The
trombone as soloist
As a very
young man Ole Schmidt was a jazz pianist, but he later established himself as
one of Denmark's most successful conductors of the post-war era. At the same
time he has himself composed a wide range of works.
With its combination of rhythmic energy, concentration,
elementary expressiveness and immediate accessibility, Pièce concertante is highly characteristic of Ole Schmidt's
music. While the two brass instruments have a prominent role and extensive solo
passages, especially towards the end of the work, this is just as much a
concertante work where, for long passages, the whole small orchestra takes
centre stage.
Apart from the brasses, the ensemble in the work is
identical to that of Béla Bartók's Music
for String Instruments, Percussion and Celeste from 1936. This work does in fact appear to have been
an important source of inspiration for Ole Schmidt's composition, not only in
the soundscape, where the piano is often as salient as the brass, but also in
the exuberant polyphony and the flexible rhythms with frequent shifts between
different bar lengths.
As for the solo instruments, it is particularly their
similarities - but also their differences - that the piece works with. Their
common acoustic starting-point as brasses is an obvious shared feature, but
their differences in attack and compass gradually become evident too, both when
they play together and when they take turns developing the same musical
material. At the same time, collectively and individually, they stand out
strikingly from the at once compact and transparent sonority of strings, harp,
keyboard instruments and percussion.
The pawky
philosophical humour that sometimes rears its head in Per Nørgård's music
should not be underestimated. In
It's All His Fancy, That it
quite simply cannot be ignored. In recent decades Nørgård has been greatly
preoccupied by musical time and not least the experience of tempo and motion at
many levels. This is very true of this work, which has borrowed both its title
and the subtitles of the individual movements from Lewis Carroll's books Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass (published in 1865 and 1872 respectively), in whose
surreal fairytale universe no one and nothing are quite what they seem - and
where no one moves as one expects either.
But among the Alice titles and
quotations in the score there are also references to several other sources of
inspiration. The fifth movement, for example, in its sub-subtitle ‘Stravinsky
v. Chopin', makes a direct link between
on the one hand Lewis Carroll's song of the battle of the Lion and the Unicorn,
which is in fact sung by the two brass soloists, and on the other hand two of
the great composers of the past who worked most in their music with the
experience of time. In addition the movement was explicitly launched into the
world "with greetings to Douglas Hofstadter", the American cognitive researcher
whose bestseller Gödel, Escher, Bach has time and consciousness as a recurrent theme (and
whose two main characters, the swift Achilles and the slow Tortoise, lent their
names to a Nørgård piano work of the 1980s).
But although the music explores
subtle combinations of rhythmic layers among the instruments, it also leaves a
great deal of freedom to the performers. Passages can be repeated at will, the
music may be electrically amplified or not, and some of the musical elements
can be included or omitted. On the whole the music provides plenty of scope for
experimenting one's way to one's own experience of time.
Bent Lorentzen is one of the living Danish composers who has worked
most with music drama, in both large and small formats. On top of this, scenic
effects and explorations of the potential of the instruments as actors often
play an important role in his instrumental music, and Circles is no exception.
To begin with, the various
sound-resources of the trombone are in focus. There are short, circling
staccato figures over wide intervals with lots of interpolated rests. There are
sudden effec-tive glissandi or emphatic, abrupt one-off attacks. Or there are
ticking scale runs or song, breathing, screaming or panting into the
mouthpiece. Gradually the playing techniques are mixed together more and more,
and the same pitches or melodic figures begin to alternate between different
ways of playing, where not least the glissandi become more and more dominant at
both the bright and the dark pitch.
At the end of the work the
movement from the conventional music of the beginning into not only theatre,
but pure mime, is completed. Instead of playing on the trombone the musician
moves it in various prescribed patterns, while only alternative, noise-like
uses of the voice are left, and in the last bars even only the breath itself.
Through many of Bent Sørensen's works runs the sense of something
hidden, of an underlying narrative and many remote prehistories that are much
greater than the sum of the delicate, refined details, quiet suggestions and
intangible movements of which the music is to a great extent built up. Although
most of Bent Sørensen's oeuvre consists of instrumental works for chamber
ensembles, it is to a rare degree dramatic music that makes him one of the most
striking Danish composers of recent times - precisely because much of the drama
is often kept below the surface.
And this is the case too with The Bells of
Vineta.
The literary inspiration for the work is a central topos in Scandinavian
literature - a hidden universe that becomes visible; the story of the city of
Vineta, found in the Swedish Nobel Laureate Selma Lagerlöf's novel The
Wonderful Journey of Nils Holgersen - the enchanted Vineta off the
coast of Gotland, which sank into the sea and now only rises up once every
century.
As so often with Bent Sørensen, this is extremely
quiet, slow music. It is one of his few works for solo instrument. On the other
hand it provides rich oppor-tunities to experience his profoundly original and
subtle art of instrumentation in its purest form.
The experience of a different
reality behind the immediate surface of the music is present from the outset,
inasmuch as the trombonist must for long stretches sing harmonies with his own
playing. This results in a strange timbral and melodic parallel world where one
can never quite agree with oneself -whether the faraway bells one thinks one
hears are real, or are only something one imagines sinking away below the
surface of the sea through long sliding notes.
At an early stage Peter Bruun developed one of the most distinctive
tonal idioms among the younger Danish composers with an aesthetic that to a
decided, even remarkable degree is more focused on sensuality, structure and
movement than on conflict or confrontation. While the music is influenced by
his teacher Per Nørgård's luxuriant, sophisticated soundscapes, at the same time
it focuses, as far as the choice of material and musical events is concerned,
on concentrated, harmonically and formally simple processes.
This is also the case in Twelve to Remember, Twelve to Come, which rather resembles a long, slow,
three-movement meditation on just a single recurring chord-change. The
orchestra sets the scene with delicately shifting instrumental timbres and many
polyrhythms while the solo trombone holds forth above it. Rather than a
traditional solo concerto with its dynamic interplay of soloist and orchestra,
this is a solo development with orchestral underlay, almost like that of a jazz
soloist with a backing group. With the associations of Spanish and Latin
American music immediately evoked by the basic harmonic phrase, this makes
Miles Davis' and Gil Evans' jazz classic Sketches of Spain a reasonable comparison if not a direct source of
inspiration.
Jakob Levinsen, 2005