is untouched by the music theory world. Things like marching band formations, which, of course is coming from my situation here at Ohio State, but also things like musical fountains, musical fireworks displays. There is a whole emerging sub genre of musical visualization online that is either generated by amateurs through programs such as line writer. And also, I would say professional audio visual artists who think of their work as not grounded in either music or visual design, but really as a unified composition that engages both domains. So I think that the world of Scriabin in the early 20th century has a lot to teach us about what is happening now in audio visual design. And I found that a lot of creators are still wrestling with the same problems. How do you balance visual events with musical events? How do these two elements complement each other? What is the potential for audio visual congruence and counterpoint? And I think modern technology allows far more experimentation and realization than was possible in scribbins day. David Staley 31:06 Anna Gawboy, thank you. Anna Gawboy 31:08 Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Eva Dale 31:11 Voices from the Arts and Sciences is produced and recorded at The Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Technology Services studio. Sound engineering by Paul Kotheimer, produced by Doug Dangler. I'm Eva Dale. Transcribed by https://otter.ai