Lars Petter Hagen is a Norwegian composer still in his thirties. I had
not encountered his music before. I have returned to this disc several times
over the previous three months in an attempt to gain a greater understanding
of this body of work before writing this review. The failing is all mine I
am sure, but I cannot get a ‘handle’ on the music and as a
consequence no revelatory doors have opened for me. The liner accompanying
the disc a general essay titled
Auferstanden aus Ruinen (risen from
ruins - crudely translated) and a transcribed conversation with the
composer. Both are reasonably interesting and a good starting point
regarding the underlying philosophy of the works but the complete lack of
any detail regarding any of the music severely impaired my ability to
comprehend what I was hearing.
There is a Hagen ‘sound’ for sure. This is overtly
contemporary music which while by no means rejecting tonality
per se
chooses to embrace it - wholeheartedly on occasion - as fits a greater need.
There is a very static quality to the majority of these scores. The analogy
that struck me repeatedly was of musical mobiles; phrases or instrumental
groups slowing rotating in a larger space. On occasions these groups overlap
and interact. Within each group Hagen uses bare ‘simple’
intervals, whether consonant or dissonant, but the interest is generated
when the overlap cause further resultant ‘harmonies’. He also
juxtaposes pure electronically generated tones with the more complex yet
still pure sounds of, say, string and harp harmonics or bowed vibraphones.
There is a Satie-esque stasis which I found hypnotic at times but ultimately
too unrelenting and grey.
The disc opens with
Norwegian archives. Here, live playing is
set against a tape of ‘old’ recordings of an orchestra and
electronics. The electronics create an effective halo of extra-orchestral
texture around the sound blurring the ear’s ability to identify quite
what is playing what. Hagen gives the five movements very specific titles
but I’m still struggling to understand how the titles relate to what
you hear. Indeed if your attention wanders it is very easy for one section
to have blurred into the next with next to no differentiation. Another
characteristic is the emergence of what one might call super-consonance
suddenly from a passage of resolute dissonance. These tend to be a sequence
of chorale-like chords which have a pure “white-note” consonance
of Copland-like naivety. Such a passage in the second movement
6
Hymns immediately precedes a recording of distant hymn singing. Its
rather atmospheric; like hearing a church service relayed over a bad radio
from across the road and down the street … but I’ve no idea what
it means. The following movement confuses me even more - over a held
drone-like open fifth on the violin a sheep bleats five times. This movement
is called
A play about melancholy. I suspect we are meant to laugh
with Hagen; certainly on first unprepared hearing it’s
something of a shock. Like most gags, the more you hear it the less funny it
becomes. The closing movement -
Funeral Marches - in turn closes with
over a minute of an old orchestral recording - of what, I do not know.
This is what Hagen writes in a note about the work on his own
website:-
“From writing in a post-serial, complex style I have in recent
years turned to working more and more with documentary material. It is
important to me that the music sounds somewhat untreated, so that the
collected material presents itself in its most reduced form. I like to think
of the form as a sketch book. The five movements of this work are various
archives of ”found objects”, all of them having originated in
works by the above-mentioned composers [Edvard Grieg, Gerhard Schjelderup,
Edvard Sylou-Creutz, Signe Lund, Geirr Tveitt and Harald Sæverud].
Some are straightforward harmonic reductions, like slow, unfinished
chorales; others are archive recordings from Norwegian radio, quoted
fragments from the Norwegian (and German) orchestral heritage, or
re-syntheses of Norwegian folk music. In addition I employ temperaments from
two traditional Norwegian folk instruments: seljefløyte and
langeleik, a wooden flute and a string instrument.”
I quote that at length because although specific to one work my
sense is that the philosophy applies to much of the rest of the disc too.
The next piece is
The Artist’s Despair before the Grandeur of
Ancient Ruins. So there is clearly a thread coming through now - of
memory, decay and heritage. The thing is to the ear it sounds remarkably
similar to the preceding work. Again musical mobiles slowly turn and
consonance appears from behind clouds of dissonance before disappearing
again. The work ends with another curious disjunction; suddenly we get a
strange full orchestral ending … well not really full. The middle of
the orchestra has been disembowelled leaving high string harmonic chords
over a
fff parping contra-bassoon and a simple tonic/dominant timpani
figure; it’s a curious echo of the end of Mahler’s Third
Symphony. That’s a similarity I noted before reading Hagen’s
assertion in the liner that “my postulate became to accept the
impossibility of writing better orchestral music than Mahler. The history of
the orchestra after Mahler is a ruin.” I’ll pass that thought
onto Ravel, Bartók … add any of a hundred names.
The
idea behind the third work,
Tveitt-fragments is
rather neat. As is reasonably well-known the composer Geirr Tveitt suffered
a creative catastrophe when his home burnt down destroying literally
hundreds of unique and irreplaceable scores. Hagen has created a work using
literal burnt fragments - samples are reproduced in the liner - which show a
chord here, a key-signature there. The result sounds, again, remarkably
similar to the other works. By now it seems clear Hagen doesn’t do
rhythm once one excludes the chirruping synthesiser figurations that inhabit
some of the scores. I do find myself wondering why one calls a piece
Funeral March if there is no element of a march to be heard. By all
means call it funeral
music or reflections on a funeral march but by
now - an emotion repeated on every listening - my frustration with this
music is building. Which is slightly unfortunate since I have not reached
the work that initially piqued my interest in requesting this disc to
review.
The idea of a contemporary idiom work, using a
‘classical’ concerto form showcasing a definitively
‘folk’ instrument - the hardanger fiddle - seemed like an
intriguing prospect. There’s fine playing from soloist Gjermund
Larsen. The clashing dissonances with the fiddle’s drone strings give
a clue to Hagen’s fascination with microtonal overlapping motifs.
Again, once one strips away the embellishing figurations of the solo part
and the sputnik-like electronic interjections the music is nearly wholly
static. The term ‘concerto’ seems something of a red-herring.
For sure the instrument is pretty much ever-present but as an integral part
of the overall texture rather than a leading line. Much more bizarrely,
around the nine minute mark, the music is interrupted. At that point we are
given a recording of the speech the composer gave at the work's premiere in
English together with a German translation. This is overlaid initially with
a birdsong track. The German translation is not such a thing - it wanders
off on a different thread which since I do not speak German - and there is
no translation of the translation (!) again I am left bemused as opposed to
enlightened. Gradually the predictable bell figures on harp and percussion
return under the text so that the music slowly returns to centre-stage. Once
again there is almost no variation in the style of the music and the work
limps to its end with little impact and no sense of completion or closure. I
am very loath to be negative about any music I feel I do not understand but
this is operating on a level to which I do not respond. I doubt I ever will.
The entire disc suffers from rather an unatmospheric recording.
Without being able to see scores my feeling is that the dynamic range of the
recording has been lifted and constricted. Surely, there are a greater
nuanced range of quieter dynamics requested than we are given here. One can
turn down the volume from its usual setting but then the whole sound picture
recedes. Clearly, no comparable recordings exist. That said, as far as one
can tell these seem to be highly competent performances. They are limited
only by the cramped recording quality and the limited emotional landscape of
the music. The booklet is fine and the photographs of the Tveitt fragments
are the most intriguing element. Personally I rarely find composer
conversations bear much repetition and this is no exception. The notes are
written in English and Norwegian. The disc is presented in the increasingly
popular cardboard gate-fold format with the liner booklet tucked into a slot
inside. Pictures include moody shots of a snowy train station and
down-market pizza establishment; as with the music no context or explanation
is given. Again, my suspicion is that there is a belief that some
sophisticated form of post-modern irony is at work here but it’s
beyond my understanding.
Sadly, this is music I find as unremittingly drear and dull as the
images that adorn the disc's sleeve.
Nick Barnard
