Orchestral Works

Everlasting Dusk

By Tim Rutherford-Johnson

‘It is at Dusk that the most interesting things occur, for that is when simple differences fade away. I could live in everlasting Dusk.’

– Olga Tokarczuk: Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead
(Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones)

There is something treacherous about sounds. They are unreliable narrators. For example: the music of Bára Gísladóttir appears dark and troubled to our ears at first hearing. With its apparent screams of rage, rumbles of fear and vast, obliterating crescendos, it seems to speak of the night and its terrors. But this would be an illusion. Or at least, only part of its story.

Certainly, many people respond to these sounds with metaphors of darkness and annihilation. After all, Gísladóttir does write music that exists at the extremes: long durations, loud volumes, wild activity and icy stasis. I’ve fallen into this trap myself, tripped by these sounds as though stumbling over a rotten log. In a previous sleevenote for Dacapo Records, I described VÍDDIR (2020), Gísladóttir’s masterful eruption for nine flutes, three percussionists, bass guitar and double bass, as ‘a black night of a piece’. Elsewhere, I’ve written of how the hour-long SILVA (2022), for double bass and electronics, probes layers of despair and aggression.

I once asked Gísladóttir how she feels about reactions like these. ‘I don’t mind’, she told me, ‘but I’m always so surprised by how dark it appears to people. SILVA – it’s really this idea of grrrrrrrggghhh … that there’s a heavy metal techno rave underground in which the trees are growing into the ground instead of up. That they are raving. To me it’s humorous!’ Another work, Animals of your pasture (2022), imagines a multi-species flock of animals, running across prairies, fighting, dancing and singing together as if one single organism. The image is equal parts comic and chaotic. But with the animals’ activities rendered through the metallic crinkling of thimbles on harpsichord strings, the howls and drones of woodwind and a cataclysm of electric guitar, the effect is certainly more visceral and disruptive than it is comfortingly pastoral.

Key to understanding the humour and vitality of Gísladóttir’s music, as well as its more disturbing undercurrents, is her conception of sounds, instruments and ensembles as living organisms. ‘It’s very important to me the idea of sound being treated as something alive’, she says. ‘The feeling of sound as something sterile is extremely depressing. It’s so important to remember the life in everything, and not only in humans.’ And there is certainly something more-than-human about the places Gísladóttir’s imagination takes her, whether that is the liquifying bass frequencies of SILVA or the gleaming event horizon of VÍDDIR. Organisms themselves – especially, but not only, human bodies – lie at the intersection of comical excess and self-annihilation. As she describes in relation to NEIND (2015), a piece for double bass and a multi-instrumentalist who must gyrate, contort and play several instruments at once in order to meet the work’s absurdist demands, her music seeks a state of mind ‘where the level above the furthermost emotional overload possible is a dimension of misty nothingness’.

A similar position can be found in the novella With My Dog Eyes, by the Brazilian avant-garde writer Hilda Hilst. The book was profoundly influential on the composition of Animals of your pasture, and gave it its title. Published in 1986, With My Dog Eyes narrates the descent into apparent dementia of the university professor Amós Kéres. Like Samuel Beckett’s Molloy and James Joyce’s Molly Bloom, Kéres tells his story in a feverish and fractured monologue, one punctuated with mania, poetry and depravity. Hilst welcomed the obscene as a literary aesthetic (her works do not flinch from portraying all aspects of bodily function), and as Kéres’ identity dissolves, she shows his thoughts as divided between vaporous, ungraspable memories and sharp bolts of physical impulse.

Another of Gísladóttir’s favourite authors is the Polish Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk, whose novels also portray, albeit through an ironically slanted prism, an eccentric and searingly honest view of human psychology. ‘To me most of her books are comedies in a sense, but it’s very hidden’, the composer says. ‘And sometimes I feel like my music is the same … I get asked “Are you very angry?” Which I’m not. Or not constantly at least!’, she adds, laughing. In Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead – a title taken from the English poet and visionary William Blake, but which could easily sit alongside titles of Gísladóttir’s such as Music to accompany your sweet splatter dreams (2019), or Split thee, Soul, to Splendid Bits (attn.: no eternal life/light this time around) (2018) – Tokarczuk tells a noirish murder mystery, set in a remote village on the Czech-Polish border. The plot centres on an aging teacher and caretaker of the local holiday homes, Janina Duszejko, who discovers a series of mysterious deaths, beginning with her cantankerous neighbour, whom she calls Big Foot. Duszejko, an amateur astrologist and translator of Blake’s poems, tries to convince others that these people were murdered by the local wildlife as revenge for the actions of hunters. Feeling herself almost shamanically in tune with animals, Duszejko also views the world through the eyes of a middle-aged woman living on her own, turning its scorn back on itself with a dry and sardonic wit. (When she confronts the police with her suspicions: ‘The Commandant wasn’t sure if I was making fun of him, or if he was dealing with a madwoman. There were no other possibilities. I saw the blood briefly flood his face – he was undoubtedly the pyknic type, who will eventually die of a stroke.’) Tokarczuk’s brilliance is to present her character at her worst and least explicable, and yet still make us warm to her (before, in the novel’s denouement, pulling the rug out from under us). In a more recent novel, The Books of Jacob (2018), she performs a similar feat on a still greater scale, placing us inside the mind of the sociopathic religious leader Jacob Frank. ‘She never really labels him as such, it’s never really judging, which is an aspect of the work that I really love’, Gísladóttir explains. ‘But it’s very uncomfortable to read a book of a thousand pages about a person who is so ghastly and violent. I’m still recovering from it, it was very triggering somehow!’

There is nothing expressly comical about the three orchestral works presented on this release, COR (2021), Hringla (2021–22) and VAPE (2016). With the possible exception of VAPE (which I will come to later), they are somewhat abstract in conception – more so than SILVA or Animals of your pasture , at least – although each still has its moments of absurdist stubbornness and sonic extremity. Nevertheless, the correspondences with Tokarczuk’s work are striking. Here is a fascination with language and coincidence, for example. Here is an uncompromising interrogation of the body, in its excesses and ailments. And here, most of all, is life, vaporous and between states, neither dark nor light; an ‘everlasting Dusk’.

COR was commissioned by and written for the WDR Symphony Orchestra in 2021. Like many of Gísladóttir’s recent works, its title plays on multiple meanings. In this case, they come from two different etymologies, Medieval French and Latin: cuer/cor, meaning ‘heart’, and cors/corpus, meaning ‘body’. In several other languages, ‘chor’ or ‘kor’ is also the stem for ‘choir’ or ‘chorus’. Heart, body, choir. Nouns both visceral (blood, flesh, voice) and abstract (the core of things), hymns and cadavers. ‘COR is built on a collage of these aspects’, Gísladóttir writes in her short programme note, ‘where the intention is to shed light (or darkness if you will) on their existential unity.’

If orchestras are also organisms, the one Gísladóttir rouses in COR is a raging beast. The music begins with a primal bellow, of brass players and flautists growling into their instruments, percussionists screeching cardboard tubes across the surface of tam-tams, and oboes and clarinets interjecting rasps of rough multiphonics. Beneath it all is a deep E natural pedal tone, which acts like a chain shackling everything in place, keeping it just on the right side of control.

The core is sustained by seven amplified double basses – Gísladóttir’s own instrument – who play almost uninterrupted throughout (there are no other stringed instruments). Sometimes they are that thick chain holding back the beast; at others they merge with the whispered flutter of a high flute. Only once are they completely silenced, at the work’s climax. This, describes Gísladóttir in her preface, is ‘the CORe of it all’, a ‘mad percussion solo’. Over the course of two minutes, while the bassists play short loops in free tempo, the four percussionists mount a long, interminable crescendo on the tam-tams. At the point of maximum volume, the basses drop out – defeated, or just no longer required – while the percussionists continue to hammer ferociously. (The notation here is just a dense black block, scored with lines like the grain of wood. Anything more precise would draw the players away from complete abandon.) The tam-tam roar continues for another forty-two seconds (‘really the most noise possible’ insists the score) before it is cut off by the conductor and left to ring and fade.

Inside the long decay, the core imperceptibly returns, in the form of hushed tremolos over a low B – the first change in the work’s underlying harmony for more than thirteen minutes. The effect is magical and has a surprising origin. As a teenager, Gísladóttir was a reluctant bass player in her school orchestra. She had learnt violin as a child but had given it up for football instead. She was only persuaded back to music during a year-long school exchange to New Zealand, where the school’s orchestra needed someone familiar with stringed instruments to play the bass, and when she returned to Iceland, she joined a youth orchestra.

By her own admission, she was not a good member of the ensemble. She would turn up to rehearsals but did little practice in between. One day, however, the subject of rehearsal was Prokofiev’s Suite No. 2 from his ballet Romeo and Juliet . That piece begins with a great crescendo of brass followed by a halo of pianissimo strings, which seem to emerge from within it. Hearing it for the first time was a formative musical experience. ‘This is where I fell in love with music’, Gísladóttir says today. ‘And I think this moment is always following me.’

Where COR ends, then, is very different from where it begins. Yet in reality the two states – fury and calm – are just different tellings of the same fundamental thing. One wrapped within the other; two interpretations of one indistinct shape.

***

The idea of creating many things from just one developed out of Gísladóttir’s double bass playing. Because of its long, thick strings and cavernous soundbox, the bass makes a sound that is rich with layers of overtones and reverberations. Even slight changes in finger pressure or bow speed can open up new worlds. Thousands of universes can be contained within a single point, a fact exploited by both the double bass choir of COR and the solo bass, played by Gísladóttir herself, of Hringla. In learning to control these worlds – to make the tiny adjustments of her hands that allow her to activate them and pass between them – Gísladóttir has come to see her bass as both an organic extension of her body, and a kind of home. Like a cocoon, it is something she wraps around herself (even as she, physically, wraps herself around it), and allows herself to be absorbed by and transformed within. And this cocoon-like attunement projects into her ways of thinking: ‘I feel I understand the most about the world when I am in the same mindset. I don’t think my thoughts flutter so much.’

This duality of flutter and focus – represented metaphorically in the physics of a bass string producing a steady note through constant vibration – is the essential dynamic of Hringla, written to mark Gísladóttir’s receiving of the Gladsaxe Music Prize in 2022. As well as orchestra, it features Gísladóttir as an improvising soloist and electronic projections derived from the music of her bass. The work’s Icelandic title has a range of meanings, from the rattle or tinkle of metallic objects to a wobbling hesitancy or indecision. As with COR, all of these possible interpretations inform the shape and sounds of the piece.

‘Hringla’ is first apparent in Gísladóttir’s percussion set-up. Three percussionists play a range of metal instruments, including crotales, bells, wind chimes, temple bells, Chinese gongs and tam-tams. All of them carry properties of rattling or focusing to varying degrees, from the random tinkling of wind chimes to the singular, sustained tones of temple bowls. Most emblematic, however, are three objects known as Euler’s discs. An Euler’s disc is a patented form of educational toy designed to demonstrate the physics of angular momentum. It works on the same principle as spinning a coin on a tabletop: as the disc spins, it slowly loses energy due to friction and vibration. As it does so, its angle of rotation tilts from the vertical to the horizontal until it eventually comes to a clattering stop. Designed so as to minimise rolling friction around its edge, an Euler’s disc can be made to spin like this for minutes at a time. As it spins, it creates an optical illusion that it is levitating slightly. More importantly for Gísladóttir, it also produces two sounds as the vibrations of the disc against the surface get progressively faster: a seemingly infinite rising scale and a continuous percussive rattling. The motion of the disc and the sound it creates therefore act like narrowing channels, transforming a large-scale flutter or rattle into a single point of focus. (Interestingly, the same sound was used in the 2001 film Pearl Harbour to mimic the sound of torpedoes powering through the water.)

The duality of focus and flutter is enacted out on many levels of Hringla , from local phenomena like the buzzing multiphonics of an oboe or the ‘ripping’ glissandi of a trombone, to the activation of fragile harmonics that flick in and out of view on Gísladóttir’s bass. The bass has its own fluttering shadow in the form of the live electronics, which sample its sounds and replay them in distorted fashion – a kind of shimmer between the real and the virtual.

The drone itself provides a focus, but it also wavers, either rising a note above or dropping a note below and precipitating moments of crisis when it does. If there is a meditative quality to Hringla – and the drones, wind chimes and temple blocks certainly suggest that there is – it is a meditation that acknowledges the possibility of disturbance, perhaps even welcomes it. Gísladóttir has practised yoga for many years, and surely knows the difficulty of truly emptying one’s mind. As with so much of her work, what she offers in Hringla is not idealism but honesty. The fact that she herself is at the centre of the work, wrapped around her bass is significant: it’s not always clear which is the focus and which the flutter – orchestra or soloist. They push and pull at each other. As much as the individual is disturbed by the wider society, so does she disturb it in return.

***

Although Gísladóttir’s work often casts an uncomfortably penetrating eye over human emotions and behaviours, it tends to do so in abstract terms. Rarely does it attach itself to real events. VAPE, written for the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and premiered at the 2017 PULSAR festival in Copenhagen, is an exception. Here, the metaphors of darkness and dread that I spoke about at the beginning of this essay do seem to apply. The composer’s prompt for the piece was reading about the Tokyo sarin gas attacks of 1995, and in particular the descriptions of events contained in the interviews collected by Haruki Murakami in his book Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche . On the morning of 20 March 1995, between 7.30 and 8.00 am, five members of the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult stepped onto different trains of the Tokyo Metro. Each carried plastic bags full of liquid sarin, a deadly and highly volatile nerve agent. Placing the bags on the floor of the train carriage they used umbrellas with sharpened tips to release the sarin, which then evaporated quickly and spread throughout the carriage as the attackers disembarked. Fourteen people died as a result (thirteen of them within twenty-four hours), while many hundreds more were injured, some of them severely. In time, the perpetrators were all apprehended and either sentenced to death or life imprisonment. More widely, as Murakami shows, the attacks had a profound effect on Japanese society’s sense of self.

In the days and weeks afterwards, investigators were able to reconstruct the ninety-minute timeline over which the attacks took place: when each attacker stepped onto his respective train, when each pierced his bag of sarin, and when each train was alerted to a problem and withdrawn from service. By compressing these timelines proportionally to just ten minutes, Gísladóttir was able to construct a temporal structure for her piece, a kind of transcription of the attacks. She divided her orchestra into five groups – violins; violas and cellos; double basses, harp and percussion; woodwind; brass – and assigned one attack timeline to each. The attacks themselves are represented by sharp jabbing sounds for each group: snap pizzicato for the strings, slaps of the mouthpiece for the brass, vocal grunts for the wind and, most symbolically, the stabbing of balls of plastic bubble wrap for the percussion. Each is preceded by a creeping, sinister anticipation (one can imagine in its soundscape fluttering nerves and anxious heartbeats, as well as the approach of subway trains), and followed by a gradual vaporisation and suffocation, represented in techniques such as string overpressure or air sounds and whistle tones in the wind. Two additional minutes are added at the end for reflective after-thoughts, inspired by Murakami’s follow-up to Underground, The Place that Was Promised, in which he interviews members of Aum. The piece therefore offers a triple perspective – of attackers, victims and perhaps even the gas itself – all shrouded and merged within the same vaporous atmosphere.

Gísladóttir’s choice of subject matter has drawn criticism, and she herself has reservations about the piece: although she revised it in 2020, she still regards it as an early work. It was composed while she was still a student at the Royal Danish Academy of Music, and in its use of a strict pre-compositional structure – rather than in-the-moment intuition – it is unique in her output to date. Nevertheless, she defends her choice of topic, saying that the idea was to deal with violence as a theme, rather than the details of the attacks themselves. That is, to confront violence as it is, objectively and without fear. In a sense, the actions of the Aum cultists were beside the point for her; likewise, the victims themselves, despite the tragedy of their deaths. Like Murakami (or, indeed, Tokarczuk), Gísladóttir is uninterested in cultural depictions of ‘right’ versus ‘wrong’ or ‘sanity’ versus ‘madness’. In this way VAPE is very different from, for example, many of the works of grief and mourning that were composed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the United States, such as John Adams’ On the Transmigration of Souls or Steve Reich’s WTC 911. In these works, documentation (lists of names and New York field recordings in the case of Adams; recordings of air traffic controllers and firefighters in the case of Reich) is used as a means of remembrance and dramatic re-enactment; they are understandably partial acts of memorial and comprehension. In its temporal and spatial abstraction of violence, VAPE comes closer to a work like StartEndTime by the sound artist Mark Bain, a recording of seismic vibrations on the east coast of America made on 11 September 2001, stretched and edited so as to unfold audibly and in real time. Bain’s seventy-four-minute sound work registers the impacts of the planes and subsequent collapse of the towers impartially, as peaks of seismic vibration translated into soundwaves. Unlike Reich’s and Adams’ pieces, StartEndTime is not intended as a memorial but, the artist says, as a record of the global terrain becoming ‘a bell-like alarm denoting histories in the making’.

Similarly, Gísladóttir distances VAPE from the specific events around which it is structured. ‘I don’t feel that violence belongs to anybody’, she says, ‘because it is universal’. What she found interesting in Murakami’s narration was not the violence itself – ‘we know violence’, she says – but the victims’ reactions to it. The release of a nerve agent is different to the detonation of a bomb or the hijacking of a plane. There is not a dividing line between before and after – only a gradient of concentration between safe and unsafe. Thus when they began to feel unwell, few of the victims on the trains considered that something external had happened to them, and many did not feel any ill effects until some time later. ‘Everybody thought, “I must be getting a flu, or maybe we’re all getting a hardcore virus”, because everybody was dozing off’, Gísladóttir explains. ‘No one thinks, “Someone is here to hurt me”.’ Their first thoughts were often to do with their personal inconvenience. Murakami’s interviews reveal that on the carriages, commuters often did not communicate with each other or raise an alarm, despite their evident and shared discomfort. Many of those who were affected continued into work, prioritising their perceived obligations and disassociating from the events around them. The effect of the violence, Murakami concluded, was to expose a troubling weakness at the heart of contemporary Japanese society (one that, we are bound to say, is not unique to Japan).

It is a feature of the sarin attacks that despite the tragedies of their deaths, the number of people who were killed is small compared to the impact felt by thousands of others over a much longer aftermath, whether through long-term respiratory or eyesight problems, or psychic and post-traumatic disturbance. (One of Murakami’s interviewees notes the essential role played by paramedics and local responders in this respect.) And this is to say nothing of the wider impact on Japanese society. Like an evaporating liquid, the effects of the sarin attacks spread further and further, even as they became less concentrated. This influenced the portrayal of violence in VAPE itself. Although the five moments when the attackers pierced their bags of sarin are represented, these merge into an underlying entropy that begins before the attacks and continues afterwards. Just as the differences between the opposing actions of suffocation and evaporation disappear, so too does the line between before violence and after violence, between sarin and not-sarin. The sense of fear and anxiety with which the piece begins does not abate, and indeed the work’s climactic moment – a huge crescendo of drums and cymbals – occurs in the so-called aftermath section, outside the timeline of the attacks themselves: as if it is only with reflection that the true horror is revealed. The moment resembles the crescendo of tam-tams towards the end of COR, although at this point of greatest extremity there is no resolution or release in its wake, only vapor, continuing to disperse until it disappears entirely.

‘At the end of my tour, I would take a final look around, and I should have felt happy that everything was there. After all, it could just as well not have been. There could have been nothing but grass here – large clumps of wind-lashed steppe grass and the rosettes of thistles. That’s what it could have been like. Or there could have been nothing at all – a total void in outer space. But perhaps that would have been the best option for all concerned.’

– Olga Tokarczuk: Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead
(Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2018)

Tim Rutherford-Johnson, 2024