i’ve previously suggested that, for a while at least, use of the flute jet whistle in contemporary music ought to be subject to a lengthy moratorium, due to its excessive overuse. During some of the concerts at this year’s Estonian Music Days, i found myself wondering whether this should also be applied to that most humble of ornaments, the trill. They were absolutely everywhere – which is not to say they weren’t effective, only that they seemed to be surprisingly prevalent, making the lines and textures of works with quite different inspirations and intentions feel oddly similar.
Apropos, the concert given by Estonian music collective Ludensemble which, to a large extent, was characterised by granular and above all tremulous soundworlds. For Madli Marje Gildemann, represented by the first and last parts of her triptych Three Studies on Plant Biology, they served to aid her tapping into organic forms of behaviour. In Osmosis, granular sounds (tapped, plucked and repeating notes) were the environment within which a few trace tones could be detected. These gradually took on the form of chords, arrived at seemingly through evolution, and as such having a quality somewhere between familiarity and strangeness. In Photosynthesis, the sounds – gentle, shivering, glistening – were similarly hard to parse, like trying to catch slivers of light. Even when the music expanded, becoming a robust, trembling soundscape, for all its obvious energy and presence, it was never quite clear what it actually was we were hearing, until, in a similar way to Osmosis, it evaporated via sounds of breath. The only certainty was that it was continuously fascinating.
Lauri Jõeleht’s new work Chant harmonique II claimed to be “for double bass and 7 instruments” but in practice the bass only meaningfully presented itself as soloist quite late in the proceedings. That was a shame, not just because the rest of the piece was a relatively simple bit of pentatonic noodling (not without some interest, at times simultaneously lyrical and quivering, an interesting effect), but primarily because of how impressive it became once the double bass – superbly performed by Regina Udod – finally woke up. Its engrossing solo explored overtones with a mix of delicacy and power, until everyone came together to radiate a vaguely fifthy final chord. Yet more evidence of the fact that Jüri Reinvere’s days as a genuinely forward-thinking composer are long gone came in Flüchtig, für Immer. Moving from light tremors to jaunty bass figurations, while it was generally more suggestive than demonstrative, somewhat tense and unsettled, its post-Romantic demeanour was undeniable and in this context felt weirdly anachronistic.
Chords, chords, chords: in her fascinating new piece The Sounds Between Sounds, Marianna Liik – the worthy winner of this year’s LHV New Composition Award – took us into a place not so much of flux as perpetual transition. Concepts of start and end were rendered moot here, in music not travelling from A to B but playing in the less easily definable spaces betwixt those notional points. Earlier on, tangibility seemed to be coming, only a moment or two later to be going again, the chordal nature of the soundworld never static, never ending, ever evolving. Later, Liik hinted at something more defined, breaking things up with piano flourishes; now the ensemble was working and moving together in a different way (accenting some nice little hiccuping tremolo moments), the clarity, complexity and richness of the music continuing to shift, often rapidly, before our ears. The end was pure enigma: a curious chiming appeared, apparently triggering the end, yet even now we hadn’t so much ‘arrived’ somewhere as were left at just the latest stage in a potentially never-ending journey through an in-between sonic space.
The highlight of the concert came from Elo Masing, Estonian-born but long based in Berlin, whose music has been frustratingly absent from the Estonian Music Days in recent years (something that afflicts all Estonian composers who dare to leave the country). Her new work …nothing but a halo…, for octet and electronics, took us back to an adjacent world to that of Gildemann, inspired by plants. Masing’s work is characterised by slow-form but highly spontaneous states of change, in which ambiguity is everywhere. And so it was here: high, tentative, nothing clearly defined, sounds either still and timbrally remote, or timbrally familiar but mutating. A soundscape in motion, tangible but alien, the instruments like organisms singing and moving – and communicating? an abstract dialogue? – with patterns emerging as the music turned climactic. The epilogue was poignant, a polarised aftermath with weird, wan pitches describing a faint avant-song.
German ensemble Broken Frames Syndicate offered a more sonically variegated concert, though some of the music felt difficult to connect with. In a way, that was appropriate, even deliberate, as it was a late evening concert titled “Hello Darkness”. Nonetheless, Patrick Schäfer’s Dunkle Mitte was curiously uncommunicative, despite its energy and activity, whereas Sarah Hennies’ Memory Box was similarly problematic for the opposite reason, keeping its remnants of sound just too far away, so they stopped acting as distant but suggestive artefacts and just became something we couldn’t hear. It could have been tantalising, but in this performance was simply frustrating. The Light of the Dark by Michael Gordon was also packed full of energy, though here the way Gordon leaned hard into fun and larks – always as part of a strong musical thread, whimsical, imaginative and amusing – made it compelling. Special kudos needs to go to cellist Nathan Watts, for the unflagging way he continued to grind away while everyone else was partying hard.
It was nice to hear Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s early work Ró, composed when she was still exploring new sonic ground rather than just repeating herself, ever more crowd-pleasingly, as she does today. Ró is simple but it works, tiny strands of filigree achingly frangible beside the solidity of drone, though i couldn’t help feeling Broken Frames exaggerated this a bit, making the piece feel rather inert, teasing possibilities but with nothing, ultimately, to show for it. Yet equally, that kind of active-passive liminality is part of the work’s beauty and power. Malle Maltis’ electronic piece Night Music tantalised in the best way, its atmosphere laden with sounds pulsing and jittering like so many synthetic nocturnal creatures. As a short window into an implied larger habitat it was beautifully focused.
i’m not going to pretend i really understood the narrative or perceived the titular presence in The Story of Eros, by Tatjana Kozlova-Johannes (the only world prèmiere of the evening), but on purely musical terms, it proved convincing. In some respects it also emerged out of shadow, elusive, fluttering and fleeting, strands of unstable lines trying to speak, sliding around but more or less able to cohere together. Abrupt shifts in dynamic shook things up: now loud, moving fast while the piano considered slower chords, overall emphasising rapidity not pitch, more about how than what. And now quiet, a patterscape of small staccatos, the piano continuing to reflect, softly now.
The journey into delicacy continued, with motes of pitch becoming the basis for texture – yet motes that wanted to grow and expand. What transpired was less a communal song than a complex act of singing: all individual, in sympathy but also doing their own thing, soloistic yet also a chorus. Its conclusion was a form of gradual erasure, falling back into repetitions at different speeds, high harmonics, blank final piano notes, and the faint noise of crinkling paper. Kozlova-Johannes’s music has a unique notion of directness, mingling notions of abstraction and emotional charge such that neither seems to predominate, yet one consistently comes away struck deeply by both its musical and subtextual weight.
The Ludensemble performance from this year’s festival is available to stream (for free) either as audio via Klassikaraadio and/or as video. Links below:
