Alberto Savinio (1891-1952)

Les Chants de la mi-mort
La Mort de M. Sacerdote
Les Helmes dorées – Offrande
Mes Poumons argentés

“Castor and Pollux,” they called themelves, Alberto Savinio and his brother. They were both painters, and the brother, being three years older, was the first to make a reputation; he was Giorgio de Chirico. That made young Andrea Francesco Alberto de Chirico decide he needed a name change. There is a story, which probably came from Savinio himself, that he adapted the name of a French translator of Oscar Wilde: Albert Savin. No such person, however, is known to the National Library of France, and we must presume this origin to have been part of Savinio’s elaborate fantasy world – a world he created and expressed in an output that included novels, plays, songs, operas and ballets, as well as paintings not unlike his brother’s.

The two of them were born and brought up in Greece, then moved with their widowed mother to Paris in 1911 – propitiously, for they were able to come into contact with Stravinsky, the Italian futurists and the leading avant-garde poet of the time, Apollinaire. Savinio learned from them all, and in the spring of 1914 put together a play with songs and drawings, Les Chants de la mi-mort (The Songs of Half-Death, i.e. Sleep), of which he gave partial performances. Apollinaire was impressed. “We found ourselves facing a musical poetry so unexpected and so shocking,” he wrote, “that we are persuaded this work could now be the starting point for a direction in modern music.” Indeed, singlehandedly, and at the age of only twenty-two, Savinio had invented musical surrealism, with his sudden outbursts, abrupt switches from one image to another, bald repetitions and snatches of familiar tune. These features are all to be found in the three short songs we hear this evening, which come from a compilation (published as “Album 1914”) that seems to be drawn from material for Les Chants de la mi-mort. In an essay of this period, Savinio expressed his wish for dramatic and musical elements that, contrary to the ways of traditional opera and song, “do not support each other by any kind of mutual interdependence.” Clashing irreconcilables are part of the point – as in other music on this program from so much later.

Øyvind Torvund (b. 1976)

Neon Forest Space

Alongside regular musical studies in Oslo and Berlin, the Norwegian composer Øyvind Torvund played guitar in rock and improvising groups, and his music assembles disparate materials, inconsistent attitude: sounds from rock or from everyday life (or nature) occurring in chamber music, simplicity in a complex context, improvisation coexisting with exact notation, music combined with film or projections, seriousness in counterpoint with humor. Raw melodic schemes may come from Purcell, the infill from the detritus of electronic distortion or street noise. Categories are split open or blurred, habits unbent. To quote Iggy Pop: “The neon forest is my home.”

Torvund himself puts it like this: “My chief concern is keeping an open approach as to what may function as the constitutive parts of a work of music, and trying to combine several kinds and levels of elements.…Contrasts, juxtapositions and completely opposite perspectives interest me because I believe that there is a lot happening around and beneath the ordinary musical framework, and a lot of unconscious forces to be explored.”

He wrote Neon Forest Space for asamisimasa in 2009 as a sequence of seven short encounters for amplified instruments and recordings, an off-kilter set of variations, some of which may be repeated within the overall duration of twelve minutes:

1. “21 waves trio,” for cello, percussion, and a radio issuing white noise. The three-quarter-tone glissando that ends the cello’s phrases is to sound “like a car driving by fast.”
2. “beamed through,” for arpeggiating microtonal clarinet over an electric-guitar drone, the combination suggesting bagpipes.
3. “( –and further),” in cello fifths, subtly changing in tuning, with aerosol can; punctuation comes from low hums on the electric guitar and from a much more present harmony.
4. “on my way, on your way,” for clarinet, again microtonal, and household implements.
5. “multiple slått [i.e. Norwegian folktune],” for clarinet, now diatonic, and various accompaniments.
6. “space corner,” for electric guitar and percussion imitating tape sounds – energetic jogging in step.
7. “forest space / neon bright,” for all four musicians in dialogue with recorded material.

Simon Steen-Andersen (b. 1976)

on and off and to and fro

Born in Denmark and now resident in Berlin, Simon Steen-Andersen completed postgraduate studies under Bent Sørensen and Hans Abrahamsen at the Royal Academy of Music in Copenhagen in 2006, by which time he was already causing a stir by boldly confronting expectations about where music comes from, what it is made of, what and how it can say. The musicians of asamisimasa have several pieces by him in their repertory, and last year released an album devoted to his music, Pretty Sound, on the Dacapo label.

The present piece, included in that collection, dates from 2008 and was first played at Darmstadt that summer. It starts out as one kind of music – a trio for soprano sax, bass, and vibes, all of them rotating through small elements and coming together in a sort of limping march that is projected through electric megaphones – and becomes something quite different. The megaphones, from being transmitters (if also distorters), take off by themselves, using their siren and foghorn capabilities, and out of grunge comes something as luminous and haunting as a fairytale. The trio has become a sextet, with a solo cadenza for the first megaphone player about two-thirds of the way through the duration of sixteen minutes or so.

Laurence Crane (b. 1961)

John White in Berlin

Composer, teacher and performer, John White has long been the guardian spirit of English experimental music, an example to composers from the generation of Cornelius Cardew and Howard Skempton to that of Laurence Crane and beyond. Crane places him “in Berlin” here for at least two reasons: that was where he was born, in 1936, and it was where this piece had its first performance, in 2003, played by the group Apartment House, with which Crane has had a close association.

A moment of contrast on this program, John White in Berlin is marked “very soft and still,” and proceeds evenly through its thirteen minutes, a single – and spellbinding – musical state. Pervading it is a four-note chord maintained in the middle register of the piano, with occasional interruptions, by the actions of four electronic bows attached to the relevant strings while the player holds down the sustaining pedal. In another context, this chord would be a dominant seventh, but in this piece there is no context for it: it is the atmosphere in which the music takes place, an atmosphere judiciously colored by percussion. Almost folding into that atmosphere are the other features, which include a breath of melody – down a step, back, up a step – introduced as harmonics on the cello, and passages of barely moving chords on the piano. The electric guitar, also using an electronic bow to contribute to the drone at first, turns to glowing harmonies as the piece moves toward – one might better say “stays toward” – its culmination.

Trond Reinholdtsen (b. 1972)

Unsichtbare Musik

Time for some Scandinavian dada. Trond Reinholdtsen, like his fellow Norwegian Øyvind Torvund, studied in Oslo. His early work was in the direction of complexity, German-style, but his talents as a singer – and comic – led him away, though not entirely. In 2009 he established the Norwegian Opra (sic), which, like the outfit in Bayreuth, is devoted wholly to the works of its founder. Clips from several of the company’s productions can be viewed on YouTube. Unsichtbare Musik (Invisible Music), which also dates from 2009, was composed for asamisimasa and will need no explanation.

Program note © Paul Griffiths

Born in Wales, Paul Griffiths has written books on music, novels and librettos.  Among the first are The Penguin Companion to Classical Music and The Substance of Things Heard, a selection from the reviews and essays he produced during more than thirty years as a music critic in London and New York.