I first heard Ensemble Adapter play at a festival they held in 2006 in Reykjavík called Frum. It became an annual festival, and I attended every year they held it. The festival took place in the early summer, which was before the rise of tourism, a rather difficult time for events in Reykjavík, as a lot of potential audience members were already out and about. Despite this, they gathered a small but dedicated following who showed up regularly at their concerts.

Back in 2006, most contemporary music being performed in Reykjavík was either local or from other Nordic countries. Anything from beyond Scandinavia tended to fall under the category of “lighter fare” (with notable exceptions of course).

Ensemble Adapter stood out, not least for the caliber of their performances. I didn’t know them at the time, but I always made sure to be in town when the festival was on. I think I did not miss a single concert, ever. Their festival was a chance to hear long Feldman pieces, a whole concert of solo pieces by Franco Donatoni, and music by Aperghis, Christian Wolff, Emanuel Nunes, and Yuji Takahashi. They would also play pieces by younger composers, some local to Reykjavík, but mostly from Berlin, which has always remained their hub. They would later do a CD of Bunita Marcus’ Music for Japan, which was a great inspiration for me.

During my studies at Mills College, percussionist William Winant once encouraged us young composers to write only for ourselves and our friends “as every great composer ever did” and not bother chasing after large ensembles. In many ways, I have followed this rule. However, as time has gone on, some accomplished musicians such as Ensemble Adapter have become my friends. Which doesn’t mean that I’m not scared every time I work with them, but as Sir Simon Rattle once put it when he was asked if he was scared to take over the Berlin Philharmonic, “of course I was scared, I would have been a fool otherwise.”

Ensemble Adapter premiered my piece Draumbót at Frum Festival in 2010, and I had never at that point experienced a such a thorough rehearsal process. When I was invited to the rehearsals, they were already well prepared and had very precise questions and enjoyed asking the composers involved about all kinds of details. Every ensemble is different, but they are definitely more on the “work closely with composer” side.

To my great surprise they were able to take the piece not only to Viitasaari in Finland for the Time of Music Festival but also to Copenhagen that same summer. I had the opportunity and the good fortune to attend all these performances, and each time I was invited to rehearsals and asked different, specific questions. This was a wonderful opportunity to see the interpretation of my piece evolve over several performances with the same people, each performance only a month or so apart.

By 2010, having already attended their festival four times, I was starting to become a familiar face, and I had become better acquainted with them through some mutual friends. I was given the chance to write a piece for them, and of course I accepted. I was quite nervous as I understood that they were very good musicians, even if at that point they weren’t yet the new music celebrities they would later become.

Needless to say, I had a great desire to work with them again and write more pieces. It wasn’t to happen for another decade or so, as they got pulled into the epicenter of the new music world, first on the European mainland and then elsewhere as well. They did, however, adopt and adapt (no pun intended) one piece I wrote for my group Fersteinn, Kvartett No. 7, and toured with it all over.

I have a faint recollection of applying for a residency in Berlin right around the beginning of Covid. In the application I outlined an idea for a collaboration with Ensemble Adapter for a piece that I called Clavis Metrica. It was basically the same idea as the current piece, but I envisioned it as something shorter at the time, under 20 minutes. 

My application didn’t get accepted, but during Covid two members of Ensemble Adapter moved to Iceland and we re-visited the idea of writing this piece. I described the idea in more detail, and Gunnhildur Einarsdóttir and Matthias Engler told me I could make it longer if I wanted to. We had an event in mind, but everything kept constantly changing in this era (2020/2021), festivals were cancelled or postponed, etc. Nevertheless, I started working on the piece, and for a year and a half I didn’t work on much else (as I mentioned in my last post). 

Despite the odds, the concert did happen on October 14th, 2022, in Gamla Bíó. If you’ve seen the Icelandic film Grand Finale from 2024, it is about a chamber ensemble giving a performance in the same venue, but luckily it was nothing like that.

The concert was performed by the four original members I had written the piece for and worked with closely. In the lead-up to the rehearsal process, I really wondered if this star ensemble that had played all these fancy festivals in Europe and elsewhere had changed their approach. To my great surprise, they were even more diligent if anything, and I experienced nothing but good vibes and utmost professionalism through and through. Not only did I attend rehearsals, but there were also multiple rehearsals at the venue itself. This gave us the chance to experiment with and re-arrange the seating plan of the musicians, as we found out that what worked in the rehearsal space was not ideal for the concert venue. I could arrange all the speakers, which were under the audience’s seats during the performance, and get a strong feeling for balance and so on. 

On the day of the concert, Kristjana Helgadóttir, the flautist, had fallen ill or come down with something. Apparently, in their world there was nothing else to do but to take a few tablets, drink some herbal tea, and start playing. The woodwinds play almost the whole time, with lots of microtonal accidentals and delicate extended techniques and rattles on their feet, and it all turned out splendidly. More than that, something just really happened during the performance, there was this feeling of utmost concentration. It was a full house and an amazing success in every way. I was absolutely thrilled.

Afterward, once we heard the recording, Gunnhildur Einarsdóttir expressed the idea that we could possibly even release this recording. Not only that, but they mentioned the possibility of pitching it the Austrian label col-legno. We looked into it. The performance was great, no doubt. Luckily, it had been recorded on multitrack with good microphones for Icelandic national radio (RÚV). There were, however, loud fans in the background, coughs, and various unwanted noises on these recordings, and one of the loudspeakers with electronic sounds had some issues. Working with Jesper Pedersen, we were able to eliminate all kinds of unwanted noises, and I was able to reinforce the electronic components in ways that I wanted. A lot of work went into tweaking the sound and the cleanup, but there were no edits, and what you hear on the CD is this live concert. With Þorgrímur Þorsteinsson handling the finishing touches, I am quite pleased with the outcome.

This concert turned out to be one of the last concerts that Ingólfur Vilhjálmsson and Kristjana Helgadóttir played with Ensemble Adapter. I have nothing but gratitude for how they performed and how it all turned out when so many conditions could have made everything go sideways.

But here it is, the album is out, it all happened. Thank you!

Clavis Metrica took me a year and a half to write. Some might say that the basic skeleton of the process is about as interesting as a tax report. These were by far the most rigid constraints I had worked with in a long time, at least on the surface. The meters of traditional Icelandic poetry are no more rigid than, say, counterpoint. To a casual listener, their definitions and explanations may seem rigid, but the complex meters of rímur developed over a long time and in conjunction with people who have a natural feeling for them, meaning that they have come to feel natural for people immersed in its world.

There is a centuries-old literary genre called háttatal or háttalykill in Icelandic. The genre has its roots in the Latin clavis metrica (roughly, a key to meters). The most famous one from Iceland is Snorri Sturluson’s Háttatal, composed in the 13th century. Many others have been written since then, which together form a vast catalogue of meters originating at different times. My initial plan was to be all-encompassing, going all the way back to the medieval Scaldic and Eddic meters. (Side note: Scaldic poetry is an amazing term. It means “poetic poetry” to my ears. It’s like Naan bread, Chai tea or Salsa sauce.) I soon realized, however, that medieval Icelandic meters imposing restrictions on my musical language weren’t restrictive enough, or it would force me to be too random. In other words, it would sound like modern music. Many composers have found inspiration in this material with good results, yet it did not serve my purposes. I wanted something that would evoke the hypnotizing effect that I have experienced from some rímur performances or simply reading or singing rímur out loud, especially at the point at which the words themselves become hard to follow and the bragur itself shines through. The bragur is, for lack of a better term, the meter, yet the word does not sound technical or mechanical at all and can sometimes mean the “feel” of something.

Poetic rhythm or meter is not the same as musical meter or rhythm. For me, a poetic rhythm in musical terms means phrase structure, whereas poetic meter means basically “repeated but variable patterns of emphasis and coloration,” and that is what I’m working with in Clavis Metrica. I work with meters that appear in the 14th century, flourished in the early modern period, and had a late great flowering in the 19th century but continue to be used to this day.

Clavis Metrica started as a kind of a joke, the idea of making a piece that was a sonification of the Icelandic rímur meters, a sketch of a very raw, bare outline of various meters played one after the other. Like a lot of ideas, it started to germinate and take root in my sketch books. Some of my pieces have started as an idea in a sketchbook even a decade before I really start working on them, and that was the case with Clavis Metrica.

Once I knew that I would have a large canvas and very good performers, I could take this idea wherever I wanted. The big question remained of how these meters, so closely associated with words and narrative, would become instrumental music. The piece contains five main sections, roughly speaking: an introduction and four main parts. The criteria for interpreting these meters changes in each of the four main sections, as does as the instrument leading the meter.

After the introduction, the harp leads the main syllable count, with percussion emphasizing alliterations, while the winds hocket in a way that differentiate between strong and weak syllables. At any point where the meter calls for rhyme, they play simultaneously and repeat the interval the next time the same rhyme-ending or syllable appears.

In the second section the percussion leads the syllables, and alliterations and rhyme are stated by the harp and percussion. The winds are merely decorative in this section.

The confusing motive in the winds becomes the driving force of the third section, which behaves similarly to the first, with winds driving the syllables forward and percussion and harp emphasizing rhyme and alliterations.

In the last section the harp pronounces the syllables, while the winds do the alliterations and percussion does the rhyme. This way, we gradually cycle through 20 primary meters and 5-10 variants of each.

At the premiere the audience was handed this Clavis Metrica along with the regular program notes. The Icelandic names of the meters and their variants are highly specific and have no obvious equivalents in any other language, so I haven’t translated them. Google thought that frumbakumsneitt was a “prime rib cut”.

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}The Clavis Metrica of Guðmundur Steinn{ – }Click here for Overview{

Introduction

Stuðlafall – samrímað

Stuðlafall – samrímað, mishent

Stuðlafall – samrímað, framhent

Stuðlafall – samrímað, frumframhent, bakhent, kurlað

Stuðlafall – samrímað, frumframhent, bakhent, síðhent

Stuðlafall – skárímað

Stuðlafall – skárímað, frumframsneitt

Stuðlafall – skárímað, frumþrísniðþætt, fimmsneitt

Stuðlafall – frárímað

Stuðlafall – frárímað, framrímað

Vikhent 

Vikhent – frumframhent

Vikhent – frumframsneitt

Vikhent – vikframhent

Vikhent – framhent

Vikhent – bakhenduvikað

Vikhent – vikbakhent

Vikhent – vikbaksneitt

Vikhent – vikstiklað

Vikhent – vikstímað

Ferskeytt

Ferskeytt – frumframhent, hálfhent

Ferskeytt – frumsamframhent

Ferskeytt – framhent

Ferskeytt – víxlframhent

Ferskeytt – afhent

Ferskeytt – hályklað, bakhent, fagriháttur

Ferskeytt – fráhent

Ferskeytt – þríkveðið, oddskipt

Ferskeytt – sléttubönd, hringhend

Stikluvik

Stikluvik – sexstiklað, sexþættingur

Stikluvik – sexstiklað, vikframhent, nýstikluvik

Stikluvik – sexstiklað, vikframsneitt

Stikluvik – þríaukrímað

Stikluvik – þrísniðstiklað, stiklusneitt

Stikluvik – þríhent

Stikluvik – þríþráhent

Stikluvik – þríhent, vikframsneitt

Stikluvik – hringhent

Gagaraljóð

Gagaraljóð – frumframhent

Gagaraljóð – framhent, fortaksháttur

Gagaraljóð – bakhent

Gagaraljóð – frumhent

Gagaraljóð – víxlhent

Gagaraljóð – víxlhent, hályklað

Stafhent

Stafhent – framhent, háttabönd

Stafhent – missamframhent

Stafhent – bakhent

Stafhent – framsneitt

Stafhent – misafturbrugðið

Stafhent – misaukrímað

Stafhent – frumstiklað, þríþættingur

Samhent

Samhent – framhent

Samhent – framsneitt

Samhent – frumstiklað

Samhent – frumstiklað, síðframhent

Samhent – frumstiklað, síðsamframhent

Samhent – misaukrímað

Samhent – aukrímað

Stefjahrun

Stefjahrun – frumframhent, vikivakalag

Stefjahrun – frumhent

Stefjahrun – víxlhent

Stefjahrun – hringhent

Stefjahrun – framrímað, svifhent

Stefjahrun – frumstímað

Stefjahrun – samrímað

Valstýft

Valstýft – frumframhent

Valstýft – frumsamframhent

Valstýft – frumframsneitt

Valstýft – hályklað, frumsniðstímað

Valstýft – frumstímað

Valstýft – uppstiklað

Valstýft – frumstiklað, glingurlag

Nýhent

Nýhent – framhent, síðaukrímað

Nýhent – frumbakhent, síðaukrímað, skárímað

Nýhent – hringhent, bakhent

Nýhent – sniðaukrímað

Nýhent – sniðvíxlhent

Nýhent – sniðstímað

Nýhent – fráhent

Breiðhent

Breiðhent – frumhent

Breiðhent – víxlhent

Breiðhent – hringhent

Breiðhent – oddhent

Breiðhent – breiðsamhent, áttstiklað, jafnhent

Breiðhent – breiðsamhent

Breiðhent – breiðsamhent, aukrímað

Langhent

Langhent – frumhent

Langhent – víxlhent, skrúðhent

Langhent – hringhent, velstígandi

 Langhent – oddhent, flughent

 Langhent – oddhent, síðinnhent, draugalag

 Langhent – samrímað, áttstiklað

 Draghent

 Draghent – frumstiklað

 Draghent – frumstiklað, síðbakhent

 Draghent – oddhent

 Draghent – fráhent

 Draghent – fráhent, síðbakhent, veltilag

Draghent – þríkveðið, þrístikla

Skammhent

Skammhent – frumhent

Skammhent – víxlhent

Skammhent – hringhent, glæsilag

Skammhent – oddhent

Skammhent – víslþráhent

Skammhent – frumframhent

Skammhent – síðbakhent

Skammhent – fráhent

Úrkast

Úrkast – frumframhent

Úrkast – frumsamframhent

Úrkast – frumbakhent

Úrkast – síðtvíþætt

Úrkast – víxlasneitt, frumhent

Úrkast – fráhent

Dverghent

Dverghent – frumframhent

Dverghent – síðtvíþætt, glettulag

Dverghent – frumhent

Dverghent – innbrugðið, bragarós

Dverghent – alrímað

Dverghent – frumstiklað

Dverghent – frumstiklað, síðtvíþætt

Dverghent – fráhent, ljúflingsháttur

Braghent – samrímað

Braghent – samrímað, frumframhent

Braghent – samrímað, framhent

Braghent – samrímað, frumframsneitt

Braghent – samrímað, framsneitt

Braghent – samrímað, frumbakhent

Braghent – samrímað, síðbakhent

Braghent – samrímað, bakhent

Braghent – samrímað, frumhent

Braghent – samrímað, samhent, skjálfhent

Afhent

Afhent – frumframhent

Afhent – framhent

Afhent – frumframsneitt

Afhent – framsneitt

Afhent – frumtvíframhent, síðframhent

Afhent – frumtvíframsneitt, síðframsneitt

Afhent – bakhent

Valhent – samrímað

Valhent – samrímað, frumhent

Valhent – skárímað

Valhent – skárímað, sniðsamhent

Valhent – skárímað, síðhent

Valhent – frárímað

Valhent – frárímað, frumþrístiklað, síðstiklað

Valhent – rímvikað

Valhent – rímvikað, framrímvikað

Stúfhent

Stúfhent – framhent

Stúfhent – samframhent

Stúfhent – framsneitt

Stúfhent – samframsneitt

Stúfhent – hringhent

Stúfhent – frumhent

Stúfhent – fimmstiklað

Stúfhent – frumbakumhent

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So, 172 stanzas all in all.

The rest has nothing to do with Icelandic poetry other than my obsession with small intervals. The piece uses an animated score (as is usually the case), and each of the musicians sees the whole thing. Electronic sounds are played from the same devices that show the videos (which are never visible to the audience), and during the performance, small electronic loudspeakers are placed under the seats of some of the audience, and some electronic sounds are coming from there and others are coming from similar speakers on the stage.

All of the players use both hands, both feet and their mouth during the performance. Winds use foot rattles and percussionist and harpist play various whistles and in the case of the percussionist, harmonica (retuned). None of them really gets very much of a break for a total of 46 minutes. It is an immensely virtuosic piece despite its calm surface.

About the tuning, the harp is tuned into a just intonation scale, using various proportions deriving from the harmonic series. It uses A flat as the fundamental. The harp pedals are used, but only in the highest and lowest position, as this way I could easily approximate various related pitches (for nerds only: as the major second is the fifth of the fifth or 9/8 with only a total of 3 cent error, which is tolerable). The lower strings of the harp have preparations such as hair clips and bells.

The percussion is mostly non-pitched except for a re-tuned harmonica, which I have become quite proficient at tuning with a nail file over the years (destructive, one-way). Actually, as I was writing this I had this sudden “oops, do I know where this harmonica is at this point?” moment. It took me quite a while to get it just right. Anyhow, the percussionist also uses his feet with two bass drum kickers on (a) a cardboard box and (b) a large temple block.

The woodwinds are playing microtonal approximations of the harp scale and more. Like a lot of my pieces, they read microtonal accidentals of a 36-tone equal temperament (meaning that between each of the notes on a piano there would be two more notes), so lots of notes. Given the abundance of keys on modern woodwind instruments, one can usually find a suitable approximation, but these are by far the most demanding parts I have written using this approach.

The way Clavis Metrica is written is very optimistic (hard to play, that is), but I knew exactly who I was writing for and that the piece would be in capable hands. I therefore felt like I had the dream assignment – large canvas and the best possible materials and people to work with. In a long process like this, a lot of things can go wrong, and even if the piece is technically working out a lot of things can go all sorts of ways in performance, rehearsals, reception, framing, and even advertising/attendance etc. The chances of embarrassment are always great for everyone involved (makes you wonder why anyone does this king of thing in the first place). But more about how it all turned out in the next chapter.

Whenever I say “rímur” and “kvæði” are poetry I feel like I’m lying. So many things about this tradition are so easily lost in translation and, as I have gradually found out, are often quite misunderstood by the average Icelandic person today. 

When I say the word “poetry” in English, people probably think of something romantic, artsy, highbrow, etc., whereas this tradition that we are talking about included EVERYTHING. Rímur and various related traditions with overlapping stylistic elements would include any topic covered on Netflix and also ones that would not be allowed even on Netflix. It was the Icelandic people’s primary form of entertainment and art for at least 700 years – if not longer. Gossip, praise, women, tobacco, alcohol, coffee. Verses to remember one’s way between farms, pornographic jokes, ways to entertain oneself when on a boat, on a horse, during roundup, while drinking with friends. Most famously, long epic poetry: stories that were more than an evening’s length of half-sung, half-spoken material. The word “söngur” or song/singing was all but reserved for what one did in church. The “rímur”/“kveða”/“kvæði” type of “song” and its many variations and cousins were the dominant art forms. Needless to say, when people had so few distractions in their lives other than poetry, poetry developed into a language of its own, and its embellishments became so elaborate that to this day it is almost impossible to translate most of it into any other language. Ironically, the most elaborate effort to do so has been with some of the poetry of Jónas Hallgrímsson, who is Iceland’s most beloved romantic poet and who is also often portrayed as the archenemy of the traditional rímur style. Let’s look at an example from this website, translated by the late Dick Ringler:

Út um móinn enn er hér engin gróin hola, fífiltóin fölnuð er; farðu’ í sjóinn, gola!

Heath and howe are bare and bleak, here no flowers revel; daisies cower, wan and weak — wind! you sour devil!

This is a ferskeytla or quatrain, which is also hringhend (I’ll get to that later). This is the most common of the traditional meters from the 14th century onwards. What exactly makes it a quatrain/ferskeytla? Well, first off, there is the infamous 7/6/7/6 syllable count for the lines (see the musical examples in my last post with the ⅞ ¾ ⅞ ¾ rhythm). For some languages this would be enough to make it metered poetry, but not here. It also needs to rhyme. For a ferskeytla, every other line rhymes with every other line. Also (and this is arguably an ancient and somewhat unique feature of germanic poetry), you have to include alliteration: two words in the first line of a couplet and the word at the beginning of the second need to start with the same consonant, unless you want to go the easier route and fall back on vowels. Any vowel can alliterate with any vowel. This pattern is repeated in the second couplet or second half of the stanza. Some meters are also very specific on which beats these alliterating words are to be placed, musically speaking – typically the first and third syllable of first line and the very first of the next, although there are some exceptions. This was not thought of as enormously complex but rather standard. For a nineteenth-century audience, this would simply be the most basic criteria for something to be even considered a poem or “bound speech” (Icelandic bundið mál). This particular example is a hringhend quatrain, which means that the third syllable in each line also rhymes with all of the others.

By the time I was 24, I had developed quite an interest in this subject and had been searching for nonconventional means of conceiving of and notating rhythm. After having been introduced by Charles Ross to the music of Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, which was a revelation, my curiosity towards the music of an island I was more familiar with was re-kindled. When I heard that an old teacher of mine had received a grant for folk music research, I contacted him and asked if he needed minions for this project. He accepted me into this project, and that summer I learnt a great deal about this subject and started reading whatever there was to read about this subject, scanning old manuscripts and listening to many hours of these performances for data entry.

Later, I was offered to transcribe folk songs for the Iðunn society. I ultimately transcribed 160 folk songs for what was to become volume II of their collection, The Magnetic Tape Collection.Eventually, I discovered the research of Svend Nielsen and then the book Kvæðaskapur by Hreinn Steingrímsson, two radically different studies that both seem to contradict the ideas most people have about traditional Icelandic folk songs. Others have argued that the style most suitable for performing longer pieces of epic poetry involves a lot of not only improvisation but built-in variations within the song. On top of that, Hreinn argues that the pitch relationships of a song could also expand and contract – both in a single performance and between performers performing the same song. According to Hreinn, what defined the song was primarily its contour rather than a melody of specific pitches. These ideas and the recordings I listened to at the time were to prove very influential on me.

Listening to these taped performances opened further up gateways for me in terms of rhythm. Ideas of pitch and harmony or the looseness and relativity of it have been an endless source of inspiration for me, but one feature that didn’t immediately find its way into my music is the hypnotizing effect of the meter. After having listened to countless hours of this music, it finally occurred to me that, even though we talk about meter as a poetic, prosodic, structural, stylistic element, it is in my opinion first and foremost musical (in the modern sense of the term), meaning it has to do with sound patterns. Repeated over and over in a long string of stanzas, these patterns become very hypnotizing and somehow stimulating at the same time, like a good cup of tea.