Chambered Music

The Idea of Changing the Perspective and Meaning of Familiar Things

By Tim Rutherford-Johnson

Simon Steen-Andersen describes his String Quartet (1999) as his ‘opus 1’: the zero point of his subsequent compositional development. It earns this status, he says, by being an attempt to remove all the ‘distracting’ elements – that is, intervals and harmonies – from his music. As he heard it, any two pitched notes – in either a tonal or atonal context – placed together would create associations with other pieces of music and thus distract from the experience itself. With his quartet, then, Steen-Andersen sought for the first time to write a music that does not evoke harmonic listening; that is, a non-tonal music.

A year later, Steen-Andersen developed this idea in the guitar solo in-side-out-side-in …  . Along the way, he found the beginnings of a repertory of sounds – especially hushed dry flurries, evoking guiros or rattles – that would soon become signatures of that non-tonal music for more than a decade: sounds that not only evade harmonic distractions but also highlight the physical energies behind individual musical gestures. Sounds like these enter the foreground in Praesens (2001), the next step in the composer’s development and the first major ensemble piece after his String Quartet. In just the opening moments, they can be heard in the form of sheets of paper rubbed against cardboard, a credit card strummed across the piano keyboard, a rapid flurry of clarinet key clicks and bouncing string jétés – to say nothing of the actual guiros and cabasas in the percussion section.

Praesens (‘Presence’) begins from the idea of a constantly transforming energetic flow, inspired by the memories of the composer’s mother’s recordings of Glenn Gould playing Bach. To begin with, this takes place across the whole ensemble, in a plasmatic exchange of individual and group identities. About midway through, however, the music coalesces momentarily into a double concerto for violin and clarinet. Two of the composer’s favourite instruments – the former (often playing sul ponticello) sharp and metallic, the other warm and rounded – they carry the energy forward in a two-part relay until, after a sort of joint cadenza, they recede once more, leaving the music to continue, less certainly, towards its unknown destination.

Musical energy is also a theme of Besides (2003) – and in particular an interplay of energetic extremes that are brought onto the same dynamic plane. On one level are the sorts of active micro-sounds that first appeared in in-side-out-side‑in … . These are put under a microscope in the form of an amplified trio of piano, piccolo and violin, who use volume pedals to magnify their quiet actions. The other voice, as it were, is a second trio of violin, viola and cello (playing with a drastically detuned, and hence heavily distorting bottom string) that plays with the force of multiple fortissimos but against heavy mutes. The ‘quiet’ sounds of the piano/piccolo/violin trio bloom far beyond their actions suggest; the ‘loud’ sounds of the string trio struggle beneath the dampening effect of the mutes, their efforts leaking out in the sounds of friction and acoustic distortion. As the work progresses, this counterpoint fractures into increasingly isolated shards; short jabs held together only by the spaces between them, until the cello takes up that space and ends the work with an extended cadenza.

Besides has been one of Steen-Andersen’s less-performed pieces. Yet that final cadenza has been responsible for an extensive series of spin-offs, beginning with Beside Besides, a fragment for solo cello based on the final pages of the ensemble piece. This, in turn, has spawned many related works for other solo instruments and ensembles, each of them a ‘choreographic translation’ of the physical gestures of the cello piece into the physical realm of another instrument or group of instruments. Called Next to Beside Besides, these may further be performed with video (or the performer playing a different version), in which case they carry the name Self-Reflecting Next to Beside Besides …

Amid (2004) continues the idea of interplaying extremes, but this time hardwires them directly to the physical actions of the musicians. The work begins with loud, unison gestures: a full, triple-fortissimo exhalation across the mouthpiece (flute); the same, but into the body of the instrument (clarinet); an upward glissando across the full range of the keyboard (piano); a five-string, two-octave slide (guitar); triple-fortissimo bursts of noise (percussion, violin and cello). Each gesture requires a full commitment of energy; each lasts little more than a second before it is repeated.

This is one half of the interplay: a single motion, requiring full physical effort and movement (of the hands, lungs, bow etc.). In between is what Steen-Andersen calls the ‘reload’: the swift movement required to reset the hands to their starting position, to refill the lungs, to draw the bow back again. These actions are notated in the score, but, in truth, the initial gestures are so deliberately big and the space between them so small that even the best player could not avoid creating a noise in between: it is key to Steen-Andersen’s aesthetic that these ‘accidental’ sounds are not acted: they emerge from a specific musical situation. They are the background to the gestures’ foreground, the liminal, negative space between the sounds. As Amid progresses, it slowly expands to take the place of the foreground gestures, giving the whole piece a cross-like structure as background becomes foreground, and vice versa.

Described like this, Amid is the most formally straightforward piece on this release. There is one other thing, though. At the start of Besides, one can hear a strange ‘whooping’ sound – something distinctly alien, even within this world of unusual noises. You could be forgiven for assuming it to be an electronic keyboard, but it is the sound of the piano, amplified through a guitar Whammy pedal that enables the sound to be transposed gradually by up to two octaves. In the context of the acoustic instruments, it’s a sound that temporarily pulls you out of the work and forces you to recalibrate your expectations of it. Something similar, but more precisely situated, takes place just over halfway through Amid with the introduction of a major sixth, softly but deliberately arpeggiated on the piano. This is the first instance of an explicitly harmonic (even tonal) moment in Steen-Andersen’s music since before the String Quartet, yet its effect is not to distract from but to enlarge our experience of the music, enabling us to experience the familiar sound anew or as something alien.

In Chambered Music (2007), another such moment occurs around one-third of the way into the piece. Although brief, it provides the only overt clue to the work’s principal source material – the spoken diaries of one of history’s most famous (and revered) political prisoners. The identity of that individual is not important, but the idea of incarceration and the stifling of speech – as an extension of the muted energies first explored in Besides – is. It is extended in multiple dimensions across the work: Steen-Andersen began by collecting dozens of ideas for how music or sound could be ‘chambered’. Among those that made it into the piece are: jam jars; metronomes placed within soundproof boxes (to be opened at appropriate moments); a high E played on piccolo trumpet with practice mute, which sounds a tiny but highly pressurised vibrating air column; samples recorded from the inside of a piano and the inside of a loudspeaker; the locks on a briefcase; and looping repeats that create rhythmic chambers within the flow of the music itself.

Most important, though, is a solo trombone, which is placed offstage, ‘several doors or walls away from the hall’. Recalling the action dynamics of Besides, the idea is that even when the soloist is playing as loud as possible the sound that reaches the hall is only pp–mp in volume. Melodically doubling the prisoner’s muffled speech (played on a sampler keyboard), they stand in for that prisoner, another figure shut away and placed at such a distance that we can barely hear them any more. In performance, Steen-Andersen says, the trombonist registers at first as an annoyance – why is someone practising next door when a concert is on? – then as amusing, as their interruptions take a comic turn; and finally as the work’s emotional core.

And where do these four early works stand in relation to Steen-Andersen’s later career? The gestural dynamism and forward-falling momentum are easily apparent in two of the next pieces he wrote – On and Off and Two and Fro (2008) for ensemble, another exploration of contrasting performance actions; and the video performance Run Time Error (2009–20), which entails the composer recording himself running around a performance space, sounding objects as he encounters them. The use of musical actions as elements in an abstract drama that first appeared in Chambered Music is developed further in works such as Black Box Music (2012) and Korpus (2015). And alienated familiars, like the major sixth of Amid, have become a frequent feature, albeit in a more dramatic style, of pieces like the Piano Concerto (2014), in which the soloist is paired with a video doppelgänger, playing a piano that has been dropped from height onto a concrete floor; and TRIO (2019), in which an orchestra, choir and big band are placed in counterpoint with each other and historical film footage of their predecessors. Most recently, the opera Don Giovanni’s Inferno (2023) remixes three centuries of operatic history as it follows Don Giovanni into hell. ‘I’m more and more fascinated’, the composer says, ‘by the idea of changing the perspective and meaning of familiar things by placing them upside down or changing their context’.

This release thus presents four early works from a career – beginnings that would prove to be the very foundation of what it would later become.
 

Tim Rutherford-Johnson is a writer with a focus on new music. He is the author of the widely praised Music after the Fall (University of California Press) and The Music of Liza Lim (Wildbird), and has co-authored Twentieth-Century Music in the West (Cambridge University Press).