Srrjei – sörj ej att din sköna tid förflutit is our video- and sound-article published in the Vis Journal for Artistic Research, thematizing improvisation with the old and the new. The article is in Norwegian. (Follow link to open in separate window).
Music, Reincarnation and Reliving the Moment
Nils Henrik Asheim
You always like to be given a second chance, don’t you.
If it was good, to experience it again.
If it was bad, to repair it.
If it was neither of the above, to find out.
I never tire of listening to that moment.
Music, the art form that engages and inhabits time the most deeply.
In a pure and exact manner, without need for any help from external elements.
Another art form, film, teaches us how to view time from many sides and thereby that music can never have only one time.
Cuts, angles, timelines, voice-overs, rewinds, foreshadowing. Repetitions that are not repetitions.
I have one time base that is my own history of musical impressions and another attached to performance of the moment.
I carry baggage from my history that also makes up who I am,
while every day I must unpack it, put it on anew to recreate myself,
and I simultaneously want to get out of it by tearing if off, unravelling it
to study the fabric,
and while I practise at coming closer,
at keeping a distance from the material,
I am reset and ready to experience the meaning again, or find another meaning altogether.
I have learned a tradition, I have grown within a community,
I have become a member of a line of musicians, I have listened,
adopted something, eschewed something else,
It’s impossible to forget anything, even the things I would like to forget.
As a musician-composer I feel the tension
between borrowing an expression to share it with the community once more,
versus searching around and beyond the borrowed things to find something nobody else has owned,
but who belongs to what,
what is ownership and what is belonging?
Music can be set in stone, or it can be mutable.
A child learns a song, I can sing it!
She loves taking part in group singalongs. She expresses herself, the song is both hers and shared with many others. She has a skill, an accomplishment, something absolute.
Then she wants to sing whatever comes to her – a mutable song that is not to be fixed in a repeatable form, just to try out what things mean
– I find a twig, can it be important?
A fragment from a classical work can be picked up and sought turned around –
I move back (and forth) between the time of former composers and my time.
The turned-around, the mutation, releases disruption into the intimate sphere,
a question mark into the familiar,
a creative adaptation without pretensions of improvement or replacement,
but of trying out a beginning and a meaning
and crossing the old tradition with a present moment.
But after all, I want this because something is off. Something is right, something has meaning,
but something remains, something I should take hold of, repair, sew over again, rebuild,
remove the rhetoric, the targeted trajectory that aims to take you somewhere specific,
and replace it with the time loop, the possibility to look at a tiny cell over and over again
and experience opportunities for meaning
– I found something, can it be important?
That a great deal resides in a phrase, more in a tiny piece of a phrase, even more in a single note,
most of all in the anticipation in-between,
continue composing by removing –
I never tire of listening to that moment.
When the composition’s time crosses the moment’s time,
that fragile balance,
how a work emerges reincarnated in another.
Ingfrid Breie Nyhus
What lives in the old material and what can it become?
Our collaboration began with the idea of undressing a style. Could we strip away excesses from the Romantic song in order to get closer to it? It was an attempt to understand, as in: To interpret implies to understand or discover, to understand through the body and through experience. Unpack, peel away; to search for what really lives inside the song.
We went on a voyage of discovery with a handful of songs for an extended period of time. Turning them over and tinkering with them, sensing them, trying to be them, trying to be something that resembles them, trying to be the opposite. We put them aside and came back to them. We allowed the memories to daydream, we let time obliterate, and we let time connect phrases and passages to muscle memory.
We allowed the song to become a place, a place that we circled. We travelled to its outskirts and back to its centre, investigated the regions this song could contain. The clear icy resonance of Demanten, the rhythms of Lasse Liten’s reassurance or inundation of the wide world, the movements in Svarta rosor's disturbing, prickly stems, Jubal’s repetitive strands, sometimes only a twang, sometimes only a rhythm, sometimes a warning, sometimes a ticking reverberation.
And at all times, returning to the starting point. We spoke a lot about ‘contact’, ‘contact with the starting point’. We could decide to play the song with ‘a lot of contact’ with the song as it was. This meant that much of the song’s original form and structure was kept, that the chord sequences were more or less intact even though they could be shrouded, hidden away or sullied and the text or the melody could be quite recognisable.
One means of doing this was with what we have called a ‘contour’, where we render a song with a blurry gaze. ‘Shall we do a contour of Jubal?’ means to play the song with the form and structure of Sibelius’ Jubal score, such as by preserving the main features of the chord structure or melody or rhythm or motifs or resonances and retain an approximate dramaturgy for the different parts of the song, the way the original song was composed. But the blurry implies that details are smugded out or erased. When something is blurred, the imagination also has to hook up. A ‘contour’ is a shadow version; the song as a warped version of itself, an alternative to itself.
On the other hand, if we have played a song with ‘little contact’, this has implied an agreement between us that we allow whatever emerges in the moment of improvisation. Whatever arise of impulses and connections, from the two of us, here and now, may occupy greater space. Digressions and overwritings are part of the agreement, if the moment prescribe so. But at the same time we want to try to retain a certain degree of inner contact with the original song’s forms or content; not leaving it completely.
As time has passed with exercises close or distant from the starting point of the song, the songs have developed into a sort of planets that we can travel. The planets have become our understanding of what the song could be – a tiny world of its own, with many different possibilities and contrasts to combine from. They are like a catalogue of possibilities. The catalogue is a multifarious network of embodied proposals for what each song can mean or become.
We have liked to improvise miniatures from this catalogue. The question: ‘Shall we do a miniature of Jubal’? may produce very many different answers. These responses may contain small fragments of the original, but most often, it is rather the idea of fragments from the original which instigate a new idea, which initiate a new improvisation. The framework ‘miniature’ is a kind of haiku, and because of the short form, it is over before we have time to think about what actually happened. Listening to what we just did in the silence immediately afterwards, gives a new experience of what this song or planet may be, and then we can subsequently dive into a new miniature. The experiences of miniatures accumulate in layers. The thought of a previous improvisation can serve as a trigger for a new improvisation and so we continue. We have pushed each other and surprised each other, and the duo’s dynamic and reciprocity has propelled us forward.
Our work has gravitated between difference weightings of interpretation and creation.
The first exercises of testing out small variations and stylistic changes have been closer to the frameworks of classical interpretation; traditioning with an emphasis on preserving – but simultaneously with an opening for some variation and personal input.
The exercises involving contours have been a larger step away from what one usually considers the framework of classical interpretation today, since our voices and ideas have occupied more space and the changes have been more intrusive. But all the same, also here the interpretation and traditioning have been in the driver’s seat; an aim of seeking to understand the song in our rendition.
And then we have done exercises and work in which the new ideas, the new sounds and the new creations have gained prominence,fostered by interpretive work. Here, we have taken over the wheel of form and concrete contents – even though the old piece, or parts of it, or features of it, lives on somewhere inside of us. Its presence inside us could be very distinct and clear for us, but not necessarily discernible for others, in the music that emerges. The activity of interpretation has nourished us and our curiosity, but the creative impetus has been more important –the drive to discover what the old may turn into.
Creating through composition and improvisation never occurs without a lineage, all creation stems from something, containing memories and remnants and threads from something else.
Where does the new begin and where does the old go?
