Lífið lotnast á leynda þrautarbraut. Högg skár í dýfu þegar snellfynns skel heggur í mót þorstann á Hamranesi hratt neðan við niðurgil. Grýtlu ljúfan og væti hart að engjinaðri skoðun Hersteins á myrkri tepórlíu – hvenær sem hann svo fór endanlega með hana. Lífið hlotnast þeim sem við stundir stynja – grýta og hrynja – liggja í lagi í mjúku horni – þurrka stafi og nógum kolli. Braut skar á brynju, leggur ljúfhöggan niður andlitið og spornar við steytu á mjólkurbílnum – þrotlaust.
My slight return to the US
A friend wrote an email and asked me if I could come in a month to play in upstate New York. The time frame was a bit short. I asked another friend if he wanted to put together a band to play there but he suggested perhaps a different timeframe. I agreed. Snowball started rolling and all of a sudden we had a band – a tour and some University lecturing engagements – all lined up.
I set out to create a supergroup with people on the east coast that I knew. I used to play in a band with Liz Meredith called Satellite with Travis Johns also, a long time ago and I wrote a piece for Shayna Dunkelman a long time ago, Jonathan Pfeffer I had known since 2011 and we had met in Iceland and had various correspondances about art and music. They have all done all kinds of projects since the last time I met them all. Shayna even played with Yoko Ono, to name just one from her very impressive list of previous collaborators. Liz has been very active in the improv scene in and around Baltimore and has two solo records on Spleen Coffin under her belt.
We got the gigs lined up and I sent materials along so that rehearsals could go smooth. To my surprise Jonathan volunteered to help a lot with setting up the gigs and such and happened to have enormous experience in setting up shows and lots of other things which came in very handy to say the least. I knew the people and trusted them musically even though we were only going to have limited rehearsal time before our first show I was convinced that this was going to be a good band, and I was right.
I flew to the states on November 5th. I stopped at Shayna’s place in NYC and after a delicious dish of huevos rancheros in a neighbourhood Mexican cafe we headed over to Philadelphia where we met Liz Meredith and Jonathan Pfeffer, rehearsing at the latters apartment.
Philadelphia
The first gig came the day after at the Rotunda hosted by The Fire Museum (November 7th). Without realizing it I had performed 14 years earlier in a concert hosted by Steve Tobin of The Fire Museum, and even stayed at his house then. Also I was traveling with Liz Meredith again this time. Strange co-incidence I hadn’t foreseen as I didn’t know about this connection with Steve Tobin. We played after Ben Bennett who did an amazing set of solo percussion improvisation that left everyone in awe.
Washington D.C.
The following day we took the Amtrak down to D.C. (we traveled light). There we performed at Rhizome along with the Pique collective on November 8th (yes election day in D.C., can you imagine?). This is an amazing venue – a beautiful house, a gallery and all kinds of things at the same time. It’s an old house that feels threatened by all the luxury condos rising up very quickly on either side of it. It is very central in various overlapping experimental music, poetry and art scenes in D.C.. It’s run by very generous and wonderful people and they have very cool T-shirts which we all had to get.
Me and Jonathan stayed with a friend of his who is a serious big time international reporter. He took us for another dosage of some wonderful huevos rancheros in a breakfast place that was beside this club which is pictured below. Those who know the history get the joke.
Baltimore
We took the Amtrak back North up to Baltimore and got ready to perform at the Red Room (on Nov 9th) which, for those that don’t know, is a very well known venue, especially relating to improvised music but also various other experimental forms of music making and is connected with the High Zero Festival. This amazing composer called Samuel Burt was our host so to speak – as they are a collective, and most concerts are from what I understand on some one persons responsibility. Good system I think.
Our opener was improvising singar Bao Nguyen who is an incredible vocal improviser. Incredible performer overall with a great stage presence. It was a great honor to do a collective improvisation in the end of the concert. This apparently is a tradition in the Red Room, that all the performers that played that evening, regardless of style or background, do one collective improvisation. What great times.
The Big Apple
I’ve traveled enough in the States to understand that as far as gigs in New York go – always expect the worst (sorry). I don’t mean the crowd but . . . for example, when scouting out for gigs we got a lot of stange offers, pay to play, something seemed to be working then canceled and one very interesting reply that was like “I don’t like it – but if you can come up with a convincing strategy to bring in a minimum of 50 people you’re in”. Didn’t sound fun.
But Jessica Hallock with NYC-Noise was open to it and offered us to perform at the Ridgewood Presbytarian Church. I envisioned a deconsencrated old church or perhaps one of those small storefront churches you see people screaming and falling into oblivion – all of which I’ve seen and even attended in America. This was not the case.
We entered a “just renovated” super clean and nice church – splendorous, in fact, despite the Calvinist modesty. The church people were very nice (yes some were present) and the host/promoter, NYC-noise, had lots of volunteers running around to make sure that we were sounding good and feeling good. Pizza and club soda catering. Very nice. Not what I expected in New York.
The crowd was great, the opening acts were great – Madison Greenstone filling the space with circular breathy huge multiphonicky extravaganza that sounded like some of Hendrix’s finer moments on pause/hold/freeze – but all with one acoustic clarinet (if acoustic clarinet was not a term, it is now, just for emphasis). Kwami Winfield also did a splendid – microphone stuffed into a trumpet crazy noises extravaganza that came out wonderfully in that space.
Usually I prefer dryer spaces for my own music – but the resonance was good – sound didn’t disappear into a clouded muffledness but had a clarity and precision it seemed despite the reverbaration.
Apart from going to a Korean late night restaurant with Liz and Tim there was not much time to party afterward. I had to get up early the next morning to go to Ithaca. A lecture in Cornell at 1:30 pm after 4 hours of sleep and a 5 hour bus ride in the morning.
Ithaca
My friend Travis Johns who, as a matter of fact, was the instigator of all this (the guy that wrote the first email), recieved me at the bus stop – all suit and tie very clean and tidy looking – looked like the man I had always known but with a professor Johns aura (I was wearing the same clothes from the gig the night before, T-shirt with potato chips crumbled all over it). I asked him if I cold at least change my clothes somewhere before the lecture. He and his wife Paulina (a great visual artist) took me to the famous Moosewood restaurant, which was right by the bus station.
It slowly dawned on me that this wasn’t Travis’s usual professor look but he was merely putting on a play in order to make me slightly nervous.
Before entering the lecture hall Travis put on Bring the Ruckus by the Wu-Tang Clan and I felt that was fitting. I was ready for the grill, ready to be cooked up or even eaten raw by the Cornell composition students. Turned out the were very friendly. No ruckus needed – no beef – all vegetarian and just very nice and interesting questions and conversations. The “kids” are alright.
Marianthi Pappalexandri-Alexandri, who was my host -formally speaking, also had lots of interesting thoughts and reflections on the various subjects. To my great surprise she was aware of the work of Goodiepal. Why wouldn’t she?
We manage to recruit one of the students for a gig the next day. John Eagle is his name. On Saturday November 12th me, John Eagle, Travis Johns and the animated notation giant Ryan Ross Smith put together a concert of animated notation “cult classics” in the Soil Factory which is an enormously intersting venue.
It is a place where heavy duty academic people from different fields along with heavy duty non academic people meet and host art exhibits, concerts and various get togethers. Most of said get togethers revolve around climate related topics and more specifically often soil related topics. In other words the toilet was very organic – they practice what they preach. This felt like a place where things are actually happening – I felt I was walking into something historical in the making. I encourage anyone to check out this place and the people affiliated with it if people find themselves in Ithaca for whichever reason.
Ryan is an old friend. He has been in Iceland a couple of times. We are part of the world wide animated notation hang but he more then anyone else in that “field” has been very close to the Icelandic scene for a long time. There is a special affinity between his work and the S.L.Á.T.U.R. community and also it helps that we both went to the same school although not at the same time.
Binghamton
On Monday the 14th I went down to Binghamton to give a lecture at SUNY Broome which is where Ryan Ross Smith currently teaches. I lectured on animated notation and related topics – same slides as the Cornell lecture. The students were mostly students in recording technology but we had great discussions and manage to play a part of a score during the lecture.
Binghamton, like Ithaca is located in a beautiful hillside, forested upstate New York area and has a lot of old historical buildings. It has a seemingly different economical situation than Ithaca for instance you see ads in the bus shelters about joining the U.S. Air Force – which I didn’t see anywhere else that I went. Having been in various places in the States, this doesn’t surprise me, unfortunately. Yet it is a very charming town that left a very deep impression on me and the students seemed very nice.
During the end of my stay in Binghamton, me and Ryan discussed some big plans, big big plans. (More on that later).
After a brief stop in NYC eating Dosas in Jackson Heights with Shayna’s boyfriend Sree, I went to Princeton NJ.
Princeton
My host in Princeton was Jeff Snyder. First I did a brief lecture in his class. The students were there for max/MSP, pd, interactivity and various advanced computer music topics. They were coming from music and/or computer science from what I understand. They seemed to follow quite well despite the seemingly fast pace of the class. I watched a few students present collaborative projects using max/MSP, many of which were quite intruiging and impressive.
In the evening I got to hear the PLORK or Princeton Laptop Orchestra rehearse, including one of my pieces. To my great surprise they didn’t only play laptops which is an element that Jeff Snyder introduced into the group (what, acoustic instruments?) and they did a great job. Also two student pieces were being rehearsed which sounded very good and had complicated technology and some deep conceptual dimensions seemingly. One of the pieces had the stage covered in strings that interacted with the computers and the performers made geometric shapes with them. The other had a bunch of piezoed Ukuleles beefed up and feedbacking intentionally, which was quite up my alley in some way (the ukulele part for sure).
Me and Jeff tried to find places to eat after the rehearsal which had gone over time. He suggested we’d go to his place. It was quite an adventure to see where he lives, he has a small setup there in addition to the very impressive facilities he has on the Princeton campus. In both places he had a studio setup and some instrument building – things in the making. He is a fascinating artist and a human being.
His dog potato greeted us and he made some soup and salad and we sat on his porch overlooking his pedal steel in the living room. We talked about Susan Alcorn and other virtuosi of the pedal steel guitar and the wonders of the instrument. His knowledge of the subject is very impressive.
The last night was the only night I got to stay at a hotel, or more specifically some hotel like facilities in the Princeton Seminary. It was a short night because I had to go all the way to JFK airport and had back home to the land of Ice the next morning. I made it back and now I’m here. I had such a great time on my journeys but oh boy was I tired.
Can’t wait to do it again though!
29 Gígjas in the Faroe Islands
After the premier of Horpma III (for 27 plucked string instruments in just intonation) on the first Tectonics Festival in Harpa in the year 2012 me and Halldór Úlfarsson met and talked about specifically designing semi-homogenouse instruments for this or a similar purpose. Instead of having a vast array of plucked string instruments of different shapes and sizes getting in each other way because of differences in dynamics and articulation we imagined having simple instruments with controlled mini differences manufactured by us and the performers in a maker lab of some sort.
Over the years between failed grant applications and opportunities that didn’t quite pan out as we hoped, this idea was still very much in the air between the two of us and we would discuss it every time we met and a very prototype version of these instruments eventually appeared in my opera Einvaldsóður in 2017.
Long story short, the long awaited opportunity arrived to do our large piece with students of the Glasir Gymnasium (or high school) in 2020. Our idea from the very start was always to include:
- amateur musicians in a large group
- cheap “ingredients”
- a manufacturing process that could be done relatively quickly in any part of the world given that it had a maker lab
- Use fruit cans as resonators and have the participants eat ice cream and canned fruit as a part of the process for making the instruments
All of this and much more came into the world a year later than planned, in this last September (2021) in Tórshavn in the Faroe Islands. We had the opportunity to work with the in-house Fablab master Jan Hellisdal McIntosh and he was extremely competent in the task and generous with his time and resources.
Students assembled the instruments with nylon fishing lines, screws from a hardware store, as well as laser cut cheep MDF “wood” and 3D printed plastic bridges. Then they cleared out the cans quite professionally just as planned. Then each of them decorated the instruments however they wanted.
Once the instruments had been made the big question still remained. Will 29 people, most of which are completely uneducated in music, be able to learn how to read my animated score and play a 3 string instruments after very little rehearsal time.
What can I say, the musicality of these students surpassed my greatest hopes and I’m a very optimistic man (otherwise I wouldn’t have ventured into this in the first place.
So hear you go 29 Gígjas performing Dhorpma I – Sálarró at the Glasir Gymnasium on Nordic Music Days September 3rd 2021:
Landvættirnar – fjögur tónverk frumflutt – þrennir tónleikar í Mengi
Landvættirnar eftir Guðmund Stein Gunnarsson í Mengi laugardaginn 6. febrúar klukkan 20, sunnudaginn 7. febrúar klukkan 20 og miðvikudaginn 10. febrúar klukkan 20.
Miðaverð 2.500.- Bókið sæti á booking@mengi.net
Landvættirnar fjórar er setta af fjórum sjálfstæðum en samliggjandi verkum eftir Guðmund Stein Gunnarsson. Tilurð verkanna hefur átt sér nokkuð langan aðdraganda.
Deilt hefur verið um hvað landvættirnar tákna og sú spurning er skoðuð í tónum og hljóði. Var það Snorri Sturluson sem bjó þá til? Eru þeir eldri og af erlendri fyrirmynd? Tákna þeir eitthvað annað? Eða eru þeir hreinlega til í raunveruleikanum og goðsögnin þar af leiðandi sönn?
Verkið er yfir klukkustund að lengd en skiptist í marga undirþætti. Flytjendur leika allir á fleiri en eitt hljóðfæri og stöku sinnum fleiri en eitt í einu. Tónverkið notast við hreyfinótur sem eru vídjó á tölvuskjá og ná þannig að framkalla ýmis konar hikstandi hrynjandi og jafnframt einhvers konar dáleiðslu.
Verkið notast við tónstillingar sem byggja á náttúruyfirtónum og smástígum tónbilum. Með þessu er framkallaður ákveðinn seiður sem líkist hefðbundnum íslenskum kvæðasöng á köflum.
Flytjendur verða Kammerhópurinn Steinalda sem í eru:
Þórunn Björnsdóttir, Steinunn Vala Pálsdóttir, Ásthildur Ákadóttir, Andrés Þorvarðarson, Óskar Magnússon og Páll Ivan frá Eiðum.
Verkefnið er styrkt af Tónlistarsjóði Menntamálaráðuneytis, Átakssjóði Tónlistarsjóðs vegna Covid-19 og Starfslaunasjóði Listamanna 2019.
Hlekkir fyrir hvern viðburð fyrir sig hér að neðan.
∞ ∞ ∞
Landvættirnar by Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson in Mengi; Saturday, February 6 at 8 p.m., Sunday, February 7 at 8 p.m.
on Wednesday, February 10 at 8 p.m.
Ticket price 2,500.- Book a seat at booking@mengi.net
The four land wights are mysterious creatures – they appear everywhere in modern day Icelandic culture, on the parliament building, in soccer tournaments and on the Icelandic coins. A coat of arms for a country without an army. They are said to reside in each of the quarters of the country, protecting it. Nobody knows where they came from, why they’re here, and overall their origins and history is a subject to debate to say the least. Why are they still considered so valuable to this day then?
A set of four suites, one for each of the four land wights is going to be performed by a new experimental music ensemble called Steinalda. It’s composer Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson has been working on it for quite some time now. It’s a piece that explores nuances in everyday objects as well as traditional instruments. The musical language is very experimental, but this time around, if anything, melodic.
Links to each event:
Laugardaginn 6. febrúar kl: 20:00
https://mengi.net/events/2021/2/6/landvttirnar-gumundur-steinn-gunnarsson-amp-steinalda
Sunnudaginn 7. febrúar kl: 20:00
https://mengi.net/events/2021/2/7/landvttirnar-gumundur-steinn-gunnarsson-amp-steinalda
Miðvikudaginn 10. febrúar kl: 20:00
https://mengi.net/events/2021/2/10/landvttirnar-gumundur-steinn-gunnarsson-amp-steinalda
The Barrels and the BBC
I met Halldór Úlfarsson in 2003. Then he had just made his first “punk-fiddle” which later evolved into his famous Halldorophone. In 2013 however, he introduced me to a piece of equipment called a 3d printer. To me it was a hilarious device because I had been thinking that in the future people will simply buy a toothbrush online and print it out. The future was already here.
We talked about what we could do with a 3d printer in relation to musical instruments. We thought about digital routers and laser cutters also. All of these eventually found their way into our collaborations.
After I had slept on the concept of 3d printing though, I felt that the clarinet barrel was a piece that was an “easy target” so to speak, in order to transform a traditional instrument into something slightly different. Perhaps something very subtle however, almost like a trumpet mute.
Little did I know that a student at the Iceland University of Arts had approached him with exactly the same observation. He happened to play the clarinet. Þráinn Hjálmarsson was involved as well and we got busy right away. We got to the drawing board and almost immediately started printing out experimental versions.
The first ones were way too grotesque, too extreme and some where not very helpful to tone production of any kind. Already by version 3 however, we found something that I immediately fell in love with. We started developing version 3 into 3.1 and so on until we got to 3.2.1. By then I was satisfied and wanted to use this particular barrel in a piece that I was writing. By now it has appeared in 8 of my pieces so far.
What touched me about the 3.2.1 was that it had a very subdued timbre and made the interval structure of the instrument narrower in a non-linear manner. A lot of my music had been dealing with some sort of subdued timbres with melodies and counterpoint of narrow intervals. For instance Helfákn:
I am a part of a composer collective in Iceland which is called S.L.Á.T.U.R.. It was at its peak of activity in those days. We had many annual, monthly and sometimes weekly events in this period, public or private. The one that usually drew the biggest crowed though, was our New Years concert. We decided that we would do the 2014 new years concert with people writing short pieces for a clarinet quartet with 3d printed clarinet barrels and other variations. It was a success, now we had created not only weird clarinet barrels but a musical repertoire.
This was the start of a busy year – a year in which I traveled more than I have done previously or since. I also wrote several pieces – many of which use 3d printed clarinet barrels.
Starting with the 2014 S.L.Á.T.U.R. New Years Concert, the pieces I wrote are called Skrund 1, 2 and 3 and they were performed as interludes between other pieces (yes perhaps those 3 were just one piece – a matter of definition, 3 individual stück nevertheless).
Then there were the 5 Norræn abstrakt verk (or 5 Nordic Abstract Works) for solo clarinet written for Ingólfur Vilhjálmsson from Ensemble Adapter. Then I wrote Siglitør for the Norwegian Ensemble Tøyen fil og klafferi and the first out of four in a particularly fruitful collaboration (which also includes Hyglitør, seen and heard below).
This fall also had the premier of the biggest piece I had done using my preferred method of notation, namely animated notation. Conductor Ilan Volkov had taken over the baton of the Iceland Symphony in 2011. All of a sudden there was a leading figure in the Icelandic music establishment that was not only open to experimental music but had primary enthusiasm for not just new music in general but experimental music in particular.
There were many collaborations that Slátur did with Mr. Volkov during his stay in Iceland and at one point he had asked me if I wanted to have a piece on a concert that he was setting up in Glasgow. He mentioned my piece Laur but after talking I expressed my wish to write something new. When I asked about the instrumentation of the group he told me that it was the BBC Scottish Symphony. Yikes.
Big opportuinites tend to bring out the most conservative. I was aware of that. A lot of interesting composers write less interesting pieces for orchestras for some reason. For me comfort and compromise would have been betraying everything I believe in so I decided to write this piece as if it was the last piece I would ever write. Plus, I had already once written a more traditional orchestral piece mainly in order to get some grip of its machinery in case such an opportunity would rise.
I worked on Sporgýla in 2013-2014 in parallel with the other pieces I already mentioned. I also had a part time job as a museum guard at the time. There was a lot of juggling. I wanted to have the barrels in there. I wanted to use animated notation. These were to things that I needed to “sell” the people at the BBC so to speak. One out of two would have stopped most orchestras from performing it.
How would I bring my vision to a full orchestra? It was a problematic medium for me in many ways. Incidentally I met with a lot of musicians in Iceland, many of whom were in the Iceland Symphony to talk about various techniques. The individuals are always great even when the group tends to be a bit politically, well . . .
When I arrived in Glasgow my first mission was to introduce the clarinet barrels to the clarinet section as gently as I could. It’s not that there wasn’t skepticism but the principal clarinetist was particularly tolerant and collaborative which was key. For a musician of that caliber it’s not a given to want to be seen with a see-through plastic, or even green or yellow instead of a proper looking barrel on the instrument.
My second mission was to get the screen technology working for 6 groups, 36 musicians in all. This was the part that went cuckoo. In short, the piece was going to be the starter of the concert and the computer synchronization failed – on stage. We had to try again after intermission by starting manually by cue (which is a practice I have found myself doing increasingly over the last years). My synchronization had worked the same way for 8 years and never failed. With changes in recent operating systems due to security reasons, things were no longer the way I was used to. No more excuses, my bad. On second try, however, it sounded this way:
I was fairly pleased with the performance despite of it all. I don’t think the BBC SSO administration was happy about this whole thing however. They remained polite nevertheless as they are all nice people. Things like this are common place in S.L.Á.T.U.R. performances in Reykjavík but are seldom seen on the global orchestral stage. If a conductor drops the baton, the performance doesn’t stop. If a violist breaks a string, the performance doesn’t stop (both of these things happened in the same concert). These are important considerations and the streamlined orchestra machine is a lot to compete with. The barrels performed splendidly however despite some quirks they still had – the players handled them well.
In the end of the year I wrote a piece for Ensemble Crush from Duisburg for the Winter Akademie in Schloss Benrath hosted by Gerhard Stäbler and Kunsu Shim. The clarinettist of the group Kyusang Jeong was thankfully very open to this. This piece also used the 3D printed clarinet barrels. This was a memorable event as well, and luckily no fiasco.
For some reason I haven’t used the 3d printed clarinet barrels since, but I’ve sent the “recipe” to several people who are interested in developing this idea further. The plan has been to go deeper into this at some point, we’ll see. Perhaps we will go deeper into this project again – we had a lot of ideas we still haven’t tried out. We are interested in seeing other people develop these ideas for their own purposes as well. We want to try making the barrels with other materials as well. Remaking other parts of various wind instruments is also an option but this is a larger assignment. In some ways it opens the woodwind instrument up as a modular phenomenon like a modular synthesizer or a chain of guitar effects pedals. One could imagine students having crazy 3D printed additions or substitutes on their instruments to switch around play with (in every sense of the word play). These technologies have a lot to offer which we haven’t even started to scratch the surface of and inevitably it will influence a lot of things musically in the years to come as I believe it already has done in various other fields.
Music Video
. . . and there’s a music video! Sam T. Rees (or studio CAPS LOCK ON MY BLACK HOLE) made the cover to the sinfonia L.P. and CD on Carrier Records + numerous other of my records on Traktorinn.
On Sinfonia (4th mov. – The People)
Ensemble Fengjastrútur on the evening of March 8th 2019 premier and the recording session two days later, consisted (as usually) of an eclectic combination of very talented individuals, each with an interesting and wide background.
Each one of them is a great artist and it was a truly wonderful experience to work with them. Only a tiny little aspect of each performer is present on this recording because there is so much to say about each one of them:
The Winds
Þórunn Björnsdóttir is a multidisciplinary artist. She studied Sound & Vision in the Hague, has published poetry done various types of compositions and performance pieces but is also a serious recorder player and teacher. She has been a member of Fengjastrútur since the very beginning. She has also written pieces for Fengjastrútur on other occasions.
Páll Ivan frá Eiðum is also a multidisciplinary artist. He is a composer, for instance of works with animated notation and has written many for Fengjastrútur for instance. He’s a painter, a “pop” musician, a video artist, a sound artist and a political satirist of sorts. He is also a very talented multi-instrumentalist with a great ear and very dynamic in all kinds of ensemble interactions. We’ve been very much together on this journey since 2002.
Björn Davíð Kristjánsson is a flautist of a higher order. He taught my sister how to play the flute (yeah, Iceland) and he is an overall very likeable human being. He has performed with the Icelandic Flute Choir since the beginning and countless other groups and ensembles.
Percussion Section
Ásthildur Ákadóttir is a pianist, a composer and a multi-disciplinary everything like many others in this group. She was in Pascal Pinon, which was a successful indie rock band which toured the world a few times couple of years ago. Like many other people performing in this group she could probably have been in any role and done it equally well.
Gunnar Grímsson is the only member of Fengjastrútur to have met John Cage. He studied electronic music in Utrecht in the 80’s. He has been a primus motor in Fengjastrútur since the beginning and I can’t remember any Fengjastrútur performance that he wasn’t in. He has also been important in the Reykjavík improvised and electronic music scene and has been part of the group Jói á hakanum. He’s also a web developer and an activist.
Andrés Þór Þorvarðarson is a composer and a percussionist and has been in various bands such as Milkhouse and has been active in the Reykjavík arts collective Post-dreifing. When I met him for the first time in many years I was trying to remember where I knew him from. He greeted me with an apology and reminded my that he had been in the most difficult class I ever knew when I was teaching music theory in Hafnarfjörður music school. Interesting! I don’t know how many teachers, including ones in higher education deserve my apology, feel free to remind me, anyone. Anyhow, this consummate gentleman put the dishes in the dishwasher in the studio and turned it on – unasked. I think that was a great contribution to the studio owner saying: “you guys can come back anytime”. Thanks Andrés.
The Strings
Hafdís Bjarnadóttir is a composer, jazz guitarist and painter. She has written for orchestras and ensembles and has also been an active performer in Fengjastrútur and many other groups and ensembles. She has released several albums that reflect her eclectic nature as an artist. And yes, she also knits and knitting patterns sometimes find their way into her compositions.
Svanur Vilbergsson is a highly esteemed classical guitarist. He studied in Escola Luthier in Barcelona and in the conservatories in Hague and Maastricht. He has been a driving force in the ensemble Stirni and The Icelandic Guitar Trio. Also he has performed with The Caput Ensemble and done plenty of solo and duo concerts both locally and abroad.
Hallvarður Ásgeirsson is a composer and improviser. His output spans the broad spectrum between contemporary composition – free jazz and rock. He also performs with the Mantra band. We played together in the Bulgarian folk music group Stórsveit Nix Noltes. He has been active in Fengjastrútur throughout the years, yet another great example of the ecclecticism in the ensemble in particular and Icelandic music life in general. I have been performing with him all kinds of things, improvised or otherwise since last century. He brought me into the free improvisation at a young age.
The Engineering/Production team
Jesper Pedersen just released a record on his own. Read my liner notes about him there. He has been an integral part of “my sound” (so to speak) since Horpma I. He works with modular synths, animated notation etc and has been very active in S.L.Á.T.U.R. / Fengjastrútur and all this since his transmigration from Denmark to Iceland in 2009, although he was probably actively participating in all of this earlier.
Katrín Helga Ólafsdóttir or K.óla, like Andrés is a part of the Post-dreifing collective. She is a composer, singer, producer, engineer and well – performance artist. She is a rising star on the Icelandic omni-arts scene but on this record she was mostly on the buttons and using her very precise ears.
So a very talented and ecclectic group full of multi-talents and flexible musicianship. I have worked quite frequently with Fengjastrútur throughout this last decade and as I say I have worked closely with a lot of these people for a long time. Therefore there are a lot of unwritten things in the score that go without saying. They understand my aesthetic. It was remarkably easy. We had a very nice and quick professional recording session in Masterkey Studios in Seltjarnarnes. The group sat in a circle, just like Buena Vista Social Club, there was good atmosphere and they were tight.
The concert in Mengi two days earlier was also an adventure. There is a cat that frequents concerts at Mengi. According to co-ordinator Ragnheiður Elísabet Þuríðardóttir, the premier was the first time the cat sat through a whole concert.
On Sinfonia (3rd mov. – Art Works)
The Worcestershirean artist Sam T. Rees and I have worked together for a few years and we’ve made some record covers together. Well, it’s his record covers, I only make the sound part. He does his best work unobstructed (like most artists). The artwork is Art Work or works of art.
He is an enthusiast of print, ink and obscure old, rare DIY methods that never really caught on. He has an eclectic collection of obsolete printers, digital, analog, non-electrical, gelatinous or fully vegan. Some date back more than a 100 years, others (the one we use the most for instance) only 70. He appeared on Icelandic television once:
3d design indeed. I came into his studio one day discussing the prospect of the sinfonia project. He already had some ideas. He showed me anonymous 70 to a 100 year old drawings that he had ordered on ebay for less than 10 quid each. We wondered if they are faked or if they could be, if they are actually that old. They did a good job of making them look old so we figured that if somebody went through all the trouble to fake them, a) they did a good job and b) they would probably want to make more money off of them.
Why he bought these items in the first place I don’t know but they had this strange aura, like going to somebody else’s great grandparents drawers to find embarrassing doodles that were never meant to be seen publicly perhaps. I feel a bit guilty now that I say that. Nevertheless, the artists are anonymous to us as they are to the potential buyers of our record.
The elephant man on the front cover is such a drawing. I love it. Additionally there are trains and a princess of some sort. We both have a love of trains, and so does my son. Old obsolete train tickets have featured on our CDs before.
Up until now we’ve mostly done CDs but this time we’re doing vinyl for the first time. It is quite pricey but each “copy” is entirely unique, both the covers and the records themselves as each is recorded individually and everything is done by hand in Iceland – there is no getting things from overseas and sending them to overseas etc. The cover the records, the cd’s and everything are made by artisans and artists in Iceland (and yes Sam is usually based in Iceland but is currently trapped in England).
Me and Sam both agreed of the success of Lárviður by my band Fersteinn, the whole record inside and out.
But I find Sinfónía to be a high point of our collaboration so far as it is the result of a long-term collaboration.
His artworks are very unique, prints and dystopian installations of various robotized found objects etc. A sense of a dark but humorous but creepy eerie-ness seems to cloud everything he does, which might give one a totally different perception of what a consummate gentleman he is in person.
He works a lot with re-used materials – as a matter of fact, the vinyl covers themselves, are re-used. If you look inside each sleeve, you will find which record this sleeve used to cover, before it was inverted.
On Sinfonia (2nd movement – Music)
The Fengjastrútur concert in Mengi was going to have several older pieces and maybe one or two new ones. The new one grew into a symphony of sorts. Consequently there wasn’t room for anything else on the program. As is the case with many other recent works of mine, this one deals with four elements, sequentially and/or simultaneously.
For most of my concert music animated notation is a de facto thing. It has become my vehicle to express the kind of rhythmic elasticity that the music needs. There really is no other way and it is a thing of its own. Off course the music has grown in symbiosis with it as is the case with any form of notation – years of trial and error have guided me figuring out what is realistic within this medium. The score is a video file. It is fixed. The musicians and I are the only people who get to see it usually, unless you search for the scores online at home. As an audience you cannot see them in concert. The presentation is simple, almost traditional.
Everybody (the 9 musicians that is) is sitting around a table. There is a variety of instruments, 3 groups of 3. Flutes/recorders, plucked strings/harmonicas, percussion and everyone has some other sound making devices as well. The plucked strings are tuned 1/6th of a whole-tone (33cents) apart (very small intervals). The same is true for the harmonicas although they and the bottles are the only instruments that play in the strict just intonation version of the 36 note in an octave scheme (imagine a piano with 3 times the amount of notes if your unfamiliar with this kind of talk). So many notes spread narrowly, not exactly evenly and not exactly not. The recorders and flutes approximate according to 1/6th tone symbols.
Back in 2006 my backpack was stolen from a hotel room in Denmark. It contained two important things. My first laptop (which luckily did have the most important stuff backed up elsewhere) and the Ratio Book, which I had borrowed from Áki Ásgeirsson and never seen a copy of anywhere since. The book was about ratios and music with the proceedings from some conference in The Hague or something like that. There was an article by James Tenney which opened up my ears and mind to the two-sided nature of note relationships – the relationships of short notes vs. the relationships of long notes, as I see it. In other words, the ear is more specific when it has more time and more vague when it has less time. When it has little time it likes to recognize the contour and rounds things of to the simplest common denominator (or simplest similar ratio) but with more time you get higher resolution and a more specific and subtler sense of, well, harmonicity.
A mind blowing discovery for me. I had started reading Partch at 20. It was kind of him to write Genesis of a Music for that exact purpose, as he himself said, so that one wouldn’t have to start from scratch like he did. Back to Denmark in 2006, I heard a lecture by Tristan Murail where he played a fake piano sound, based on sine-waves, rounded off to 1/8th of a tone as is a common practice in France nowadays. It sounded right to me. Confirmed what had Tenney said.
This opened me for the possibility that intonation is first and foremost a practice, not just a relationship of fixed entities. My inquiries into traditional Icelandic rímur folk song only strengthened my conviction. The hotel lobby had a internet machine for customers. I had to use it to check my email. A friend had sent out an email saying that James Tenney had just passed away. I was deeply saddened even though I never met the guy, such an enormous everything, great composer, theorist and many other things.
Tenney had guided my view a little further. Intonation is a practice. Just intonation is a moving target or that is to say physical instruments are moving targets. The longer the notes the more relevant it is. Are the Harmonicas therefore not tuned the same as the guitars in Sinfonia? What about the flute and recorders? It depends on how hard you blow into the harmonica, where exactly, and how hard you press the string on the fretboard. Your embrochure and fingering on a wind instrument will vary, as will the instrument. The performers are asked to listen and find a soft landing spot somewhere around there, if they don’t hit the just intonation target, they will hit one of its neighbors. Growing up in a culture that had no resonant spaces for centuries makes one think of pitch as a continuum and rightly so because there is no fixed point in space.
On Sinfonia (1st movement – History)
Sinfonia for Ensemble Fengjastrútur
Sinfonia is a symphony of sorts, written for the experimental music ensemble Fengjastrútur which is based in Reykjavík, Iceland. Fengjastrútur is an ensemble that specializes in experimental performance, experimental notation and experimental instrumentation. The musicians are not defined by the instrument that they are most comfortable with but rather their general musicality, artistry and how both of those things apply to each individual piece they perform.
Sinfonia is the result of a long-term collaboration with Fengjastrútur, as a composer, performer and organizer but only one of many people who have step into each of these roles.
A Brief History of Fengjastrútur
I was once interrupted when somebody overheard me saying that I had founded Fengjastrútur. It is disputed who founded Fengjastrútur. But we know it was founded in 2007. We performed a piece by Stine Sörlie at a festival and Fengjastrútur was to gradually form a long term collaboration with the S.L.Á.T.U.R. collective, Most memorarbly in the 2011 New Years Concert were several pieces were premiered that have since traveled widely (unexpectedly).
Fengjastrútur started to appear in the Jaðarber concert series at the Reykjavík Art Museum where the Ensemble got a chance to collaborate with the likes of Gerhards Stäbler, Kunsu Shim and the late great Pauline Oliveros. Through S.L.Á.T.U.R. the ensemble got better and better acquainted with animated notation and eventually would perform music by non-Icelandic artists as well, such as Ryan Ross Smith, Sean McKenna and many others.
In the spring of 2011 I was introduced to a fellow who told me that he was going to be the principal conductor of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra in the next season. The following season was going to be a big deal for Iceland in general and the orchestra in particular because it was going to happen in the new and splendorous Harpa concert hall. This luxurious building was subject to much debate, being finished so shortly after a huge economic recession. None of us experimental composers and musicians, Fengjastrútur, S.L.Á.T.U.R. etc. thought we would ever have anything to do with that building. It was for someone else.
The soon to be principal conductor claimed that he was going to have a festival of experimental music hosted by the orchestra. He mentioned the possibility of people like Christian Wolff, Alvin Lucier and many more of our favorites possibly coming to Iceland in this festival that was going to happen with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. I was awestruck, nodded politely and then thought to myself: “Yeah right, don’t get your hopes up buddy”.
At the time the Jaðarber concert series was about the only place for this type of highly experimental historical pieces. Music with experimental notation for instance was not commonly programmed in Iceland outside this series and perhaps S.L.Á.T.U.R. events. All of these events were very simple and low budget and usually held in any house that one could get for free which was sometimes art museums and sometimes private houses, cafes and artist workspaces.
Quite unexpectedly Harpa was to become a quite regular hang out for many of us and mostly through this conductor, whose name is Ilan Volkov, S.L.Á.T.U.R. and Fengjastrútur found their way into Harpa and all these famous people that he mentioned would eventually turn up here.
The first year Fengjastrútur did Burdocks, the following year, we worked with Christian Wolff himself. Then Alvin Lucier and several other international composers would collaborate with the ensemble over those years.
When I got fired
Þráinn Hjálmarsson had become the managing director of Fengjastrútur around the time when Alvin Lucier came to town (Tectonics 2014). He was organizing rehearsals and as it was hard to make everyone’s schedules fit, so he had to “fire” some people. I was one of those that got sacked (for the time being at least). As things turned out however, I’m happy I did.
The next day Ilan Volkov sent out an email to see if anyone in the Fengjastrútur network was free the following day to take the two other big avant-celebrities of this year’s Tectonics festivals for an Icelandic sightseeing. Fengjastrútur was rehearsing on that specific day, but I was free. I borrowed a car from my parents so that I could take Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram on a “Golden Circle” around Gullfoss and Geysir and other famous tourist attractions in Iceland.
On our first stop at Almannagjá a shaman from Greenland was chanting and banging on a drum there. Looking around slowly with Dumitrescu and Avram it all seemed seemed so natural. I’m a huge fan of their work and had a lot to ask them. We talked about many things and they were very kind. They encouraged me to visit them, I should spend a week and bring my wife along etc. I told them maybe I could figure out a way to come next year to Romania, but they were very firm that I should come “this year” (2014) because who knows how long anyone will live.
We drove to Gullfoss and we were all very happy and nourished by the immense presence of this popular waterfall. Suddenly Ana-Maria Avram asked me: “are you a vegetarian”. I said no, because I wasn’t back then. “Good” she said. I asked why she asked. “Well, for cooking when you come to visit us”. In other words it was already decided that we would visit Romania, this year not the next one.
Later that year me and my wife spent a week in the beautiful countryside of Romania with Ana-Maria Avram and Iancu Dumitrescu and they taught me about Celibedachean phenomenology, Brancusi, Emil Cioran and other interesting things while eating fresh plums and grapes from their land. It was a wonderful time and I learned a lot from them.
I was very saddened when I heard about the passing of Ana-Maria Avram unexpectedly in (2017) and I thought about this wonderful time we had in Romania. Sinfonia is dedicated to her memory. I’m pretty certain she’s doing well wherever she is now and her music will still be influential for many years to come.
In his article on this record in Percorsi Musicali, Ettore Garzia, traces some connections with Ana-Maria Avram in a poetic way as far as I can tell from my limited Italian. I had never thought of this piece in direct relation with her music, which makes it an interesting read for me and a reason to re-visit some of her vivid and energetic recordings which there, fortunately, are a plenty of.