There were a couple of occasions last year when i commented on the potential hit-or-miss quality of portrait albums, in relation to the music of Bára Gísladóttir and Rolf Wallin. i’ve been reflecting on this further while listening to four other recent portrait discs, which i’ll be exploring in the next few articles. They’ve proved to be an illuminating experience, consolidating but also questioning my existing opinions about these composers’ work. Perhaps that’s the best and truest function of anything that purports to serve as a portrait.
The biggest surprise has come from Between Trees, the first album devoted to the music of Norwegian composer Kristine Tjøgersen, and a release i was especially excited to spend time with. On the one hand, i’ve admittedly had some niggling reservations about Tjøgersen’s music for a few years, yet my experiences of her work have been almost uniformly positive, sometimes overwhelmingly so (the world première of BOWER at Borealis 2022 being the most outstanding). Her output is uniquely fantastical in the way it incorporates aspects of play, biodiversity and theatrics into the conception and execution of her work, and every time i’ve attended a performance of something by Tjøgersen it’s been utterly unforgettable. Yet even just a few minutes into the opening, title track of Between Trees, i couldn’t shake the feeling that i was missing something vital. What i was hearing, the product not of a single communal music but multilayered and composite, nonetheless appeared to amount to little more than a series of textural shifts. The obvious question was being insistently begged: does this stuff work without visuals?
Other pieces feel more problematic. Ensemble work Travelling Light overall seems inconsequentially gestural and repetitive, made irritating by recurring flute jet whistles (painfully endemic in so much contemporary music at present), though at its most compelling resembles a strange mechanism with weird and wonderful sounds emanating from it. Seafloor Dawn Chorus (featuring more jet whistles) and Avian Chatters fare much better, in no small part due to the beguiling juxtaposition of exotic sounds that Tjøgersen creates. That’s particularly so in Seafloor Dawn Chorus in the way nascent forms of melody, around halfway through, present a more tangible musical presence than is found in the undeniably tactile but ephemeral sound-shapes that predominate and give an arbitrary quality to the narrative, keeping one at a distance. Violinist Marco Fusi does a fabulous impression of the elaborate song and gymnastics of a bird-of-paradise in Avian Chatters, but despite the merits of both these pieces, they still make one question to what extent these translations from and evocations of the natural world are really successful in a purely aural context.
Depending on your perspective, this either indicates limitations in Tjøgersen’s musical language, and / or – more likely, i suspect – highlights the considerable extent to which she is absolutely in her element, and at her best, in a fully immersive, audiovisual-theatrical environment. A couple of other pieces on the album, Konkylie for prepared solo violin and The Sticks, seem even more elusive and uninvolving, though Habitat works better in its playful exploration of dry, non-resonant and pitched materials. Starry Night is an unexpected slice of immediate simplicity, guitar chords drenched in bright, uplifted radiance – though at barely three minutes it sounds more like a sketch than a final product.
i’ve had the pleasure of experiencing the orchestral work Bioluminescence twice in the concert hall – at Ultima 2023 and, best of all, Only Connect 2019 – and this studio recording captures well its elusive, tremulous nature, only occasionally coalescing into formations that seem more concrete. Being the most tantalisingly vivid in terms of the images it brings to mind, it makes me wonder whether this is actually what Tjøgersen hopes and expects to happen in all her (non-theatrical) music, that a clear, cogent visual analogue will be triggered in the listener. Personally i doubt it, as it’s such a risky aspiration, but based on the evidence of this album it’s impossible not to wonder.
i’ve been surprised and rather bewildered to find the experience of Between Trees such an unexpected challenge to what i thought by now was an experienced and well-considered understanding of Kristine Tjøgersen’s music. Nonetheless, the album is extremely faithful to what it sounds like, though whether that’s the sum total of what it actually is, is another matter. Either way, this album has done something highly valuable in posing fundamental questions about Tjøgersen’s work that haven’t previously come to mind in the concert hall. It’ll be interesting to consider this more in the future, in both live and recorded situations.
Released last year by Aurora, Between Trees is available on CD, vinyl and download.
You’re so right about those flute jets, Simon – my heart now sinks every time I turn up to an HCMF gig and spot a flute in the ensemble; one knows all too well what’s going to happen with it…