Louisiana Ritual

Musik i parken

By Christian Munch-Hansen

In the music video Pyramid, filmed at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, a drone camera glides over the museum’s Sculpture Park, soaring above the lush slopes that meet the coastline at Humlebæk in North Zealand. In the park, the Mikkelborg Riessler Siegel Trio is seen standing on a pyramid sculpture by Danish artist Poul Gernes (1925–1996) – a striking and visually captivating scene. In another video, Winter Sun, close-ups of the musicians in action are interwoven with shots of glistening waves and sea foam washing over the stony shoreline. A powerful connection emerges between nature, visual art, and the sonically evocative music that greets the listener, revealing how deeply the physical surroundings are linked to the creation and expression of this music.

© Louisiana Museum of Modern Art/Franck Tusolini

Over a ten-year period from 2014, this Danish-German-American trio met every summer at the museum to carry out a recurring ritual. Over two weekends, they performed live in the Sculpture Park, often to the surprise of the museum visitors, with each musician assuming a distinct physical posture: Palle Mikkelborg with his trumpet held high or with his body curled around it; Michael Riessler upright like an obelisk, his fingers dancing over the keys of the bass clarinet; and Wayne Siegel like a maestro, conducting with mysterious gestures in front of a computer screen, as if creating sound from nothing. Wayne Siegel recalls the trio’s beginnings:

‘In 2013, I was invited by Louisiana’s music director Lars Fenger to perform in the museum park with my motion-tracking system. On the same occasion, Palle Mikkelborg and Michael Riessler performed as a duo, and we were all accommodated in the museum’s boathouse, eating, drinking and hanging out. I don’t know if it was Lars Fenger’s secret intention to bring us together, but there was immediate chemistry, and the following year we performed as a trio.’

Since then, these three distinctive musicians, each with their own career and musical style, have formed an unconventional constellation and developed a shared voice in a genre that has no name – music at the intersection of electronic music, contemporary chamber music and free improvisation.

Wayne Siegel originally created the electronic backdrop of Winter Sun/Sig nærmer tiden as a sound installation titled Solkreds (‘Sun Circle’) for Dodekalitten – twelve monumental stone sculptures by artist Thomas Kadziola, situated at Kragenæs on the island of Lolland. Siegel explains: ‘The electronic harmonies are programmed to continuously evolve. It is the same software we use for the trio recordings, and which serves as the basis for our improvisation.’

The music opens with dark, electronic textures and the sound of bells. Soon, Riessler’s bass clarinet and Mikkelborg’s trumpet enter like narrative voices. The music resembles a winter poem in sound – with sun and clear air, yet everything is frozen or covered in snow, as if in a deathlike slumber. This atmosphere continues when the music quotes Sig nærmer tiden (‘The Time Approaches’) – a beautiful and familiar melody in Danish song tradition, composed by Oluf Ring in 1922 to a poem by Steen Steensen Blicher from his famous poetry cycle Trækfugle (‘Migratory Birds’, 1838). Blicher’s poem presents winter birds as a metaphor for humankind, compelled to make their final ‘migration’ upon ‘hearing the voice of winter.’ In the same way, the music conveys a trace of human existential experience.

Mirages, with an electronic backing track by Michael Riessler, depicts a dramatic encounter between human and machine. A festive chaos of voices – keyboards, percussion, winds – unfolds, full of motion and drive. After three minutes, the tumbling pulse is interrupted by sudden, dramatic breaks. In the final sequence, the music has moved beyond rupture and conflict, floating like a magical cube in a desert mirage.

The compositional framework for Gothicwas created by Wayne Siegel. At first, the trio’s members act cautiously, as if unwrapping something fragile or unknown. Perhaps wisely – soon, a metallic-sounding pulse materialises, combined with ambiguous melodic gestures from the bass clarinet and trumpet. Here, Siegel opens a kind of gothic play with clichés from horror and film music, with underlying humour: demonstrative minor chords, ominous organ sounds, mischievous glockenspiel and small doses of thunder.

Live in the Park 2019 documents the trio’s performance in Louisiana’s Sculpture Park, while the remainder of the release was recorded in the museum Concert Hall. Despite wind, weather and technical challenges when recording outdoors, the August 2019 performance emerges clearly: a rhapsody for laptop, trumpet, and bass clarinet, arranged in a series of carefully constructed musical tableaux.

In the work’s airy opening, Mikkelborg quotes one of his own melodies, also heard in the music video Capricorne, produced by Louisiana Music Channel. The melody frames the composition and reappears in the coda. Following this atmospheric introduction, a more abstract sonic painting emerges: Siegel expands the electronic soundscape with clinking metal, music box tones, bubbling water and mechanical clockwork, while trumpet and bass clarinet reach for melodic motifs. Around six and a half minutes in, the music reaches a calm intermezzo with blues phrases before a new and inciting pulse emerges – the theme of Mikkelborg’s Glass Painting (from Anything but Grey, 1992). Towards the work’s end, a searching atmosphere, as indistinct as in a foggy landscape, prevails before a final fast-running beat is initiated. Winds and electronic effects intensify the increasingly expressive progression before it ends abruptly, giving way to a suggestive, melodic conclusion.

Song Tread Lightly is a composition by Palle Mikkelborg, based on a poem by Norwegian author Olav H. Hauge (1908–1994). The music was first recorded on the album of the same name, as published in 2000. It was originally part of a ten-movement suite titled A Moon of Light, premiered at Norway’s Maijazz Festival in 1998 with the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra. At that performance, Hauge’s poem was recited:

Song, tread lightly on my heart
Tread lightly as bellheather on watery moor
As bird on overnight ice
Break the crust of pain
Song you will drown

‘We must take care of life so it does not break,’ Mikkelborg has said in reference to the poem’s poignant statement on the fragility of existence, which can shatter like thin ice. The poem gained new weight when Mikkelborg reused the music for the memorial concert Eternity’s Sunrise at Roskilde Festival in 2001, a year after the tragic festival accident in which nine young people lost their lives during a Pearl Jam concert. In its new trio form, Mikkelborg’s flugelhorn gently touches the listener with its warm timbre, serving as a melodic guide over pre-recorded keyboards and choir.

Christian Munch-Hansen is a music writer, author and educator.