Dark silhouettes of steel, rising from the heavy shadows towards the sky, hammers beating, smoke rising in flood lights, glittering water – a shipyard of sorts – and no real hope, no remedy for fatigue; just a numb feeling of a world grown old… so yes, the beginning of Franke-Blom’s Rekviem (the above word accumulation quickly formed from the first few seconds of Franke-Blom’s work) brings on a feeling of the dark and the eerie, like were you traveling with the most forlorn of those entering their bardo, on the hopeless might of this music…

As the instruments of the orchestra, layer by layer, section by section, pick up – follow suite - in a short, panting breath, the heart of the deceased, who himself (as is common among the newly dead) does not yet realize his demise, keeps beating fiercely inside his bardo body… because it’s so easy to get used to living, so easy to live as you were going to live forever (which is almost true, but in a sequence of lives, a sequence of bodies, of course… with amnesia as a foggy realm in between), that The Tibetan Book of the Dead actually advices us when dying to look for signs of death to logically determine whether one is alive in the life one has lived, or really just passing through a bardo between lives , which we tend to label “death”.

A requiem naturally touches on these subjects, and as a Western discipline of art, it of course usually conveys more heavyheartedness and a fearful sense of loss than anything else, even though Franke-Blom in a note on a postcard tells me that he feels his Rekviem indeed also instills some sense of consolation in its later part. It is true too, that a loss of someone in death – which is immeasurable – may wake us to a higher state of awareness, in which a ray of enlightenment from the true nature of existence might briefly shine into our hallways of desolation, administering an exquisite moment of consolation above the actualities and the concerns of this particular identity; this particular life, this certain manifestation of crystallized light, this brief, momentary formation of energy through matter, which, in the words of Gunnar Ekelöf is nothing more than “a place, a coat, a name…” [“Tag och skriv” from “Färjesång” (1941)]

Eventually the violent rage and confusion of the initial bars settles down into a calmer state of abiding. I see a wounded and hunted animal stopping in the dark forest to lick its wounds. I feel the discovery of death sinking into the mind of the stricken, into the one who left his body-vehicle for his bardo journey, and into the senses of his relatives and friends, still safely riding their anatomies along the curvature of the planet. The orchestra soars and circles in this state of re-orientation, still hung with shreds of disbelief.

The texture becomes increasingly transparent and ominous – anticipating – with only timpani sounding silently, carefully, as the traveler through the Valley of the Shadow of Death looks around, trying to grasp the situation, trying to peer through the darkness of his predicament.

At this stage of vibrant helplessness an electroacoustic dimension is introduced through sparsely trickling drops of water, echoing in a space that may be a cave of some kind. The chilly gusts of moist air lift ancient scents through his trembling nostrils, as he makes contact with lives way behind; lizard lives, toad lives, silver-fish lives… down through the endless series of lives that he’s passed…

The tender, brittle beauty of tingling, high-pitch percussion (Glockenspiel? Celesta?) mingle with the unevenly falling drops, achieving an unbelievably tense, but still transparent, atmosphere, reminding me of some of the most startling sections of Stockhausen’s later compositions.

A layer of strings enter in sweeping gestures of pure love, in an old Nordic accent of Grieg or Alfvén, as the deceased is embraced in the thoughts of his contemporaries, or as the bardo traveler revisits places of romance in his past. In this state between lives the traveler realizes that all places are here, all times are now; that the false boundaries between a then and a now, a here and a there have been nothing but the sweet illusions of Samsara…

A dark rumble, like waves of an earthquake passing through clay and rock bottom, or the unrest of a majestic glacier shifting its position, hints at relentless forces of the unconscious, which may, at any time, rise in horrendous visions in the mind of the deceased, in his self-projected, karmic scarecrows, which he may, or may not, identify as just scarecrows of his own mind.

In this breathless suspense the orchestra hangs in withheld might; the wheezing breath of a giant…

As Franke-Blom again engages larger portions of the orchestral sections, the music picks up velocity and grows denser, in clashing waves of conflicting currents of anxiety.
Some bars of strings reveal the despair of the human situation between dense matter and raw spirit; the lingering confusion of the developed mind of Man in these endless voids of consciousness.
It’s an expanding-contracting passage of Lars-Åke Franke-Blom’s Rekviem; a desolate exchange of anguish and hope.

Some singular Tchaikovsky pizzicatos dot the swaying grove of strings like airborne insects, as the wind of change blows hard.
A peculiar, almost witty instance of a wind solo with the percussion of wood-blocks (?) and high hat leads over into yet another burst of feelings from inside the straitjacket of the forced thoughts of existence. Franke-Blom’s score is rich with these short statements of creative, inquisitive delicacy; of compositional spurs of sublimity, easy to bypass if not listening attentively, like those little extra details of the early Donald Duck magazines; those little figures everywhere in the pictures, adding excitement and depths to the presentation.

After a stormy passage the music stops dead in its tracks, the listener falling forward into a brief pause of silence, like falling of a refusing horse in a hurdle-race.
The orchestra returns after a deep breath, in power and might, hammering down on the circumstances of life and death (which may not be so unlike each other, after all), as the music limps forcefully ahead in a strange motion of unevenly distributed attitudes.

The orchestra stamps it feet fiercely, in a vain attempt to persuade the laws of existence to make just one exception… Oh, the feelings are those of the wild ocean rising against the cliffs of a distant, desolate shore. The orchestra – the incarnated voice of the deceased – has gone from denial to fury. It stands like a bold warrior of old, swinging his sword around at the horde of barbarians – servants of Death – that surrounds him.

After yet another crushing silence the Tchaikovsky notion – those lonely, wintry boulevards of dusk in S:t Petersburg of the latest decades of the 1800s; Symphonies 5 (1888) and 6 (1893)… - emerges out of the contemporeana, and in addition, as often in Franke-Blom’s works, strong Allan Pettersson accents appear in the swaying despair of the invocative strings.
A kind of stillness in the havoc settles into the requiem, when the feelings of fear and regret have taken their toll, exhausting the prey, the bardo wanderer and his shadows, der Wanderer und sein Schatten…

A transparent, diligently orchestrated passage grows out of a feeling of anticipation, perhaps even of coming to terms with the facts, the deathness of this life, and the bewilderment of still feeling just as alive, though in a dreamy kind of way; a surprise to Westerners!

The orchestration throughout leaves nothing to wish for. It is masterly executed, and really calls for a pure listening re-run, without any thoughts or analogies, were that possible.
The sounds Franke-Blom has laid down in the score are brilliantly recreated by the orchestra and its conductor.

Contemporary gestures inside this really timeless life/art expression shoot like curving firefly trajectories through the dark, i. e. glissandi of the strings through the musical texture – and bodies start to feel unnecessary; just nailing you down in the grip of gravity…

With just about 7 minutes to go, Franke-Blom starts sounding considerably more jolly, in an arm-waving down-the-path dance of the bodiless in a magnificent Shostakovich guise for a while; jerky movements through the back alleys, erratic shadows falling high up brick walls; Fritz the Cat!

It’s unfair to a composer like Franke-Blom to just comment on haphazard parts out of the greater work, for each bar is written in anguish and delight, each centimeter of score has been deliberated on and decided in this game of choices – but these glimpses of Franke-Blom’s Rekviem is what you get, since neither time nor space permits a more detailed account.
I must stress that this work holds so much intricate beauty on the currents of sorrow and despair, on the tidal wave of overwhelming feelings of loss and hopelessness - as well as a in the calm precipitation of coming-to-terms with the rules of a higher order, in which life and death prove to be just two names of the same phenomenon, in an ever-recurring sequence of existence, until, maybe one life, enlightenment is reached… - that the true content of this music could never possibly be embraced in these lines.

Close to the closure of the work, still, introspective peace is felt, in the extension of thinly layered sections, in which the orchestra sounds more like a chamber ensemble, and then even like a string quartet, until it winds down into stretches of single instruments.

Just before the end the double basses breath regularly and calmly to the right, as a woman’s voice enters, and Lars-Åke Franke-Blom’s Rekviem reaches its conclusion in a delicate sound world of voice, celesta and calmly breathing double basses…

Alas, peace is dawning as the bardo traveler approaches his rebirth, and may it be a favorable one!

This work, recorded here at the premier on 29th September 2001 in Norrköping, Sweden, is, shamefully, not available commercially. May all good forces press on to make a release happen!