Alpha music
A release
with music for recorder, saxophone and percussion is automatically a musical
innovation. Before Alpha was formed in 2004 there was no repertoire for this
configuration. All the works on this CD have therefore been written
specifically for Alpha in 2004-05 by a handful of living composers from three
generations, and even after a quick listen to the CD the results of the
composers' work give rise to two small conclusions: first, that Danish
composition music - right now - is a multifaceted, highly original phenomenon;
and secondly that the combination of recorder, saxophone and percussion is a
really good idea!
The quite special thing about this trio formation is the breadth of
sonorities it can muster. A percussion set is of course wide-ranging in itself,
but saxophones and recorders too span a wider range of sounds and registers
than people normally think. On this release three saxophones and seven
different recorders are used, and together with the percussion and the clutch
of composers represented, this makes for an entirely original recording - both in musical breadth and
compositional clout.
The
first composer on the CD is the youngest. Eblis Álvarez was born in 1977 in Bogotá, Colombia, and made his debut in 2004 from
the composition class of the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen. As a
composer, he too ranges wide: he has participated in a number of contemporary
music festivals, and in various projects that explore rock and South American
folk music. The work on this release, El triste juego de la polka espectral (which can be translated "the sad game
of the spectral polka") is also inspired by folk music, but in this case not
primarily South American - although this does seem to lurk somewhere or other
in the background - but the Burmese folk music of which Álvarez has heard Alpha
play arrangements. And the source of inspiration emerges clearly throughout the
work; the music is almost transparently clear in its texture, consisting as it
does of small, pithy rhythmic figures that are repeated and varied for a very
long time in a long, homogeneously bright belt of sound. In this way - in its
apparent endlessness - the music is like a version of the religious and secular
music of the Far East, stressing its constant variation and non-organic
development.
Ib Nørholm's Jubilate Deo in primavere is, as the title reveals, a kind of a song of
praise in (the music of) the spring. Nørholm was born in 1931 and with this
work from 2005 has reached his opus 182. And the work confirms the fact that throughout
those 182 he has tried widely differing approaches characterized by an
insistent exploration of all musical possibilities. In the 1960s Ib Nørholm was
a leading figure in the invention of a postmodern musical style - ‘stylistic
pluralism' - which (briefly) can be regarded as a recognition that anything
composed before, and the ways in which this has been done, can be (re)used in
new compositions.
This idea - that the history of music constitutes a reservoir of
possibilities for the composer - can be used directly as an approach to Jubilate Deo in primavere. For technically
the work is to a great extent a kind of free counterpoint, in principle a
technique from a much earlier date. The individual parts relate to one another
with imitations and responses, while remaining fully valid in themselves, and
throughout the work Nørholm is able, with very simple resources, to let the
various instruments paint a vivid pastoral soundscape. Nevertheless, there is
also a sense of flux: the shifting of the music in sections with abrupt changes
in the percussion arsenal produces surprising sound dynamics.
Despite his age, Søren
Nils Eichberg, born in 1973, has an impressive CV - as
a composer, pianist and conductor. His official opus list counts only works
from the past five years, so it is all the more remarkable that his piece for
violin and orchestra Qilaatersorneq from 2001 won First Prize at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in
Brussels. The work on this release, Cantus, is in several respects highly unusual. In the first place the form
of the work is at least superficially disjointed - but in a positive way.
Instead of forming links between the different musical phrases with temporary
bridging passages, the music is sectional and almost mechanically divided. Each
phrase is given a place and repeated to a point, then a new phrase takes over.
All the same the music does cohere; the individual phrases are related, and as
the work progresses one learns more and more about the kind of musical entities
they are. Another striking feature is the composer's dexterity and the way it
shows its willingness to accommodate the listener. The elements of the music
are telling and well wrought and they sound in the instruments where they sound
good. In that sense the music seems much more heard than thought, within an
aesthe-tic framework where the listener's experience and understanding take
pride of place.
Bent Lorentzen's work Farbentiegel II is a study in sonorities (a Farbentiegel is a crucible or melting-pot for colours). Lorentzen
was born in 1935 and is probably best known for a string of prizewinning
music-drama works. Yet he also has a large instrumental oeuvre behind him, and
it seems important to the understanding of this that much of his musical
development in the 1960s took place at the Swedish electronic music studio EMS.
For the work at the mixer seems to have been transferred to acoustic instruments;
in the case of Farbentiegel
II the music bears
the marks of minutely detailed work with the sound - for example with noise
effects, timbres, spatial effects and manipulation of pitches - as much as with
the placing of the sounds in time in a composed sequence. For as the title
suggests, there is a predetermined - but hardly audible - rhythmic mould which
deals with the temporal aspect.
The form of Farbentiegel II falls into two parts and is at once simple and
effective. The first third is both measured and subdued, while the second
two-thirds is violently unstable. First the metallic percussion (both as deep,
broad beats and small insertions), the deep drone of the saxophone and the
distorted eruptions of the recorder are mixed in a sequence of overlaps and
repetitions with no real development. It is so to speak a totality consisting
of recurring sound-events that work in and of themselves. The second section,
on the other hand, is pure motion. Here the drones are replaced by unstable
notes that are trilled and bent with no fixation. Here too the percussion,
whose gongs and tam have up to this point actually produced highly complex,
saturated sounds, becomes particularly unstable; the dominant instrument is now
tubular bells whose tone is bent back and forward as a result of their
immersion in water as they are struck. Thus the work more and more becomes a
unified soundscape whose individual elements become harder and harder to
distinguish.
The
title of Svend
Hvidtfelt Nielsen's work,
Trionetics, gives us a good clue to the point of
the music. Quite freely translated - the composer has presumably invented the
word himself - Trionetics means studies in how a trio is specifically
manifested. This interpretation fits in well with Svend Hvidtfelt Nielsen's
history, since at one time he himself thought that precisely the exploration of
concrete musical phenomena - especially phenomena that have something to do
with music and time - has been a characteristic feature of himself and his
musical contemporaries since the end of the 1980s, with its origin in the
composition training at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Århus and the
teachers Per Nørgård and Karl Aage Rasmussen. Irrespective of how much of this
the composer has intentionally associated with his choice of title, Trionetics is an ensemble piece with a capital E. Although the individual melody
lines of the three instruments would probably work as melodies in their own
right, it is in the interplay that meaning arises.
The piece develops as a stronger and stronger challenge to both
musicians and listener; it is initiated with a shared spirit among the parts,
with imitations and joint emphases, but very quickly the small motifs develop
rhythmically such that small displacements, replacements, unpredictable accents
and incommensurable parallel sequences create a dizzying impression. The tempo
is for the most part fast and the notes short, so the metaphor of the musical 100-metre
race seems appropriate. The difference - from the world of athletics - is that Trionetics is run in
hilly terrain, the pace-length of the competitors changes constantly, and the
runners rarely start at the same time.
The last work on the CD, Jaco, was written by the ensemble itself as a taut fusion of several
elements. It is at once composition and improvisation, and at once acoustic and
electronic. Structurally, the piece is built up as a progression of accents
played at different tempi by the different instruments. The form is simple: a
structuring introduction with insistent emphases accompanied by the small
discharges of the recorder and a little melody. By the middle of the piece
everything is brightly crackling, until a calm, almost meditative section forms
an ebb-like conclusion.
That the work is midway between the acoustic and the electronic should
be understood in the sense that Jaco has a large number of odd
sounds that one does not normally associate with the acoustic instruments of
the ensemble. They are a result of the fact that the microphones used in the
recording - or in the concert situation in ordinary amplification - have
deliberately been placed very close to or inside the instrument they are
recording. This amplifies sounds that the human ear does not normally perceive
- for example the noise that arises when the saxophonist tongues the reed or
the unstable, surprisingly long fade-out that the kalimba drum produces at the
end of the work. In other words, Jaco is music in a state of
flux between the acoustic and the electronic - a fusion that, thanks to a
simple technical manoeuvre, brings the listener right into the instruments'
normally private sound--universe. Regardless of these interesting theoretical
perspectives, Jaco is a work that stimulates both the brain and the experience of the
senses; it is a sharply delineated multiplicity of sounds which in an extremely
dense rhythmic sequence brings direct musical energy close to the listener.
Henrik Friis, 2005