Within my own tight menagerie of favorites – the albums lovingly bejeweled with fingerprints and dog-eared booklets – Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s name appears on more CD spines than any other living composer. I’m not being hyperbolic when I admit that I need to hear her music no less often than I need to revel in the night sky. This music unlocks something about human-ness on a more visceral, fundamental level than even the Thich Nhat Hanh passage that once redirected my life, or that Terrence Malick scene tattooed inside my skull. Maybe this is resonating with you, too, and fellow Thorvaldsdottir acolytes, I tell you without reservation that Anna has reached a true inflection point with the scores and performances represented on this record.
I’ve been invited to write these liner notes due to some expectation of expertise: I’ve advocated in print for Anna’s music for over a decade, breathed the same rehearsal room air with her while workshopping her first quartet, and have similarly witnessed, first-hand, Sono Luminus sound engineer Daniel Shores cajoling microphones and mixes to mystically make “it” sound like “it” sounds in my head.
And yet, when I’m deep in the trance of Anna’s oeuvre, the question of “What does it mean?” is noticeably (and mercifully) absent. When Spektral Quartet presented our Thorvaldsdottir commission Enigma to audiences, we were uncharacteristically brief in contextualizing what everyone was about to experience, leaving it to something along the lines of, This music is simultaneously colossal and microscopic – the scale is both universal and sub-atomic. You’ve no doubt noticed that Anna herself avoids fertilizing proscriptive notions of how one should consider what they hear, gently insisting that this is our world to explore. And yet, these sounds awaken a rare species of curiosity, don’t they? There’s a (hopefully) forgivable compulsion to ascribe environmental reference points or even an attempt at obliging the composer to unpack why we seem to be vibrating at some alien frequency when we listen.
So where does that leave us, here?
What I will hazard is that Anna’s music presents dualities, and more importantly, the liminal space between them. This is going to sound a bit grand, but I don’t care because it’s true: these arrangements of sound don’t create a universe, they are the universe. What I offer you now are words revolving around a question – one essential to these pieces and all of the composer’s catalogue – the answer for which I am still in quixotic pursuit:
How is this music so gargantuan?
It’s the sterling capture of the performance, of course, and yes, orchestration/voicing/pacing are key. But there is an intangible at work here. Nothing I’ve ever confronted in the orchestral realm is quite this staggering, or precipitates such an immediate, exquisite vertigo.
ARCHORA
ARCHORA is ushered into existence by a plangent Db summoned by the bass clarinet, contrabassoon, bass trombone, tenor and bass tubas, cellos, double basses, and rattling chains. There is no transitioning into this immense space…you are just here now. This harmonic cornerstone evaporates in less than a minute, and yet, somehow it hovers in the ears throughout till the midpoint of the piece, when it is replaced by a magnetic C-natural – again amongst deep, stygian voices – that sounds somehow more agitated, or more activating, by this point in the score.
One remarkable feature of this piece is the responsibility, as well as the trust, it places on the individual performers. The reason that low Db is so potent, so magnificent, is that the players are imperceptibly ducking out for air asynchronously, giving it the effect of something mythical, or at least superhuman. This technique is not novel or new, but the collaboration between the composer, requesting that the musicians embody serenity as they negotiate these precarious hand-offs, and the Iceland Symphony performers, without whose belief in this process the entire enterprise would quickly disintegrate, is spellbinding.
Is it beginning to resonate, why I refer to the pieces on this album as an “inflection point?” Many composers can make an orchestra sound voluminous. What you are hearing on this track, though, is a composer not simply engaging an orchestra, but synthesizing with it to become an organism of improbable magnitude.
But how does ARCHORA manage to bridge such heady expanses?
It’s the strings unleashing a battery of col legno battuto that whips my focus back to terra firma. They are not shocking gestures, but grounding ones that recalibrate the point-of-view back to that of the listener. It’s the circular cascade of descending lines, like some perverse Shepard’s tone that loosens my grasp on which end is up. It’s the whole organism, bending back toward whatever drone prevails in a given section that makes escaping some central truth or eternal nature of this primordia impossible. And each time the scene approaches overwhelm, we’re met with a gleaming chordal or timbral pyramid, offering a reprieve.
I have the sense of experiencing a concept I understand only at the…feline…level: that of the "observer effect” in physics. ARCHORA, through its absence of perceptible passage of time – a regular beat – exists outside of my influence, and yet listening to it, I have the sense that I am creating the next tonal area, the next vista, simply by changing the position of my gaze.
ARCHORA is extra-human and human, simultaneously. With the arrival of the viola Bb–A cadence (16:45) and with a now discernible sense of time provided by the bass drum appears what to me is one of the most generous moments in all of Anna’s music. It enters not as deliverance from – or suspension of – struggle, but a reminder that having reckoned with all the titanic forces within this universe, we’ve emerged together. Or as Anna puts it to the orchestra in the performance notes, regarding the impossibly long sustains throughout, we have traversed “the distance on a thin rope” while carrying a delicate flower “without dropping it or falling.”
AIŌN
ARCHORA plays like a solo adventure, or a single-camera shoot. AIŌN, by contrast, implies to my ears a more communal endeavor. A construction of the universe more so than a rendezvous with it. Here again, my brain keeps tilting toward cosmic metaphors when attempting to provide a sense of scale.
Intriguingly, Db is the first of our north star pitches in this second score as well, breathed into being with wisps of air from the winds and non-pitched circular bowing in the strings. Unlike ARCHORA, though, with its three interior movement titles a secret shared only with the performers, in AIŌN we are offered three explicit movement headings, beginning with “Morphosis.” Wriggling amoebas of semi-chromatic flourishes cross and recross the ensemble before coalescing around an E-natural, and by extension creating a cathartic major 3rd with the A-flat that provided a perfect 5th with the curtain-raising D-flat. These are familiar, foundational intervals, and they unfold before us in quintessentially Thorvaldsdottir fashion: by a series of descending suspensions. I’d suggest that no composer employs this device more persuasively, with each alternation of tension and release palpable in one’s body.
We are returned to the breath, literally, by the end of the movement but as something more akin to a memory than a closing of symmetry. Movement two, “Transcension” is the point at which allusions to humankind become frequent. The reverberant snaps of Bartók pizzicati and more specifically the incantations issuing from the low strings suggest evidence of the earth we inhabit. Is this our earth, though, or some allegory for our planet?
What most captivates me in this middle movement, though, is the scraping effected by the percussionists. Building something new, irrespective of scale, is never a linear process and I can’t help but imagine some empyrean Etch-a-Sketch eraser at work here. Wiping the slate clean, so to speak, allows for a new approach to our mutual endeavor, but it also affords the listener’s ears a recalibration – an effective device for making sonic space in advance of The Next Big Thing.
Nowhere is a sense of engineering – or maybe continual re-engineering – more tightly focused than the 3:23 mark of movement three, “Entropia,” when the contrabassoon, double basses, and XL bass drum begin provocatively cycling a hocket to demarcate each bar line. This is coordinated rail spike-driving…just at the scale of Cronus, Hyperion, and Rhea. The rhythmicity of it is startling because of its scarcity. Not only here, but across this entire album.
Remnants or apparitions of material from elsewhere in the piece find their way into this final movement, but never looking quite the same as when we last crossed paths. The air is truly remade, though, with only two minutes remaining and immediately preceding a resolute brass chant before all forces assemble to parade in an ecstatic, roll-the-credits Db major triad. A moment just as revelatory as the finale of a certain late-19th-century German tone poem frequently associated with space.
So what makes ARCHORA and AIŌN so huge? The answer is, and I’m not being coy, everything. It’s the transcendence of bar lines, the exploitation (the good kind!) of the range of the orchestral “instrument,” the perfectly-timed exits of any section of the music, the unequivocal conviction of the Iceland Symphony musicians, the immediacy and detail of the recording capture, and the crystalline mix.
It is the uncommon intuition of the composer herself – a trait not miraculously bestowed, but uncovered only through persistent, perpetual excavation.
–Doyle Armbrust