The Story Lives in the Sound of the Words
Live Maria Roggen
At first it was just the mere singing of these Sibelius songs. The melodies, moving up and down with a scope well outside my register, I had to cheat with octave jumps and other tricks to make them work with my voice and my interpretation. And the lyrics were in Swedish. I wanted to do this properly, I took private lessons in Swedish pronunciation with Barbro*, this time I wanted to get the different ö's and u's right. Does the key to the Story lie in mastering the traditional?
Is the key to the Story to be found in the original texts? Gradually, chords, melodies and durations began to change. But the lyrics, the poems, still remained as they were written 150 years ago. Trying to shift something in them, dissolve something in them, felt physically impossible. The lines of the poems felt sacred. Even with the piano part on its way into full dissolution and transformation, I kept clinging to the sacred texts that I had been put in charge of. Repeating them again and again, for them to make sense.
After a while, we started trying out translating some of the poems into Norwegian, word by word. It felt like illegal appropriation, a crime. This is not poetry, these are platitudes! An øyenstikker (dragonfly in Norwegian) is not a slända (dragonfly in Swedish). A slända is beautiful and graceful, in both sound and image! But we repeated the exercise, and gradually the øyenstikker became a thing of beauty, too. And above all, something familiar – something I could retell in my own words. Does the key to telling the Story lie in the personal language?
Then Marius* visited the project room, and suggested we do an exercise with blacking out words in the text. Only what felt most important should remain. Which story could come out of that? Did the original story reside in these remaining words, and did it matter? How much of the melody, if anything, stuck to these disintegrated, clipped text phrases? From that point we started a work of opening up, setting the words and melodies free - showing them the trust to be told in new ways, and new, and yet again new. Does the key to the Story's survival lie in opening it up to infinite possibilities? Or is that when it dies?
That high-resolution enlightened razor-sharp drawing with five six seven sins
that we circle around, but cannot see. Imagine that. We're already there.
We might poke it carefully, sense it, then we blink it away.
*Barbro = Barbro Marklund, colleague at the Norwegian Academy of Music, professor of classical singing
*Marius = Marius Kolbenstvedt, stage artist and guest in our project
Speechless1
Marius Kolbenstvedt
