Nordic Music Days claims to be the longest-running annual music festival in the world, having existed as a showcase for contemporary Nordic composers more-or-less continuously since 1888. This longevity raises some questions of category definition: What might unite today's composers working in Helsinki with their counterparts 1,500 miles away in Reykjavík? Has modern communications technology and international study wiped out national characteristics or amplified them? Does anyone working in this year's host city, Copenhagen, ever make the 30-minute journey over the bridge to check out what's going on in Malmö? What, if anything, does being a ‘Nordic composer’ mean?
This was something Bent Sørensen (speaking in his capacity as chairman of the Danish Composers' Society which was effectively hosting the festival) attempted to get to grips with in his opening address, delivered entirely in Danish and hastily translated for me, appropriately enough, by Norwegian and Icelandic friends. Sørensen alighted on the misty-eyed concept of ‘Nordic longing’, but over the course of this long weekend at the end of September it became increasingly clear that very few of the featured composers see themselves as twenty-first-century Sibeliuses or Griegs swooning by a fjord and poring over their tone poems.
Instead, there was much evidence of a more timely and international concern with how concerts might be curated. The primary venues for the weekend's events were not concert halls, but two imposing buildings on Copenhagen's Slotsholmen: the Black Diamond, a monolithic, multi-purpose arts centre and extension to the Royal Danish Library, and the astonishing Lapidarium of Kings. Formerly the royal brewery of Christian IV (1577–1648), this is now a repository for retired statuary; cavernous rooms are littered with multiple plaster casts of angels and disembodied stone heads. One chamber contains the ‘Valley of the Norwegians’ (Nordmandsdalen): a dense crowd of life-size seventeenth-century working people, frozen like a scene from the Narnia books.
Many events were staged around and among the dramatically lit statues. Chamber ensembles and solo performers crouched in a cerulean haze beneath giant horses charging into battle, or between the knees of a Hercules. This unusual staging was ingeniously exploited on the festival's opening night, by presenting all the events as a promenade performance, repeated three times for peripatetic audiences.
Most striking of these was the International Contemporary Ensemble's realisation of Icelander Ingi Garðar Erlendsson's S:I/V:II (canon). As its name suggests, this was a mechanistic, repetitive canon in inversion for flute and clarinet, and was performed on either side of a sculptural installation fashioned from sewerage pipes. With the score pasted onto it, this structure acted as a massive music stand, somewhat like Philip Glass's Music in the Shape of a Square and Strung Out, in which the pages of the score are pinned to the walls and the performers have to walk ‘along’ the piece. The pipes, here, doubled as a resonating chamber for rumbling golf balls periodically launched through them by a percussionist, and a digitally frozen clarinet note. It had something of the inexorably weird and witty quality of John White's machine pieces, combined with a Heath-Robinson approach to construction.
Meanwhile, among the stone cherubim reclining upstairs, ICE presented three stylistically divergent short pieces for viola and cello by Fredrik Gran (Sweden), Li-Ying Wu (Denmark) and Teitur Lassen (one of the few representatives from the Faroe Islands) – a glistening spectral workout, a quasi-serial miniature and a folk-ish meditation with interjections from recorded voices, respectively. These were linked by improvised segues from the Swedish Drånkvartetten: four performers playing amplified hurdy-gurdies with effects pedals to create gritty walls of sound and pulsing percussive textures. Musically sensitive and ebulliently performed, the collision of composed and improvised music, and refined and abrasive string sonorities was very satisfying.
Day two of the festival centred on solo performances. Norwegian artist Signe Lidén's exploration of the volatile sounds of suspended bells and electronics had a placid beauty, but suffered from the festival's decision not to supply any explanatory programme notes (for almost all events). It was unclear what the processes and thinking were. The Girl Who Never Was by Erik Bünger (Sweden) was a clever conceit: a PowerPoint lecture/performance on the slippery nature of sonic memory. Bünger's opening gambit was the fascinating story of the rediscovery and restoration of pioneering sound-recordist Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's 1860 ‘phonautograph’ transcription of Au clair de la lune, complete with ghostly audio reconstructions, but quickly strayed into examinations of the 1922 silent film Nanook of the North, Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, the 1631 so-called Wicked Bible (with its misprint, ‘thou SHALT commit adultery’) and so on and so on, until the point was muddled. Bünger's model for this performance may have been Robert Ashley's concept of infinite ‘digressions’ on a subject, but Ashley always managed to maintain an atmospheric thread and internal logic, whereas Bünger's libretto resembled a disconnected stream of internet memes. His interpolation and touching performance of a Danish hymn, remembered from his childhood, rescued the performance and gave it an emotional resonance.
A day of mild panic and benign bewilderment ensued, with an event entitled Jouissance (presumably with a very intentional nod to Lacan's painful excess of pleasure). This comprised more than a hundred free concerts occurring in 15 different spaces over eight hours. As a result of this daring experiment in programming, it was impossible not to miss most of what was happening. The sheer density of events had the intriguing effect of attracting unexpected listeners, such as groups of tourists wandering in to find out what the noise was, then staying put for the next concert. It was ‘audience development’ in action, an irresistible lure.
Among the most interesting of the events I fleetingly caught were When Silence Came, a miniature chamber opera by Louise Alenius Boserup (Denmark) on the subject of the death of a parent, which fused elegant string textures with an understated pop aesthetic (as represented by the composer's own coolly restrained voice, with its echoes of Nina Persson of The Cardigans); at the opposite end of the spectrum of emotions, Willibald Motor Landscape by Øyvind Torvund (Norway) saw the ensemble asamisimasa battling against sci-fi synthesiser effects in a virtuoso display of exuberant ridiculousness.
Kaj Duncan David (Denmark/UK) and Mathias Monrad Møller (Germany) presented a collaborative work, Packaged Pleasure, a deadpan parody of a composer film portrait/hagiography. This featured Andy Ingamells (UK) performing his own, frenetic, dadaist works in sync with his onscreen doppelgänger while pondering whether he should be seen as ‘a genius, or a kind of genie’. Superbly entertaining, it felt like the Britishness of the satire didn't translate for the somewhat suspicious Nordic audience. Ingamells also played dead (and naked) for Danish composer Jeppe Ernst's unsettling Rekviem – Part One: The Physical Treatment, which saw a trio of female performers alternately percuss and caress him, according to Ernst's score. The deeply ambiguous sexual politics of the piece kept the audience deathly silent, while the tension between the aesthetics of new music and live art represented one of the festival's more explicit demonstrations of the blurring of the boundaries between art forms that ran throughout the weekend.
The most ‘Northern’-sounding pieces came from two Icelandic composers (perhaps not unexpectedly). An idiomatic choral work, Ice Age, by Hugi Guðmundsson, was full of lush harmonies smudged by glissandi, like mist rising from a glacier, while Anna Thorvaldsdóttir's In The Light Of Air was an expertly sustained 40-minute piece for small ensemble and a halo of subtle electronics. Exquisite as the aurora borealis, the piece moved from string harmonics, prepared piano and bowed harp to melodies that brought to mind Angelo Badalamenti's chilliest film scores for David Lynch.
Perversely, after this tumult of overlapping events, the final day of the festival featured just one performance, Trembling Superheroes by Juliana Hodkinson (British, but a long-term resident of Denmark), a bravely uncompromising set of music for children, performed with super-powered gusto by the Esbjerg Ensemble. The piece is a 45-minute sequence of solos and duos, giving each of the players an absurd characterisation and scenario, something like the instrumental music theatre that occurs throughout Stockhausen's Licht cycle. The audience, a good percentage of them under the age of ten, seemed initially enraptured by the spiky writing for piano, cello and violin and the creative use of ping-pong balls, an amplified floor and a cascade of feathers; a bravura solo on an outsized balloon by percussionist Christian Martinez marked him out as star of the show. However, in the last ten minutes attention began to wane and some of the crowd crawled off into the darkness, or fell asleep, suggesting the piece could do with a small amount of tightening up.
Summing up the Nordic aesthetic on the evidence provided by this festival, it would seem to revolve around a playfulness and resourcefulness regarding material, new technology and curatorial practice, and some stylistic seepage from extra-musical sources. The inspiration comes from an international outlook, rather than from the old national stereotypes and archetypes; multiplicity trumps domesticity, resulting in festivals such as this one: imaginative and bold.
