Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival - Composer in Residence

Blurring boundaries: performing Rebecca Saunders

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 09:28:55 +0000

Woodwind player Carl Rosman is a member of Cologne-based contemporary music group musikFabrik, who will be performing Rebecca Saunders’ Chroma, cinnabar and a visible trace at hcmf// 2010. He tells hcmf// about the demands and rewards of playing Saunders’ compositions:

“I first met Rebecca in 2001 when I was playing in a concert with Ensemble Modern as a guest and albescere was on the programme. I'd heard some of her pieces before but only in passing and that was the first time I'd been able to immerse myself properly. The first time I played her music was in the premiere of insideout, a dance project (I think it was called a 'choreographic installation') with Rebecca, musikFabrik and Sasha Waltz's company, which we've played over 100 times.

“We did the first working sessions in early 2003 and found out pretty quickly that we're both interested in the same things on the clarinet. Her music in general moves back and forth between almost impalpable delicacy and extreme violence and both of those are things a clarinet does very well! In particular, we started looking at a particular area of the clarinet's potential, quiet multiphonics with just two notes usually quite close together which have a very characteristic tonal quality and an even more characteristic microtonal harmony. That appeared on the A clarinet in insideout and since then also in stirrings still, and we're working on a bass clarinet solo at the moment which explores similar sounds.

“musikFabrik have performed pretty much everything of Rebecca’s that we could make fit our setup: insideout, vermilion, cinnabar (which has just come out on CD), a visible trace, albescere, disclosure, into the blue, underside of green, quartet, stirrings still and some things without clarinet, of course, including trumpet, double bass and piano solo works as well as dichroic 17.

“I'm very interested by how Rebecca’s music is always blurring the boundaries between sounds, as well as between sound and silence. Her music is full of ‘dal niente’ and ‘al niente’ directions (crescendo from nothing, diminuendo to nothing) which if they're strictly observed – and the clarinet can probably do this better than any other instrument – mean that there are hardly any hard edges in the music: not only sounds but instruments are constantly blurring into each other. At the same time Rebecca is constantly reworking and reusing certain instrumental gestures, which means that both as performer and listener (and since there are so many gaps in her music it's simply not possible to be the former without being the latter as well) you're constantly confronted with familiar characters in an unfamiliar landscape. Often she won't join gestures or even isolated sounds up in a single instrumental part but will let melodies come together from the interactions between the players.

“Like a lot of composers she makes regular reference to Beckett and there's a clear link to me between some of her textures and the manner in which Beckett will often let characters seemingly carry out simultaneous monologues, even with certain situations or attitudes seeming to carry across from one play to another, without actually interacting in an obviously 'theatrical' sense – perhaps it's a formalised environment in a sense but the result, with both Beckett and Rebecca, has tremendous raw impact for exactly that reason.

“As I mentioned, Rebecca is very fond of sounds which appear from or disappear into nothing. The clarinet may be one of the instruments best suited to such a technique but that doesn't mean it's easy, especially when the sounds are so often combined with techniques which destabilise normal sound production – breathy sounds, fluttertongue and the like – and that was an enormous challenge to me when I started playing her music. Interpretatively for me the word would be 'stimulus' rather than 'challenge': I very much enjoy going where her pieces take me! I did have a few moments of worry when we were playing disclosure recently. The clarinet and bass clarinet sounds are really extremely violent, both in themselves and in the fact that they emerge so abruptly from what is often a very quiet background. I often needed reassurance that I wasn't taking the violence of the part too far.

“The main part of my playing in Chroma is in a trio with cello and electric guitar which also appears (in a different form) in insideout so I had already played it over a hundred times. The context is also similar in insideout: there are various other fragments of music which are overlaid but which aren't synchronised on a beat-by-beat basis: the fragments start at a given time (coordinated by stopwatch or in insideout by a central clock) but exactly how they unfold, for example whether climactic gestures are simultaneous or slightly offset, isn't fixed. That affects the way we shape the given gestures, so again there's a lot of listening – and even more in the other music I have in Chroma, which is a duet with another clarinettist I sometimes can't see!

“In Hannover we played the piece in the Gallery Building of the Herrenhäuser Gardens. I felt a little as though we were Baroque servants scurrying back and forth, or perhaps unusually lively sculptures. Maybe in Huddersfield Town Hall we'll feel like civil servants. Either way it fits with the nature of how the piece fits together – the formalised environment which forms a kind of background to most of Rebecca's music, I feel – and either way the nature of the tasks we're actually carrying out means there's no danger of us feeling too much like functionaries.”

musikFabrik perform Rebecca Saunders’ Chroma on Saturday 27 November and cinnabar and a visible trace on Sunday 28 November. Click here to buy tickets for the concerts.

Pulling threads of sound: Rebecca Saunders interviewed

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 10:07:59 +0000

Composer in Residence at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival for 2010, Rebecca Saunders was born in 1967 and initially studied music at the University of Edinburgh before winning a scholarship to study composition with Wolfgang Rihm in Germany.

Her large-scale work Chroma premiered in the Tate Modern turbine hall in 2003; a reworked and expanded version will be in performed by musikFabrik in Huddersfield Town Hall as part of hcmf// 2010. Saunders’ pieces cinnabar and a visible trace will also be presented by musikFabrik, whilst Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart and Frode Haltli will perform Soliloquy and ensemble recherche will present the UK premiere of her 2009 work murmurs.

Here Saunders tells hcmf// about her work and inspirations and reveals the challenges involved in realising a work as epic as Chroma…

What first drew you to composition?

I don’t really know when it happened, but I did write music as a child. In the year before I went to university, I didn’t travel the world like many of my friends; I sat at home, at the piano and wrote a lot of music. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but when I had time, and silence, I found myself writing. At university, I didn’t write very much, to be honest, perhaps there was too little time, and too little silence, but in my last year, I focused more and more on composition.

I had the good fortune to get a scholarship when I finished my degree in Edinburgh and just knew I had to study in Europe. It was a succession of completely intuitive decisions, really. I wasn’t aware of what I was doing, but at some level felt driven to move away and write.

What did you discover about yourself as a composer when you arrived in Europe?

I gave myself a year and I never looked back, really. I then applied for another scholarship for another two years so I could continue, and by studying with Wolfgang Rihm, found myself in an environment which was completely surprising and new to me; there was an enormous sense of freedom.

At the beginning, I could barely speak the language and the music I heard around me was new, everything was new. It was like going back to the beginning of everything. I would recommend it to all artists, just to step outside of their own culture and reassess themselves, their pre-conceptions, everything. It’s a wonderfully freeing experience and enables you to listen deep inside yourself, to focus in on your own voice and begin to decipher what is it you have to do.

Can you identify a particular work which felt like a breakthrough?

My very first lesson with Wolfgang made a big impression on me. I brought him the beginnings of a work for string orchestra. The writing was dense, and looking back, the fabric of sound I was working on in the piece was forced, and clearly not my own. He had already looked at some earlier studies of mine where fragile and quiet lines are juxtaposed. He took the first page of the score of the work for strings, turned it upside-down, looked at me inquisitively and said, “Bring me next week one tone.”

It was a wonderful moment, a liberating experience. No-one had ever before given me the ‘permission’ to rid myself of the superfluous, to work with one single sound and to let it emerge from silence. From that moment on, and for a long time to follow, each piece began with an empty page that felt saturated with silence, where each new tone that could be added to the page, must be absolutely necessary, carefully weighed and considered.

The first piece I wrote there was called Behind the Velvet Curtain – it’s a bit of a strange title, but it was because my teacher couldn’t speak English and I couldn’t speak German, and so we talked in strange images. And at the time it was a fitting method of communication.

Were there any ways of seeing music that you consciously reacted against during this time?

That’s a hard one to answer. I did feel very liberated, though, coming to central Europe and being in an environment where I didn’t feel as though I had to justify what I was doing, where I was taken seriously. The contemporary arts, including contemporary music, were seen to be necessary; one feels one is making a valuable contribution to the fabric of contemporary society, just by getting on with one’s work.

How do you gather your thoughts when approaching a new piece?

The key period, the most important moment, I think, is when I work with musicians on a one to one basis. I find it quite exhilarating to be exploring timbral palettes of different possibilities, to be able to immerse myself in the sound potential of an instrument. I have a great fascination for particular single instruments, like the double bass, the trumpet. And then I proceed by combining these individual palettes in unusual instrumental combinations.

From this basis, I begin to follow my sounds, to order and define very carefully the sound palettes with which I wish to work: what is really essential for this piece? What’s the core sound, the core intention? The essence of what I’m trying to do in a piece depends very much on the individual sounds that I felt drawn to explore at the beginning.

How do you incorporate outside concepts such as literary references into your work?

Well, to be honest, there are texts, there are writers, sometimes there’s a visual impression, which may play an important role, but essentially it’s the sounds themselves that define the work-to-be, that really influence what’s going to happen. It’s the physicality of sound, trying to transmit that across to the listener; I think that is more important to me than anything else. I am not a composer who wants or needs to deliver a philosophical message in that respect. For me, what’s really important is enabling the listener to feel the magical physicality of sound, the timbre, the colour, the mass, the weight, of sound. That’s what I feel I’m working with, almost like a sculptor works with different materials.

On the other hand, there are moments when reading, for example, the late Beckett novels, that I stumble upon some words, an expression, a seemingly perfect formulation of an idea, and I take this quotation and it may accompany a number of compositions. I am fascinated by Beckett’s language and his prose continues to accompany my present works. There is something terrifyingly perfect in his reduced and skeletal language. Despite the power of his writing there is a certain fragility and tenderness. And his language is of course impressively musical. His late works are a never-ending wealth of inspiration.

What does silence mean to you and how do you use it?

I do imagine often at the beginning of a piece, the empty A3 page in front of me. It’s almost as if it’s saturated with silence. If you imagine that silence is saturated with sound, as a composer you gently pull this thread of sound out of silence. You release it from this cacophony of silence; then releasing it and letting it disappear into silence again. That doesn’t mean that sound cannot also erupt out of silence, but it’s like it’s the canvas on which we paint. You have to feel the weight of silence, because silence can have different mass, play critically different roles within a composition. It’s quite important to remember that the notes themselves are probably less important than what happens before and after them.

Chroma sounds fascinating – could you tell us about the original idea behind the piece and how has it changed over subsequent performances?

In 2003 Chroma was premiered in the Tate Modern in the turbine hall, which is a wonderfully inspiring inner landscape. Originally seven groups, six of which were instrumental, and one which was then made up of 63 music boxes, were distributed throughout the enormous cavernous space. And now I have 20 different modules: it’s big, and 16 minutes longer. The last version was just last week, actually, Chroma XII, and the piece has grown again. I composed three new modules for Chroma XII and explored for the first time the transition from inside to outside, in the Baroque gardens at Herrenhausen in Hannover, which was quite a challenge, but also a fascinating new development.

The piece is longer and the form has become more complex. Chroma explores three different key issues: the architecture of the space, the density of the collage in the given acoustic, and the nearness or distance to the different music being performed. So firstly, it’s about entering into a dialogue with an architectural space, exploring and emphasising the particular characteristics of the space. The twenty modules or soli or ensembles are placed at different positions throughout the space; they are collaged according to a timeline, which is rewritten for each new performance. The solos, duos or trios play simultaneously; they play one after another; they reformat into different groups. There are also non-instrumental modules, such as a ‘60s record player and an antique gramophone. I now have 115 music boxes, which often occupy a central position. These act as a kind of objet trouvé inserted into the collage.

Considering how dense the collage can be in the given acoustic is also critical. How many different ‘sound surfaces’ – which is the terminology I like to use for the separately written trios, solos or the mechanical sound sources – how many can you hear simultaneously but so that each retains its individual essence? I have to know the space well to be able to construct a new collage. Often I write new sound surfaces to expand the collage, or may even reduce the amount of modules I use. I think the Town Hall is going to be an enormous challenge because it’s big. As it is important to stretch the space, and expand into neighbouring rooms and spaces, it is quite possible I may need to write a couple of new modules for this version, too.

Is it a logistical nightmare getting all the musicians to play at the right time and at the right volume?

Calculating the collage, exactly coordinating the vertical juxtapositions and order of the different groups is also a nightmare…. I have an assistant now, Mark Barden, an ex-student of mine, who has assisted me for the last five versions. The piece has become logistically so complex, that he has become quite invaluable.

Is everything controlled down to the last detail, or is there an element of chance and accident to the way the performance turns out?

Some modules are played freely. The majority of them, most importantly the original six which are the backbone of the work, these are very carefully juxtaposed. I calculate the position and length of the pauses, must know exactly which modules are vertically connected, consider the juxtaposition of the various tonal centres. Each musician has a stopwatch. So I do control pretty much every parameter. But there are some solos, particularly in the last third of the piece, which is very quiet and fragile, that are played completely freely.

And the audience can wander around during the performance?

Yes. And ideally chroma is played twice – although I’m not sure how it’s going to be done in Huddersfield – so that you then experience the piece from a completely new perspective. The listener is able very much to determine the listening experience. That’s the third point I wanted to mention: nearness and distance to the music. One can be very close to the musicians, be really within the music, feely move between separate sound surfaces. It is very physical; you can feel the wavelengths of the extremely low double basses in your stomach; you can see the sweat on their brow, the physicality of the performance itself, witnessing the gesture behind the sound. And also being able to hear different strains from afar, finding a place to listen, hearing five, six, seven different ensembles surfacing and disappearing. That’s an unusual listening experience, one that I find particularly exciting to explore.

What qualities do musikFabrik bring to the piece?

I love to work with this ensemble; they’ve played most of my work and we’ve worked together for many years. I trust them completely; they can pretty much do anything they want with the music and I know it’s going to be quite wonderful the way they perform it. I sense they know what I’m trying to say.

What demands do you think you make of the musicians you work with? You’ve mentioned a focus upon gesture…

It is fascinating to examine and to watch the relationship between the musician and his or her instrument. The gesture behind the sound; the physical intention behind it: to question that, to look at that. There’s a certain theatrical element, which I treasure. If you imagine a grand piano on a stage, it’s almost like a statement in itself, if someone is sitting there in silence just about to play: the lid opens; the foot upon the pedal; the hand raised. Or even just tiny elements: the weight of the bow on the string; the muscles stretching between the shoulder blades of an accordion player. This physical phenomenon of sound fascinates me.

Click here to see more details and to buy tickets for concerts featuring Rebecca Saunders’ work at hcmf// 2010.

2010: Rebecca Saunders

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 09:15:17 +0000

Born in London in 1967, Rebecca Saunders studied violin and composition at Edinburgh University, before putting her instrument to one side when she won a scholarship to Karlsruhe Music College, Germany, where she studied with Wolfgang Rihm. She returned to Edinburgh between 1994 and 1997 to pursue a PhD in composition with Nigel Osborne and currently lives in Berlin.

Saunders’ compositions feature sometimes unusual combinations of orchestral instruments with ones such as accordion, electric guitar and whistle. They range in size from pieces for soloists and duos to large-scale works, such as Chroma (2003, revised 2010) which at its hcmf// 2010 performance will feature 20 different ‘modules’ made up of solo or grouped musicians, as well as gramophones and music boxes. Her 2003 work insideout accompanied Sasha Waltz’s dance installation, whilst traces featured at the BBC Proms in 2009.

Saunders’ work has been recognised with many honours and awards, including membership of the Berlin Academy of Arts, the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival’s Paul Hindemith prize and the Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Award for chamber music in 2008. She has lectured at the Darmstadt summer school and was chosen as Capel-Compositeur (composer in residence) for Staatskapelle Dresden 2009–10. Her work is published by Peters Edition.

Rebecca Saunders biography and list of works on Peters Edition website

Sasha Waltz’s insideout with music by Saunders

Staatskapelle Dresden perform traces:

Part 1

Part 2

2011: Bent Sorensen

Thu, 19 May 2011 15:28:10 +0000

The Danish composer Bent Sørensen is to be Composer-in-Residence at hcmf// 2011, taking place this year from Friday 18 November - Sunday 27 November.

A wide-ranging programme of recent work by Bent Sørensen, revealing elements of the composer's work hitherto unfamiliar to UK audiences, extends throughout the ten-day festival.

The Sørensen programme is complemented by concerts, premieres and events featuring a spectrum of younger composers on the vibrant Danish new music scene. In the first year of his three-year association with hcmf// Jexper Holmen will write a new work for London Sinfonietta Chamber Players.

The Festival also welcomes some of Denmark's liveliest new music ensembles and performers, including Athelas - Denmark's leading contemporary chamber ensemble - FIGURA Ensemble with mezzo soprano Signe Asmussen and Ensemble Scenatet.

This major survey of trends in Danish new music is one of the key elements in hcmf// 2011. It is made possible by generous funding and close co-operation with SNYK, Wundergrund Festival, The Danish Arts Council, the Danish Composers Society and the Danish Arts Foundation.

The announcement was made by Festival Director Graham McKenzie at a reception on 16 May at the residence of the Danish Ambassador, Birger Riis-Jørgensen at which Bent Sørensen was also present.

Bent Sørensen programme

Bent Sørensen is one of Denmark's leading composers. Now in his 50s, he studied with Ib Nørholm at the Royal Danish Academy of Music and with Per Nørgård at the Jutland Music Academy. His music for chamber and orchestral forces is widely admired in Britain - he won the prestigious Nordic Music Prize in 1996 for his violin concerto, Sterbende Gärten - and he is Professor of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music.

'But there's a more experimental and conceptual side to Bent Sørensen's recent work which I wanted to present during this year's Festival', said Graham McKenzie, adding:

'My interest in Sørensen's work led me to discover other, younger Danish composers who are at the centre of Denmark's current vibrant music scene - many of whom are influenced by Sørensen's work - and so I decided to incorporate a more thoroughgoing Danish focus to this year's Festival.'

The opening concert of the Festival (Friday 18 November) is devoted to the UK Premiere of Bent Sørensen's It is pain flowing down slowly on a white wall, written for the Trondheim Soloists and accordionist Frode Haltli. The World Premiere takes place just weeks beforehand at Oslo's Ultima Festival.

There are five further concerts showcasing Sørensen's work, including Documentary Concert #1 (Saturday 19 November), a composer portrait performed by Ensemble Scenatet which includes a silent documentary film of the composer. The final concert of the Festival, (on Sunday 27 November) will include the UK premiere of Saudades Inocentes, a new work by Bent Sørensen and Anna Berit Asp Christensen for three generations of male singers - grandfather, father and son - guitar and accordion and a landscape of loudspeakers. This new work is commissioned and produced by SPOR Festival and hcmf//.

Cikada Point 4 (Norway) perform Processions Variations - improvisations around Sørensen's Funeral Processions in a late night concert on Monday 21 November, and there's another Sørensen UK Premiere from Cikada and Scenatet, joining forces for a spatial performance of Shadowplay (Tuesday 22 November), a tapestry of three trios.

hcmf// is also seeking ways to represent The White Forest, an extraordinary site-specific installation created by the composer and stage director Katrine Wiedemann in which eight vocal pieces by Sørensen were relayed through speakers hidden in a white-painted woodland setting.

Complementary elements of hcmf//'s Danish programme

A younger generation of Danish composers also takes its place in this year's hcmf//.

London Sinfonietta Chamber Players will premiere a new work for clarinet, viola, violin, cello and electronics by Jexper Holmen (Saturday 19 November).

The Norwegian Ensemble Asamisimasa presents On and Off (Saturday 26 November), a portrait concert of Simon Steen-Andersen, a former pupil of Bent Sørensen. Steen-Andersen combines wit and imagination with well-crafted ideas and an awareness of the visual element of music.

Ensemble Scenatet presents the UK Premiere of Fish and Fowl (Monday 21 November), a ‘super remix' of chamber works by Juliana Hodkinson and Niels Rønsholdt presented in the form of a live audio-visual story.

Denmark's leading new music ensemble, Athelas, presents Floating Messages and Fading Frequencies, a new work with strong Danish resonances by New York downtown star Annie Gosfield (Friday 25 November). The work is inspired by signal communications between the Danish Resistance and British SOE during the Second World War.

FIGURA Ensemble presents a spectrum of work by young Danish composers Peter Bruun, Anders Brodsgaard and Nicolai Worsaae, as well as the Icelandic-German composer Steingrimur Rohloff, who is composer in residence with FIGURA in 2010-2011 (Saturday 26 November). There are new pieces for ensemble and mezzo soprano, an expressive solo for double bass and electronics as well as a song cycle from Peter Bruun's award-winning work Miki Alone.

FIGURA members will also lead a composition workshop (Sunday 27 November) for children aged 9-12 as part of hcmf//'s imaginative Family Programme.

Further details of hcmf// 2011 will be announced in due course.

Find out more about Bent Sorensen

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 16:20:40 +0000

Visit Bent Sørensen’s official website to read his biography, listen to his music, browse through the gallery and find out about up and coming projects:

Learn why Bent Sørensen is considered “without doubt the leading Danish composer of his generation” in this article on the Edition Wilhelm Hansen website.

Listen to Bent Sørensen music and ‘Radio’ on Last.fm

Listen to full length versions of two of Sørensen’s pieces: ‘The Deserted Churchyards’ and ‘The Shadows of Silence’.

Reflections on Bent Sorensen

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 17:01:33 +0000

hcmf// Artistic Director Graham McKenzie reflects on the music of Composer in Residence Bent Sørensen ahead of the Festival...

I first came across Bent Sørensen's music in 1997 on Birds and Bells - a CD on the highly influential ECM New Series. At the time I pretty much collected everything released on the Munich based label irrespective of whether I had any prior knowledge of the artist or composer. Throughout the recording Sørensen plays continually with spatial depth in the music, inviting the listener to experience it from unusual and changing perspectives as glissandi sweep through the ensemble sound and composed ‘echoes' reverberate. The music is beautifully realised by the Oslo Sinfonietta and Cikada. Nordic Sounds commented - ‘Sørensen's music is dreamscapes without boundaries'. The track I kept returning to was Funeral Procession - slow and almost inaudible in places - there is a sense of compromised beauty about the piece. Like all of Sørensen's mature works it creates a strong sense of decay emotionally akin to viewing an aging artwork! I waited eagerly for further instalments from the Danish composer. Sadly nothing more arrived and gradually I lost contact with Sørensen's sound world.

I was re-acquainted with the composer and his music in 2007 courtesy of an invitation from the Danish Arts Council to attend the Bergen International Festival where Sørensen headed up a strong Danish themed programme. There I met Sørensen, found him to be engaging, found that we shared the same birth year, and hatched a plan to profile his work at some future edition of hcmf//!

Since that first meeting I have travelled to Denmark on a number of occasions to meet Sørensen and discuss his work, during which I have also become increasingly aware of an inventive and burgeoning music scene, involving a younger generation of composers and musicians, that seamlessly interconnects and flits between genres - much of it inspired by Sørensen,who is frequently cited as an influence. This cross fertilisation and experimentation in many ways seems to reflect recent developments in Sørensen's own practice. For a composer who has undoubtedly reached the elevated position of ‘greatest living composer' within his own country, I am astonished at the extent to which he embraces risk!

From the quiet, pulsating string quartets of the 80s, the 90s were largely dominated by large scale orchestral works, to be followed by Sørensen's self described ‘opera years'. The composer seemed to be following a well trodden path. Lately however he has diverted sharply and steadily built a more conceptually orientated and carefully curated body of work - perhaps best evidenced by The White Forest - an installation by Sørensen and stage director Katrine Wiedemann, in which eight vocal pieces by the composer - recorded by Theatre of Voices - are relayed through speakers hidden in a ‘white'woodland setting'. Sørensen is clear that he does not see this side of his work as some sort of distraction from the main event of his more ‘classical' composed works. ‘I don't want to make my music into a sound installation,' he says ‘I want a sound installation to be my music'! He is also strongly attracted to the durational possibilities offered by sound art - including permanence! He speaks of being deeply affected by the experience of returning to the concert hall to collect his bag shortly after a performance of one of his works, alone with the double basses and music stands, and wondering what remained of his music?

This growing flexibility to space and location however is also fuelled by a genuine desire for music to engage with a wider and more diverse audience - removed from the constrictions and conventions of the concert hall. He talks enthusiastically about his next project - a series of ‘backyard operas' - where the performance will take place in a back courtyard or square while the audience look on from the windows around the courtyard. In the second act audience and performers will switch locations, with the performers now visible in the open windows.

The perception of Sørensen is generally that of a solitary figure largely due to the pervading sense of melancholia and sadness to be found in much of his work. ‘Music is sorrow,' he says! Paradoxically as his current practice demonstrates - it turns out that he is the consummate collaborator! In his latest work Saudades Inocentes Sørensen has taken the relationship between artist and curator to its extreme conclusion, crediting writer and curator Anna Berit Asp Christensen as the co-author of the piece - ‘Anna and I were discussing some projects involving me as a co-curator and I asked her -Why is it always me who gets involved in your world of making programmes? Why don't you get involved in my world creating the pieces for the programme? A lot of the ideas regarding form, narrative elements etc - really came from Anna...'

The Portuguese word Saudades cannot be easily translated - it is often a desperate longing beyond that which cannot be reached. There is certainly no suggestion of desperation in Sørensen's music but there is a sense that he is still searching, still learning, and moving in directions that will surprise both him and us, for many years to come!

Bent Sorensen: Space to dream

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 10:55:06 +0000

“I think art is a way to create dreams which are eternal,” Bent Sørensen says. “I don’t mean that the music I write will be eternal, but when you sit down to write a concerto, you are free to dream that you’re going to live forever. Art is a way to deal with death.”

“To sit down in front of a new piece of paper is to start a new life, really,” he adds. “The music becomes like a diary and is infected with the things that happen around me.” Although Sørensen, the Composer in Residence at this year’s Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, may be the only person able to link each of his works to specific memories from the time he wrote them, his music has the power to cast a similar spell upon the rest of us. His soundworld is one of shadows and uncertainty, where microtonal shifts and delicate glissandi evoke a range of emotional states and where fragmentary melodies blur and decay like a series of half-remembered associations.

“For me to write a piece, there has to be some links which meld together without really having anything to do with each other,” he says. “That’s like living, as well: living is very much by accident and you can’t really control what’s happening. But then you think, ‘Why am I here right now?’ and it’s down to a lot of small coincidences and accidents, that certain things came together, and I’m always looking for that in my work.”

The opening concert of hcmf// 2011 features the first UK performance of Sørensen’s new work, It is pain flowing down slowly on a white wall, performed by accordionist Frode Haltli and the Trondheim Soloists. It’s the second piece that Sørensen has written for Haltli, after Looking on Darkness, composed for Haltli’s professional debut in 2000. In this case, the “small coincidence” which birthed the piece was a chance encounter when Sørensen was a guest of the Arcus Temporum festival in Hungary in 2008. A woman approached him and gave him a slip of paper with what would become the title of the piece written on it. “She said it was from a poem by a Hungarian writer, and that it reminded her very much of my music. I thought it was a very beautiful sentence, so I put it in my pocket. I knew that was the title. I have to get the title before I write a piece. It’s like naming a child: even if you name a child Brian and he grows up and you think he looks more like a Steven, you don’t change the name.”

Sørensen is unafraid to put emotion at the forefront of his work and It is pain... explores sorrow, a theme chosen from a story he was told by a friend, “about a girl who wanted to become an accordion player and was very talented, only she couldn’t play in the end because of problems with her back. I had this feeling of tears flowing down onto an accordion.” In Haltli, he feels that he has found a musician who can take his ideas from the page to the audience in the most direct way. “I asked Frode, ‘How does it sound when this accordion is crying? Can you make tears come out of it?’” he says.

“It’s the most clearly melodic piece I have written. But then I wanted everything to gradually disappear, because of this feeling of someone who couldn’t play the accordion anymore. Halfway through the piece, all the strings disappear, but then the orchestra start to sing and play on the melodica, so you have 16 melodicas and they drown the accordion. And as with many of my pieces, there’s a spatial idea to it. Frode is sitting in the back; he’s almost hidden in a way. There is one violin player at the other end of the hall, and there’s a kind of dialogue, a musical love story between the violin and the accordion.”

There’s a twist to the story, or as Sørensen might see it, an accident which reveals something else about his art: “The funny thing was that I went back to the same festival in Hungary this year and I met the same woman. I told her that I’d used the title for a piece and she was very happy. I asked her if she would find the poem for me and she said that she would translate it into English. The next day she came to me and she said, ‘I’m sorry, but it was actually not a white wall, but a red wall.’ And I said, ‘I don’t mind, because your line is better than the one in the poem.’ That’s very close to what creating art is about, because you have an idea and then it changes in the memory and becomes something different.”

As a young composer, Sørensen studied with fellow Danes Ib Nørholm and Per Nørgård, the latter known for deriving music from mathematical sequences through his ‘infinity series’. Earlier Sørensen works such as Sterbende Gärten (alternately The Echoing Garden or The Decaying Garden), Shadowland and Minnewater, with its subtitle, Thousands of Canons, explored repeating cells and proportions in ways that gave the works almost fractal-like qualities; but the composer says that such structures do not interest him so much now. He sees the creation of his first opera, 2004’s Under The Sky, as a turning point in his approach: “In the late ‘80s and the first half of the ‘90s, I was working with very strict form and rhythm. Then since the end of the ‘90s, when I started to work with music theatre and worked with text and dramatic forms, the timing became different, and I also started to think much more about spatial things.”

“I think I realised that all of my music up to my opera had some hidden film scripts, or theatre scripts or poetry in it. I don’t mind saying that my music is telling stories; it’s just that I don’t always remember what stories they are telling. Sometimes the best thing in music is that you have the freedom that you don’t always know what the story is about, but you know how you should tell it. You are speaking with a language which you may not completely understand yourself, but you are creating a story which is true.”

The Sørensen works programmed at hcmf// 2011 highlight this storytelling in space as well as time. Aside from the arrangement of the musicians in It is pain..., there’s Shadowplay, a concert in which Sørensen revisits three relatively recent trios for different combinations of instruments – Schattenlinie (2010) for viola, clarinet and piano; Phantasmagoria (2007) for violin, cello and piano, and Gondole (2010) for violin, viola and cello – and recasts them as one 15-movement work in Huddersfield Town Hall. Cikada Ensemble, Ensemble SCENATET and Trio Aristos will perform the piece, with one trio onstage, one in the middle of the audience and one on the balcony. “I always dreamed that one day I could put these three trios together in one concert,” he says. “I don’t know how it’s going to work. It’s a spatial piece, and it’s like a destruction, because they are three independent trios with five movements each, and by melding them together differently, you are destroying the original form. But I think the music should be good enough to survive that.”

Huddersfield also plays host to Snowbells, a new version of Den hvide skov (The White Forest), an installation by Sørensen and Katrine Wiedemann (who also directed the first performances of Under the Sky), which brought an unexpectedly wintry glade of snowy white trees and the sounds of church bells to a summer forest in Jutland. This time the forest is staying put – “In November, a white wood in Yorkshire is just ridiculous compared to summertime in Denmark,” Sørensen remarks, and judging by the freezing temperatures during last year’s hcmf//, he has a point – instead, his sounds will manifest themselves mysteriously from speakers hidden around one of Bates Mill’s industrial yards, a further move in time and space from the original source recordings.

The installation Den hvide skov marked Sørensen’s first use of prerecorded sound in his music: the second is Saudades Inocentes, a work developed in collaboration with Anna Berit Asp Christensen, artistic director of Copenhagen’s SPOR festival. “Anna Berit’s my experimental playmate, in a way,” Sørensen says. “We recorded her in a lot of situations – she’s always humming, so we recorded that, and her steps when she was walking – and other females’ voices, all the female sounds we could find in Copenhagen, basically.” These voices form a diffuse cloud which emanates from loudspeakers under the audience’s feet, whilst onstage, three generations of male singers: a grandfather, a father and a son, sing texts developed from the recordings. “It’s a lot about longing: they are singing to each other, but in a way they are in two different rooms.”

Sørensen credits his collaborations with encouraging him to expand his music into these new fields. “All the way up to the end of the ‘90s, I was basically working on music on paper. I love the loneliness, to lock myself in for days and months and work. And then when I started to work on Under the Sky, I suddenly started to collaborate with other people.” He adds, “When you need people from other artforms, you get inspired by them. But you’re also inspired by their artform. When I work with Katrine, I get inspired by theatrical elements. When I work with Anna Berit, a very strong curator who can put things together, I get inspired to work with different elements in new ways.”

Audiences can look forward to more collaborations and experimentation from Sørensen in the future. Whilst his immediate work plans still include several more traditional commissions for concertos, this year he has cut back on his teaching duties in order to have more time for projects such as the ‘backyard operas’ he has been developing with Asp Christensen, site-specific performances in unlikely locations using simple electronics, ghetto blasters and elements of text and movement. “I felt that if I continued with so much teaching I would only have time to write all those quite posh commissions, like the concertos. But I also want to work in a more experimental, underground way, which is what we’re doing with the backyard operas. We’re also doing some indoors concerts at the Bergen festival where we go into some famous people’s houses and change them into one big sound installation.”

He considers: “So that’s what I’m doing at the moment, a combination of classical and much more conceptual music. But of course, I want the classical music to be conceptual and the conceptual music to be classical. I can’t divide myself into different kinds of music; they have to be under the same umbrella.”

Click here for more details of Bent Sørensen events at hcmf// 2011 and to buy tickets:

Snowbells, Friday 18 November then throughout the festival

Trondheim Soloists + Frode Haltli, Friday 18 November

Dokumentary Koncert #1, Saturday 19 November

Cikada Point 4: Improvisations on Bent Sørensen’s Funeral Processions, Monday 21 November

Shadowplay, Tuesday 22 November

Sørensen/Nono/Haas, Sunday 27 November