It’s tremendously valuable for a composer to have performers, conductors, interpreters who like your music, who not only perform or even commission pieces from you, but who actively like it.
It is even better when those good ambassadors are also great people. I have had the pleasure and privilege to get to meet and work with several such wonderful musicians in my career so far. Two of them are violinists Ronnie and Ellinor Weber. Besides permanent posts in the Nordic Chamber Orchestra, they perform together as the Weber Duo as well as in the string quartet, the Weber Quartet.
I have worked with Ronnie and Ellinor several times. Back in 2018, I composed Trinidad for them: a technically demanding, but also fun, showy and theatrical duet. In the piece, I take a contemporary classical idiom, inspired by personal heroes such as Ravel and Shostakovich, and spice it up with influences from Caribbean music. Going beyond mere appropriation, I wanted to explore the possibilities in a genuine stylistic mash-up.
Western classical music has a long and not unproblematic history of perpetrating stereotypes, for example by mimicking the styles of foreign nations and societies. (One very early example of this is, in fact, the Ancient Greek musical modes that share names with the much later church modes!) I’d argue, however, that this kind of cross-pollination is useful for bringing in new and fresh ideas, and that is what I sought to do in this piece.
Ronnie and Ellinor are performing Trinidad, as well as music by a number of other great Swedish composers from four centuries, Wednesday July 2nd, 8pm at Härnösand Cathedral. The week after, they are performing the same programme north of Sundsvall, at the lovely little Lögdö Church, Thursday July 10th, 7pm. Lögdö will be the last of three concerts with this programme; they did the first one last Sunday June 29th, at Njurunda Church south of Sundsvall.
Last Friday, as I wrote in last week’s post, Höga Kusten Vokalensemble premiered my motet Pie pellicane, Jesu Domine as part of a wonderful programme that also featured music by Pēteris Vasks, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and others. Today, the local newspaper published a review of the concert by local freelance music critic Rune Andersen, and I was thrilled to read the following (my translation):
Saulesco knows how to write for the choir. His piece is tonally well-balanced and elaborately written.
Honestly, as much as I naturally enjoy getting a great review, it was equally gratifying that the ensemble took such pleasure in learning and performing the piece. Again – it’s worth so much having good ambassadors for your music.
An example of a good ambassador on a different scale altogether is Adam Neely: extraordinary bass player, video essayist, and one half of the progressive jazz fusion band Sungazer. Yesterday, Adam posted a video about Catalan multi-instrumentalist and composer Lau Noah. She seems to be flying under the radar, even though she has had some notable successes already. Those include performing on NPR Tiny Desk Concert, collaborating with musicians such as Jacob Collier, and collaborating with a number of other ridiculously talented musicians on her critically acclaimed sophomore album A DOS released last year.
Regardless, it seems Lau Noah has yet to reach more widespread fame. While he probably won’t singlehandedly change Noah’s career trajectory, Adam Neely’s close to 2 million YouTube subscribers have gotten a glowing (and, true to Neely’s form, theoretically thorough!) introduction to Lau Noah and her music. And now I am writing about it – about her – here on my blog. Indeed, I too absolutely recommend you giving her music a listen. And you should absolutely watch Adam’s video.
One particular thing Noah said in the video stayed with me, when she and Neely discuss the complex harmony in her songs (which she claims comes from jazz music and golden-age Disney soundtracks). Noah says that, while she uses lots – ”millions” – of chords, her ”goal is to play the millions of chords and make it sound like it’s four chords”. Complexity for its own sake is not her goal, nor is making her music sound complicated.
Much like how I admire and adore the rhythmic intricacies of Sungazer, Noah’s harmonic textures excite me. And similar to how Noah talks about a ”folky” throughline in much of her music, with a focus on narrative and storytelling, Adam Neely famously insists on all of Sungazer’s music (if not all music, period) really being in 4/4 if you just put your mind to it.
Circling back to Trinidad, which I so look forward to hearing Ronnie and Ellinor play tomorrow in the beautiful Härnösand Cathedral, that piece was also never intended to project complexity to the listener, even though it regularly changes metre and for a long time lacks a clear tonal centre. However, in the hands of deft musicians, this purported complexity can melt away, leaving behind something that hopefully sounds deceptively clear. It is kind of like what Lau Noah described as making ”millions” of chords sound like only four chords.