Adaptations

Into the Unknown

By Jakob Kullberg

We have all probably experienced the outcome of a novel being adapted into a screenplay and, in turn, into a feature film. Likewise, we have likely felt disappointment at some point that a motion picture did not live up to our expectations, or perhaps quite the opposite, that it struck us as being even better than the original. Any conversation concerning such adaptations will soon revolve around comparisons between the original and the adaptation and will inevitably move on to a discussion of fidelity in relation to the source. Was the film doing the novel justice, or was it perhaps instead offering a noveltake on the original? Inherent in this idea of being faithful to the original is the assumption that a work of art contains a translatable core, something which can be transmediated through adaptation.

In the world of classical music, the idea of adaptation is often met with some resistance. Since Beethoven’s era, composers have been enshrined, placing them and their work on a pedestal creating what philosopher Lydia Goehr calls ‘an imaginary museum of musical works’. The notion that a composer’s score is a sacrosanct work of art with clear boundaries stands in stark contrast to the nature of adaptation. The Russian linguist and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin believed that there were two types of ‘bodies’, the canonical and the grotesque, the canonical being an artificial state of arrested development. In his seminal work Rabelais and His World (1965), Bakhtin positioned that everything is in a never-ending dialogue with everything else around it – it is ‘a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body.’

One fascinating feature of the critically acclaimed Danish trio The Firebirds – Banke, Filipsen & Pasborg’s album Adaptations is the convergence and reconciliation of two potentially divergent worldviews. Is it a stretch if one suggests that Bakhtin’s idea of the ever evolving body is an apt description of the approach of a jazz musician? Adaptations consists of a relay of musical transmediations beginning with a set of improvisations by The Firebirds which have been offered to a number of contemporary classical composers of widely different aesthetic backgrounds. These composers have freely chosen which of the improvisations to use as inspiration for their individual work for string quartet. Subsequently, upon completion of these quartets, The Firebirds have in turn ‘re-reacted’by drawing inspiration from the recordings of each work to make what they call ‘arrangements’. Like a relay of potentially ever evolving music, an improvisation solidifies into a string quartet, which in turn dissolves into an arrangement, incorporating improvisation. As in a process of filtration each composer has chosen their subjective compositional filtersdetermining what material is transferred from the source material to find new form.

A Possible Meeting
The album’s initial suite of interconnected pieces begins with The Firebirds’s A Possible Meeting consisting of two improvisations that have been superimposed on one another to create music that paradoxically is both spaciously calm and rhythmically driven. Norwegian composer Inga Margrete Aas’s If the Eye Was an Animal can be experienced as a microscopic zooming in on intervals as presented in the beginning of A Possible Meeting. However, as if the process of transmediation has distorted the information slightly, Aas does not actually quote the material accurately. She unfurls a sonic landscape of shrill, trembling intervals by the use of modern techniques that partly outline the extensions of a Lydian chord in C. In Birdeye, The Firebirds respond to Aas’s string quartet with an arrangement that retains the key of C major, shifting the G of the scale to a G sharp, thereby augmenting this Lydian scale. The fact that a low C is not actually heard in the deep bass of Birdeye is of no consequence as one nonetheless experiences this as a subliminal echo of Aas’s piece.

According to keyboardist Anders Filipsen, The Firebirds identified two key points of departure in their approach to adapting these through-composed quartets. Firstly, each quartet presents distinct motifs that the trio has treated with a degree of fidelity, developing them further through combined rearrangements and improvisations. Secondly, the trio aimed to preserve the emotional character of each quartet while allowing for the emergence of a new identity.

Repetto
The Firebirds’s improvisation Repetto is in itself the catalyst for two of the string quartets heard on this album, Veli Kujala’s Fast Forward and Mauro Patricelli’s Fato. However, the group have chosen the order of these quartets and their reactive trio-rearrangements based on an aesthetic assessment of musical flow and artistic coherence rather than priority. Repetto, whichin the strictest sense of the word is not an improvisation, consists of a predetermined rhythmic figure that sets up the group’s foray into the unknown. Both Fato and The Firebirds’s relayed response called Nocturnal Dance take their starting point from this rhythmic idea and the main intervals integral to Repetto’s structure, establishing a clear connection. Like an alternate reality Repetto’s other offshoot, Kujala’s Fast Forward and its descendant trio arrangement with its inborn improvisation, Faster Than Slow , both spin off from their parent in a less openly derivative fashion. As with Repetto’s initial successors, The Firebirds emphasise that the sequence of events holds no significance, and tracks four through eight on the album can be perceived as a cohesive five-part suite.

Low
The second but last set of dialogues on the album is presented in the order they were conceived commencing with The Firebirds’s dark and brooding industrial-sounding improvisation, Low. Piquing the interest of composer Nick Martin as he embarked on an adaptation for the album, the bleak and sombre improvisation inspired the tender slowly fluttering quartet Queer Tears. Are the mournful glissandos reminiscent of human tears, or are they merely the cries of gulls overhead, perched on the rooftops of Martin’s parents’ house in Cornwall, where he composed it? Due to the intuitive nature of the project, Martin decided to rely on instinct much like one might improvise with pre-existing material, discovering form as it unfolds. In this sense his approach closely mirrors the way The Firebirds work in their adaptations of the string quartets.

The trio’s rearrangement of Martin’s work, simply titled Cry, creates an entirely more distant feeling of sorrow which takes its inspiration from Martin’s opening chord progression. Like a passage through a forlorn urban landscape in the dim of dusk, the unwavering slow groove seems laden with the acceptance of tears long gone by.

At the End of the Road
The exploration of the darker emotional hues continues as the three tracks in this final offering are curated in reverse. Still is The Firebirds’s reaction to Xavier Bonfill’s modernist string quartet, titled Still Life, itself a product of adaptation processes. Using samples from At the End of the Road, Bonfill has manipulated these excerpts electronically only to further transmediate the result by making a notated instrumentation for string quartet. Whereas Still Life, with its painfully slithering microtonal glissandos , can be experienced as an ominous large-scale conflict seen microscopically from deep orbit, Still is like a quiet life-affirming confirmation. With a touch of imagination, one can read these two titles as a question and an answer: Still Life? … Still!

As we delve deeper into this dismal reading, itself a performative adaptation that undoubtedly influences the listening experience, the final track on the album, At the End of the Road, seems to respond to the question: what does an organ at a future post-apocalyptic church-Mass sound like? Imagining The Firebirds’s final music accompanying a quiet chanting of the famous lines from T. S. Eliot’s poem, The Hollow Men (1925):

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper

Jakob Kullberg is an internationally acclaimed cellist and educator, and one of the most active and stylistically versatile Danish instrumentalists. He holds a Ph.D. from the Norwegian Academy of Music.