By Andrew Mellor
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Matmos performing Robert Ashley’s 'Perfect Lives' at Ultima Festival, Oslo. Photo: Henrik Beck
Hold on to your hats: the fierce, uncompromising, never-look-back brigade that personifies contemporary art music is all sentimental about the past. This September, Norway’s biggest new music festival celebrated 25 years of upending the expectations of the good folk of Oslo by publishing a limited edition, cloth-bound retrospective book for the occasion. In its pages – and over the four days of the festival’s opening weekend – there were copious opportunities to discuss what the last quarter-century of musical creativity has produced and how things have changed. But have they changed, honestly? Really?
Oslo certainly has. But it has taken its time. So many of the city’s new buildings, districts and attitudes seem to have sprung up in the last five years – perhaps even the last three. Ultima embraces all of Oslo’s musical institutions: a national opera company in a new building, a music academy in a new building, a newfangled dance agency in a new building and a symphony orchestra about to start work on a new building. The festival now cleaves to the city’s Vulkan district, which emerged along the cutesy Akerselva river almost overnight. Events were still scattered about Oslo’s rough-and-ready streets and surrounding mountains. But Vulkan, with its industrial-chic and its migrant trendies from elsewhere in the city bent on discovering ‘the new’, proved magnetic.
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Ensemble Musikfabrik at Ultima Festival 2015, Oslo. Photo: Henrik Beck
So how is ‘the new’ dealing with all this celebration of ‘the old’? Well, it seems that looking backward is the new looking forward: the new (old) stimulus for the latest definition of a brave new modernity. Lars Petter Hagen, the composer in charge of Ultima since 2012, has made a specialty of that, in that his music explores the distances between then (Grieg, Mahler) and now, teasing with notions of tradition and national identity, pulling lovingly at all those already-frayed edges. ‘Nationhood’ was Ultima’s theme last year. This year, it was ‘Nature’, which round these parts is probably what remains of nationhood when you take out the anthems and flags.
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John Persen- Mot kalde vinder (installation). Photo: Henrik Beck
A lot happens at Ultima, which made for a proper, multi-directional refraction of the theme. One morning, there was a chance to engage with nature directly. At dawn, a group of us sat in James Turrell’s Skyspace chamber (2013), cut into a hillside on the edge of the city. Turrell’s many ‘Skyspaces’ dotted across the globe, use tinted lights projected onto the walls of a funnel to frame a small patch of sky; the sky (in this case, cloud) then appears to gradually transform in shade, dimension and proximity. What really set it off here was the sonic spillover from next door. So we moved there, into a more spectacular room (either end appears to disappear) in which Elisabeth Vatn and Anders Røine wailed and keened on harmonium, Nordic bagpipes, fiddle and harp. It was a remarkable sound: rooted in folksong, pained yet beautiful, full of quiet Nordic defiance.
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Henrik Hellstenius, Orets Teater III. Photo: Henrik Beck
Much of Vatn’s singing on her Nordic bagpipes – raw but cleaner and more humble in tone than we’re used to from Scottish pipes – constituted a sort of cry of the poisoned earth. Which was exactly, sonically, how Henrik Hellstenius’s On Nature had ended the night before. As this messy theatre piece lumbered into its final chapter at the Oslo Opera House, it alighted apparently randomly on a tale of two children climbing a mountain. Singers Njål Sparbo and Stine Janvin Motland – freed suddenly from the unfathomable sprawl of Hellstenius’s multi-lingual, multi-ensemble, multi-stylistic and even multi-composer creation (he borrowed liberally from Franz Schubert) – stepped up and breathed something like life, nature and a resulting artfulness into the evening. A good old-fashioned story, that’s what we needed. But even that wasn’t enough.
Perhaps On Nature, taking itself so desperately seriously, was shafted by what came immediately before it at the Opera House: a kooky, invigorating show from Plus Minus Ensemble that asked gentle questions and then, rather kindly, answered many of them, too. Matthew Shlomowitz presented his tongue-in-cheek Lecture About Bad Music with the four musicians of the ensemble behind him, demonstrating his flawed attempts to write a crap piece due to the almost inevitable victory of some sort of sonic golden ratio and the principle of ‘habituation’ – music endearing itself to the brain upon repetition. Before that, the foursome played and danced their way through Alexander Schubert’s wicked Sensate Focus, a piece for amplified instruments, electronics and strobe light effects in which the aggressive, roboticized musicians squared-up to the audience in aggression. Both acts need tightening-up, but both were onto something.
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Oslo Philharmonic performing Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie, Photo: Henrik Beck
And both were signs that Ultima has relaxed; that it’s no longer a summit from which delegates must emerge having agreed on a conceptual roadmap for new music. Perhaps that, in turn, has induced this freedom to look backwards. The festival opened with a performance of Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie, hefty with passion and power from the Oslo Philharmonic under conductor Vasily Petrenko. The piece is almost 70 years old, but it still speaks of all the clashing contradictions of modernity in a language of embracing colour and pure, unbounded joy – the joy of the here-and-now.
From the cavernous Oslo Konserthus to a little gig venue on a suburban square, and a performance that, in my mind, topped the lot. A the Parkteatret, Cikada played James Dillon’s Oslo Triptych, distilled, careful music with the qualities of a rare and distinctive plant, written with ink on a page and performed with a veiled joy by the ensemble, underpinned by the gentle breath of Kenneth Karlsson’s Indian harmonium. Directly after, they played Jon Øyvind Ness’s Gimilen, a 20-minute reflection on nature in which the composer acknowledges the influence of Anton Bruckner’s calmed symphonic pace and space. The day before, I’d heard a piano monolith in 12 movements by Herman Vogt (Concordia Discors Études), which appeared to journey outward, inward, upward, downward in search of – wait for it – harmonic consonance, a neat triadic chord.
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Ensemble Musikfabrik / Helge Sten. Photo: Henrik Beck
So, we’re allowed to do all this stuff now? The neat, tonal chords that were once confined to Baltic and American composers on the fringes of the contemporary music scene, certainly not heard at new music festivals, are fair game? The dead white men of Europe aren’t the embarrassing uncles at the party any more? It seems so. Perhaps Mr Hagen knows that the freedom to look to our musical past can only mean far less orthodoxy in our musical future.
Andrew Mellor is a music journalist and critic based in Copenhagen, and is founder-editor of Nordic culture websitemoosereport.net
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