20. January 2012
What is music?
I’m woken up this Sunday morning by the light that searches its way into my consciousness. Dreams stumble around and become morning-thoughts and eventually I’m ready to open my eyes before this day’s tasks. I have come home after dramatic winter days in Åbo, Finland.
Since last autumn I study at the Åbo Akademi University. My professor Johannes Brusilla and my teacher Camilla Hambro help to clean up my brain and I am once again in the school bench to update my scientific music perspectives. A lot has happened since I as a very young musician studied Music science at Stockholm University. I had Martin Tegen as teacher and in Uppsala professor Ingmar Bengtsson ruled and his books became our guides for our studies in this field. Today the subject appear completely different and I have made my way to Åbo Akademi University because of the opportunity to work with the music ethnologist Johannes Brusilla as the music ethnology-perspective on contemporary music sets the music free for observation rather than lock it in old observation-patterns.
As Leif Segerstam’s librettist and close friend I have had a unique opportunity as one of few to gaze into Leif’s creational process. I have had the chance to sit with Leif as he composed music to my words, which through him received a musical costume. I have always sung modern/contemporary art music. I see it as a duty to our composers and creators to give them an opportunity to have their works premiered. I always find that performing new music is equally a source of frustration; it’s complicated, incomprehensible, difficult to sing, challenging and very, very wonderful and I have had the privilege to have several composers dedicate several songs to me over the years.
How often does not a singer have to face “fait accompli”? Sing the notes as they are noted “prim avista” and after a few run-throughs sing before an audience who understands as little as the singer.
To really be able to sing contemporary music in a way that it touches the listener I developed an analytical method “The association principle” during my early studies for Martin Tegen at Stockholm University. The association principle has served as a workshop for deepening understanding of the musical material and been a great help for me during the rehearsing process.
I will in my encounter with Leif’s “free pulsation music” use this analytical method in order to work out, if possible, how it works. The practitioner stands free yet bound by chosen notes in a performance. Alone, without conductor, he has to understand his part of the musical conversation and take responsibility and charge for his own part of the music from his habit of following a Maestro’s direction and suggestions.
Is the “free pulsation music” a development of the aleatorian music as we know it from Lutoslawski or is it a further development from Sibelius’s 7th? Or from which musical genre did it spring? Two of many questions that I will take on in my research.
Leif has written a series of vocal pieces and all the songs have had their premier. One of the singers who has sung his songs “Six Songs Of Experience” and “Seven Red Moments” through many concerts, including on international stages, is the opera singer Taru Valjakka. “Seven Red Moments” for high soprano hasn’t gotten its title from its contents but rather from its creational process. The edge of the pen that Leif uses almost takes on a red colour through the intensity of creation without breaks and without correction.
“Free pulsation” vocal music is an on-going conversation in pitch but how the “devil” do you find the note?
It is by understanding the creational process that you can understand your own part within the music and then find your given place in the musical dialogue that characterises “the free pulsation music”. Because without given beats and without conductor and without a score you have to prepare yourself to Listen, as Leif puts it:
“What is music? – Music isn’t that which reverberates, music is why what-reverberates, reverberates as it reverberates when it reverberates.” Leif Segerstam