Hidden Letters

Hands on Stone

By Tim Rutherford-Johnson

A double bass, a voice that cuts between natural and falsetto registers, and a collection of wooden and metallic percussion instruments would not be many composers’ first choices for setting sensual love poetry. But this subverting of expectations – while not for a moment denying the reality of that sensualism, or its expression – is precisely what Tan Tuan Hao seeks to achieve in Vit turka hendur á steini (‘We dry our hands on stone’) (2021), his setting of words by Dennis Agerblad, an artist and drag performer who was born in Denmark but brought up on the Faroe Islands. The texts that Tan draws upon are pop songs, written and published before Agerblad came out publicly. They are strikingly beautiful: tender, erotic, but articulated in a language hardened by Faroese geology and climate. They speak of bodies swimming in cold surf, hard stones for pillows, and the mingling of salt and rain.

Tan says that what surprised him about these poems was Agerblad’s obvious affection for the landscape in which he was raised, even if did not appear to sit easily with his subsequent life and career. Tan alludes to this landscape through percussion instruments made of wood and metal: earthy materials whose crisp resonances recall the islands’ basalt rocks. The double bass that completes the trio adds a note of unwieldy intimacy. While it has a similar lyrical presence as, say, a viola or cello might in a more conventional setting, its sheer size turns their keening song into a slightly awkward, and therefore more tangible, struggle. Even at the end of the piece, when most of the bass’s music is played on harmonics, you can still feel the instrument's weight, like washing hanging from a line.
 

Tan Tuan Hao at the recording session © Jesper Egelund

All three pieces on this recording approach present themes of sensuality and desire within unexpected contexts and against (gender-based) norms. Pour un maître que j’aime (2022) is based on a story from the life of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia from 1740 to 1786. As a youth, Friedrich (to use his birth name) was more interested in the arts and philosophy than his warlike father, Frederick I, known as the ‘Soldier King’. In his teens, Friedrich was close to a Prussian officer Hans Hermann von Katte, with whom he may have had a love affair. The two men attempted to flee Prussia for England but when Friedrich’s father discovered their plans, he had them both arrested and (as soldiers themselves) tried for treason. Although Friedrich’s life was spared, Katte’s was not, and Friedrich was forced to watch his execution.

What drew Tan to this story is that it is preserved in the diary (and letters that she copied into it) of Friedrich’s older sister Wilhelmine. It is therefore a rare instance of history seen from a female rather than male perspective. Tan differentiates the voices of all three characters by register, giving his piece the sense of a miniature opera, but following the upturning of gender expectations, the lowest part is given to Wilhelmine.

Other elements suggest the dramatic context: upright figures for snare drum and piping clarinet at the start evoke the military prison in which Friedrich and Katte are being held, and the discursive counterpoint of the work’s interludes suggests the three characters’ private conversations. But in general, the key moments of the story are narrated second or thirdhand: Friedrich’s pleading for Katte’s life, Katte’s contentment to die for ‘a master whom he loves’, the execution itself. Tan follows a similar line of abstraction, structuring his work around a suite of Baroque dances that would have been popular in Friedrich’s time. Although the names of the dances (allemande, loure, courante, pavane) are preserved in the score and there are echoes of them here and there (most notably at the French overture-style double-dotted rhythms near the start of the piece), their musical models have been transformed so thoroughly that they are only passingly recognisable. Instead, they provide a distant and alienated context for Wilhelmine’s diary entries. The story of Friedrich and Katte may be apocryphal, but it is a potent one of love and loss. Still, it is accessible only indirectly through observations and imaginings, captured in the deliberately halting corporeality of Tan’s music.

We cannot be sure, either, of the relationship between Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, the two greatest English poets of the First World War. Owen certainly held Sassoon in high esteem, and Sassoon introduced Owen to sophisticated – and homosexual – literary circles. Tan offers glimpses of their story through extracts of Owen’s letters and the poem ‘With an Identity Disc’ in And Therefore With You (2021). Again, the challenging context (in this case the trenches of the Western Front) sets the foreground sensuality of Owen’s words into sharp relief. Despite this backdrop, the duet Tan writes for bass clarinet and baritone is the most tender of all three pieces on this recording. (‘I sit alone at last, and therefore with you, my dear Siegfried’: Owen’s words to Siegfried are apposite.) The clarinet’s presence suggests – remotely – a marching band, but really the war is something very far away. The baritone’s bass clarinet partner is a little more agile than Vit turka’sdouble bass, and the absence of percussion softens the music’s edges. But the pay-off is a greater sense of isolation. We are shown more glimpses of a sensual life within a context that barely allows it.
 

Tim Rutherford-Johnson is a writer on new music. He is author of the acclaimed study of music since 1989, Music after the Fall (University of California Press), The Music of Liza Lim (Wildbird) and co-author of Twentieth-Century Music in the West (Cambridge University Press).