Tor Aspaas & Per Skalstad Duo: ‘Story’ and ‘Return’ in Norwegian Violin-Piano Miniatures

G   arborg’s novels are profound and gripping while his essays are clear and insightful. He was never inclined to steer clear of controversy. His work tackled the issues of the day, including the relevance of religion in modern times, the conflicts between national and European identity, and the ability of the common people to actually participate in political processes and decisions. Although he was to become known as an author, it was as a newspaperman that he got his start. In 1872 he established the newspaper Tvedestrandsposten, and in 1877 the Fedraheimen, where he served as managing editor until 1892. In the 1880s he was also a journalist for the Dagbladet in Oslo.”

I f you are about to perform a ‘miniature’—or any piece, really—it’s good to first take a moment and re-tell yourself a story that, to you, the piece embodies. “Write it down and clip it onto the sheet music,” my piano teacher told me when I was 8. “If the composer didn’t say what story the music is telling, then you need to make up a story. Or else how are you going to know what you’re going to say, or how you’re going to say it?” Five decades later, I continue to think that that’s a great idea. If a story wasn’t supplied by the composer, then you need to make one up. Make one up, write it down, remind yourself of it each time, right before you begin playing the piece.



    [50-sec clip, Tor Espe Aspaas & Per Kristian Skalstad, Johan Halvorsen, ‘Suite Mosaique, No. 4: Chant de Veslemøy’, 1.6MB MP3]



    [50-sec clip, Tor Espe Aspaas & Per Kristian Skalstad, Johan Halvorsen, ‘Suite Mosaique, No. 4: Chant de Veslemøy’, 1.6MB MP3]

T or Aspaas and Per Skalstad are very good at telling stories. They must’ve had music teachers like Ruth Mapson of my own childhood.

V eslemøy—in morose, poignant, fateful F-sharp minor. Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata is in F-sharp minor... Also, Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 1... Scriabin’s Piano Concerto and his Piano Sonata No. 3, too. Wieniawski’s Violin Concerto No. 1 and Vieuxtemps’s Violin Concerto No. 2... Second movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23... Reger’s and Tippett’s second string quartets; Shostakovich’s string quartet No. 7... Two of Chopin’s mazurkas, plus a nocturne... Last but not least, two preludes and fugues in J. S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier are in F-sharp minor. F-sharp minor carries a lot of ‘attitude’.

F   -sharp minor, although it leads to great distress, nevertheless is more languid and ‘love-sick’ than lethal. Moreover, it has something abandoned, singular, and misanthropic about it.”
  —  Johann Mattheson, 1713.

B ut what about Veslemøy? What do we know about ‘Veslemøy’?

I n Norwegian, it nominally means “little girl” ... a compound of ‘vesle’ = “little” and ‘møy’ = “girl”. But it’s way more than that. This name was used by Norwegian author Arne Garborg for the main character in his epic poem ‘Haugtussa’ [The Mountain; literally ‘heap of rocks’] (1895). Almost certainly this popular Neo-Romantic Garborg poem was the inspiration for Halvorsen when he wrote this Suite in 1898. But the idiomatic compound ‘veslemøy’ was a commonplace way before Garborg even. It connotes ‘fairy’ or ‘sylph’—mysterious; charming and beautiful but creepy; other-worldly.


T he poem is propelled by Garborg’s rural culture and infused with its values and lore. A number of supernatural beings—like the Draug, the Hulderpeople, and other characters from Norse mythology inhabit the epic. A ‘haugtussa’ is originally a female subterrestrial (a woman troglodyte of the Hulder race). But here the main character, beautiful young above-ground Veslemøy, is revealed to be a Hulder and a haugtussa. The 219-page poem is dark and foreboding; it is not for no reason that its sequel, published in 1900, was ‘I Helheim’ (In Hell). More than a stereotypical, ever-cheerful Norsk outlook  :Ѣ  Garborg was rendering Dante-like divina commedia, a long oblique rant against the church and what he felt were deleterious social effects of church dogma and pious blind eyes turned away from real problems in the world—poverty, starvation, indignity, suffering.

V eslemøy (also called Gislaug) is the youngest of three sisters, and lives with her elderly mother near Jæren in rural Norway, south of Boknafjorden and northwest of Dalane in the county of Rogaland. The oldest sister has died, we are not sure how, maybe from tuberculosis, and her other sister has fled some time ago from the countryside to the big city—by implication, that sister has become a prostitute, wild and estranged from her family. So Veslemoy and her old mother are alone.

T hey are dirt-poor and live as tenants on a farm; like characters in a fantastical Haldor Laxness novel, they are harassed to their wits’ end by the local land-owner.

V eslemøy has a precocious natural insight into people and situations. She is savant-like in her surprising confabulations, each story containing enough kernels of truth to have a devastating verisimilitude. Other kids (and adults, too) gather around her to hear her tell stories, or to pose riddles—a famous winter fireside pastime for us fun-loving Norwegians.

V eslemøy habitually makes up stories, stories upon stories. One night, her dead sister visits Veslemoy and tells her that she is endowed with the capacity for ‘second sight’, to be psychic, and to foretell what will happen. Veslemøy’s stories are not entirely her ‘own’, and Veslemøy’s compulsion to tell them is not necessarily hers to control. The sister’s revelation is a great burden to Veslemøy, but she has no choice but to accept it.

G arborg’s point seems to be that it is better to be a ‘seer’—better to be spiritually ‘awake’ in a Zen sort of way or the state of Bodhi awake-ness attained by the Indian spiritual teacher Gautama Buddha and his disciples—than to be stultified/mortified by the oppression of routine day-to-day life and the paternalistic rule of priests. From this point forward, visions haunt Veslemøy, and the netherworld spirits pursue her. She is narrowly avoids being abducted underground by the Hulders. She has also the ability to see what symbolic animal spirit each person around her has behind him or her.

V eslemøy experiences the problems of tweens in any age: crazy first love, almost gets engaged to the kid on the farm down the road. Instead, the foolish boy finagles marrying a rich girl, and the experience of being dumped unhinges Veslemøy. Veslemøy has to fight even harder with her inner demons, who abduct her into the mountains. There, she meets trolls—some who are decent souls and others of ill repute. She commiserates with them about their crappy fate as outcasts, and how they have been deprived of a life worth living. The Haugkall (mountain king) proposes to marry her, despite the outrageous difference in their ages. She tells him No, Hell No [Well, actually she collapses because she sees that he has the mouth of a rat.] and is brought home sick and delirious. At the end of the poem, the dead sister consoles her again, and admonishes her to buck up and to get ready descend into Hell, accompanied by a volve/voluspa/goddess/wizard/witch/wolfwoman who will teach her “through horror, the work which will become your honor”.

H   er ser du Visdoms Volve staa.
Ho vil deg gjeva djupt aa sjaa
og store Røynslur herde.
Ho bèr deg gjennom Helheims Gov;
der skal du skimte Livsens Lov
og gjennom Rædsle lære
det Verk, som vert di Ære.

[Here before you Wisdom—Volve—stands.
She gives you depth of seeing
and lets you hear what big Røynslur hears.
She compels you to go to Hell
where you can’t help but glimpse the Law of All Life
and from Horrors-more-than-Faith learn
that work which must be(come) your Fate-Honor.]
  —  Arne Garborg, ‘Haugtussa’, 1895.

S o Halvorsen didn’t need to write any story or provide program notes or annotations to his music; the notions above would’ve been familiar (from Garborg’s Haugtussa 1895 poem, or from Grieg’s Haugtussa lieder from the same year) to any Scandinavian who would’ve heard Halvorsen’s violin-piano duo in 1898 or the years shortly after.

B ut we need to write the story down and remember it, to make these few notes mean something. For us, Halvorsen’s chamber music—much of it, except, say, for the Passacaglia and Sarabande Duos for violin and viola—might seem sentimental or dated, hence, dismissible, if we don’t bother to find out about what motivated the composer to write it. We need to invest a little energy to find out why it mattered at the time—what the social context was, who the performers and early audiences for the works were, and what they cared about—in order to accurately value the works. In the case of Halvorsen, Aspaas and Skalstad do a wonderful job of reanimating these pieces, entering into them, and reminding us of the characters’ stories—and how being ‘awake’ and engaged matters in present-day society. Fear and absurd suffering as the ‘juice’ for creating meaning and redeeming humankind; theodicy; the eternal return; Neo/TheOne; an 1895 feminist ‘Matrix’, sort of.

S o Halvorsen’s violin-piano duos are nothing like Stravinsky, Elgar, Elliot Carter—any of the works that fill the 110 pages of ‘violin-piano’ repertoire in Hinson’s book. We have wonderful violin double-stopped consonance flavored by piano dissonance. We have haunting, brooding, poignant, elegant, serious recital behavior, not encore bon bons. We have exalting, transcendent phrasing if you are careful and listen for it. The pieces are short. If you blink, you’ll miss it.

B rahms tries to make the violin and piano co-equals; Schumann instead often pitches the violin as a virtuosic protagonist against the piano. But those are ‘big’ works. The small scope and small timescale of miniatures like Halvorsen’s don’t allow for that kind of dramatic development. Instead, we have these mystical, Neo-Romantic microfictions.

T he uneven weight between the bowed and hammered strings does not have time to sink-in or become problematical. The piano roams free in the middle and treble registers, just as a microfiction character would. Listeners’/readers’ minds are obliged to interpolate, to read between the lines. Microfiction will not support any expectation of explicit storytelling. It is all between the lines. It must be so. There are too few lines for it to be otherwise. So, with microfiction (i.e., miniatures like Halvorsen’s), we understand its ground-rules before we begin, and we relish the extra interpretive responsibility that the author/composer places on us.

Y ou might think that miniatures would be ideal for our time—an era of short attention-spans and a taste for sound-bites and web-surfing. But no. The small size actually requires patience and effort.

T he replication 8-8 | 8-8 in this 32-bar piece provides a natural suggestion of reconsideration. Not ‘repetition’ but something more like... like... like Faulkner’s ‘As I Lay Dying’ where different chapters are told from the point of view of different characters, whose personalities change as the story proceeds. Veslemøy above ground starts with a downbow, with the mute on (piano-violin duo, with the mute on!), and the Veslemøy underground, bowing inverted now begins with upbow. The violin before, and the violin after. Piano, trans-substantiated; shape-shifting piano. The repetition/reconsideration/return (with the upbow/downbow inversion effects and with properly calibrated subterranean piano pedaling) provides us a chance to get inside each character’s mind and discover each character’s uncertainties—about what is real and what is illusion; about who one is and who one was/will be. Fiction? Hardly!

W e find that each character is receptive to all types of detail. Poetics are found in merely taking a drink of water; magic is found in merely talking to the wolf. Don’t ignore the wolf or pretend like it’s not there. You’d better talk to it.

I f this stuff interests you, please have a look at Kristin Rygg’s nice chapter in Ulla-Britta Lagerroth and Erik Hedling’s book (link below). Clairvoyance, mystical duties, the obligation to give voice to songs not yet born, the symbolic meanings of upbow and downbow.

T or Aspaas was born in 1971 in Røros. Aspaas received his Diploma in Piano Performance in 1996, studying with Liv Glaser and Jens Harald Bratlie. Since 2007 he has served as professor of piano on the faculty of the Academy in Oslo. He is particularly active and sought after as a chamber musician; ensemble performance and accompaniment are also his specialties at the Academy. Besides his concertizing and teaching activities, Aspaas has served as artistic director for the chamber music festival Vinterfestspill in Bergstaden on Røros since 1999.

P er Skalstad was born in 1972. At age 12, he entered the Norwegian State Academy of Music (NSAM) in Oslo, pursuing both piano and violin. Skalstad got his Diploma of Violin Performance in 1995, studying with Stig Nilsson, Lars Anders Tomter and Camilla Wicks. In 2002, he completed his Diploma of Conducting, also at NSAM. In 1988 Skalstad joined the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra. With the NCO, Skalstad plays the viola when needed. Per founded the Oslo String Quartet in 1991, with Geir Inge Lotsberg (viola), Åre Sandbakken and Øystein Sonstad (cello). Skalstad was assistant concertmaster in the Norwegian Opera Orchestra from 1993 to 2005, and he has performed as a soloist with the Norwegian Radio Orchestra, the Bergen Philharmonic, the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra and the Risør Festival Strings. In the 2004 Halvorsen recording with Aspaas, Skalstad played on the Halvorsen`s 1705 Rogeri.

Johan Halvorsen Chamber Music

• 6 Stimmungsbilder for Violin and Piano (1890)
  
• Suite in G Minor for Violin and Piano (1890)
  
• Danses norvégiennes for Violin and Piano (1897)
  
• Elegie for Violin and Piano (1897)
  
• Passacaglia in G Minor on the Theme by Georg Friedrich Händel (from Harpsichord Suite in G minor, HWV 432) for Violin and Viola (1897)
  
• Sarabande con Variazioni in G Minor on the Theme by Georg Friedrich Händel for Violin and Viola (1897)
  
• Crépuscule for Violin and Piano (1898)
  
• Suite Mosaïque for Violin and Piano (1898)
  
• String Quartet in E, Op.10 (1901)
  
• Little Dance Suite for Violin and Piano, Op.22 (1902)
  
• Slåtter for Violin Solo (1903)
  
• Miniatures, 5 Easy Pieces for 2 Violins and Piano, Op.29 (1910)
  
• To serenader for Violin and Piano
  
• Norske viser og danse for Violin and Piano
  
• Concert Caprice on Norwegian Melodies for 2 Violins

J    ust knowing the dream, just knowing the song,
the tune will hold fast in your mem’ry—
seductively beckoning the whole day long.”
  —  Arne Garborg, ‘Haugtussa’, 1895.

• Tor Espen Aspaas website
  
• Per Kristian Skalstad website
  
• Oslo String Quartet website
  
• Johan Halvorsen page at Wikipedia
  
• Johan Halvorsen, Suite Mosaique score at IMSLP
  
• Aspaas T, Skalstad P. Johan Halvorsen Violin-Piano Duos. (2L, 2004.)
  
• Daverio J. Crossing Paths. Oxford Univ, 2008.
  
• Faulkner W. As I Lay Dying. Modern Library, 2000.
  
• Hinson M, Roberts W, eds. The Piano in Chamber Ensemble: An Annotated Guide. 2e. Indiana Univ, 2006. (section on Duos for Violin & Piano, pp. 3-119, omits Halvorsen)
  
• Hinson M. Essential Keyboard Repertoire, Vol. 8 (Miniatures). Alfred, 2006.
  
• Loft A. Violin and Keyboard: The Duo Repertoire: Volume II: From Beethoven to Today (1970). 3e. Hal Leonard, 2003.
  
• Neuhaus R. As I Lay Dying: Meditations Upon Returning. Basic, 2003.
  
• Rygg K. Mystification through musicalization & Demystification through music: The case of Haugtussa. in Cultural Functions of Intermedial Exploration. E. Hedling & U-B Lagerroth, eds. Rodopi, 2002. pp. 87-102.
  
• Veslemøy Vråskar, photographer in Olso

Tine Thing Helseth and the Mystique of Circular-Tone Trumpet

A    way of describing the difference is that the [geometric bore profile of the—] American instrument produces a ‘circular’ tone with a lot of brilliance, while the German trumpet [bore profile is—] a more ‘oval’ one: the German tone is ‘wider’ and less brilliant... In Scandinavia we have mostly made use of the American trumpet. Its brilliance is part of the so-called Scandinavian sound.”
  —  Tine Thing Helseth, interview in MIC Norsk musikkinformasjon, APR-2009.

T he Norwegian trumpeter Tine Thing Helseth does miraculous things. I especially admire her treatment of Johann Baptist Neruda’s concerto—which Tine manages in a way that is both elegant and viceral. Her playing of all of the brass war-horses is wonderful, but this Neruda piece for her especially epitomizes the concept of ‘circular’ tone.



    [50-sec clip, Tine Thing Helseth & Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, Johann Baptist Neruda, ‘Concerto in E-flat – II – Largo’, 1.6MB MP3]



    [50-sec clip, Tine Thing Helseth & Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, Johann Baptist Neruda, ‘Concerto in E-flat – III – Vivace’, 1.6MB MP3]



    [50-sec clip, Tine Thing Helseth & Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, Johann Baptist Neruda, ‘Concerto in E-flat – III – Cadenza’, 1.6MB MP3]

H    ave we ever before heard this level of melancholia, such as what we heard in the Andante movement, or in the flowing and lively dance of the finale movement? When have we ever heard anyone run that brilliantly up and down along the scale? And that, on a trumpet! On this instrument that was formerly used to open splendid doors and gates for worldly rulers and clerics...”
  —  Lippische Landzeitung, DEC-2007.

T he effortlessness and honesty of Tine’s articulation... The weightlessness of her breathing... The decisions about the emphasis of each note, including sweet little appoggiaturas... Interpretations filled with emotional depth as well as cerebral insight, musical body in harmony with musical mind in harmony with well-matched musical instrument. Bak skyene er himmelen alltid blå!

J ohann Baptist Georg Neruda (Czech: Jan Křtitel Jiří Neruda) is curiously obscure, and even the dates of birth and death for him are not clear (given as ca. 1707 and sometime in 1780 in Dresden by the Grove Dictionary). Raised in a musical family in what’s now the Czech Republic, Jan/Johann spent some years as a violinist and conductor in Prague and Germany, after which he became Konzertmeister of the court orchestra in Dresden. His works include 18 symphonies, 14 instrumental concertos, plus several sonatas, sacred works and an opera.

N eruda composed this virtuosic concerto for the valveless ‘corno da caccia’ in the clarino register, which requires “hand-stopping” and other tricks to manage the tessitura and chromatics. And there are a number of historical trumpet players who do perform the piece on baroque-design instruments.

B ut playing it on a modern, valved trumpet—American or otherwise—presents a different set of challenges, for fingers, tongue, embouchure, and lungs. And valves enable a wider latitude of interpretive choices—ones that Tine explores beautifully.

S    he plays with radiance strong enough to light up the entire hall. Her embouchure is light and her technique impressive. Each note is marvellous and her dynamics are based on natural and deeply felt musicality. ...she showed us just how wonderfully a trumpet can sing... It sounded like a song, but there was no need for words.”
  —  Zürcher Landzeitung, JUN-2008.

T ine was born in 1987 and started to play trumpet at age 7. She is currently studying at Barratt Due Music Institute in Oslo with Arnulf Naur Nilsen. She has appeared as a soloist with, among others, Wiener Symphoniker, Vienna Chamber Orchestra, Zürcher Kammerorchester, Zürcher Kammerorchester, Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland Pfalz, Cappella Cracowiensis, Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, Camerata Nordica, Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie and all the major Norwegian symphony orchestras. Tine’s website chronicles her many performance awards and contest victories. She has performed at SHMF and other festivals. Tine is also leader of the brass ensemble, tenTHING. Every opportunity to hear this fine artist perform is magic. Check out her website for current performance schedule.

S    he [has] calmness, balance, musicality and technical mastery. She has vigour, confidence and natural authority—and her instrumental ‘nerve’ commands the attention of listeners...”
  —  Aftenposten, JUL-2006.

• Tine Thing Helseth website
  
• Tine Thing Helseth on MySpace
  
• Helseth T. Trumpet Concertos by Haydn, Albinoni, Neruda & Hummel. (Simax, 2007.)
  
• TenThing website
  
• Barratt Due musikkinstitutt, Oslo
  
• Det Norske Kammerorkester (Norwegian Chamber Orchestra) website
  
• Neruda J. C^to in E-flat. [score, 23pc chamber orchestra string parts 6-5-5-4-3, trpt] Tarr, 1997. (MusicaRara.com)
  
• Neruda J. C^to in E-flat. [piano reduction, trpt] Tarr, 1997. (MusicaRara.com)
  
• Neruda J. C^to in E-flat. [piano reduction, trpt arrangement] Rondeau, 2008. (Bb trpt and Eb trumpet pdfs)
  
• Tine Thing Helseth at Pro Arte Artist Management, Bergen
  
• Tarr E. Neruda's Concerto for horn (or trumpet). Brass Bulletin 1990; 70:36-45.
  
• Historic Brass Society website
  
• International Women's Brass Conference
  
• International Alliance for Women in Music
  
• International Trumpet Guild

Trio Mediæval: Dark Winters, Mythical Thinking, and the Duty to Invent

A  principle that is characteristic of both mythical and musical thought is that which is referred to as ‘calculus of combinations’. According to this principle, myth consists of distinct elements or ‘mythemes’, which the narrator of a myth—like any speaker of a language—may combine by obeying certain rules, thus creating mythical stories and utterances. The same principle can be found in folk music as well. ...Folk-melodies reshape and transform themselves everywhere. ...[Only fragments] have survived in the memory of the people. It is due to this fact that the melody includes numerous tonal irregularities.”
  —  Eero Tarasti, p.45.

Trio Mediæval’s performance yesterday (02 December) at Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Kansas City was exceptionally good. The weather outside the filled-to-capacity cathedral was freezing, and the audience deeply appreciated the Trio’s warmth and charm.

It isn’t often that we think of medieval singing and jazz improvisation at the same time. But, in fact, much of the charm derives from improvisational qualities of the Trio’s performance. The ‘tralling’ (mouth-singing, of rhythmic nonsense syllables); the ornamentations and microtonal shadings they applied to various figures, especially in solo passages; the antiphonal and aleatoric effects they used in several songs as they sang, dispersed in different locations within the cathedral sanctuary and, walking, converged on the central altar platform; the atmospheric effects by guest percussionist Birger Mistereggen, who simulated blustery gales, drifting snow, sea blown against a rocky shore, wind clacking icy branches together, cows in a mountain meadow, animals in the stable, etc.—all of these were delivered in an engaging, extemporaneous, dramatic manner. The improvisational effect is more evident because the Trio does not rely on sheet music during performances: the entire recital is done from memory.

If as a child you were ever thrilled by a parent or grandparent who told you bedtime stories from memory, confabulating new and exotic features on the fly, that is the spell-binding effect that you can expect from Trio Mediæval’s singing. It is a spell of clan and family, longing and belonging. Etymologically, ‘tralling’ → ‘thralling’ → ‘enthralling’ → ‘enthralled’ : the listeners who were these songs’ original target audience were induced to be ‘in thrall’ to the clan elders/chieftains/society whose songs these are. No mere artifacts, these folk songs were ancient normative generators, anchors, and enforcers of cultural identity, family identity, individual identity—the songs were a means for the continual inculcation and (re-)invention of identity, desire for community, and belonging. Ethnomusic-archy!

In fact, that inventive quality is a fundamental aspect of traditional Scandinavian skaldic poesy. The nominal sketch, characters, sequence of events, and so forth are there. The framework of the story must be respected, but the storyteller who recreates the story is obliged, aesthetically, to personalize and revivify it in the retelling. Each time the story is retold, the storyteller must extemporize and breathe fresh life into the story. Considerable dramatic license is granted for the performers to embellish and resequence, to repeat or return to subplots or vamp and emphasize some feature of a character or location, some interaction between characters that bears some special relevance to members of this audience on this night’s retelling. Trio Mediæval’s improvisations are just like that: faithful, conspiratorial, storytellerly improvisations.


After all, this historically-informed performance (HIP) practice is serious ethnomusicology, but it is not museum conservation of static texts. The music is continually evolving. The Trio focuses on individual performers and the insights gained from them about learning how to arrange and sing this traditional material, and performing such folksongs in public. The Trio’s website notes some of those who have preserved this oral tradition, from whom the Trio has derived some of their arrangements of these tunes. Although a first-rate singer or Hardanger fiddler may take up tunes (‘slattar’) from other performers past or present, it’s incumbent upon a new performer to add something of her/his own whether it be different ornamentation or varied rhythms or new ‘mouth sounds’. It would be banal to slavishly reproduce what has been done before. It would be ‘bad form’ and aesthetically false. Conservation is not sufficient for authenticity. It’s essential that skalds/singers contribute something new and diverting each time. True also of the folkmusic and stories of Finland, Iceland, and Sweden. Think of Eddas and sagas; think of Kalevala.

In this concert we were reminded that myth and music are two forms of discourse that are interrelated, as Eero Tarasti and others have written. Trio Mediæval reveals to us precisely and vividly how they are related. Bravo!

I  f music has its own place in all reflections on culture, it [holds this position of power] by the stakes it represents. Music is indeed never insignificant. It is simultaneously a strong and unifying means of communication and a revealer of identity within the abundance of models that characterise a society.”
  —  Laurent Aubert, Music of The Other.

• Trio Mediaeval website
  
• Trio Mediaeval on Myspace
  
• Trio Mediaeval at Alliance Artist Management
  
• Anna Maria Friman website
  
• Trio Mediaeval. Folk Songs. (ECM, 2007.)
  
• Trio Mediaeval. Stella Maris. (ECM, 2005.)
  
• Trio Mediaeval. Soir, dit-elle. [Evening, says she.] (ECM, 2002.)
  
• OralTradition.org website
  
• Aubert L. The Music of the Other: New Challenges for Ethnomusicology in a Global Age. Ashgate, 2007.
  
• Carruthers M. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge Univ, 1992.
  
• Cohen J. Medieval Identity Machines. Univ Minnesota, 2003.
  
• Delanty G, Isin E, eds. Handbook of Historical Sociology. Sage, 2003.
  
• Gronow J. Sociology of Taste. Routledge, 1997.
  
• Hopkins P. Homology of Music and Myth. Ethnomusicology 1977; 21:247-61.
  
• Kvideland R, Sehmsdorf H, Eiriksson H, eds. All the World's Reward: Folktales Told by Five Scandinavian Storytellers. Univ Washington, 1999.
  
• Nettl B. The Study of Ethnomusicology. Univ Illinois, 2005.
  
• Nyberg T, Jensen C, Jensen K, Lind J, Bisgaard L, eds. Medieval Spirituality in Scandinavia and Europe: A Collection of Essays in Honour of Tore Nyberg. Univ Southern Denmark, 2001.
  
• Post J, ed. Ethnomusicology: A Contemporary Reader. Routledge, 2005.
  
• Potter J. Vocal Authority: Singing Style and Ideology. Cambridge, 2006.
  
• Potter J. Past-perfect and Future Fictions. Basler Jahrbuch für historische Musikpraxis XXVI, 2002. Amadeus, 2005.
  
• Ramnarine T. Ilmatar's Inspirations: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Changing Soundscapes of Finnish Folk Music. Univ Chicago, 2003.
  
• Timothy Rice page at UCLA Dept of Ethnomusicology.
  
• Rice T. Europe. Routledge, 1999.
  
• Stone R. Theory for Ethnomusicology. Prentice Hall, 2007.
  
• Tarasti E. Myth and Music: A Semiotic Approach to the Aesthetics of Myth in Music. de Gruyter, 1979.
  
• Thompson P. Voice of the Past: Oral History. Oxford Univ, 2000.
  
• Treitler L, Arlt W, Zuckermann K, Welker L, Sachs K, Butmann V. Improvisation in der Musik des Mittelalters und der Renaissance. Basler Jahrbuch für historische Musikpraxis VII, 1983. Amadeus, 1999.
  
• Østby L. Theodor Kittelsen Drawings and Water Colours. Dreyer, 1975.

Trio Mediæval: A Cappella Anagnorisis

H  e was the solitary and lucid spectator of a multiform, instantaneous and almost intolerably precise world.”
  —  Jorge Luis Borges, Funes the Memorious.

Trio Mediæval was recently broadcast on NPR St. Paul Sunday [18-NOV-2007]. The a cappella performances of the Trio are a consummately precise blending, with perfectly tuned and controlled pitch and exquisitely matched vibrato. Trio Mediæval’s next live performances will be tomorrow (02 December) at Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Kansas City, on 04 December at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall in New York City, and on 14 December at Bijloke Concertzaal in Gent.

T  he voices of three women, each one distinct and yet all three closely melded. Nothing else... dark silence all around them. I think the group is breathtaking: arresting, vivid, calm but never peaceful, with every moment ready to bring a surprise.”
  —  Greg Sandow, The Wall Street Journal.

Y  ou can’t sing a footnote.”
  —  Susan Hellauer [of Anonymous 4], on performing medieval music.

A  harmony-led view of the music hears a sequence of vertical sonorities made up of rhythmicised pitches proceeding in a linear fashion, while a counterpoint-led view hears lines of rhythmicised pitches that proceed through changing vertical relationships. Put like that, it is not easy to see the difference. But it is in fact a dichotomy that has been perceived between these two views-or, if you prefer, an insistence on perceiving a difference between them-that lies at the heart of the century-long debate about the hearing of medieval music.”
  —  Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, The Modern Invention of Medieval Music, p. 158.

The first note of a phrase doesn’t get as much attention as cadential notes. But trills, morulae, tremulae, appogiaturas, and microtonal variations—especially on penultimate notes of phrases, and especially when the note is a ‘longa’ and when the interval between it and the following note is an ascending half-step—these increase the already-heightened dramatic tension. When such ornaments are performed slowly and with obvious deliberation, the tension is further increased. Rhetorically, the impact is similar to that of organum purum sung by the upper voice, with a lot of latitude with regard to timing/tempo.

I know only a tiny bit of Norwegian, and this lack of fluency substantially frees me from the literal textuality of the songs. The sounds seem timeless, in part because my linguistic deficiency decouples my comprehending process from the lyric. The sounds also seem ‘permanent’. Compared to the age of these sounds, how minuscule is the time we have to live! The songs remind us of our own mortality, and of the continuation of the world without us. How exactly do these songs ‘work’? And why do the songs’ solitariness and mesmerizing effect remind me of the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges? How medieval/post-modern is that?

• Anna Maria Friman, soprano
  
• Linn Andrea Fuglseth, soprano
  
• Torunn Østrem Ossum, soprano
  
• Birger Mistereggen, guest percussion and mouth harp

• Det lisle bånet (The little child)
  
• So ro, godt barn (Rest now, sweet child)
  
• Villemann og Magnhild (Villemann and Magnhild)
  
• Tjovane (The thieves)
  
• Nu solen går ned (The sun is setting)
  
• I mine kåte ungdomsdagar (In my reckless, youthful days)
  
• Gjendines bådnlåt (Gjendine’s lullaby)
  
• Rolandskvadet (The song of Roland)
  
• Solbønn (Sun-prayer)
  
• Eg veit i himmerik ei borg (I know a stronghold in heaven)
  
• Nu vilar hela jorden (All the earth now rests in peace)
  
• Springdans fra Vestfold (Dance from Vestfold)
  
• Eg aktar inkje (I don’t think much of those boys)
  
• Den elskte Jerusalem (Beloved Jerusalem)
  
• Till, Till, Tove (mountain pasture song)
  
• Lova Line
  
• Danse, ikke gråte nå (Dance, do not cry now)
  
• Den signede dag (Day of joy)

The nonsense-syllables (‘tralling’) add to the hypnotic, atemporal quality of the songs. This idiom involves a sequence of improvised syllables, instrumental-sounding passages, and uneven accents—and in this respect ‘tralling’ is similar to Scottish and Irish gaelic ‘mouth music’. Trio Mediæval also does a type of mountain pasture singing known as ‘laling’—an example is the cattle song ‘Till, Till, Tove’.

These contrasts in sonic texture emphasize the transitoriness and shallowness of much of our daily lives and conversations. The contrasts in texture are like Rilke’s cathedral Rose Window; are like Blake’s Tiger’s Eye with its deep fearsome symmetry. The contrasts are like blue-water sailing—water so deep it may as well be bottomless. The Trio’s textural contrasts set up a kind of ‘force-field’: the voices’ effacement of the self induces in us an alienating desire to live an imaginary life in the medieval ‘amour-propre’ sonic space that they create.

W  hy mightn’t there be, somehow, a new science for each object? A Mathesis Singularis and no longer Universalis?”
  —  Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida.

Through these folk songs there emerges a dialectic of signs and symbols, a precursor to the modern, Wittgensteinian notion that the self is a by-product of language, the conflict between particularity and generality, the conflict between the individual and her/his expression: the concept that language and public and private narrative are what enables us to be ourselves. (Self-) consciousness is inhabited by linguistic otherness!

The fact that language is so important in our experience of ‘self’ might lead us to expect that the narrative tension between our private selves and public others must eventually resolve. In fact and paradoxically, with these songs our conventional language-based concept of identity produces the opposite effect. These songs make us seek sources of authentic individual identity beyond language.

The song ‘Gjendines bådnlåt’, for instance, betrays the extent to which the individual is shaped by society and by public discourse. The mother’s lullaby portrays the self as a collage of experiences and begs the philosophical question as to whether there is anything more to us, anything immortal. Introspection in the company of a baby too young to speak; a solitariness-together: the drive toward authenticity leads the song to seek alternatives in unisons and silence—a silence more ‘telling’ than words—in the hope of finding a form of expression for a mystical self, one that will not grow old and die.

T  he songs are on fire: the Trio quests for more, ever more immediacy—until one wonders whether the escalations can possibly continue. The Trio’s quest for this supremely authentic self is manifested by a relentless search for sonic truth and timbral purity, even if that search involves, paradoxically, severing the sound/truth from the self (the three singers’ selves), from the sound’s/truth’s substrate. This is an aspect of the ur-scandinavian temperament: a violent, unremitting quest for truth and transcendence through beauty, which inadvertently ends in solipsism, often in desolate wildernesses and darkened churches. This skaldic view is my birthright. I recognize it when I hear it. I am myself Norwegian.”
  — DSM.

T  he voices blend and fuse in clouded silence: silence that is the infinite of space: and swiftly, silently the soul is wafted over regions of cycles of cycles of generations that have lived.”
  —  James Joyce, Ulysses.

From the sonorities—the interplay among the notes and the silences reverberating in the cathedral as the Trio sings—one forms new understandings. The listener’s imagination is propelled to new vistas, much in the way that James Joyce’s run-on prosody can move us. The counterpoint between the parts’ colors and rhythms and the sculpted diminuendos that collapse sounds into silences all contribute toward shaping the music into something we can understand, even without our comprehending the Norwegian words. This mental process is like reading Finnegan’s Wake without aiming to decode the English words, understanding it instead by osmosis. Joyce’s writing is not ordinary narrative prose: it is performance art, sculpted poetry, hell on wheels.

When we listen to these folk songs, silence and space play primary, essential roles enabling/compelling us to understand, dividing the cathedral into gestures and sounds, using the gestures to discover a path through sonic ambiguity. Silences provide textural contrast that confers meaning upon the text, and qualifies or reinforces the surface meanings that are present in the text.

T  he silent images in the soul bring their silence to the words that are the life of the mind. They work silence into the texture of language: they keep it
supplied with silence, with the original power of silence.”
  —  Max Picard, Die Welt des Schweigens.

I  n the realm of Western art music, silence is generally perceived not as the original power at the centre of the texture, but at the opposite extreme: its acknowledged function is to provide the conventional matting, frame, and structural delimiters to ease and define listeners’ reception of a performance... the dimming of lights, cessation of audience noise, and quiet ambience between movements. [In Mozart,] the silence lacks sound but not motion, the moment of no-sound carrying forward and raising urgent expectations of what is to come. [e.g., piano concerto in G major, K. 453, m.224].”
  —  Jenny Doctor, Silence, Music, Silent Music.

The first movement of Haydn’s String Quartet Op. 71 No.3, mm. 1-14 has a bar of rest with a fermata, right before the Vivace begins-and unison eighth-note rests subsequently. The silence of the four parts is a way of manipulating the listeners’ expectations of tension and release, of stasis and action. It’s a valuable compositional tool, an effective motivic device—one that arises frequently in the Trio’s arrangements.

S  he told me that Ireneo was in the back room and that I should not be disturbed to find him in the dark, for he knew how to pass the dead hours without lighting the candle. I crossed the cobblestone patio, the small corridor; I came to the second patio. A great vine covered everything, so that the darkness seemed complete. Of a sudden I heard the high-pitched, mocking voice of Ireneo. The voice spoke in Latin; the voice (which came out of the obscurity) was reading, with obvious delight, a treatise or prayer or incantation. The Roman syllables resounded in the earthen patio; my suspicion made them seem undecipherable, interminable; afterwards, in the enormous dialogue of that night, I learned that they made up the first paragraph of the twenty-fourth chapter of the seventh book of the Historia Naturalis. The subject of this chapter is memory; the last words are ‘ujt nihil non iisdem verbis redderetur auditum’. Without the least change in his voice, Ireneo bade me come in. He was lying on the cot, smoking. It seems to me that I did not see his face until dawn; I seem to recall the momentary glow of the cigarette. The room smelled vaguely of dampness. I sat down, and repeated the story of the telegram and my father’s illness. I come now to the most difficult point in my narrative. For the entire story has no other point (the reader might as well know it by now) than this dialogue of almost a half-century ago. I shall not attempt to reproduce his words, now irrecoverable. I prefer truthfully to make a résumé of the many things Ireneo told me. The indirect style is remote and weak; I know that I sacrifice the effectiveness of my narrative; but let my readers imagine the nebulous sentences which filled that night. Ireneo began by enumerating, in Latin and Spanish, the cases of prodigious memory cited in the Historia Naturalis: Cyrus, king of the Persians, who could call every soldier in his armies by name; Mithridates Eupator, who administered justice in the twenty-two languages of his empire; Simonides, inventory of mnemotechny; Metrodorus, who practised the art of repeating faithfully what he heard once. With evident good faith Funes marvelled that such things should be considered marvellous. He told me that previous to the rainy afternoon when the blue-tinted horse threw him, he had been—like any Christian—blind, deaf-mute, somnambulistic, memoryless. (I tried to remind him of his precise perception of time, his memory for proper names; he paid no attention to me.) For nineteen years, he said, he had lived like a person in a dream: he looked without seeing, heard without hearing, forgot everything—almost everything. On falling from the horse, he lost consciousness; when he recovered it, the present was almost intolerable it was so rich and bright; the same was true of the most ancient and most trivial memories. A little later he realized that he was crippled. This fact scarcely interested him. He reasoned (or felt) that immobility was a minimum price to pay. And now, his perception and his memory were infallible... A circumference on a blackboard, a rectangular triangle, a rhomb—are forms which we can fully intuit; the same held true with Ireneo for the tempestuous mane of a stallion, a herd of cattle in a pass, the ever-changing flame or the innumerable ash, the many faces of a dead man during the course of a protracted wake. He could perceive I do not know how many stars in the sky. These things he told me; neither then nor at any time later did they seem doubtful. In those days neither the cinema nor the phonograph yet existed; nevertheless, it seems strange, almost incredible, that no one should have experimented on Funes. The truth is that we all live by leaving behind; no doubt we all profoundly know that we are immortal and that sooner or later every human being will do all things and know everything.”
  —  Jorge Luis Borges, Fune the Memorious.

Borges’ Funes the Memorious character is a person who is constitutionally unable to enter into a story. He can remember and retell anything and everything, but he cannot himself play a part in a story, even the story of his own self. In a story we are prepared to accept an updating of our understanding. And most stories are about people who resist the transformation of their perceptions or of themselves, with comic, tragic, or tragic-comic results. But Funes is unable to do this because his mental condition prevents him from engaging in the mutual fiction of singling from the Real, the core Symbolic fiction of singular reference which rides on our trust in each other—author and reader; singers and listeners—a trust which is prepared to have its granting in the mutual ‘taking-for-granted’ meet with disappointment, discouragement, repudiation.

This is very much the Fune-like ‘spell’ that Trio Mediæval casts. The central feature of our listening consists in temporarily imagining that we have a co-reference with the singers, with the songs. But none of our percepts turns out to be mutual—they could never be updated by anyone else; we recognize them as if déjà vu, and we suffer a sort of aspirational disappointment, a leaving-behind. Similarly, Funes suffers in his withdrawal from the world. In principle, Funes shouldn’t be able to speak at all—and, technically, neither can we (while the Trio’s singing persists). The relation of Borges’ narrator to Funes reveals that the mutual trust of language can and does break down. People talk [sing] past each other, and their mutual trust must acknowledge the finite risk of breakdown. It’s not only Funes who is unable to perfect a reliable, unambiguous understanding in dialogue with a fellow human being: the narrator is revealed as trapped within the same dilemma. And we’re trapped in it, too—we are exposed to unexpected sacrifices and losses, for [and of-] those we love and with whom we imagine ourselves to be fully in harmony. So before we can congratulate ourselves on the luxury of being able to forget so much (whereas Funes was condemned to remember so much), we’re reminded that what we remember may not be what our friends or family have remembered and valued: they may be like Funes, recalling something that we had vaguely sensed but didn’t actively notice, something that at that earlier time had been noticed and remembered by them. The poignant ‘anagnorisis’ in these plot-free stories [songs] turns out to be our own!

So, too, in these songs we marvel at the Fune-like precision of the Trio’s members’ memory. These songs—enchanted and enchanting—give us a glimpse of the existence of an enduring, transcendent self. And then we achieve a sudden, anagnoristic realization that we are, and can only be, something less than that self. We may be less memoriously burdened than the Fune-like Trio. But we are, oh, so much more mortal.

G  ode ord skal du hogge i berg; de dårligere i snø. (Praise, write in stone; criticism, in snow.)
Av skade blir man klok—brent barn lukter vondt. (Pain wisens you young; if not wisened, burnt kids smell bad.)
Et lite, men utsøkt selskap, sa mannen—han drakk alene. (Good but small party, said s/he, drinking alone.)”
  —  Norwegian folksayings.

[Linn Andrea Fuglseth founded Trio Mediæval in 1997. Linn Andrea is from Sandefjord and studied at the Norwegian Academy of Music, specializing in baroque interpretation, and the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London. She has also trained with Marit Isene, Barbro Marklund, Emma Kirkby and Mary Nichols. Linn Andrea has been soloist with the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, The Norwegian Baroque Orchestra and Det Norske Solistkor. In addition to singing, she conducts a children’s choir in Oslo and writes arrangements of Norwegian folksongs for the Trio.

Anna Maria Friman is a PhD candidate at the University of York, where she is researching modern performance of medieval music by women. She has presented her research at international musicology conferences—including a paper entitled ‘Early Music Singing: Fact vs. Fiction’ in 2002 and another paper at the ‘Voice, Sound and Subjectivity’ conference in 2005. Anna has performed with the Gavin Bryars Ensemble, Red Byrd, Last Century Ensemble, Ciconia Ensemble, Peter Hill, NYYD Ensemble (Estonia), Latvian Radio Choir, Stuttgart Bach Choir, Det Norske Solistkor, Collegium Vocale Gent, and Ricercar Consort directed by Philippe Pierlot. Her work in the U.S. has included recording with the Girl Choristers of Washington National Cathedral. She grew up in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Torunn Østrem Ossum was originally from Namsos, Norway. She studied singing with Svein Bjørkøy at Rønningen County College in Oslo. She has wide experience as an ensemble singer and has performed with groups such as Det Norske Solistkor, Nordic Voices, Con Spirito and Grex Vocalis conducted by Carl Høgset, where she also sings as a soloist. ]

• Trio Mediæval website
  
• Trio Mediæval on Myspace
  
• Trio Mediæval at Alliance Artist Management
  
• Anna Maria Friman website
  
• Trio Mediæval. Folk Songs. (ECM, 2007.)
  
• Trio Mediæval. Stella Maris. (ECM, 2005.)
  
• Trio Mediæval. Soir, dit-elle. [Evening, says she.] (ECM, 2002.)
  
• Alazraki J, ed. Critical Essays on Jorge Luis Borges. Hall, 1987.
  
• Bailey T, Santosuosso A, eds. Music in Medieval Europe. Lund Humphries, 2006.
  
• Barthes R. Empire of Signs. Hill & Wang, 1983.
  
• Berger A. Medieval Music and the Art of Memory. Univ California, 2005.
  
• Berlevag Men's Choir. Cool & Crazy. (FirstRun, 2002.)
  
• Borges J. Funes the Memorious. 1942.
  
• Borges J. Labyrinths. New Directions, 2007. (Funes, The Memorious)
  
• Borges J. Ficciones. Duckworth, 2007.
  
• Howard W. Historical Figuration: Poetics, Historiography, and New Genre Studies. Literature Compass 2006; 3:1124-49.
  
• Klinck A, ed. An Anthology of Ancient and Medieval Woman's Song. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
  
• Leech-Wilkinson D. The Modern Invention of Medieval Music: Scholarship, Ideology, Performance. Cambridge Univ, 2002.
  
• Losseff N, Doctor J, eds. Silence, Music, Silent Music. Ashgate, 2007.
  
• McGee T. The Sound of Medieval Song: Ornamentation and Vocal Style According to the Treatises. Oxford Univ, 1998.
  
• McGee T, Rigg A, Klausner D, eds. Singing Early Music: The Pronunciation of European Languages in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance. Indiana Univ, 1996.
  
• Prauscello L. Singing Alexandria: Music Between Practice and Textual Transmission. Brill, 2006.
  
• Sherman B. Inside Early Music: Conversations with Performers. Oxford, 1997.
  
• Smith F. Nordic Art Music: From the Middle Ages to the Third Millennium. Praeger, 2002.
  
• Strohm R, Blackburn B, eds. Music As Concept and Practice in the Late Middle Ages. Oxford Univ, 2001.