"I think there’s something unbrutal in being extremely brutal"

As part of Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival’s ongoing commitment to developing and commissioning new musical voices, London Sinfonietta’s concert at hcmf// 2011 on Saturday 19 November features Marula, the first of four pieces to come from Danish composer Jexper Holmen’s two-year residency with hcmf//. Running until 2012, Holmen’s residency is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation and backed by SNYK, Denmark’s centre for contemporary music, and his publisher Edition.S.

“It’s just a small advertisement for what will happen next year,” Holmen says of the work for clarinet, string trio and analogue ring modulator, which premiered at London Sinfonietta’s Sonic Explorations event in October. “It’s quite a violent piece, but there’s still this ambience of softness about it.”

Marula forms the third part of a cycle of works – Miranda-Medina-Marula-Melonta – where Holmen has tried to focus less upon details than on creating powerful music that uses blurring and distortion to unsettling effect. He used chance operations in the course of composing the piece, which his notes for the piece direct the musicians to play “as if the carved blocks were relentlessly paced forward by a stream of lava.”

“I think there’s something unbrutal in being extremely brutal,” he says, “because you save the idea, you protect the idea from being destroyed when you do it in a very block-like and manifesto-like way.” The work calls for the string players to hold double-stopped chords and then move their fingers to different notes, producing intervals where the pitches slide away from each other, a similar effect to the electronic ring modulation. “It will blur the sense of specific pitches and make it more a question of density,” he says. The whole piece is amplified then fed through loudspeakers in mono to increase its heavy, intimidating atmosphere.

Holmen has been drawn to create noisy and challenging pieces since he was a teenager: his audition piece for the Royal Danish Academy of Music used prepared clarinets, “ones I had constructed from different parts put together, soprano clarinets with bass mouthpieces, mouthpieces on their own and some other things that had to be put together with gaffer tape.” Once accepted at the conservatory, however, he found that under-confidence with the range of compositional techniques he was learning led him to write what he calls “very polite music”.

“We had Xenakis visit us and listen to some of our pieces, and with mine he didn’t even want to comment, he said it was too ‘school-like’,” he recalls. “That made me think that perhaps my music wasn’t meant to be polite, and so I began to write more experimental music again, especially very loud pieces.” In recent years he has found ways to incorporate more subtle and melodic elements into his music without compromising his sonically abrasive side. He says he feels more musically connected to electronic artists such as Autechre, his fellow Dane Bjørn Svin and Aphex Twin than to much of classical music, citing the latter’s sparse and oblique Selected Ambient Works Volume II as a particular influence. “Many of my pieces have things that are going around and around with only small changes,” he says. “You have to sharpen your ears to get the details, although if you don’t sharpen your ears you can still listen to the surface, and that’s interesting too.”

Huddersfield audiences first encountered Holmen’s music at hcmf// 2009, with Lullabies, an exploration of the unpleasant underbelly of children’s music, and Oort Cloud, a 40-minute imagining of “cosmic disaster” inspired by a previous concert Holmen had attended where the venue acoustics were overwhelmed by the resonating sound. It was, he says, a deliberately demanding piece, both for the musicians – the saxophonist had to simultaneously combine multiphonics with circular breathing, whilst the accordionists spent long periods bearing the weight of their instruments with their arms outstretched – and for the listeners, as Holmen structured the piece so its multilayered, blurred parts would be hard to grasp as a whole. “I was a little annoyed that things were not allowed to be difficult. I wrote a manifesto for the festival that was all about difficulty being a quality, that things didn’t necessarily have to be easy,” he says.

A first look at the other pieces Jexper Holmen is composing as part of his hcmf// residency:

Melonta

A collaboration with Monty Adkins for accordion and electronics, due to be premiered at hcmf// in November 2012.

“Normally I use electronics in a simple way because that’s all I can handle technically, but now I’m working with Monty I’ve decided that for the first time it should be very subtle, very advanced and very heavily electronic. The electronics react to what the accordion player is doing. I’ve prerecorded elements and there’s also live processing of the instrument. It might change dramatically between now and the premiere, but at the moment my plan is that there should be one giant chord of more than 10 voices spread out around 26 loudspeakers, but which is only heard when the accordion is playing.”

Alnitak

A collaboration with accordionist Frode Andersen forming part of hcmf//’s Learning & Participation strand.

“It’s a further development of Lullabies, which I did at hcmf// in 2009. That was for electronics. music boxes and old defective accordions.  Again, it’s for music boxes and accordions, but the electronics are very much calmed down. We’re asking people to play the instruments who have no experience of playing. We don’t think of them as amateur musicians; we look at them as people doing something that they are not used to. They will have this very fresh approach to the instruments they’re playing. And then we’re doing some alternative amplification techniques to make it sound special. Although it’s written as a Learning and Participation project, it’s important that it’s still this uncompromising and relentless approach to music, so it shouldn’t be easy for anybody.”

Theïa

Written for ELISION ensemble and featuring contrabass clarinets, vibraphones, prepared cellos and tam-tam

“Again it has this blurred, alienated sound and uses ring modulation, only this time it’s not one ring modulator but many. It’s done exclusively with analogue gear as the analogue ring modulators sound much warmer and richer than digital ones.

Theïa is inspired by the giant impact hypothesis. People wondered why the moon was so big in comparison to the earth; it’s an unusual size for a satellite. It’s very lucky for the Earth as it stabilises it, and without this stabilisation, life wouldn’t have been able to develop. So the hypothesis is that once, in the early history of the solar system, Earth was impacted by another planet, which caused it to almost be smashed apart, and this formed the Moon. So it’s something extremely destructive which has caused something very beautiful and lovely. Theïa is an ancient Greek goddess who was the mother of the sun and the moon. There’s a lot of pulsating things in it, like things orbiting, and it’s very heavy and relentless. I’ve not used rhythm so much in my other pieces, but this one is all about pulses.”

Click here to buy tickets for London Sinfonietta’s concert featuring Jexper Holmen’s Marula on Saturday 19 November

Hear more of Jexper Holmen’s music here on Soundcloud

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