This spontaneously brings the concept of montage to mind, and philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman’s description of Pier Paolo Pasolinis cinematography in the book Sentir le grisou: montage as the art of rhyme, conflicts, matching attractions.
«Matching attractions» as sound, in the form of a prosodic course of events of voice and grand piano, in which the «montage» becomes a fundamental idea in the process onwards through text and music. The result is greater than the sum of its parts. Within the montage, language-songs are born, constantly moving ahead through the field of tension between text and music. To Ingfrid Breie Nyhus and Live Maria Roggen, sound art is found between the lines, that’s where it’s used and gets used up. The texts come to life between the chords and transgress the boundaries of music. Songs, rhythms and chords – are suddenly in phase, glide past one other and phase out again. Abate for a moment only to reconnect. The resulting displacement constantly forms new rhythmic patterns, changing. Material against material, chord against voice, rhythm against rhythm form irregularity and deformation when meeting and gliding past one another. Heat arises from the friction between the two components. Oval rhythmics is established. Superpositions create both polyrhythm and polytonality, which find new ways in the process of weaving text and music. Become nomadic.
In this dramatic and mysterious landscape from Rügen, Germany, German painter and graphic artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) created his most renowned pictures, which are described by NE (The Swedish National Encyclopedia) as follows:
«Friedrich’s landscapes usually present a dualistic composition with dark yet articulated immediate surroundings – our world –, a break in the continuity of space over midground, and a brighter remote area that hints at a transcendental reality: a reddening evening sky behind a curtain of clouds, a moon beyond drifting clouds, gleaming mountain peaks in rising fog etc.»
Associations continue towards the dim moonlight from one night this summer, when our tangible world meets something dreamlike and undefinable.
from the inside of a clavichord in front of a grand piano, by a lake surrounded by three trees and some boulders by the foot of the hillside towards east, with a group of junipers reaching for a hill of deciduous trees creating a formation around a settlement where a group of individuals has gathered around a fire, when slowly day breaks and the sun appears on an almost cloudless sky, scattered cries from a flight of geese slowly flying towards a high mountain chain to the west, where morning light gradually outlines a large stretch of coniferous forest, climbing upwards to the mountain chain passing from dark blue to lighter grey, when suddenly dusk is setting in again, and the reddening sky covers the whole landscape, which soon grows into pitch-black darkness, in which the last flames of the fire is the last thing we see before everything fades away, and becomes silent until the next stroke of a clavichord key, when air is again moved through the landscape.
Rhythm is dynamic displacement. Phasing in and phasing out. In and out elsewhere on its way to something. Somewhere I reflected on the frustration of not being able to stop the flow of a piece of music developing, which is fully possible when reading a text:
Reading a text, I stop. Have time to ponder, to reflect — what is this text about? The result is I lose focus on the written word on the page in front of me, start thinking about things that have nothing to do with the text I’m reading. I think. Return to the text relating differently to what’s on paper before me. The seemingly unwarranted break in reading makes me now see the text in a quite different light, it feels natural, though I don’t fully understand why. Just a sense of something new. I now continue reading with a different energy altogether, which causes the text to change before my eyes and become something completely different than what it was when I started reading. There’s something between the lines I cannot quite put my finger on — but experience—in the text’s flow onwards in some indefinite direction. What’s between the lines has to be something that came to mind because of my stopping the reading’s motion. When playing the piano—improvising in real time, I cannot stop music’s time flow the same way. Pauses of different length are of course possible in musical flow, but the time factor in making sound inexorably presses on. In a text, I can pause anywhere, and wait as long as I like, ”destroy time”, as Alice Notley puts it. You can return to the poem, read it again and stop wherever you like, but improvised music never returns in the same shape, expiring like breath in cold autumn air. The decomposable musical flow that disappeared just now. Music itself, its sound, lingers in the acoustics of the space only to vanish altogether. The printed word keeps on returning in new ways and in new contexts each time I read a text again. Poetry says what it says, yet in a state of change, yet ”timeless”. I now stop anywhere I want in a text and think about something. I play on my grand piano once and for all. The definitive in creating a musical flow that rushes out in space as acoustic dust — ground into particles, yet still here in some form in this text somehow. Ingfrid Breie Nyhus and Live Maria Roggen manage to do the impossible by «standing still» in a sounding reflection of text and music. Real-time composition at its best creates a «frozen» present moment in which linear time seemingly disappears for a short, short moment in the lapse of time. Now.
Poet Inger Christensen writes: «It.» Thus begins the cycle of poems with that very title, that she published in Danish in 1969. Long before we begun to entangle ourselves in postmodern arguments about what could be relative truths in our lives and the language we use, this pioneering cycle of poems about our time and what it means to be human arrived.
The change desired is never exactly like
the change attained
The change attained has nothing in common with
tha actual change
The actual change is deprived of its actuality by
psychic dislocations
The psychic dislocations are permanently unknown
In practice unity will be proven impossible
Time place motion no
they will never merge here
It's a matter of indeterminate points
(dream/infinitely receding image/bio-
logical signal)
where language and the world brush inform de-
form or whatever each other
so that the world coninues just continues
in spite of the will to change
which continues just continues
In practice it will be possible to create solidarity
through long-term physical contact
In practice it will be possible to destroy solidarity
through short-term psychic contact
In practice what happens/has happened will
stay unformulated
(Inger Christensen, Det. Scenen - transitiviteter 8. København: Gyldendal, 1969. Transl. by Susanna Nied)
I : I remember the experience of something potentially romantic appearing in the un-romantic. I mean, when we had picked apart a long series of Sibelius songs, and we’d found cells that were interesting sound-wise and we molded them for quite some time. Afterwards, we started mixing cells from the different pieces, letting them glide into one another, and then some romantic qualities began to re-emerge. Something with a light and dark tenderness, that was inside the dismantled material.
I : Doors may open while playing, into areas where it feels particularly right to be, where the music and the body and the listening flow especially well, where it is rich, fertile, telling, interesting, moving, where the music and the body merge, becoming a dense stream, which you have no choice but to follow. I think it’s exciting to constantly search for new types of openings like this, like a kind of voyage of discovery, to expand one’s territory. The experience of bodily flow can arise independent of style, but I think it works best when you manage to retain something you really believe in or in which you sense a sincerity, something that remains naked also in the broad sweeps, something you can follow and identify with, wholeheartedly?
I : Yes, distance is also needed, maybe it’s about having flexibility in the movement between different distances. A rigid distance or reserve can be as dry as crispbread.
I : Sometimes you experience a musician who pretends as if there were an intensity present and who exaggerates gestures or musical effects to cover up the absence of contact. As Peter Brook writes in The Empty Space: «To imitate the externals of acting only perpetuates manner – a manner hard to relate to anything at all.» When it feels like the performer is only imitating something external, it is difficult to be drawn in as a listener.
I : Finding a language that feels like mother tongue has also long been a driving force for me; when do I experience that what I am playing is «somebody else’s» and when do I feel that the way I am talking (and what I am talking about) is wholly integrated. Building a language is really a labour of patience. In this sense, you could call improvisation a particularly slow type of composition. Because so much molding and time is required before something becomes internalised in the body.
I : We have been curious about digging into the Romantic works, digging into the language, digging into the interpretation. For me, to interpret (as a musician) means to try to understand something through one’s own body and voice. And to take that seriously, I need to sense and really mold the music and everything surrounding it. A (co)creative approach to a work of interpretation thereby becomes unavoidable. And when it comes to improvisation and composition, they are two sides of the same coin for me. When I compose, I improvise as an important part of it; I allow body and ear to project immediate responses into what I reflect on and test on a larger scale. And when I improvise in a performance, the long-term ideas and reflections are clearly present for me. That’s how my head works, and I have cultivated this as a type of practice because it suits the way I am wired. In the same manner as when I put aside the classical interpretive framework earlier in life, because the idea of playing a wholly predefined sequence doesn’t suit my disposition. My head and body have always been more predisposed to interjecting whims; nudging that which transpires, stopping up to listen, exploring paths that suddenly emerge, absorbing the encounter with other sounds that are singing at different levels. It was good when I realised that I could work with music in a manner that corresponds with how I am, instead of struggling against that to adapt to a tradition’s framework. But I do want to include threads from these traditions and languages in my playing all the same, because they are an important part of me.
Anna Lindal
go into the core of the work – music's innermost bouillon cube
a nuclear element, so many turns of peeling
time stops, sinking in, between each cord, breathing
we rest in unresolved harmony
What is romanticism for you?
Ingfrid and Live Maria asked the question, and I was forced to think carefully. Sure, I know it's a movement of ideas in the first half of the 19th century, a reaction to the Enlightenment's ideal of reason - a movement that emphasizes the importance of emotions for the human existence. They wanted to free themselves from norms and conventions, they chose nature over culture, it was a rebellion against rationality and the classical ideal. But after all, didn’t romanticism as an epoch and its bloated stepchild national romanticism go to the grave in and with impressionism and finally modernism? Well, that can be discussed. In the great institutions of classical music around the world, romanticism lives on in all prosperity as the prevailing style ideal. Why?
The words have withdrawn their meaning
melted down, dissolved, diluted
every sound disintegrated
the feelings in dispersion – fleeing, without weight
nailing down, leaving drops in the voids – can’t escape
(With age Sibelius had problems with the texts («Words are always a burden for my art»). He wanted impressionistic, intimate, aphoristic poems, no longer national-romantic epics. The music became more strophe-like. There's a logic to letting these songs fall apart like this, a hundred years later. But is it even more obvious when the texts become fragmented, when cognitive meaning is absent?)
Romanticism and nostalgia are so close, but fundamentally different. The nostalgia wishes to come home, to a better now (a «then» not a «there» according to Kant, so time – not space). A notion that we must return to something that was better, more beautiful, truer, that existed before. It is a way of remaining alienated in one's contemporary time. (In our time, we see it becoming political and dangerous.)
I have occupied myself with historical instruments and style studies, also looking back and examining the past. It could be confused with nostalgia but is anything but.
Nicolaus Harnoncourt writes in his «Musik als Klangrede» that before the year 1800 music was a language and after it was not. The music then became a way to depict emotions. This is very boiled down but describes simply how Romanticism changed the musical expression. From a musical linguistic grammar to a musical interpretation/painting of the varied emotional states of man. It's clear as hell that it's still relevant in our time - it's an attractive and absorbing task as a musician. Our orchestras are built as custodians of a romantic tradition, that is where the core of repertoire and style lies. The whole dimension of the orchestral organism belongs to the turn of the previous century. Precisely there where romanticism as a creative style ideal breathed its last inflamed breaths, we stayed - lingering in the beautiful, nostalgic and emotionally driven, the beautiful sound, the life-pouring uncompromising expression. The intense vibrations of the strings, the magnificent organ sound of the winds, the gestures, the dynamics, the melodic lines. The harmony that hasn't given up yet, winding its way through the chromatics, indefatigable. (Then we know what happened, Schönberg (and Hauer!) released the pitches, the harmony had to give way to 12-tone equality, the tonal hierarchies dissolved, and the idiom became no longer graspable, understandable.)
the language of difference – feeling, voice
every motive
the fourth rises a question, the semitones rub, suck, stagger
everything is meaningful, pointless and simple
every phrase a question
unspoken idiom
yet – haven't understood anything
and nothing
displaces, touches language returns
fragment larger than totalities
The weight of each tone and its inherent history gives meaning to the smallest part, the tones breathe and burn. I can't follow what has happened, I enjoy discovering the romantic present that speaks directly to me without relation to source or original. I accept it. It is genuine and unwavering. In a world that is falling apart, the fragment is the only security and most important component. It is also attraction– we always want to be seduced; the romantic beauty hurts as well as does good. But all this concentrated work by two dedicated musicians who keep digging at the site - again and again, new perspectives chiselled out, over years - it's so beautiful, it can't be described, it gives such a special kind of knowledge, transmitted in the moment, in the instant and enters the innermost room of listening, where I have to face my voice and my listening.
L : I associate the romantic with losing oneself in the playing. When we first asked that question, I was more focused on the musical, stylistic elements that others had defined as romantic. But now I think that it’s not about style. Losing oneself in the playing doesn’t look or sound a certain way. There is a just something genuinely romantic about choosing a presence where you lean fully and wholly into something that is guided intuitively – a process you don’t question, that you just believe is right and true in the moment.
L : That was nicely put: ‘naked also in the broad sweeps. And to ‘sense a sincerity’ in the emotional passages, I think you must allow for the possibility that the musical expression cannot always turn out as planned. In a spontaneous sincerity, what builds up to something powerful could suddenly take a turn into something fragile, and shatter, or manifest as something small, but strong. Every turn in the music must be re-created and re-motivated in the listening moment. I believe in this! It is an extremely romantic credo, after all. But a type of distance is also necessary during parts of such a process. When is distance good? And when should one abandon it?
L : Can playing in a physically excessive way be reserved at the same time? Can one dress up in pretended emotion and strong outbursts – and still maintain full distance? Or will your emotions get involved whether you intend it or not, when the body is engaged?
L : Seen from the outside you can tell when someone who is playing/singing is fully integrated with what they hear. If their bodily movements follow the inner flow of the music, I will often experience their expression as ‘true’, authentic. In such cases their musical presence directs all their senses, so the movements, the dynamic and the musical story are mutually integrated. But finely tuned musical communication also requires extreme musical mastery and largesse – you must own an idiom, far beyond imitation. I have numerous experiences of having played and sung classical and Romantic music in my childhood and adolescence, when my body and brain were the most receptive. The experiences remains imprinted in my wrists, fingers, jaw and respiratory system – I feel very much at home in that music – as a listener and amateur musician. As a professional performer I cannot speak the classical music language with authenticity or largesse, I feel ‘outed’ when I try. There are, on the other hand, other types of music in which I feel completely at home, not just as a listener and imitator, but as a co-creator and performer. I am fluent in these musics’ languages. It is easier to express oneself ‘truthfully’ when you don’t have to think, when every muscle fibre interacts spontaneously and in unison in the split second the brain sends a signal to play a note or chord. In this sense, it is strange that some of us, rather than sticking to that which we can easily master, are constantly drawn towards spaces and processes that require us to start over a bit. Like when you and I began the work on Sibelius and then we later started this (un)Romantic project. But my experience is that if you search long enough within a material that is full of resistance, you can discover your language in new ways and begin to express yourself there.
L : Yes, it requires time and processing for musical material to be made available for spontaneous music making. One often speaks about improvising ‘over’ pieces of music, but that suggests a somewhat limited idea of something being constant while something else is evolving/changing. When I think about improvisation as a life-long endeavour, with ongoing internalisation and re-use of musical elements, when I picture an Ornette Coleman or a Sidsel Endresen, then I also see how over time, different elements are mixed together and with the musician’s experience and personality and interest and taste. It becomes a distinctive, recognisably uniquelanguage, which you can view as both the musician’s raw material and as a musical work in itself. Improvising artists have an ongoing, bodily, life-long task of fine-tuning both their material and their ability to shape material. The improvising artist’s material/work is part of an ongoing, formative process in exchange with other musicians and other music, always in progress, and at the same time there is something constant about it, because there is a specifically personal dimension there. And this personal dimension does not comprise solely the audible sound and musical expression, but also specific musical behaviour, musical logic, distinctive ways of listening and responding. I think it’s fun and clarifying that you define improvisation as ‘a slow work of composition’. Improvisational work takes place both with incredible slowness and incredibly quickly. Where the composition is an activity that can move backwards and forwards in time, with room for both spontaneity and revision, the improvisor navigates in real time, with no room for regrets, inside the embodied language and inside a whole that has come into being over of a long period of time: the body of work. The body is the work.
