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A PLAY WITH TRADITIONS // PART II // CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES // NATIONS: RECOGNITION

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Contemporary Perspectives

 


Nations: Recognition


What similarities and differences can be identified between folk music and modernistic music? Both in slått music and in newer music, we can often find material with roughly similar repetitions, only with microscopic variations. Also, folk music ‘lingers by the harmonic’, as Asbjørn Schaathun puts it, and can be seen as parallel to the blocks of sound in new music. The slått form has a specific variability: it has a stable skeleton, but the form is fluctuating and variable. The relation between the stable and the fluctuating, between what is firm and what is free, became a parallel topic in the work with Nations


When Ingfrid Breie Nyhus asked me to write a piano piece, perhaps with electronics, the very first idea that struck me was using Grieg’s Peasant Dances op. 72 as a point of departure, so that I could write a decent piano work of today. A simple and solid point of departure, for I love hearing accomplished musicians play. To make it all a bit more complicated, another idea emerged, to make an ambitious attempt to carry forward the inheritance of the large musical frescoes in post war modernism, from The Hymn by Stockhausen and Coroby Berio, to Couleurs croisées by the Belgian composer Henri Pousseur. Not least, I thought to steal an idea from Stockhausen as a version of The Hymn; letting a piano soloist be in dialogue with folk musical material from 2-4 speakers. I imagined large blocks of sound pulsating toward each other. It did not turn out that way. I started by collecting, that is, downloading as it is called these days, different types of material from a plethora of nations, but I quickly ran into conflict over terms like ‘nation’ and ‘identity’, which lead to confrontation with words like ‘originality’, ‘authenticity’, ‘trueness’ and so on. This quickly became impossible for me. What was I to do with this Brazilian song? I had no familiarity with it, and there was no possibility of understanding or getting acquainted with the background, why Brazilian music sounds the way it does. This will quickly sound like a tourist brochure, I thought. So then I went back to Norway (Asbjørn Schaathun in programme note September 2014, my translation).

 

Asbjørn picked up an idea from a previous piano work, Physis (Austbø, 2011, track 12-18); where live electronics is placed in several layers that play together with the piano. In the new work, electronics would function like a kind of virtual sympathetic strings, and add a certain unpredictability or micro variation.  The electronics picks up the sound from the piano as it is played, and triggers electronic timbres that are rendered somewhat differently in each performance, because of the nuances in playing. The variability that arises is thus a parallel to the micro variation that exists in folk music. (see also Part I: Duologue on Nations). The live electronics also affect the tonality, and push tonality away from the tempered piano. In the piano concerto, the layer with live electronics was transferred into orchestration.




Asbjørn expressed a wish before his main compositional process, that I should record my personal slått playing at the piano. He had heard it on a previous occasion, and was interested by aspects of its expression and rhythm. I recorded four or five short examples on a small computer keyboard, and he made use of the recordings in his work by using the computer, stretching and editing the material, and building it together with other ideas.  



 

After that summer he delivered the score of the solo piece, Nationsto me. The score has on the one hand magnificent and monumental areas. On the other hand, it has areas of smaller patterns in a lower voice. The beginning of the piece is a section in canon, playing the role of representing Western classical forms:



 

sound excerpt from the opening of Asbjørn Schaathun: Nations, played by Ingfrid Breie Nyhus (Nyhus, 2015a, track 3)

 

Nature and culture. Nature is, oddly enough, represented in Nations in the electronics sections, while the sections without electronics, in this context represent culture with its even rhythms, progressions over time, often in technically demanding, that is, learned, passages. The sections with electronics thematize at least some of what is characteristic in folk culture: uneveness  (‘knortethet’ as Lasse Thoresen likes to call it), quasi heterophony, (varied) repetition and an elucidation of an underlying harmonic spectrum – or as Knut Nystedt expressed it in a letter to me as an eager 14 year old student: ‘[Norwegian folk music] is characterized by a lingering of the harmonic’.  Finally: There are not so many fundamentally different stories we human beings tell each other, either in form or content. Therefore, the devil lies in the details, that is, the feeling of a nation probably also mostly lies in the details, I believe, being how you enjoy a meal, or how you design each bar of a piece of music (Asbjørn Schaathun in programme note, Spring 2015, my translation).










 

 









Even though Nations is a complex modernistic score with intricate rhythms, the notes came naturally to the hands and it is well written pianistically. I also recognized layers within the notes; well hidden, so that I could not know exactly what was what, but my body recognized material. Asbjørn had not only used his own basic material or folk music material from other sources, but he had incorporated my personal playing into the work, as a proto-material. The slått music that I had played on his midi keyboard is from a playing style that I experience as closely linked to my musical self (see also Slåttepiano: Folk Music on the Piano). When I play Nations, my body recognizes this and activates that kind of playing.  My playing self already lives inside parts of the work.



 

In our post compositional conversations, discussing interpretational and technical issues, a central topic was finding a balance between being precise as a note reader, and being flexible for folk musical fluctuations. Asbjørn pointed out that he wanted me to use attitudes that I know from slått playing within Nations. Balancing work was about finding areas where there was room for the folk musical, and areas that needed stringency.



Primarily, the folk musical ‘nature’ had a place in the ‘noodling’ passages, and in the parts where there is a rhythmical force, fluctuating over macro pulses. Here, the folk musical rhythm and ornaments could sneak in, by nuances. 




‘Noodling’ is an expression we have been using, pointing at a low voiced, slow ornamented playing (see ‘Noodling’ in Part I: Duologue on Nations). The expression in this is not necessarily introverted. I would rather describe it as from ‘behind a mask’. 
In this context, that means not projecting oneself, not ‘showing’ the music, or ‘showing’ any particular feeling; a non-expressive attitude. From behind the mask, you sing with a low voice, and no force is used in putting it forward. Instead, the sound simply occurs. In the noodling parts, the piano plays together with microtonal live electronics:  

 

 



sound excerpt from Asbjørn Schaathun: Nations, played by Ingfrid Breie Nyhus (Nyhus, 2015a, track 3)

 

 

sound excerpt from Asbjørn Schaathun: Nations, played by Ingfrid Breie Nyhus (Nyhus, 2015a, track 3)

 


sound excerpt from Asbjørn Schaathun: Nations piano concerto, played by Ingfrid Breie Nyhus, the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra and Christian Eggen, March 2016  (recording made by NRK)

 

Some of the areas in Nations have rhythms based on macro pulses. Here I recognize rhythms where I can find a groove, a rhythmical flow rooted in the body. Muscle memory from slått playing steps forward, and opens up a flexibility in the smaller rhythmical patterns within larger pulses.




sound excerpt from Asbjørn Schaathun: Nations, played by Ingfrid Breie Nyhus (Nyhus, 2015a, track 3)




sound excerpt from Asbjørn Schaathun: Nations, played by Ingfrid Breie Nyhus (Nyhus, 2015a, track 3)


 


sound excerpt from Asbjørn Schaathun: Nations piano concerto, played by Ingfrid Breie Nyhus, the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra and Christian Eggen, March 2016  (recording made by NRK)












































Rehearsing Nations, I allowed my dogmas of a folk musical piano aesthetics to lead many pianistic choices (see A Folk Musical Aesthetic?). It was necessary for me to keep this idea strictly at this point, in order to de-automitize and increase my awareness of these stylistic folk directions and investigate what they lead to musically, in different works and expressions. It involved sacrifying some of my automated, bodily knowledge of playing and response. 



 

In Nations, the piece became even harder to play, where the monumental passages probably could have had another flow technically and musically if it weren’t for these dogmas. I could have afforded a more massive, wet or pedalized playing, though in adopting this strategy a resistance arose, that I liked. The recording of Nations was done quite dry, and I played on an old Steinway grand from 1893, which gave a less massive sound (Nyhus, 2015a, spor 3). 





sound excerpt from Asbjørn Schaathun: Nations, played by Ingfrid Breie Nyhus (Nyhus, 2015a, track 3)














From the premiere of Asbjørn Schaathun: Nations piano concerto, Oslo Concert Hall, March 2016.
Photo: Fred-Olav Vatne/Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra

 

In the ending of Nations, the piano projects its volume in broad chords. In the piano concerto version, these chords are played together with a single violin.



 


sound excerpt from Asbjørn Schaathun: Nations piano concerto, played by Ingfrid Breie Nyhus, the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra and Christian Eggen, solo violin part: concert master Terje Tønnesen; March 2016  (recording made by NRK)

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