Anna Lindal has been my favorite violinist since news editor, writer etcetera, Guido Zeccola, pointed me in her direction many years ago – and especially since the days of the Claude Loyola Allgén feature concert in Borås, Sweden, in 1989, when Lindal was one of the main participants, together with Mats Persson, Kristine Scholz, Chrichan Larson and Henrik Löwenmark. Of course, Björn Nilsson in the Society for New Music in Borås was one of the main forces behind the focus on Allgén, and he is also the proprietor of Content Records, which has released this Anna Lindal CD.
The connection between Björn Nilsson, Anna Lindal and Claude Loyola Allgén is tight. Björn has recorded Anna Lindal’s performance of Allgén’s giant Violin Sonata, and Lindal’s young pupil Joar Skorpen has also recorded the sonata; both recordings located in my batch of select, favorite CDs at home, though, unfortunately, none of them is commercially available.

Björn Nilsson has raised the quality and finesse of contemporary art music in Sweden quite a few marks with his sparse but brilliant Content recordings, one of which is this CD that I’m listening to tonight; Anna Lindal’s Sitting Silently, on which she interprets works by two undeservingly little known contemporaries; Lars Hallnäs from Sweden and Hans Otte from Germany.

Lars Hallnäs (1950) has studied composition, musicology and philosophy. It is my experience that musicology for the most part does not lead to composition, but to a very dry, scientific way of hearing, which dissects and almost destroys the art per se – but Hallnäs is not destroyed at all, and does not cause destruction, making him an exception from the rule.

Perceived by me, he emerges as a careful, inward, slowly treading intellectual with a lot of strong, withheld feelings that are only just sensed as ripples on a body of water or like the still rustling in aspen leaves on a calm day; a humble but rich spirit with a fine-tuned sense of precision, in thought and in art; one of the finest examples of a latter-day thinker and artist, walking gently through life and world with no ill intent but bearing burning emotions beyond the civilized gestures of consideration that are his.

Lars Hallnäs’ work on this CD is called Stille führt der Steg (Silent brings the path) – variations on a text by Georg Trakl (1887 – 1914), an Austrian poet, whom Hallnäs has observed before, in his work Trakl-song for Soprano & Orchestra (1976).

The booklet text explains:

Anna Lindal brings in the violin from an undefined place in time, but from a spiritual place that emits a still, inward gesture of meekness and beauty, and a sense of powerful, enlightened mind at meditative rest. The violin line is thin and extended, and somewhat hoarse, like the voice of someone who hasn’t talked for many years; someone who has been in retreat in the mountains longer than his clothes has lasted, returning to a new generation in earth-colored rags and this scraping, transparent tone of voice, revealing a relentless peace; the fruit of decades of driven-off thought forms, leaving this notion of starry sky Rigpa…

The second variation commences in a livelier gesture that, however, nonetheless, drifts out in the room like a feather on a breath in a ray of light falling through the midday window. The melody scribbles a gentle message in Hallnäs’ score, leaving a hardly visible trace in time, but a certain fragrance of withheld compassion and limitless understanding and empathy, as if Anna Lindal’s bow across the violin strings speaks out of the love of Avalokiteshvara…

The third variation begins in a hint at a melody, which immediately disappears in a sparse expression of thin, gray lines across the senses, like gleaming spider threads swaying in the forest of an isolated lakeland island, inhabited only by wasps and spiders, left to itself inside the circumference of its sandy shores littered with pine cones… as the seasons turn, as lichen creeps across the rocks in incredibly slow expansions… and time takes its time…

Variation four is very short, but makes no haste getting through the one minute and fifteen seconds; on the contrary moving at an ease and a patience that you might expect of a four-hour Morton Feldman work. Hallnäs’ music is a bewildering contemporary expression, that brings Medieval monastery garden atmospheres into our stereophonic living-rooms, in tiny oases of piece and a soaring, sounding silence in the wide deserts of corrugated, obtrusive sound.
Stille führt der Steg consists of a number of such oases, in which to rest a weary mind, lightly touched by these hardly sensed strokes of the bow… like calm and absent-minded love-making in a totally assured relationship in which your love is stronger than your need…

Number five variation is a bit longer, and it begins in a slightly sturdier motion, screwing itself upwards in spirals of violin tones, albeit remaining in a still and considerate mood, full of reflection and bareness of mind, of intent. If this was a dance I would see arms raised, hands making silent and gentle Burmese gestures in space, body turning in a spiraling movement across the floor, like something you might expect at a Rudolf Steiner seminar, exploring Eurythmy motions.
The sixth variation, again, is very short. It is so withheld and inconspicuous that you might pass it by without noticing – but Hallnäs’ music, this far into his world, has sharpened the listener’s listening considerably – and maybe this is one of the more obvious results of Lars Hallnäs’ compositions; the tuning of the spirit, the sharpening of perception, the cleansing of the eye of the soul, the return to the core of oneself; that place in which we are at one with everyone and everything, in a gaze inwards that is a gaze outwards – and Hallnäs’ music is a sunny meadow of stillness in the midst of a wild forest, while also being a vehicle that takes us on an Aniara journey through the unfathomable endlessness of our lives…

The last variation, number seven, sounds like a lullaby of sorts, at first for the Children of the Earth, but then for the Beings of the Universe; a location where all times are now, all places here… and I stop at this notion of consolation for the travelers of lives, so barren and compassionate in these meager and airy pages of Lars Hallnäs’ score, tenderly lifted into the audible by Anna Lindal’s exquisite bowing.

Hans Otte belongs to an earlier generation, born in 1926, two years the senior of Stockhausen. He has been the pupil of personalities like Walter Gieseking and Paul Hindemith! You would perhaps, from this information, place his style in an earlier, semi-contemporary field of art, but he has his domiciliary artistic rights right here in this moment, no doubt.
I have heard him, for example, in the hands of Vermont violin wizard Malcolm Goldstein, performing the work Alltagsmusik in Gothenburg, Sweden in 1992, as well as playing his own Soundings with one of Hans Otte’s sound installations in Borås, Sweden the same year – of course as a result of Björn Nilsson’s efforts.

Otte’s first piece here is called Stundenbuch No. 11; an allusion on the Medieval Book of Hours; a collection of prayers and texts to be read at the canonical hours of the day. Stundenbuch comes in four parts, each containing twelve piano pieces, plus a collection of calligraphic ink drawings and fifty-two aphoristic inscriptions.
The piece has a mere one-minute duration, and is heard here on violin instead of piano. It opens an intimate and heartfelt melody that moves in an atmosphere of melancholy folklore of the Swedish, Dalecarlia kind; very lonely, in wide views across wooded ridges that disappear in the blue haze of the jagged horizon…
It passes as soon as it has started; passes by like two people pass each other by on a street, merely glancing briefly at each other, sensing the hypothetical lives that lie in the balance as long as there is a slight chance that they may stop and make contact… but they pass on and possible lives crumple in their hypotheses…

The by far longest piece on the CD is Hans Otte’s Alltagsmusik, more than three quarters of an hour.
Otte lets on that it took him three years to complete this composition. It was Malcolm Goldstein who commissioned him to write it, and Otte took it on reluctantly, not feeling he had enough knowledge about string playing.
In order to prepare himself for the composition, Otte joined his wife for two Zen courses at the Zen Temple in Obama, Japan.

Otte says:

Malcolm Goldstein’s interpretation from 1992 has a duration of 40:13, while Anna Lindal uses eight minutes more in 2001. Both recordings are very well done, sound wise, and since the two violinists are masters, the artistic value of each recording is way beyond what you usually experience.

The music is peaceful, with many rests – and the title of the CD – Sitting Silently; taken from the poem quoted in this work – is very suiting, for this piece and for the other ones on the CD too.
Alltagsmusik makes me think of someone in her own thoughts, with nothing to disturb her but fragrances and body memories from before, in fingertips, in thighs, from other times in her life, when moments like this lonely (or simply peaceful) one were scarce, when solitude was something one sought out, like a luxury not often granted. The violin describes scrawling figures on the inside of one’s eyelids, like a laser pointer from inside one’s consciousness, making a few things clear, in a thin – but sometimes intense – violin line, which you have to interpret intellectually, like you might interpret the hieroglyphic messages left in the sand on the shore by the ringed plovers…
It’s probably no coincidence that Otte’s music conjures up visions of Japanese rock gardens with raked sand, surrounded by slopes of mountains disappearing up in the mist that gradually erases all visual perception…

On the other hand, Alltagsmusik could be an expression of the moment that doesn’t care; that just is, again and again – without any consideration for what might happen during its duration, good or bad; anonymously existing on its own terms, leaving sentient beings to their painstaking pains… and who can blame a blind moment for its content…

A third, clear vision that Alltagsmusik, with its transparent scraping lines and recurrent pauses, brings me, is that of a child walking by a wall in an old, abandoned North German industrial site, sometimes letting the fingers of her hand touch the dusty wall as she passes, leaving marks and traces here and there, randomly, as she goes whistling, absentmindedly, through her present moment… and this notion gets even stronger when Anna Lindal expresses herself in wordless singing, letting her violin rest.

You have to get attuned to this music, adjusted, just as you have to merge with the tempo of the Lapland mountains when you’re hiking. The first couple of days you still have too much in you left from the frantic life of cities and offices, and you have to come to terms with the actual tempo of wide expanses, towering glaciers and rock deserts, slowly, slowly… and when you have, you become a philosopher, a thinker, and a very sensitive, intuitive being. The same goes for Alltagsmusik; you must let the music attune you, little by little, and then…!

Hans Otte’s Stundenbuch No. 13 concludes this collection of September light violin transparencies.
A hue of melancholy emerges like evening light through a stained glass window in an old church, as Anna Lindal hesitantly makes her way through emotions that hang like spider webs in her way, merging the youth of the individual with the age of the race, the glittering moments of the present with the bright light of eternity, through which the beings march in search of a final enlightenment… and the music stops on an upward motion; an inhalation before silence…

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