Arne Nordheim


Arne Nordheim - Colorazione / Fem kryptofonier / Link / Den første sommerfugl

Cikada Duo

Lindberg Lyd 2L 39. Duration: 53:39

http://www.arnenordheim.com/

http://www.2l.no/

Arne Nordheim's name rings with a certain magic. It has been enriched with a nobility that is only bestowed the unusual ones; the true originals. In his art, Arne Nordheim (b.1931) has collected a prism of wondrous nuances, which reflect back on the name that is his.

A light snow is falling peacefully over my Scandinavian habitat as November is getting ready for the changeover to December. My skis stand ready in the hallway waiting for the snowfall to thicken; a cup of hot, black coffee sits by the computer – and the music from Arne Nordheim’s new CD on the Lindberg Lyd label seeps into my ears through headphones. It’s an adventure to sit back and let life happen. Right now Arne Nordheim is happening in my life. I give the music time and space, just like it seems my life is giving me time and space, inside my thoughts and dreams.

Lindberg Lyd is a comparably new Norwegian label that puts a strong emphasis on quality, sound wise and artistically. This is apparent from just causally browsing the Nordheim album, which just arrived, and I’m talking about layout and looks as well as factual, printed liner notes and the musical content. Most record companies miss out on at least one of these aspects, but not so Lindberg Lyd (which is translated Lindberg Sound).

The release comes in the Super Audio format with 5.1 surround, but can be played on any CD player. The liner notes are printed in Norwegian and English.

The musicians – the Cikada Duo – are Kenneth Karlsson [piano / synthesizer] and Bjørn Rabben [percussion], but they are joined by Åke Parmerud [electronics] and Elisabeth Holmertz [soprano vocals] at certain instances.

I think Kenneth Karlsson is the author of the liner notes. In them he lets on that Arne Nordheim was the one who initiated this project. He wished to record an updated, electronic version of Respons III, having a hunch that Cikada Duo would master it well, so he got in touch. Of course, when Arne Nordheim gets in touch in Norway, it’s the same phenomenon as when Karlheinz Stockhausen gets in touch, or Terry Riley: Everyone gets really attentive and observant! This contact was made a long time ago, though, in the early 1990s. Kenneth Karlsson describes the original 1960s tape of Respons III as quite simple. Nordheim wished to add, for example, bell sounds. The changes he wanted to make, probably were what he’d always had in mind, but wasn’t able to realize until technology caught up with his ingenuity. The sound technician Mats Claesson and Arne Nordheim also sampled sounds for Kenneth Karlsson’s synthesizer. In the process Respons III changed enough to obtain a new title; Link, which rests on track 7 on this CD.

Shortly after the first performance of Link in 1993, Nordheim called again and said he had a work called Colorazione, for Hammond organ, percussion, two tape recorders and electronics. Karlsson says in his liner notes that Colorazione means a lot to the composer, because the idea behind the work – the method, if you will – has fascinated Nordheim since he was young. When the musicians play, the sound is continuously recorded and played back through loud speakers, delayed 15 seconds. Sometimes the sound is channeled through ring modulators, altering and distorting the music.

The score for Colorazione is a graphic one, except for a brief sequence at 6:30, when a melody appears. The delay is a primitive one indeed, working like the early San Francisco Tape Music Center experiments by Terry Riley, Pauline Oliveros and others in the 1960s: The tape ran from one tape recorder that recorded the sound, to another one that played the sound, placed some distance away, achieving the desired 15 seconds.  When the piece was to be played again by Cikada Duo in the 1990s, the primitive delay was exchanged for an electronic one, thus making the tape recorders superfluous.

The collaboration with Nordheim continued when Cikada Duo staged a series of concerts across Europe with a program entirely comprised of his music. The Norwegian singer Hilde Torgersen joined the duo to perform, among other works, Den første sommerfugl (The First Butterfly), in an electronic version. These concerts would take place in sometimes rather unusual settings: in metal workshops, in caves, on a raft on a lake, at a parliament session etcetera.

Den første sommerfugl was scored for harp and voice, set to a poem by Henrik Wergeland. Here Kenneth Karlsson has used a sound akin to an electric piano, supplementing Bjørn Rabben’s vibraphone. This version rose out of the rehearsals for this CD.

Hilde Torgersen and the Cikada Duo premiered the commissioned Nordheim work 5 Kryptofonier, based on surviving fragments of the writings of Greek poet Archilochus (600 B.C.) in 2001. Since Torgersen suffered the consequences of a car accident, Cikada Duo had to find another collaborator for female vocal parts. She is present on this CD, and her name is Elisabeth Holmertz.

The Swedish veteran of the middle generation of electro acoustic composers, Åke Parmerud (b.1953), began working with the Cikada Duo in the 1990s. Since then this constellation has conducted a number of projects of various kinds. Out of the works on this CD they have performed Link and Colorazione, and Parmerud is present on this phonogram.

Track 1. Colorazione (1968 / 1982) [18:45]

Colorazione begins in the deep, in the bottomless void of space, out of which ominous disturbances on the surface of the incomprehensible rise like dark chords of unrest, at first like the woeful dark dreams of a wakening god, alone in his Gustave Doré might among the star clusters.

Later a more harmonious drone fills the dark like the swell of calm light on a nocturnal ocean, anatomies resting in gravity, and the heaving, equable velvet is stung by the glitter of metallic percussion. I get the notion of a cosmic dawn.

After some time has passed, the smooth surface of this looming imminence reaches a critical wobble frequency, and cracks up into a thorny and rocky splinter world of rushing, bouncing and ricocheting percussion, later calming down into watchful, spaying scouting in the synthesizer, intelligently supported by lenient percussive messages. The pausing is critical here, making all the difference, building up a cat in the grass focus that the listener gets mighty caught-up in.
The percussion in fact takes up the cudgels for the development here.

Here and there I feel some familiarity coming on; some reminiscences of 1960s’ avant-garde ensemble and / or soloist excesses – and people like Max Neuhaus – who once released a phonogram with four versions of Stockhausen’s Zyklus – come to mind, thanks to Bjørn Rabben… and fact is, these guys formed their duo once upon a time to perform another great Stockhausen piece; the legendary Kontakte.

Watery, carefully treading moments are introduced, as if you’re passing through and endless series of hippie glass bead curtains, but the glassy comfort is inching over into more electronic and sharp shrills, which eventually, in turn, lose themselves in a slowly swelling synthesizer beauty that develops into wildly jabbing arms in semi-darkness; you’d better keep your distance. A mighty upset strength is let loose as percussion falls all around like big slabs of rock tumbling, while the synthesizer represents some kind of spiritual presence.

I know the score is pretty arbitrary and withheld, but Karlsson and Rabben do a great job out of their interpretation. The CD cover has a warning text: “Extreme surround sound”. I recall that BIS used to print warnings for their dynamics, and Lindberg Lyd could do that too, because their dynamics are staggering.



Tracks 2 – 6. Fem Kryptofonier (2001) [16:16] [per movement: 4:57 / 1:34 / 3:02 / 0:53 / 5:46]

I like the practice of bringing very old texts to the fore, right into the contemporary moment, like Arne Nordheim has done in these pieces, letting what’s left of Archilochus’ poems from 600 B.C. ring again.

The onset is powerful, percussion of many kinds filling space with messages from inside matter itself, from the jitter of atoms inside minerals and soil. Elisabeth Holmertz’s voice cuts through this metal moisture like a shining vocal sword, until she appears like a sonic queen embellished in percussive diamonds that reflect a universe of stars and studio lamps. Beautiful. At times she’s allowed her own time, when the percussion rests in its silence, and those moments become breathless, ethereal.

It’s a wonder that these Greek words have traveled thousands of years to our ears, and I feel the density of them; the power that they’ve amassed through decades, centuries and millennia.

When the electronically permuted male voice appears further on, frog-like, fiendish, a rank, acrid, rancid atmosphere sweeps the music in its coughing veil, like the evening mist the autumn wanderer in his self along the shore.

The timelessness of this music is carried on the clarity of Elisabeth Holmertz’s meandering vocals, which rise like solar flares over the circumstances, across the bridge from a distant past to a just as distant now. Music that makes you think, if that’s what you’re inclined to.

The mix of vocals, percussion and electronics is unusually successful, keeping the listener right there without a single moment of boredom. I seldom hear music that stays so interesting for so long. I feel a sensation of science and poetry and the human spirit passing through these dark lands with a handful of hope held close to his bosom. In a transferred sense, in atmosphere and general stature, I can find similarities with such an unlikely work as Franz Schubert’s Erlkönig, in a version by Alexander Kipnis. Astounding music!

Track 7. Link (1983  /1993) [20:13]

Link opens in a smooth explosion, not unlike Stockhausen’s most recent adventure Cosmic Pulses, reviewed elsewhere at Sonoloco. However, in Link you soon feel the presence – or likeness?! – of a church organ that talks way inside a rumble, like a sun hidden behind thunderclouds, glimpsing through, or evidenced indirectly. This is a far cry from the original Respons III, and quite beautiful. As the rumble dies down and the atmosphere turns less threatening, Christmas jingly little elf sounds glitter and shine on the velvet of the basic emotional circumstance – until further explosive events in percussion throws sticks and stones hither and thither.

After a while, thin, searching light sonorities rise out of musical darkness like search lights out of Bristol or Berlin during World War II. This tottering, staggering guardedness comes across like the withdrawn mental state of a being on the edge of the circle, on the periphery of existence, with nothing much to lose, but guarding those meager shreds carefully.

The beauty parlor ripple of richer agendas are played out on some of Rabben’s instruments, perhaps a xylophone or marimba. Karlsson’s synthesizer paints in thick strokes of the brush, layer after layer, while Rabben comes through on a mound of rocks, the Singivaggi way.

The musicians master a formidable play on extended, smooth layers and robust thunder and rockslides, artistry well beyond the expected.

Track 8. Den første sommerfugl (1982 / 2006) [4:25]

This last track on Arne Nordheim’s new CD once again features Elisabeth Holmertz - but in a more traditionally melodic way; a song of melancholy and summery inward feelings. The music that surrounds her is shiny and delightful: strings of pearls all around her voice, breaking sunlight sound into the colors of the mind.