Marie Samuelsson (b.1956) says:

“I started out as a musician and worked early on with dance. Perhaps that is why I’ve always taken an interest in the concepts of intellect and body. […] Music describes different states wherein the intellect and compositional processes are contrasted against, or forming a unity with, the more primitive or physical. That is where I find my nerve.”

Undoubtedly, Samuelsson is an artist with a lot of insight into her own creative processes. You seldom find a composer who so clearly can detect and decipher her own intuitive strands of artistry.

I remember listening to a demo CD with Samuelsson’s compositions a few years ago, with some of the works of this album, like Rotationer, I vargens öga and Krom, but Rotationer was then performed by Musica Vitæ. That demo CD also contained the earlier piece Signal and a work called Magica de Hex and a composition in several parts named Dig speglad, with a text by Magnus William-Olsson, who has also written texts for two of the works on this Phono Suecia CD. Another collaboration with Magnus William-Olsson was the work Talkörer that was broadcast in the Swedish radio art series Vita nätter (White Nights) in May of 2002.

It is, without doubt, due time for Marie Samuelsson to release a full-length CD, and Phono Suecia has taken this initiative in its Portraits series.

Samuelsson has been active in many facets of Swedish contemporary music. For a time she worked as a host of the notorious art music request show Nya Timmen at the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation’s Channel 2, where she succeeded Folke Rabe and Ingvar Karkoff.
She has also been the editor of the art music magazine Nutida Musik and she is the Vice President of FST (Föreningen Svenska Tonsättare; the Swedish Composers’ Union) since 2000. Since 2001 Marie Samuelsson is upholding the position as the General Secretary of The Nordic Composers’ Council, while also being the editor of FST’s magazine Tonsättaren (The Composer).

Frankly, I only know of two other musical figures who have found that much time for bureaucracy and administration in addition to the pure musical work: Om Kalsoum and Folke Rabe. That’s not a bad gang to join!

In her earlier years, Samuelsson studied musicology at the University of Stockholm. Myself, I am suspicious of this discipline, at least for practicing artists, because I think it tends to intellectualize what cannot be intellectualized without simultaneously being destroyed, but Marie Samuelsson seems to have escaped musicology without being hampered.
She continued with studies of classical piano at the Birka School and improvisation at Fylkingen. That must have been like a health cure after the musicology, I presume…
Samuelsson even worked as a singer in the FRIM circle; an organization for improvised music, as well as in several rock groups. Yes, this would give her a clean bill of health from any contamination from the illness of musicology!
Don’t misinterpret me; I really have nothing against musicology as such, but you have to understand that it has nothing to do with music, nothing at all. Musicology is often misunderstood as having a bearing on music, but that is a grave and serious misunderstanding. It has as little to do with music as faith has to do with the analysis of the ink in old holy scriptures.

Track 1 on Marie Samuelsson’s CD is Lufttrumma III (Air Drum III). It is a composition for orchestra and three giant air drums made of sheet metal.

The initial rumbling pictures a thousand trembling timpani in a martial landscape, the ancient armies marching up against each other, towards assured death, assured heroism… I feel the people of ancient ages, hear their blood gushing like mighty rivers of rage through their veins, hear “the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world”, as Bob Dylan said in A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall at the time of the Cuban Crisis, when John Kennedy played with everyone’s life, as soon as he had some time off from courting Marilyn Monroe across her big brass bed… and until she became a federal liability and had to be disposed off… before Kennedy himself had to be disposed off by the same federal folks… Wow-whee, pretty scary!
The turmoil of the orchestra, in tune with the might of the air drums, is a haze of tones, a maze of sound, out of which lighter, sunnier, more transparent and playful gestures of flutes and other orchestral instruments rise like feathers on God’s breath, like dandelion seeds in hard white light of day… like unselfish thoughts rising out of the heavy anatomy of guilt and dark Karma…

I vargens öga (In the Eye of the Wolf) is presented at track 2.
It is a very original composition, utilizing real live wolf howls, to which the alto saxophone of Jörgen Pettersson adheres in strangely alien duets, mirrorings and sometimes simultaneous expressions, into the melancholy meter of the wild versus the domestic in our own inner sphere… and the civilization we are so proud of or so ashamed of turns out to be a mere varnish barely covering the wilderness within. Maybe this insight, clearly audible in Samuelsson’s beautiful and threatening composition, can explain our ambivalence towards the wolfs of Northern Sweden… and the wolfs within…
Samuelsson’s electronic manipulation gives her domiciliary rights also in the framework of electroacoustics. She handles her tools diligently in this composition, carefully adding mystery and myth to her sound picture.
The wolf and the saxophone exchange gestures, even guises, as they swap identities with each other, and a golden wolf shows its yellow teeth while a shaggy saxophone soars away among the lichen-hung spruces of coniferous topographies. Masterly! Mysterious!

Krom (Chrome) is written for brass quintet.
The poet Eva Runefelt, who has written the very poetic and initiated liner notes, points out the special quality of the element chrome, which is not affected by oxygen, like, for example iron, which oxidizes and rusts, and slowly disintegrates. She feels this quality of unaffectedness also is characteristic of this brass quintet composition.

The beginning is Medieval or Renaissance, a castle, a court yard, bright colors, white horses, fair maidens, brave riders, poor and noble souls – all in these bright, light tones out of these shiny brass instruments, their sound like nails in tight rows, hammered half way down a wooden plank, reflecting the sunlight unto the eyes of a lady…
The music is totally pure, clean, without blemishes… as if it was angel music out of serenity itself.
Samuelsson balances the timbres of the quintet perfectly, the web of sounds elastically stretched across our hearing like a canopy of a soap bubble, our senses sharpened in the fragrance of lilacs…

I am – Are You? is the fourth entry, and the first with a text line, written by Magnus William-Olsson, Samuelsson’s long time collaborator. Dana Johnson provides the voice, while Sören Hermansson plays the horn. The voice and the horn interact profusely, as can be expected. A few tracks ago it was wolfs and a saxophone. Electroacoustic measures are taken also in this duet.
The horn flutters and flies, the voice nags, assures, in repetitious, sound poetic utterances in English. The horn is heard both directly and taped, as well as electronically manipulated. We do not only hear the normal horn sounds, but also valve sounds and electroacoustically treated and layered valve sounds. The voice changes position, sometimes heard deep inside some sonic reverberations or other manipulations, sometimes without any treatment at all, shockingly close, right up your face. The same goes for the horn. Not even Henri Chopin and Marc Battier could swing the voice around better, and not even myself with all Mike Norris’s filters at my disposal!
In Samuelsson’s electronic workings, the horn even takes on the guise of mighty foghorns off the coast, in timbral drones through the mist. The composer opens unexpected, salty horizons in the midst of the composition. There is seaweed in her tonal waves, entangling the horn; the voice originating in a mermaid?

Flow is written for a chamber ensemble.
Maybe the title is also an indication for the performance?
The opening is transparent; a few dispersed, wooden, percussive beats, a cello, and then a gradually denser environment, the ensemble waking, taking to its feet, rising and moving like the Hunchback of Notre Dame across the stage; a stage with very sparse lighting, leaving the corners and the back of the stage in darkness.
The ensemble grows more confident, faces the audience point blank, stands still in a stand-still march, stomping feet, waving arms rhythmically, entering a minimalist or post-minimalist atmosphere of Steve Reich (Drumming) or Terry Riley (Salome Dances for Peace), the combination of light percussion and stringent strings in an elusive and senselessly beautiful shadow play, swirling in and out behind each other, faster still, then slowing down, getting denser, then more transparent, in a motion that is a breathing in and out, a swell of waves from a distant storm below the horizon, a message from within the jitter of atomic structures of minerals… Wonderful!

Ö (Island) is next. It is a violin solo, here performed by Sweden’s most prominent practician of violin art; honorable Professor Anna Lindal. Her reputation as a true artist and a fearless magician with kind and sensual eyes has been strongly founded on the tasks she has laid before herself, like for example the performance of the almost impossible Violin Sonata by Claude Loyola Allgén, which has a duration in excess of two hours…
This is easier, but she still applies her artistry and her powers of magnificence, as she always does, in minor works as well as tremendous ones. She has a big part of my heart.

When I read Eva Runefelt’s liner notes for this and the other works, I’m struck by the fact that poets seldom get this chance to write decidedly about music. Of course some do, in their private poetry, in their poetry releases, but I mean like this, to write about music in liner notes for record companies. Poets are better at this than others, I think, and Eva Runefelt’s verbal interpretations of the music are going straight to my heart and to my musical perception. Her language is music.

Anna Lindal threads the needle, moves the bow, strings vibrating in thin, trembling, delicate lines, sharp as the razor blade of the suicide – it’s a Bach fall in the Violin forest, reminiscences of the old instrument conveyed in a modern, contemporary language; the anguish of time-traveling, the loneliness of a Werther soul in a 21st century body, the frightened looks… the evasive body language…
The melodies, the melodic gestures, are unchained dances – one hand waving free… - under a bleak sky that harbors no special promises. The Rigpa is as it is, and perhaps enlightenment is found along these jagged cracks of violin evocations.

Rotationer (Rotations) is the longest work here, with its twelve and a half minutes, composed for string orchestra.
A rumble, a cautious walk in haste through the darkness, eerie strings pitched high, a rumbling backdrop, ominous, threatening, ensuring one and all that nothing is safe, nothing is to be taken for granted, except this endless progression of births and rebirths…
Allan Pettersson strings shriek, whisper in anguish, stay close together, move in tight groups across the marshes with wet feet, the coldness of the smelling water drifting up the bodies, grasping for hearts…
The soaring weight of the collected strings sweep across the topographies like alien space ships, with scraping moonlight shadows attached, all the small beings of the forest going into hiding with shining eyes…
The rotations of this music are of a magic, age-old character, spinning a web of conjurations; a sorcery web of final thoughts, final curses, on behalf of those left behind in merciless environmental catastrophes, desert wars or old age homes, or cold kindergartens and the bottomless spiritual voids of mental institutions – and there is a vision, a dream in this music, of barren celestial bodies circling a star, and the rest is mystery and future…

The final piece on Marie Samuelsson’s compelling CD is Den natten (That Night); a choir piece with Magnus William-Olsson’s text.
The booklet text talks about a man and a woman and the intimacy and loss that is inherent in all ardent meetings.
It all begins with the words “Det finns en natt i natten” (There is a night in the night”), and the male and female voices start weaving a fellowship, a communion, which dances in a slingshot, hands holding on tight, skirt flying in the circular spin.
I realize after a while that I only hear voices; this is completely choral. The sound is so rich, though, that I wouldn’t have noticed, hadn’t I listened as a reviewer, with an ear open for everything and all.

An English translation by Rika Lesser of the complete text is published in the excellent booklet.

The melody of voices lash out against the night of indifference, speaking in their own metaphors of the love that is the power of gravity between the Man and the Woman of the Universe, in the slingshot of Existence that swirls through Space-Time, and as the melody ceases; as the sounds fall back into the silence from whence they rose, I find myself alone in the aftermath of Marie Samuelsson’s music, and I rest there in contemplation a while, my gratitude reaching out to Marie for the beauty and the stubbornness of her artistry, for the radiance of spirituality that her works emit, and simply for this hour of rewarding listening.