29. December 2011
Simplicity
For many years that tent was my home in the summers. I wandered into the mountain world and put mile after mile behind me on the road towards a new lake or searching for a new mountain.
There is so much beauty in the simple life perhaps because in that simplicity you gain the ability to see it.
I have always been filled with a great calmness in my relationship with the nature and the forces therein. The fear of darkness that I suffer from in the big city is gone up there in the mountains.
I remember with fascination how on my way up on the Mars-mountain a Golden Eagle soared and called above my head for a long time. I eventually reacted and thought that it might be time for me to turn around and return to the peak some other day. The eagle followed me all the way down and at the foot of the mountain a monstrous blizzard broke loose and I could thank that eagle for my life. I lay down in a hollow and covered myself with plastics as one should until the storm is over, but up on the mountain it would have been uncertain whether or not I would have survived.
The water in the mountain streams is clear, cold and fresh and in the morning when you step out of the tent and see the card of a passing bear you know that you are now on his territory and that’s OK. The bear doesn’t have humans on the menu but he wants to be treated with respect and who doesn’t? You just have to know how!
In the small lakes there is trout and to catch one of those and fry in the portable kitchen, it tasted like heaven.
The peaceful simplicity
In the lonely meeting with the mountain world the infinite stretches out before me. A single reindeer comes scurrying over the mountain and I sense peace in his presence, the peace that takes me is the knowledge to be incorporated into something that’s endless and much bigger than myself. The feeling is a healing to body and soul.
The bethinking simplicity
The road into the mountain world often passes through forests and marshes. It can be warm and the insects see me as a “delicates boutique” to feast on as I sweat and butt the uncomfortable. It is heavy at first with the 20 kg rucksack and to step through the marshland in heavy as every step sink deep into the ground. With experience I know that I put every-day life behind me and all the “talking thoughts” that in the silence of the nature turns into a form of tinnitus in my soul. Through the heavy, slow ascension the daily intensity disappears and I begin to recover the ability to listen.
The brutal simplicity
I find a place by a lake and put up my tent. There’s a sort of law of nature that there’s always a rock that cut into my back wherever I try to find a place to sleep yet the tiredness soon overcomes me and I sleep as a child. The next morning there can be weather or storm or frost on the tent canvas but despite this I need to get out and survive and here a time of hard work commences.
Alone in this world the life in the civilized world comes towards me like an express-train and collides. I have my notebook in hand and write to remove one impotency after the other, impossibilities meet and loose in power and power games their effect.
I break my camp when the collision courses are too strong and walk many miles to the next lake. In this particular day that I remember the evening is calm and lukewarm and I decide to get up on the mountain in the twilight. The ptarmigans twitters and far into the distance I see a reindeer herd and I hope that single reindeer finds its way back to it. Finally up on the shelf I find a small lake and I take an evening dip and prepare my blueberry soup and just sit and breath in the silence a long long time before I return to my camp.
There is something unforced about these days that manifests itself within me and outside me in harmony. The every day speculations are no longer questions of point but instead for every mile I walk the real questions emerge about what it is all about; the big existential questions, and they are never about which laundry machine to buy or if I should have fish or meat for dinner. No, the true real questions are without words.
Simplicity as a life-style
Things around me turn quieter when I find the causes and contexts to my “talking thoughts” and I become lazy. The body need to rest after everything and I stop. My camp can stay where it stands and I take short day-trips or just sit still on a rock and watch this magical world and listen to the silence, finally I can hear it… I am deep in the mountain world and I haven’t seen another human being for days, I breathe ever deeper and the harmony with the mountain world is alive and strong.
Simplicity as an artistic path of development
After some time I’m filled with a new energy and I start to wander again but only short distances without rucksack, with notebook and pen. Words starts to shape in a way I couldn’t imagine myself and then I know that it is words that are part of my author hood and not my private diary.
Soon it is time to pack my camp and meet humans again. I try to nurse the feeling within me of wholeness and serenity and a broadened perspective of time, all that is a starting point for my every day life as an artist with many expressions. I’m not just an author but also an opera singer and I have even early in my career got the chance to meet composers who have written for and dedicated songs for me.
The composer and symphonist Torbjörn Iwan Lundquist
In the meeting with new creational processes I have been able to recognize myself. As I early on learnt to respect other’s “territories” I also got to be a part in the fragile process that is composition. I got to know the composer Torbjörn Iwan Lundquist when I was writing a dissertation in musical science that circled around his work and also around developing a new method of analysis for contemporary music. Through endless conversations about the inner power games of music during walks on Ekerö and Adelsö outside Stockholm Torbjörn generously shared all his knowledge and he put literature in my hands like the “Principles of Orchestration” by Rimsky-Korsakov. Nature was our common foundation and I sat by the source of the founding forces of music and got to observe the composition of symphonies. Grand symphonies and the truly great existential questions without words from my wanderings were present and the answers were formed in the hands of the composer, that is what is MUSIC. I soon learnt to hear the instrumentation while Torbjörn composed the music on the piano and I became his copyist.
After studying a whole lot of Musical science and analysing the length, the breath and the height I realized even then that it is impossible to put new music in old forms of composition like the sonata, it would violate the music and confine it rather than through analysis open it up for deeper understanding.
Through listening to Torbjörn and hear how he talked about his music and be a part of that process I learnt to follow the musical embryo’s associational path through melodic, harmonic and/or rhythmic characters. With Torbjörn’s unyielding and my own stubbornness I created the so-called “principle of association” for modern western art-music. It is with this think tank that I immerse myself in the new works that I perform. I’ve never wanted to sing “prima vista” but have always needed to understand the music before I have been able to sing it.
I have never sung “prima vista” for several reasons; partly because it takes away the beauty in the voice, partly because I’m not some jackanape who only do without thought and partly because it prolongs the road to musical depth and understanding.
We all carry a voice within us. The voice like instruments has its laws of nature and among other things the tone creates in future tense, that means that what you hear has already been created within the instrument and a conductor who gives the thumbs up or down for a tone has very little knowledge of how a voice works. A smart conductor enhances a musical gesture that the singer can lean his/her musical thought against and with that everything falls into place.
The voice reacts to musical thoughts in the brain that sends impulses to the vocal chords and breathing organs so they adjust themselves for the tone and the clang is accordingly in the room’s acoustics. By learning how to think musically you develop your voice and musicality and every tone I sing make a mark in coming tones sine I am my instrument, a living body.
Everything is connected in one and the same body that is my own, a artistry growing through the song, -it is through the simplicity that the music takes form and it is able to shape “the grand questions”. Music is infinitely larger than its practitioner and the encounter with the MUSIC is breath taking, rich and in the best of cases you will find what you’re looking for inside.
The words that I write have the same inner power games. Often many words emerge in a strong flow and when I later look back at the finished text the words that will take shape glows while the words to-be-removed acted like scaffolding. I want the word to act in the reader without me writing explicitly what is right and what is wrong.
My librettos is created in the same way and then those texts must work both from left to right as well as from right to left in order to be musicalized. I don’t write down trivial talking thoughts other than for an occasional effect for they don’t carry any weight in the meeting with the tones but there has to be something in the word that makes it worth to enhance it into a song.
The grand simplicity
It is in the simple that I find the grand, it is my artistic path of development and I believe that there is more of a truth in there than anywhere else. The more I research and the more experiences I collect on my life-path the more I am convinced that everything comes from the same source, it is just the way of reading that is different depending on where you come from on this planet Tellus. And when we gaze into the smallest component known as the quark, it is just a reflection of the outermost picture we can see in the Universe.
Let me now wish you a breath taking, grand and Happy New 2012 and may all your dreams guide you like starlight on the path into the future.