I have lived many months with this CD now, and it has grown on me. I feel a special kinship to the wanderer of these pastures, these dreamy landscapes, these obscure and not fully depicted visions, memories… dreams – like standing alone inside a weathered early 20th century garden pavilion in November, looking out into a forgotten apple orchard through the misted-over windows…

When I received Rolf Martinsson’s CD I went through the probably hardest time of my 56 year old life; a story of love lost – lost to Tibet, to New Zealand… as the young and beautiful woman that I’d met whilst hiking in the northern parts of Swedish Lapland last summer went through with her plans of long to travel to New Zealand by way of Tibet, to settle down under in her profession as an arborist.

A year has gone, I have healed completely – and I can breathe deep inside Rolf Martinsson’s music; a music which I had with me on my emotional desert journey, and which soothed and consoled me and tucked me in many a night of desperation.

When a music has meant all this to you, it retains a special place in your heart thereafter – and Rolf Martinsson’s Dreams does! It shows that music can be much more than music; it can mean something in circumstances where everything comes to a head, when the final questions are asked… and in this way I swept Dreams around me like a purple sherwani and walked the barren lands a few months until the spiritual healing slowly rose through me, chakra by chakra, finally allowing me a whole night’s sleep and a morning without anxiety, telling me that I was on the brink of the start of the end of despair – and through all this, Rolf Martinsson’s Dreams accompanied me. Vilhelm Ekelund talked about Beginning; a very special term in his authorship, with a much deeper meaning than you usually bestow on the word, and in Ekelund’s sense, Rolf Martinsson’s music indeed brought me through the dark lands, unto a fresh Beginning.

Martinsson was born in 1956, so he’s about to turn 50, having enough lifetime behind him in his present life to be able to arrive at the fine-tuned and somber tonal language of this CD, which doesn’t seem to look anywhere but inside for guidance and examples. Because this music appears to come from within, it is all the more easy to identify with and take to heart, because, as poet Gunnar Ekelöf said: “Det som är botten i dig är botten också i andra” (the lowlands in yourself are the lowlands also in others), the whole poem – with my own translation attached – reading:

There is in Rolf Martinsson’s oeuvre this definite siding with the thinkers and brooders, with those of us who look a little deeper and a little further, when we are able to; who raise our eyes and gaze out among the heavens like the narrator in Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker; those of us who believe a poem is worth more than a car, who believe that bodies are mere vehicles to take us through life, and not something to get desperately attached to.

I feel at home in this music. I live here. As soon as I spin this CD in the bleak light of the laser box, I feel excitedly at ease, much the same way I do when I read Tomas Tranströmer or Harry Martinson or Vilhelm Ekelund or Bengt Emil Johnson, or stand in front of paintings by Sophie Dunér or Peter Dewoon, or hike in Lapland. You need something to get you on track, to wipe the shit out of your face after you’ve been exposed to the idiocy that blurts at you in the city streets from the stupid and degrading newspaper placards of troglodyte evening editions like Expressen and Aftonbladet in Sweden; perverse and completely immoral daily suicide papers. Rolf Martinsson’s music does the trick: it wipes the shit off and lifts you into a truer realm of existence where life is worth something.

The first work on the CD Dreams is Kalliope (Calliope) from 2004.

Rolf Martinsson says:

I don’t think of these Muses when I listen, because I don’t care too much for the composers’ own explanations. Sometimes this revealing of the planning of pieces means something, but the truth of the music itself is what happens in you when you hear it, and that may put you very far away from where the composer started. I simply let the music live in me, and allow myself to live in the music; a timeless journey through myself.

I’ll reveal just a few of my reflections of the Calliope collection of sub-pieces, nine in all.

The initial string curtains sway and dance solemnly in a stately pride that also carries dark purple strains of sorrow and remembrances. When the air is swept clean of any emotional or intellectual resistance; when you sit on your stool in a barren kitchen in the suburbs – bread crumbs on your table -; Martinsson stops, in silence; a silence permeated with your hearing’s inertia, until, soon, a low and soothing strand of thoughts move like yesteryear’s leaves over the lawn, hardly noticeable, but still leaving you in a certain atmosphere: strings, leaves, fall; LOTS of pictures passing on the inside of your eyelids – Martinsson doing an early Moishei Vainberg… Dark skies, lingering thoughts, still hope… waiting for the first snow; stars on your coat – the last picture of Strindberg…

Terpsichore hits it off in staggering staccato stand-offs, the string sections marching about like Greek soldiers in squares with their javelins tilted upwards like pine needles; string music painted in thick, fast layers, bowing across the canvas – Pitturamusica! – reminding me just a little bit of some places in Lars-Åke Franke-Blom’s oeuvre, especially in this reference to pictorial art that I can sense in Franke-Blom as well as in Martinsson.

Euterpe brings a much more somber sentiment, moving low across the sidewalk like the spirit of a cat that walks in secrecy, a little light in the universe that high-tails it round the corner, in between the trashcans of proletarian exploitation and misfortune.
Even in a miniature like Euterpe, Rolf Martinsson instills so much room for thought and contemplation, introspection and reflection. It feels, in the viola, that he barely moves his intentions across the score, and yet the sounding result, albeit light and delicate, sobers you up and turns your inner gaze towards places that you need to confront in your life, towards circumstances that you need to tend to. Like all very good art, Martinsson’s music brings the essence of human experience, and since, at heart, deep within – like Gunnar Ekelöf said in his poem above – we are all easily recognizing the bare facts of existence when we encounter them, there is a universal hue to his compositions, when they sound. This is high praise, not easily offered, but there is something very special in Rolf Martinsson’s music, that I haven’t really experienced since I started studying Vilhelm Ekelund seriously when I was 19 years old, in a big day-room at Jära Folkhögskola; a room with a distinct apple fragrance to it, where I spent late evenings by myself reading Ekelund. Perhaps, when I think of it, there are hints of the same delicacy and potential for path-finding also in the young Swedish composer Erik Peters.

Polyhymnia is a whirlwind across West Texas, in accordance with signs along the roads announcing the precariousness of sudden flurries. You see yellow pillars of dust dancing like a snake charmer’s snake out on the plains.

Another view of this little piece is that of some cartoon figure in a Disney movie, dancing down the stairs of a castle, into a large hall, desperately around the walls, looking for something, looking for someone. Polyhymnia is a miniature with a lot of potential. Martinsson doesn’t care less about his minuscule pieces, but gives just as close artistic attention to them as to his larger-scale works.

Melpomene starts very lyrical, withheld, standing back, sensing the environment, sniffing the air like a deer at the edge of the forest, spaying out into the field.

The gravity of the atmosphere of Melpomene is spun into a loving semi-transparency of soothing consolation, like an old women in her cane chair, sitting in the garden of an old-age home with her finest memories flying around her head like green and purple dragon-flies.

The orchestral mist is semi-transparent too, the colors guarded, never loud, and the motion ahead sometimes carried only by one instrument, until hazy wheat fields of strings provide a backdrop, swaying calmly in a mimicry of amnesia under the winds of change…

Thalia’s beginning peculiarily reminds me of a passage in Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps, at the very end of the Lento, just as Stravinsky breaks into Les Augures Printainers. This analogy doesn’t fully stand, but still, there is a very lively, mysterious shamanistic drive to the progression of Rolf Martinsson’s Thalia, which legitimates this reference; a certain held-breath, heart-beating anticipation on the threshold of something that is about to happen. String groups in dense formations flutter about at the gate of some un-treaded land, uncertain if the passage is safe, or worth the risk. The orchestral group forms an unruly crowd at the gateway, talking back and forth, discussing the matter in agitated voices, like refugees in a mountain pass, facing their grim choices.

A major work on the CD is At The End of Time, with lyrics by the well-established, but nonetheless very interesting poet Jacques Werup. The recoding is live, but the vitality and poignant timing of orchestra and words don’t let this on, except perhaps for a slight murkiness of the sound of the recitation.

The composition is a commission from the poet himself. Rolf Martinsson says about part of the compositional work:

Jacques Werup’s text is a prose poem, written in Swedish, and I reprint it here as a regular prose text, interpreted in English by Roger Tanner. I have some doubts about some of his wordings, but I repeat them here anyhow:

And I realize that you do not really get into a text until you re-write it. I’ve heard this text many times over the last year, but not until I re-wrote it here today do I feel it organically, in myself. It is mighty, this text, talking about ends, different sort of conclusions, as everything grows fainter, a butterfly winging into winter…

Werup’s touching text refers to the end of close relationships, the closest and most familiar changing into unfamiliarity, remoteness, dissociation. Lovers’ recollections of long since passed moments of trembling physical love.
He touches on aging as such, the downgrading of the senses, the growing importance of memories, far and distant memories, like (my fantasies) a porch in childhood, a swing, an old wind touching tiny legs.
This is the course of life, moving into gray areas of silvery moustaches and strong glasses; the thin desolation of late years, more and more transparent, until it doesn’t even cast a shadow of grief. The dispersing of the I.

The music provides the atmosphere for these burning memories against a backdrop of thin smoke from the glowing piles of leaves in the gardens of fall; your nostrils trembling slightly in the calm and moist air amongst the apple trees.
Rolf Martinsson is serious but calm as he moves his orchestral brush across the score, in which Jacques Werup sits cross-legged like a fall Buddha contemplating the Bardo of this life and the Bardo of after-life; the dream-like passage between this life and the next.
When Martinsson casts the spell of the dark surge of double-basses in unison with celli and violas, he achieves – seemingly without effort – the most introverted love for the human being, describing in music what Tarkovskij and Bergman and Kurosawa has depicted in film.

At The End of Time is a masterwork; yes, the merger of two masterworks into one.

A. S. in Memoriam refers to Arnold Schönberg and his string composition Verklärte Nacht. Martinsson says that he has “sought to mirror the vocabulary, gesture and musical characters present in the works of Schönberg.” He also explains that “bar 49 features a musical quotation from Verklärte Nacht, as a sounding acknowledgement of that works influence on A. S. in Memoriam.”

Beginning on a somber, brooding note, A. S. in Memoriam takes me back to my late teens and Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphony, which brought me ahead through the fall of 1966… but after a while the music, albeit with typical Tchaikovsky tracers gleaming like searchlights through falling snow, comes on in somewhat more modern motions, the music rising in a flood wave of strings, pressing hard at your eardrums in a wave-motion of stirring emotions and not so quiet desperation.
It seems Rolf Martinsson is such an expert with his orchestral tool that he can mimic any style, and to tell you the truth, I don’t know where Martinsson himself is in this piece, but that doesn’t mean that the music is pointless or anonymous; only that the very personal content that I’ve felt in his other works isn’t immediately recognizable here, where Martinsson mostly plays the role of an artisan – but the music as such is great; tight, flowing, swaying; mighty, full of strong emotions and, like I said, a ransacking desperation that sometimes, in Tchaikovsky’s tradition, falls back into surging, sorrowful double basses, mighty instruments for expressing dark despair, heavy resignation, an urge to lie down and grasp your grief with both arms…

Dreams refers to Akira Kurosawa and his film by the same name. Martinsson says that “the film includes a succession of concentrated dream scenes which create imaginative, clearly contrasting rooms. The play of images and color and the tempo and drama from a complex whole replete with musical associations.”
Later he says: “…I wanted, in my own particular way, to reflect and interpret my experience of seeing the film.”

Indeed, the cavalry storms over the hill at the very beginning, the horses stirring the dust, banners flying in the wind – until more precarious, elastic, hushed progressions tread the score, whispering wind through leaves of grass.

So many figures – musical and anatomic – pass in a kaleidoscope of ideas, in the glittering tingling of the lightest of percussion, in the long breaths of double basses, in the jolly exclamations of trumpets and in the jittery dance swirls of orchestral finesse.

I’d like to see Martinsson paint in oil some time, or even acrylic, or why not coal – or simply sketching something with a pencil. He’s such a magnificent painter of musical colors on his score-paper canvas, completely at ease with his orchestra, with his complex scores like rows of fences on a field, seen in a telephoto lens from afar, dotted with irregular accumulations of resting swallows, gathered for the flight south in fall.

I leave my jotted-down notes on Rolf Martinsson’s music here, though there is so much more to say, so much more to hear. This Daphne CD is – I’m ashamed to admit – my first close range encounter with the music of Rolf Martinsson, and it has been a great surprise to me, for I wouldn’t have thought that I’d missed out on a composer so utterly important in Swedish music of today; a true artist, with the dreams and visions of an artist – but with the skill and expertise of an artisan!
I’m also happy and impressed with the obvious absence of any flirt with, or concession to, any narcissistic, self-proclaimed avant-garde on the local scene, in Martinsson’s oeuvre. He is a man unto himself. He is an artist with a wholesome integrity, from which many would have much to learn! My congratulations on a truly great collection of compositions, Daphne Records and Rolf Martinsson!

---