Waiting for me on my doormat when i returned from Vienna a few days ago was a new CD of music by the Estonian composer Age Veeroos. i’ve been doubly excited waiting for it to arrive, partly because i was honoured to be asked to write the liner notes for this release, but much more importantly because Veeroos is one of Estonia’s most fascinating and imaginative composers (she won last year’s prestigious Lepo Sumera Composition Award). Her music isn’t just unlike anyone else’s, it has a strikingly elusive character, which is practically its defining feature. There’s actually nothing elusive about Veeroos’ subject matter, yet her mode of expression is rooted in a language of intangibility. The result is music caught in a unique and powerful tension, focused yet ambiguous.
An excellent example of this can be found in Schattenseele for violin and electronics (which i reviewed following its 2019 première). The title draws on the conception of a “shadow soul”, part of the soul associated with dreams, visions and the unconscious. For Veeroos this idea is rooted in aspects of Estonian folk culture, becoming the basis for “a thought that has lost clarity and deviated from its original form”. We do hear clarity, yet the violin’s music is obsessive, circular, a network of chords, microtonal phrases and bouncing ricochets that indicate not so much an idea as an attempt to recover, recall or reconstruct one. Whether or not the electronics – freezing and looping sequences of the violin’s material – help or hinder this process is unclear. We’re left with a dream-like impression, culminating in fragile, stratospheric icy trills and skittering arpeggios.
Similar in both inspiration and execution is Keha [body] for bass clarinet. The work is in some respects a counterpoint to Schattenseele in its focus on physical, biological processes continually in flux, with death the inevitable end. Again, the instrument is a close presence, made more intimate due to being entirely alone, and here too its attitude is quietly obsessive, fixating on a small number of ideas presented in a series of episodes. Yet in spite of its proximity and stark presentation, the clarinet’s material is hard to read. One can imagine, below its often audible sense of strain, the possibility of something unspoken, more implied than heard, or even an instrument in the process of learning how to communicate.
There’s something dogged about the clarinet’s determined persistence, and this quality also permeates Fantasia “A Threadbare Chant” for bass flute and synthesizer. The work’s title has an explicit addendum, “with elements of aggression and lament”, which Veeroos acknowledges is a response to Russia’s war against Ukraine. The role of the synthesizer is curious: does it alter the flute’s fixed trajectory? Or, in due course, does the flute shatter the synth’s clarity? Either way, while the duo ultimately forms a hypnotic alliance, the somewhat numb austerity of their music imbues the piece with a fittingly dark solemnity, its emotional weight implied rather than unleashed.
The opposite is true of percussion piece Ma olen suur kuu su silmapiiril [I am the big moon on your horizon], though its power is less emotional than impressionistic. A potent visual image was the work’s starting point, specifically when the Moon appears larger near the horizon than in the sky. The arch structure of the piece suggests its progression toward and beyond the horizon (rising or setting), climaxing in an immense central clatter – Veeroos at her most unusually demonstrative – as if shards of light were smashing together and splintering.
The remaining three works on the album are for larger forces, and also occupy intriguingly elusive yet evocative soundworlds. The most abstract is Vaatenurk [point of view], designed to explore the way compositions can be altered in real-time when played back via a web browser (and performed live at the 2023 Estonian Music Days). Comprising seven sections – six solos and one for the whole ensemble – which can be played in any order, the performance included here is therefore just one version (or point of view) of the more than 5,000 possible permutations of Vaatenurk.
The title of Ich sehe Federn wachsen im Sand der Wüsten… translates as “I see feathers growing in the sand of deserts”, a line from one of Ilmar Laaban‘s poems. This is not an image that can be directly conjured up in sound, and the work is therefore another example of Veeroos taking something descriptive and using it as the basis for indirect, intangible music. It contains some of Veeroos’ most impassioned music, as hints of tense desperation become climactic a few minutes in. Yet following a brief pause things sound constricted, the clarinet becomes transmuted into something like an exotic flute, and while echoes of the pulse and fragments return they ultimate vanish, lost in an array of barely audible noise shapes.
Hints, suggestions, impressions, possibilities – this is the evocative ‘anti-substance’ of Age Veeroos’ music, all of which, if not directly nocturnal, then at least occupies a world where black and white are inverted, playing out as traces of light against night-black backgrounds. The epitome of this – practically a synthesis of Veeroos’ output to date – is Outlines of the Night (a work i previously explored at its première last year). Ominous dark chords with a glistening high violin and, in between, mercurial slivers and shades, whistles and whispers, all hinting at something unseen, half heard, menacing and beautiful.
Outlines of the Night is released by Kairos, available in physical and digital formats. The CD is available now direct from the label, and will be available elsewhere in a few weeks’ time.
