Perhaps Thus the End

Life’s Endless Loops

By Andrew Mellor

Rune Glerup applies the rubric normally employed by visual artists and sculptors to the discipline of composing notated and electroacoustic music. He is interested in sound conceived as an almost physical structure – in material stripped of descriptive or dynamic qualities, relying instead on its own concrete and constant properties and the vibration, resonance, attraction or unease drawn from those properties when placed in the presence of other, equally clearly defined material.

Like separate parts of a hanging mobile, the static ingredients of Glerup’s scores form parts of the same fundamental structure, even if their presentation allows that structure to be heard or ‘seen’ from different perspectives or energized by different contexts. That contributes to a broader process – in the hands of performers and the space in which they play – in which the constituent parts find their own expressive and acoustic equilibrium.

The urge to hear the same sounds differently first led Glerup from his native Denmark to the European mainland where he immersed himself in the artistic life of Berlin and Paris. He returned home as a postgraduate student in the Soloist’s Class of the Royal Danish Academy of Music, where his teachers were Niels Rosing-Schow, Bent Sørensen and Hans Peter Stubbe Teglbjærg (Glerup himself now teaches at the Academy). He continued his studies at IRCAM (Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique) the electroacoustic music research facility established in Paris by Pierre Boulez.

Rune Glerup © Caroline Bittencourt

Soon a central element was established in Glerup’s works: the idea of musical ‘objects’. It was first explored in the work objets/décalages (2008, Dacapo Records 8.226578), in which blocks of sound became more distinct and demarcated according to thematic character, instrumental timbre and spatial positioning. The composer was soon convinced that the more his objects defined their own space, the more fertile and tense their relationships could become. In the series of works titled dust encapsulated that followed (8.226578), Glerup considered how he might frame such micro-relationships within a more comprehensive macro-structure. He has gone on to write a Piano Concerto for Ensemble intercontemporain, a violin concerto for Isabelle Faust and a Piano Trio for Trio con Brio Copenhagen.

Perhaps Thus the End (2017)
Early in his career, Glerup wrote a string quartet that, despite not having been played or even published, helped the composer develop some theoretical principles that he still cleaves to today. That work’s successor in the genre, Glerup’s String Quartet No. 2 and his work number 19, was commissioned by Quatuor Diotima and Westdeutscher Rundfunk with support from the Danish Arts Foundation. It was first performed by Quatuor Diotima at the Musikprotokoll Festival in Graz in October 2017.

The score falls into seven titled but linked movements, the first of which takes the title of the entire work, Perhaps Thus the End. The spirit of Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) hangs over that phrase – the writer’s fixation on existence, meaning, the passing of time and the cessation of things. Beckett has proved a touchstone figure for Glerup, a detail which aligns the composer with the work of another big figure in Danish music and an early supporter of his work, Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen (1932–2016). There are also parallels between the two composers’ actual music, which share an animalistic nervous energy and a tendency to place wholly different ideas, materials or traditions in close proximity to one another to create energizing and unexpected musical byproducts.

‘As for the inspiration for this piece,’ writes Glerup in a foreword to the score for Perhaps Thus the End, ‘I owe a lot to the works of Samuel Beckett but also to taking a walk in the park, reading the news, drinking beer in a smoke-filled bar, solitary hours cycling in the hills, failing to comprehend the endings, beginnings, repetitions, beginnings, endings of this world.’

At the start of the work’s opening movement, itself titled ‘Perhaps Thus the End’ and marked ‘leggiero, sotto voce’, a leaping, sculptural motif is born of the work’s opening unison, and is shared between all four players. The second movement, ‘Now to Press on Regardless,’ is marked ‘agitato, assurdo’, and is crammed with intricate, rococo gestures including scrunched notes and glissandi that speak of fleeting existential crisis and the absurdity of continuation when something is finished.

The third movement ‘From Deep Within’ is marked ‘poco espressivo, leggiero’. It offers perhaps the purest example of Glerup’s concept of concrete musical objects existing together but with autonomy, as the florid structures from before are now aerated, separated by held chords as if to resemble statues arranged apart from one another in a gallery. The fourth movement, ‘The Dark of Night or Day’, is a static ‘tranquillo’ nocturne before the fifth, ‘The Then Fleeting Dark of Night,’ which opens with the archaic form of a fugue, directly mimicking the ‘fleeting’ dark of night. Movement six, ‘The Strokes and Cries as Before,’ returns us to the material and atmosphere of the second movement, but now in a compressed version, before the work strains to conclude with the seventh movement, ‘The End, Again and Again,’ a prolonged version of the work’s introduction.

Clarinet Quintet, Still Leaning Towards This Machine (2015)
Glerup’s Clarinet Quintet was first performed on 14 March 2015 in Orléans by Quatuor Diotima and clarinettist Alain Billard. Three months later, the same musicians performed the piece at the source of its commission, IRCAM, as part of the centre’s Manifeste festival. The piece, his work number 16, operates to Glerup’s own principles of musical objects but nods in the direction of some musical developments, composers and scores that have shaped his music from the start.

One of those is an appropriated snippet of Boulez’s Piano Sonata No. 2, used as a form of hommage to the birth of exploratory music in the 1950s and 60s, but there are also references to Beethoven, Stravinsky, Lachenmann and the composers of perhaps the most famous clarinet quintets from music history: Mozart and Brahms. The work’s title is paraphrased from the realist poet Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) – specifically, the line in his poem Congrats, Chinaski : ‘I am still here, leaning towards this machine.’ The poem itself is an image of the poet making an alcohol-soaked birthday greeting to himself (Chinaski being his literary alter-ego).

Other influences include the Slovenian philosopher Mladen Dolar (b. 1951) (‘for his rigorous thinking of the voice’) and, again, the quintessential literary purveyor of the bleak and tragicomic, Beckett (‘for the absurd, and for the incessant and haunting vocal maelstrom’). None of these elements, writes Glerup, is intended to create a ‘collage’. Instead, they feed into a piece that is formally strong, its gestures weighty and refined, with an energy that suggests a unifying impulse despite the continued separation of the constituent parts.

Woven into the three movements are electronic elements, downsized to chamber scale for discretion using transducers mounted on instruments, meaning those electronic elements we do hear appear to operate within the same acoustic limitations as the instruments themselves. The first movements bursts with the tension of the combined elements; the texture remains consistent but like the proverbial hanging mobile, glints in different lights. The second movement is sparser and slower, with a respiratory quality. The third returns to a high speed, but with circular micro-movement only creating a sense of macro-stability; a drone draws the music away from its febrile state but at no point is any single element of the conversation forced to sacrifice its material integrity.
 

Andrew Mellor is author of The Northern Silence – Journeys in Nordic Music and Culture (Yale University Press, 2022).