It’s not really possible to understand, and fully engage with, a music festival without some reasonable appreciation of the context in which it’s happening. In the case of the annual ISCM World New Music Days, such cultural relativism is even more vital. On the one hand, it’s possible to think of WNMD as a portrait of the current state of global contemporary music. Yet that portrait is filtered by each nation hosting the festival, since they decide the shortlist of works to be performed from all of those submitted. So perhaps the best way to approach this year’s festival is to think of it as a portrait of contemporary music from the unique perspective of the Faroe Islands. What this means, of course, is that to make sense of that portrait it’s necessary to try to make sense of the attitude and outlook that underpin Faroese music-making and compositional thought. That’s something i began to do five years ago, when i spent a week in the Faroes during their annual Summartónar festival, and i attempted to build on that experience during my 11 days at WNMD. i’m getting there, but it’s necessarily at an early stage, and i still have many more questions than reliable answers.
In 2019, i remarked that one of the disappointments of the Summartónar was the surprising lack of Faroese composers. That was emphatically not the case during WNMD, which included over 30 of them, presenting a mixture of conventionally-notated and semi-improvised works. In terms of understanding that global portrait of new music, what’s perhaps particularly revealing is the extent to which Faroese composers demonstrated a fondness for using extant musical materials as the basis for their own work. From a Western perspective, this “basis” often appeared to lack meaningful ambition, with many composers seemingly content merely to emulate earlier musical models and styles, such as Bjarni Blaasvær‘s La Follia and Eli Tausen á Lava‘s 200 km/t á Oyggjarvegnum (both neo-Baroque), or Pauli í Sandagerði’s Vel op før dag (folk) and Kári Bæk‘s Trio for Violin, French Horn and Piano (folk / neo-Brahms). This was sometimes accompanied by an artless naivety that i suspect most Western composers would strive to avoid, heard especially strikingly in the basic diatonicism of Páll Sólstein‘s Kom andin halgi and the rather shocking plunge into Light Music in Simona Eivinnsdóttir‘s Livandi hjarta.
By using a word like “shocking”, and remarking on what seemed to be a lack of ambition, it may seem as though i’m being over-critical and ethnocentric. Yet while i did find these pieces seriously lacking from the perspective of originality (and, perhaps, deeper musical awareness), i’m extremely cautious about this reaction due to the fact that i’m convinced it’s at least partly affected by culture shock. When i first started going to Estonia, i encountered a musical ecosystem that was only partially connected and related to what i was familiar with in the West, and it seems to me that this is even more true of the Faroe Islands. What “contemporary music” or “being a composer” mean to the Faroese, along with associated ideas of individuality, tradition, originality, ambition, audience expectation, and such a lofty concept as “avant-garde”, is something i’m still trying to understand. (It’s worth bearing in mind the remarkable fact that art music, in the sense of fully-composed, notated, non-functional music, didn’t begin to be widespread in the Faroes until the 1980s.)
It seems to me that a culture shock like this is not merely appropriate for an occasion like the World New Music Days, but entirely inevitable, due to the way global ideas and thinking are brought together. This is surely an integral part of what ISCM is seeking to foster, smashing diverse, disjunct musical conceptions and thought processes together in a hadron collider-like festival, hopefully leading to unexpected new discoveries and fresh insights. It’s worth pointing out that there were notable instances of Faroese composers producing work much more familiar to what one usually encounters in contemporary music festivals, but for the most part, i can’t help feeling certain ideas and concepts must hold a very (even fundamentally) different meaning and value. Which, to return to where i started, perhaps says something significant about the portrait of global contemporary music as presented at WNMD, which was characterised overall by an emphasis on simplicity and / or dependence on extant music.
However, an interesting counterpoint to this – something of a third way – was something i had encountered on my previous trip to the Faroes, in which assorted styles and tropes from around the world become mashed-up and reformed into a unique kind of polystylism. The best and most consistent examplar of this is Yggdrasil, the group founded by Faroese musical mastermind Kristian Blak in the early 1980s. Blak conceived the group as a vehicle for regular, large-form musical journeys, often rooted in some aspect of nature, art and / or mythology. Over the years, a highly diverse group of musicians came and went in the group, in the process feeding into and expanding its, and Blak’s, cultural vision. At WNMD Yggdrasil gave a live rendition of Porkerisvatn, an 8-part suite Blak composed in 2021, inspired by the eponymous painting by William Heinesen and, in turn, by the Babylonian creation epic Enûma Elish and Faroese balled Sjúrðarkvæðið, both of which feature the slaying of dragons.
Performed on this occasion by Angelika Hansen (violin), Heðin Ziska Davidsen (guitar), Mikael Blak (bass), Per Ingvaldur Højgaard Petersen (drums) and Kristian Blak himself on piano (and occasional horns), the work was another potent demonstration of this uniquely Faroese polystylistic blend. Because of its nature, i think of it primarily as rooted in a kind of high concept, prog rock vein, though on this occasion folk, rock, funk and above all jazz and ethnic elements all made their presence felt. Its narrative, though episodically clear, was nonetheless unpredictable, collapsing into sparse, loosely-connected passages before reassembling and accumulating to form vast, dense climaxes. Though slightly marred by an overamplified double bass, Yggdrasil’s performance was exhilarating, with some of the most exquisite moments found in lovely detailed, lyrical solos from Hansen. Having experienced them in 2019, it was yet more marvellous proof of how simultaneously disorienting and focused, exotic and familiar, both Yggdrasil and Blak’s music can be.
Many of this year’s WNMD concerts were recorded and are available to stream; see below. The studio version of Kristian Blak’s Porkerisvatn can be streamed on the usual platforms.
[…] to experience that most rare and unknown quantity: Faroese contemporary music. i’ve already mentioned how a significant proportion of composers from the Faroe Islands based their work on extant musical […]