Piano Works

Detaching Itself from the Certainties

By Tim Rutherford-Johnson

Thomas Agerfeldt Olesen’s 40-minute Piano Sonata (2019) begins with a peculiar solo melody. Just six-and-a-half bars long, it seems to drift through at least as many keys, while at the same time detaching itself from the certainties of a fixed rhythm and even register. Like a shy teenager, it is desperate to join the party but wary of giving too much of itself away.

It is a disconcerting way to begin such a substantial piece of music, and things only get more perplexing from here. Because immediately, and unexpectedly, the music plunges into a grand Romantic fantasy in the style of Liszt. Something like our opening melody remains deep in the texture, but it is shrouded by handfuls of notes that billow up and down the keyboard. Any sense of shyness appears to be cast aside, replaced by a bravura virtuosity.

And then almost as suddenly as it began, this also stops, before restarting, like a computer rebooting. Is this old music or new music, we’re forced to ask. On the surface, it seems old, but then there are hiccups like this, or passages when the texture thins down to a historically anachronistic single line. And as the music continues, even its stylistic foundations shift beneath our feet: hints of Chopin, Ravel, Schubert and even Arvo Pärt can all be heard. Yet either way, the music maintains the same searching momentum of those opening bars.

Olesen describes one of the motivations behind his piece as a kind of ‘homelessness’, or a restless striving for identity and purpose. This is certainly reflected in the music’s endlessly shifting harmonies: moment-by-moment they resemble the classical tradition (or parts of it, at least), but closer attention shows that – like that opening melody – they avoid or undermine, rather than consolidate, any sense of orientation or direction. Everything spins outwards, rather than coalesce around a central core.

Entropic motion like this is a powerful motivator, but it can’t last forever. Something has to bring it to a steady state. (Heat death is the only alternative.) And so it proves, midway through the movement, with the most surprising moment of all. A loud cough announces the voice of the composer, ventriloquising through that of the pianist, Rolf Hind: ‘Can I speak?’

This is not the sort of thing that is supposed to happen. ‘There is a reason why, as a composer, you should not start talking in your music’, says Olesen. And yet once this awkward and improbable situation has happened, there is nothing to do but follow it through to its end.

Thomas Agerfeldt Olesen © Lars Skaaning

After jostling with the pianist for the spotlight, the composer announces a new topic for consideration: politics. ‘We are living in a world where unscrupulous and bought politicians rule in order to preserve a system which has destroyed the planet.’ Is this the reason for the anti-systemic fantasy that has been unfolding so far: rather than been passive wandering, at the mercy of some internal force, all along it has been active resistance, a model for creative disruption. But at the same time, it speaks to a deeper sense of artistic crisis and uncertainty.

The answer for all this lies outside Olesen’s composing studio. In late 2019, headlines around the world were dominated by the catastrophic bushfires that raged across Australia for almost an entire year, from June 2019 to May 2020. Almost 250,000 square kilometres of land were affected; at least three billion animals were estimated to have been killed or displaced (many species are believed to have been driven to extinction entirely); and property damage reached many billions of dollars. Air pollution in cities such as Sydney and Canberra hit many times more than hazardous levels; smoke from the fires was carried halfway around to world to South America; and 715 million tons of carbon dioxide was released into the air – an 80 per cent increase on Australia’s typical annual fossil fuel and bushfire emissions.

By their sheer, almost surrealistic scale – as Hind’s voice of the composer notes, not even the Book of Revelation could have imagined such apocalyptic scenes – the Australian bushfires pushed global consciousness through the looking glass of climate catastrophe. This, it seemed to many, gazing on from afar, was what environmental breakdown looked like. At home in Denmark, Olesen was in the midst of composing his Sonata. He began to wonder what role he, as a composer, could meaningfully play in the face of such destruction. His approach to this unanswerable question is played out in the rest of the movement: after experimenting with some ‘illustrative’ clusters and glissandi (in which hints of our opening theme remain apparent), he returns to an imitation of Pärt’s tintinnabuli style. With its bell-like alternations of consonance and dissonance, it is emblematic of the paired steps of angels and men. But even this is only a partial answer – ‘I stole it’, admits the composer. If the aim has been to find harmony without losing sight of the individual, then this has only been partially achieved. Nevertheless, what composer and pianist arrive at remains music. And a love of music (or love expressed through music) can provide at least a refuge from the sense of hopelessness and voicelessness prompted by the climate crisis and other disasters.

Having reached this point, the second and third movements can be much more straightforward. Where the first is referential and theatrical, they are cool and abstract; where the first spirals centrifugally outwards, they are focused and still.

The second movement is almost the exact opposite of the first, in fact. It is tightly controlled, almost to the point of driving itself to a standstill. Until its final two pages, it is made up of a single four-bar chorale whose three voices are repeated in every possible combination and with no other variety except changes in dynamic. Again, the harmonic underlay is unstable, but it gains certainty through sheer dint of repetition. (To the list of other passing references, we can now add Erik Satie’s Vexations, with its 840 repetitions of an off-kilter, 26-beat phrase.)

Only in the short third movement is true stability achieved, with the gentle unfolding of a simple farewell canon. When the pianist begins to hum his own countermelody, perfectly in accord with the traditional rules of counterpoint, a sense of calm descends upon the piece. Voice and piano – composer and pianist – are unified. ‘Composing means it’s all planned’, as the voice of the composer noted in the first movement. It’s not where we expected to end up, but it is a kind of resolution.

Like the grand Sonata, Olesen’s miniature 6 Sonatas (2007) draw in their own elements from musical history, although in a more playful fashion. The first association is with Domenico Scarlatti: these are character pieces, short studies in a particular motif or idea: a jabbing, lopsided rhythm; an insistent alternation of right-hand chords; a kind of ragtime on a 23-note tone row; a pastoral overlaying of rising harmonies. The third sonata – which is to be played ‘as if the sound is more or less coming from another room’, according to the score – is a distorted dream of Mozart, compiled from fragments by the Austrian composer. And the sixth is a study in unrealisable clockwork precision. Reduced to no more than the four notes of a C minor seventh chord, it only hints at its musical idea, leaving the rest for the listener to fill in.

There is also a conceptual relationship to fill in with Olesen’s Small Miracle Prelude (2003). For once, the source material here is a concrete historical work: the Prelude from J.S. Bach’s Prelude, Fugue and Allegro in E-flat major, BWV998 (a work composed for lute or harpsichord but generally heard today in an arrangement for guitar). Inspired by his love for this piece, Olesen set out to place it in a modern perspective, but without changing a note. To do so, he employed a systematic reordering of the four hundred or so notes of Bach’s melodic line, before applying a similar process to the bassline. Even though the bass process has to be repeated (because it contains fewer notes than the melody), unexpectedly this meant that the two lines converged harmonically at the work’s climax, a coincidence that earned Olesen’s piece the ‘miracle’ of its title.

Olesen’s steady counterpoint and smoothly uncurling arpeggios certainly recall Bach, even if quirks in the new counterpoint – momentary deviations in rhythm or harmony – suggest a Bach going in and out of focus. And he retains the structure of the original: in fact, the ornamented fermata just before the Prelude’s coda is identical to Bach’s.

‘Historical music is an unavoidable part of us’, Olesen says. ‘Trying to avoid it in order to be ‘modern’ doesn’t in fact make you modern’. As Olesen’s Piano Sonata alter ego would doubtless agree, composing is about speaking your mind; and that inevitably includes all that has come before. And perhaps by doing so, we can begin to answer some of the questions of today.