Månen

You Belong to Another, Just from Being There

By Tim Rutherford-Johnson

In the spring of 2024, the Danish vocal consort ÆTLA began a series of concerts under the title ‘H J Æ L P’. Centred on the themes of vulnerability and of ‘being something for someone’, these concerts featured works by the American Caroline Shaw (Partita) and the Scot James MacMillan (Miserere), as well as readings of texts by the Danish poet Barbara Agertoft and a setting of another of Agertoft’s poems, Månen (The Moon) (2024), by the Polish, Copenhagen-based composer Adrianna Kubica-Cypek. Månen was commissioned specially, and its text takes up these themes through the image of the moon, which moves ceaselessly and smoothly through the night and is viewed by groups of individuals who are brought together into a state of calm and togetherness through their shared experience of its light.

More than any other medium, vocal music sits at that meeting-place of vulnerability and support. There’s a reason the solo singer-songwriter is the archetype of raw musical emotion, and there’s a reason that religious and political movements grow around the sound of massed voices. In support of ÆTLA’s chosen themes, Kubica-Cypek draws on both these aspects.

She divides Agertoft’s poem into four songs. In the first, the repeated words ‘every night’ form a kind of comfort blanket around the notes of an A major triad, above which individual voices break into sketches of melody, or below which they murmur a subdued incantation. In the second, Kubica-Cypek applies – with a light touch – the ‘controlled aleatory’ of her Polish predecessor Witold Lutosławski to allow separate voices to share the same space without giving themselves up to a fixed pulse. In the third, solo voices sing their way through lines of the poem, triggering each other at set moments but otherwise matching their rhythms to the words, not to one another. Delicate allusions like these to plainchant, ritual prayer, and congregational singing establish an echo with the fellowship of sacred spaces, while the use of controlled aleatory allows for the free movement of voices within a prescribed context. In all these ways, the composer provides settings not only for exposed vocalisation but also ways for those lone voices to be supported and gradually brought into safety and security without giving up their identity or independence.

Only in the fourth song do all the voices come together for a prolonged time: the poem speaks of holding hands on the morning after, and of how we each belong to each other, even as we are on our own. The music ends with a fading intonation of the poem’s motif: ‘It was beautiful in a way that was beautiful’.

© Tim Rutherford-Johnson, 2026
 

Tim Rutherford-Johnson is a writer specializing in new music. He is the author of the widely praised Music after the Fall (University of California Press) and The Music of Liza Lim (Wildbird), and co-author of Twentieth-Century Music in the West (Cambridge University Press).