Deep Listening: The Immersive Music of Rosanna Gunnarson and Karin Johansson

Cover: Dan Froberg

I Grunda Vikar Ar Bottnarna Mjuka, 2024
(Outerdisk Recordings, Gothenberg Sweden)

 

“When they trailed their spikes over the strings, the strings sounded again; but they played in a new way, for now they were tuned to another pitch.” – August Strindberg

“The rest is silence.” – Hamlet’s last words

I once knew an artist, Mario Reis, who told me in a sotto voce tone that he desperately wanted to capture what he called the slow accretion of time, in a painting that would contain the true sediment of time. Not a mere representation of that phenomenon, mind you, he emphasized, but the actual sediment itself, splayed out on the canvas for onlookers to behold in all its fleeting and melancholy essence. He then proceeded, over the course of several years, to immerse his large stretched canvases in rivers, lakes, bays and occasionally oceans, allowing the silt to autograph his paintings, using the riverbeds and rocks as living brushes to establish a base upon which he would subsequently improvise his own subtle stylistic markings. His pictures thus became snapshots of time itself, and also left a residue of flowing watery movements amounting to frozen music. They stunned me in their beauty as artifacts which skillfully narrated nature as a sequence of uncontrolled and uncontrollable moments.

Inner Sanctum: The Star-Crossed Music of George Crumb and Yoshiko Shimizu

KAIROS Records, 2023.

“Whatever you think can’t be done, someone will come along and do.” – Thelonious Monk

“Don’t play the piano part, I’m playing that, and don’t listen to me: I’m supposed to be accompanying you.” – Thelonious Monk

This new KAIROS recording of works by the esteemed American composer George Crumb, played by the stellar Japanese pianist Yoshiko Shimizu, is a poetic work of the highest order. In addition to being an intensely uplifting collaborative love letter between a composer and his primary performing interpreter, it also contains one of my favourite musical titles ever, Celestial Mechanics, composed by Crumb in 1979, which might be a pinnacle in the annals of works for piano in the four-hands format. It is not a stretch in this case to claim that Crumb’s challenging but rewarding works constitute a unique domain: astrophysics for piano achieved via contemporary recording technology. If that sounds somewhat scientific, allow me to return to my preferred poetic license: these are diagnostic investigations into the human heart. Even friends or readers familiar with my reasoning may pause and ponder: astrophysics for piano? How does this work? Well, it works exactly the way it sounds. The movements of interstellar masses in space through time usually refers to large objects such as planets in their elliptical guided tours of various galaxies; however, it also occurs within an inner sanctum of silence where microscopic movements of sub-atomic particles collide with each other in a kind of unexpected resonance. And they all dance to a sacred tune, one Crumb calls “Cosmic Dances for Amplified Pianos.”

American Maestro: George Crumb Interpreted by Yoshiko Shimizu

George Crumb. (Photo by Sarah Shatz)

CD Review of George Crumb’s Makrokosmos 1 and 2, Twelve Fantasy-Pieces after the Zodiac for amplified piano, 63:59; Music for a Summer Evening, 34:12.

Recorded February 2016 / June-July 2017, Oizumi Bunkamura, Japan.

Performed by Yoshiko Shimizu (with Akiko Shibata, Rupert Struber and Natsumi Shimizu) on the Kairos Label.

“The ancient voice has ceased. I hear ephemeral echoes. Oblivion of midnight in starry waters.” “Ulysses’ Isle” by Salvatore Quasimodo (Epigraph to Crumb’s Makrokosmos)

We can all celebrate a new double-CD release from Kairos with Japanese pianist Yoshiko Shimizu playing George Crumb’s Makrokosmos, Volume I, Volume II and Music for a Summer Evening (Makrokosmos III) accompanied by Austrian percussionist Rupert Struber.The title reflects Crumb’s admiration for Bartók’s legendary piano series Mikrokosmos, and is a brilliant creative attempt to enlarge that folk spirit scale and theme to encompass all of our shared experience as humans.

Makrokosmos, Volume I and Volume II are filled with references to the history of humankind, myths, Christianity, paganism and occultism. In Music for a Summer Evening Crumb pays a tribute to poetic quotations of Quasimodo, Pascal and Rilke. The composer himself regards these three works as forming a trilogy that consists of a classical round myth form within a late modernist musical framework.

The Ambience of Mind: Music and Meditation

Tony Scott's Music for Zen Meditation. (Verve Records, 1964)

 

“We ought to listen to music or sit and practice breathing at the beginning of every meeting or discussion.” – Thich Nhat Hanh,Vietnamese Zen Master and music lover (Plum Village Records).

What kind of music, if any at all, serves the environmental purpose of establishing the equilibrium sought after by all meditators? Some teachers would suggest that music is in itself a distraction, and perhaps it is, but it’s one which I’ve always felt formed a core place in my own longtime practice. Mine is a kind of beat hybrid of Zen and Dzogchen, and I’ve long used sound as an ideal accompaniment to concentration on the breath, which is in itself a kind of reverberating music created by our own lungs. Putting on a piece of music in order to facilitate meditation also provides me with a set formality and a ritual pattern, within which one can briefly forget all limits.

Rather than calling it meditation music, however, composed or performed to aid in meditation or prayer in a literal religious or spiritual sense, I prefer calling it meditative music, almost as if it’s the music itself which is doing the meditating, through us. The approach of certain modern composers using meditational techniques in their creative practice, with or without application to or focus upon specific religious content, has long been recognized. Many notable examples have also combined concepts, meditation and music in their artistic work.