Songs of Solitude

Sing Me Back to Life

By Andrew Mellor

By virtue of his homeland as much as his abilities, Sunleif Rasmussen is a unique figure on the Nordic music scene. He was born in 1961 on the Faroese island of Sandoy, into a nation with an intrinsic and pervasive musical tradition but little in the way of formal musical infrastructure. Rasmussen learned notation from an organ book owned by his grandmother and absorbed the tunes of the Faroese folk tradition and hymnody by osmosis. As a teenager, he was sent to learn the basics of music theory in Norway, and in 1988 he made the journey to sovereign Denmark, where he studied composition with Ib Nørholm at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen.

Rasmussen has been responsible for the Faroe Islands’ first opera and its first Nordic Council Music Prize, awarded in 2002 for his Symphony No. 1, Oceanic Days. Much of the composer’s music speaks unequivocally of his nation, reflecting the utilitarian nature of music on the Faroe Islands without patronizing its people – all while breathing something of the country’s harsh, wet and blustery air. From simple ingredients, he explores varied perspectives on familiar themes and objects.

A second symphony, The Earth Anew (2015), reclaims the Nordic creation myth from Richard Wagner in a manner reminiscent of the Edda settings by the Icelandic composer Jón Leifs. It is a huge score for orchestra and singers that writhes and wriggles, cackles and cascades, sounding as if it has been hauled up from beneath the surface of the earth. It gives the impression of a musical language being formed and refined even as it as being spoken, every rhythmic impulse felt in the bones yet sufficiently crafted to bring perspective in the moment.

Many of Rasmussen’s works make use of deconstructed or refashioned elements of Faroese folk and psalm tones as the base ingredients for large, pointillist canvasses that chart gradual transmutation and transformation. While the distinctively Faroese elements of the music were once concealed, they have increasingly come to the fore in Rasmussen’s works. ‘I used to hide them – I didn’t want to be another Bartók,’ the composer once said. ‘Since the Symphony No. 1, I have been happier to let them have more prominence.’

By ‘prominence’, he doesn’t necessarily mean obviousness – real-time statement or development. Often, themes are plotted over a large expanse or traced over busy isorhythmic activity. They tend to be found in the long line, emerging only with perspective. Rasmussen likens the process to the frequent sailing trips he takes around the islands of Sandoy, Skúvoy and Stóra Dímun. ‘When you are on the water, things change slowly,’ he explains. ‘You may know how a particular island looks, but when you sail around it, you experience entirely different perspectives on the same place and you hardly notice it happening. That’s what I try to express in my music.’

Sunleif Rasmussen © Lars Skaaning

Songs of Solitude and Night (2019)
As Rasmussen’s first two symphonies suggest, it is easy to feel confronted by the biggest questions of existence when amidst the overwhelming geological landscapes of the Faroe Islands. In 2019, Rasmussen turned once more to the subject of creation for the first part of his work Songs of Solitude and Night , dedicated to the singer and conductor Paul Hillier and written for his ensemble Theatre of Voices to perform, with recorder soloist Michala Petri. It was first performed by those musicians on 16 May of that year.

The work’s first part, ‘Prelude’, uses a text from ‘Völuspá’, the prophecy of the seeress that opens The Elder Edda, one of two medieval Icelandic literary texts whose material reaches back to the Viking Age. The passage set here in English translation concerns the creation of the earth, the stars, the sun, the moon and the first people on earth: Ask and Embla.

The opening music depicts a void, eliciting a pitch-less rumbling from the bass drum by rubbing on its skin. Added to this is the mysterious sound of a bass recorder being blown while its player also sings in contrary motion and wordless, glissando singing from the soprano, mezzo-soprano and tenor (the latter two also playing percussion instruments). The bass singer begins to dredge up the story from a low G. As the ‘Prelude’ proceeds, the tutti singers tend respond in consequence to the antecedent calls of the bass, the drum beating steadily underneath as the aura of differently-pitched recorders on top suggests a virile poetic will. The music searches and searches until the two beings which ‘had not heat nor motion’ gain ‘soul, sense … and goodly hue.’

The second movement sets an English translation by Gunnar Hoydal of William Heinesen’s poem Hogboy. Heinesen (1900–1991) was a dominant creative force on the Faroe Islands during his lifetime and wrote the nation’s touchstone literary work, The Lost Musicians (1950). As well as a writer, he was a painter and a musician.

Hogboy, which has also formed the basis of a double bass concerto by the Danish-Faroese composer Kristian Blak, tells of a mysterious spirit inhabiting the Orcadian stone-age tomb of Maeshowe on the Orkney mainland. As in the previous movement, ‘Hogboy’ is a story from a distant time, one also conjured-up by the sounds of rubbing on the skin of the bass drum, but seasoned here with the very specific sounds of the guiro and vibraslap and the exacting recitation of the narrative elements of Heinesen’s text by the conductor, Paul Hillier.

Women’s voices embody the quivering Orkney girls who dance in the moonlight around the tomb, incessantly asking the phantom what it is he sings of. Men’s voices give the Hogboy’s increasingly dark replies as if from the domain of his watery underworld, moving from dark reminiscence (‘if only I still had my feet to dance with’) to ominous threats (‘I would have thrown you on the foaming beds of the seaweed’). Bright soprano recorders take on the mantle of the Orkney girls but lower pitched ones provide reflection, frenzied incantations and a moaning postscript to suggest the Hogboy’s timeless existence in his lair.

Klar op vort mod, lys for vor fod (2016)
In contrast to Songs of Solitude and Night, Rasmussen’s cantata Klar op vort mod, lys for vor fod (‘Stoke our courage, light our feet’) searches for the light, imagining a community in faith and prayer. It was written for the choir and soloists of Trinitatis Church in the heart of Copenhagen’s shopping district, its baroque ensemble and their director of music, Søren Christian Vestergaard. Those musicians first performed the work liturgically, on home ground, on Sunday 8 May 2016.

In seven movements, the score uses a text collated by Peter Skov-Jakobsen, Bishop of Copenhagen, from poetry by Helle S. Søtrup that throws a contemporary light on the scope of prayer and the idea of grief. Some musical material is drawn from Severus Gastorius’s 1681 melody for the hymn Opstandne Herre, du vil gå (‘Risen Lord, You Will Walk With Us’), whose third stanza includes the line ‘Klar op vort mod, lys for vor fod’. The tune is combined with old Gregorian modes.

The structure of a Bach cantata looms large over Rasmussen’s own. The score is written for soprano and baritone soloists, a tutti choir and a baroque ensemble the likes of which Bach would have recognized (particularly in its duetting oboes and violins). The parallel is most apparent in the first movement, ‘Du er opstandne sejershelt’ (‘You are risen, victorious hero’), which is underpinned by a continuous baroque-style tread, opens with a characteristic instrumental preamble and goes on to refract the harmonies of the chorale tune while retaining stepwise harmonic movement. The alto line weaves a ‘cantus firmus’ through the surrounding polyphony on the words ‘jeg er hos dig’ (‘I am with you’).

‘Bøn 1’ (‘Prayer 1’) presents an initial lamentation for a lost love, the idea of partnership set up immediately by pairs of oboes and violins bound tightly in imitative dialogue and the idea of separated male and female voice groups. The text of ‘Hjælp mig’ (‘Help me’) echoes that of the old hymn in its plea to ‘forstærk mit mod’ (‘strengthen my courage’). In the spirit of that plea, the baritone solo steels himself against the eddies and disturbances of life even as he asks his creator to ‘led mig ud af mit reaktive selv’ (‘let me out of my reactive self’).

In ‘Tak for dig’ (‘Thanks for you’), soprano and baritone soloists are coiled in dialogue above pulsating strings in disarming and devastating expressions of thanks, ending with ‘tak fordi du har kysset mig med din levende mund’ (‘thank you for kissing me with your living mouth’). Men’s and women’s voices are set in an antiphonal exchange for ‘Bøn 2’ (‘Prayer 2’), which uses chant-like text rhythms in laying out its litany of individuals and groups who deserve prayer – from ‘benchwarmers’ and ‘those who have endured much’ to ‘those who believed they knew what they wanted.’

‘Syng’ (‘Sing’) is a rhapsodic exhortation to sing delivered by the soprano soloist with a florid violin for company. ‘Sing me true, sing me open,’ sings the woman, ‘… sing me back to life.’ The final movement, ‘Du har eksisteret’ (‘You have existed’) closes the circle musically and philosophically. Once again it opens with the oboe couple, a symbol of the idea of union expressed in a text that asserts ‘da jeg mistede dig, var du endnu her’ (‘when I lost you, were you yet here’). After a slow fugue for the four voice parts, the original chorale begins to reveal itself.
 

Andrew Mellor is the author of The Northern Silence – Journeys in Nordic Music and Culture (Yale University Press)