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Talae - Articles and reviews

Gävle Dagblad:

A year ago, Gävle Symphony Orchestra made the first performace of the composer David Lennart's work Waves. The first of October, David is back to record Gävle-specific sound and hold a lecture on composition with students at Vasaskolan jazz education, in a project that will result in a concert at IDKA,

Spegeln on October 14.

 

Composer - then I suppose most people think of a individual and supreme genius who creates out of an intoxication of divine inspiration. Beethoven, type. When I meet David for a quick lunch and then have the honor to sit in on the lesson on jazz education, I get a completely different picture.

 

Apple & Apple is working name for a unique project, in which three composers (David Lennartsson, Sofia Jernberg and Johan Zakrisson) have composed a piece - together. The idea was a bit like rehearsing with a rock band, though this is art music.

The piece is performed at three different locations in a first turn. Each location involves, in addition to the fixed ensemble of six musicians, a local musician. Here in Gävle, Johan Sundberg, guitarist and teacher at the jazz education, will be the local musician.

Moreover, location-specific sounds will be recorded, so that we here in Gävle will hear Gävle's own sound at the concert, via electronics.

 

Now, students in Vasa enter: They are asked to record and send audio to David – though electronics is just one part of the concert, which essentially operates on acoustic instruments.

So: How do you go about composing in a collective? How do you avoid that it only becomes a soup, with to many cooks? Finding a form was important right from the beginning. Several times David returns to how important it is to be aware of form. During the month-long talks that preceded the gameplay and composing, the idea of linking with old forms and traditions was born.

The composers landed in the golden section, the formula for beautiful proportions, with roots in antiquity. A principle that can be found everywhere in nature, from galaxies spirals into the vortex of our hair.

Well known in architecture and visual arts, but often used also in music. Mozart used it, jazz solos follow it. Simply put, it means harmony and balance created by having the maximum point of tension moved slightly beyond the middle. More complicated is the relationship in Fibonaccis series of numbers (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 ...) where each new number is the sum of the two preceding and the division of two consecutive numbers (like 8 / 13) approaches the golden section, more precisely, of course, the higher the rates are. This was used when a compositional graphic system of lines and points were developed. Decimal fractions became hamonic structures which turned into sounds that became scales - so they had both a large form consisting of five parts, and a tone material to work from. David says that it is about reinventing the rules, to control chaos and to escape the repetition tyranny that easily lets you write the same piece over and over again.

Yet another fundamental idea was to write for both classically trained, sightreading musicians as for skilled improvisers. To allow the notated music to meet improvisation is an experimental field of contemporary music, but the distance may not be as vast as you might think.

- When everyone can play out of their own background a

movement towards unity naturally comes into being, "says David. I guess that is all about feeling “the feeling”, the social and musical magic which allows people to play together.

With much effort the score grew. What a privilege to take part of it! It is complex, with characters I've never seen before. Signs for quarter tones (this scale has 24 tones, the 12 ordinary plus one quarter tones for each semitone), note sequenses which describes more gesture than a musical exact quotation, smart signs for accellerando and more.

It also clearly shows that the work consists of strict written music with improvisation voices on top, except the fourth movement that is completely improvised and also occur at the golden section. David recalls that improvisation is not something that is alien to art music. Rather, one can say that it had a break. In Bach's time, it was natural to be able to improvise. If one lacked that skill one was not a real musician.

Truly outstanding musicians have also been hand-picked for the project. Besides the composers themselves (David Lennartsson electronics, Sofia Jernberg vocals and Johan Zakrisson piano) the legendary bassist and improvising musician Barry Guy, classically trained flautist Richard Craig and percussionist Pontus Langendorf from Kroumata take part.

A little idea what it might sound we get when David plays a sample from a test performance in Västerås, a mini version in which only he himself and Johan Zakrisson play. It sounds exciting: Fragile sparsity and brittle beauty towards faster, denser lots, elevations. Free poetry born out of rigorous mathematics.

In the evening, on October 14 at Spegeln, we can hear the work, which was finally named

Talae, in its entirety. Will it work? Will it carry the idea beyond mathematical formulas and analysis?

- Just experiencing the music, seek the thrill, that's what everything in the end is about, "says David.

I can only agree.

 

Camilla Dal

Gyllene snittet & kollektiv komposition - Kultur - www.gd.se  http://gd.se/kultur/1.2411378-gyllene-snittet-kollektiv-kompos  ...

 

 

 

MUSIC

IDKA Spegeln

Apple & Apple

Students from Vasaskolan jazz education

various instruments, Barry Guy

bass, Maya Homburger violin,

Richard Craig flute, Pontus

Langendorf percussion, David

Lennartsson electronics, Johan

Zakrisson piano and Johan

Sundberg guitars.

 

So are they here, composers who snowed in on golden section, with an ensemble.

All but Sofia Jernberg, unfortunately prevented. How was it - pretentious abstract

or something more?

The ensemble have had workshops with Vasa jazz students which begins the concert in a liberal interpretation of John Cage's' Branches. Pupils brought sound with them,  instruments, key ring, balloon, creaking shoe. The sound thickens thins out, the silence may take place.

Then contemporary chamber music: Paintings inspired suite Tales of Enchantment by Barry Guy, with himself on bass and Maya Homburger, baroque violin. Painterly, highly intensive music, violin fragile heat-sensitive and subtle glissandi, the small (specially built for flights) bass surprisingly large, singing resonance. Metal rods under the strings, the bass will vibrate in infinite tonal richness. Sometimes it is so unspeakably beautiful that it hurts, but the music is not conventionally sentimental. It raises the question that the composers featured for the evening in the piece Tale speak out at the beginning: Have feelings as compassion and love a place in art? Or will it automatically be romantic music? Does music have the ability to influence us to experience new infinite open states of mind? The answer is clear to me. Rarely have I been so moved by music, so full of abundant heat, so infected by deepest joy. I let go of all thoughts on the Golden section and mathematics, just following the flow. From the first movement, an airy intro and wild bassolo where the bass roar, fighting, whimpers against embrittlement of flute, zither, piano and sound games. A pulse of densification and sparseness becomes clear and the chemistry between the bass and percussion, incredible.

The musicians stare at the notes, but what is actually notated and what is not?

Impossible to say in the flow of emotions, hot, strong, vague, tentative. It is similar to the structure of consciousness 's many layers: memories, hopes, dreams, and realities clash, the sounds, sounds, rhythms. I fall into a state of extreme alertness, as injected with a secret vitamin substance - though it only is music!

Johan Sundberg join in with his solo part an embroidery of metallic sounds, one filigranswork of metal pins, pancaketurner (!), e-bow and other secret small electronic. From this rises piano, zither, sounds in a shimmering soundscape, like stars, bioluminescence. Suddenly electronic sounds from behind, David plays on Gävle’s sounds. Voice clusters of Nian (storemarket), train squeaks, water and noise - easily recognizable, but that they come from Gävle means less, subordinate to the whole that arises. In the piece’s climax in the point of intersection of the golden section the feeling of heat increases, but despite chaos attacks never loses a sense of context. The exact noted is transformed. And from there, by the musicians, rises the most intuitive, a musical, poetic whole.

/Camilla Dal in Gävle Dagblad

 

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