I studied composition
at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague in 1987 at the same
time as Madeleine Isaksson. Though I may be wrong, I seem to
remember her being one of the students who had been accepted
by Brian Ferneyhough just before he left to work in America,
leaving a whole clutch of sensitive souls high and dry. They
were later to be confronted with lessons from Frederick Rzewski:
now there was an interesting culture shock.
My only memories
of her are as a retiring, almost invisible member of our little
composers community, and no doubt she thought of me (if at all)
as an incorrigible ruffian, racing to prop up the nearest bar
in between performances at the Bonn/Frankfurt Weltmusiktage
’87 and generally refusing to take life or music in the least
seriously. This is no doubt the same reason she now has a CD
out, and I have a beer belly and a cupboard full of unperformed
manuscripts.
Having declared
this fleeting interest, I was intrigued to see how her more
recent music sounds and was reassured to hear that, to my ears
at least, very little has changed. These are the kind of pieces
which, no matter how subtle, atmospheric and refined they may
be, end up becoming hard to define as individual works – they
run into, through and over each other, and become as interchangeable
as their titles. This and more they have in common with each
other; and as my mate Graham of Leeds would say, there are ‘no
jokes.’
Stråkvåg
(String Wave) is a nice, compact string quartet, whose glissandi,
repeated notes and quarter-tones are deliberately descriptive
of water: ‘imagine getting into a small boat, feel how it is
rocked by the weight of your body and follows the waves on the
water…’ Sum om (As if) is an extension of Isaksson’s
contacts with visual art and literature, and whose glissandi,
repeated notes and quarter-tones are related to the poems of
Susanne Marten. Inné means ‘innate’ and was written during
Isaksson’s first pregnancy. The piece has some melodic gestures,
trills and quarter-tone relationships which reminded me a little
of some of Alain Louvier’s work, but Isaksson’s own description
is of course more apt: ‘…an attempt to filter the innated in
a given time and space, through the sonorities of each instrument,
pitches and movements within a harmonic body toward a shared
temporary ending.’ Andelek (Spirit Game) was written
for the Stockholm Saxophone Quartet, whose glissandi, repeated
notes and quarter-tones; ‘like a vibrating thread of energy,
strive upward towards the extremely high registers.’ Failles
(gaps) has the advantage of contrast in timbre, with trombone,
recorder and cello forming an interestingly disparate ensemble.
Rums (Rooms) is an interesting ‘game’ of a piece, with
different tempi running simultaneously, and musical structures
being built from different series’ of numbers. Å svävare
(O hoverer) has the support of texts by Celan, Rilke and others
and is in seven parts. The title comes from the poem Taktavla
by Katarina Frostenson, ‘O hoverer – the fall is an embrace.’
I don’t want to
be too negative about this CD. On their own in a properly balanced
concert programme, each piece would undoubtedly provide an interesting
and atmospheric moment. Placed one after each other on one disc,
I found myself gradually losing the will to live. Programme
notes which tempt one to write in to Private Eye’s ‘Pseud’s
Corner’ don’t really help either, but this is of course all
part of the package. This is a quiet, intellectual world with
a low tolerance of contemporary music’s post-post modern ‘fun
factor’. The intellectual question it poses to me however is,
at what point does stylistic consistency become cyclical and
dreary?
Dominy Clements
Eva Lindal, Anna Lindal
(violin)
