Nils Schweckendiek (Photo credit: Marco Borggreve)Hi, I’m Nils Schweckendiek and I’ve been asked to tell you about a concert at the Helsinki Festival on 21st August. However, if you’ll bear with me, I’ll start by talking a little about nature, numbers and social change and get to our two composers in just a moment. (If you’re Finnish, please be relieved rather than offended that I’m writing this in English – I assure you it’s much less painful this way for readers and writer alike.)
The pace of change is one of the defining characteristics of contemporary Westernised human life. Democracy and individualism have fostered innovation and a human-centred view of the world. Darwin may have challenged beliefs that supported older authoritarian structures, but mankind has been quick to reassert separation from its environment by means of technology. Every year brings new gadgets, medical advances and discoveries, while news organisations, particularly English-language ones, report epoch-making historical turning points at least once a week. People are living longer – will our capacity to absorb change reach saturation point?
“What fascinates me is to comprehend what it is that keeps Man so aimlessly in motion that he separates himself from nature as if in a blind rage. I’m interested in trying to understand this great change, which is taking place without our noticing it.” The composer Beat Furrer, whose work Uusinta, the Helsinki Chamber Choir and I very much wanted to bring to the Helsinki Festival, is exercised by some of these issues.
Furrer was born in Schaffhausen, Switzerland in 1954. As change is a preoccupation for Furrer, we wanted to confront his music with that by an older composer – if possible, one whose year of birth differed by only one digit from his. So near, and yet so far: complex changes in society and ideas reduced to the minuscule difference between two squiggles. (Today, the intrinsic beauty of a number sometimes outweighs its original, practical function as part of a counting mechanism. 2000 was the last year of the previous thousand, a grand culmination – but the number looked so good that people wanted it to be a new beginning, and so we celebrated the millennium a year early.)
1954 – 1854. So we come to Leoš Janáček, a Czech composer whose work embraces the ideal of nature from which Furrer believes we are moving further and further away. Janáček’s fascination with subjects such as childhood, new life and the natural world is expressed in numerous works, including, alongside several operas, his late collection of settings of children’s rhymes, Říkadla, with which we’ll open our concert. The theme of rejuvenation was close to Janáček’s heart in the last decade of his life, when his love for a much younger woman gave rise to an incredible flow of masterpieces.
Of the other works by Janáček in our concert, Kačena divoká (The Wild Duck) is a simple and moving piece of nature evocation, while the Elegy on the Death of Daughter Olga deals with the most painful possible part of a parent-child relationship. Nature can be cruel.
In the Říkadla as in his later operas, proximity to nature is evident in another sense in Janáček’s use of speech melodies. He kept sketchbooks in which he notated the sound of everyday spoken Czech and used his observations to capture the natural rhythms and contours of the language in his own word-setting.
Janáček’s embrace of nature is far from naïve. In the best sense, it fits into a pastoral tradition that doesn’t want Man to stray too far from his fellow beasts. For us musicians, it’s easy to forget that the late nineteenth century was a time of technological innovation, aggressive nation-building, colonialism and fledgling trade unions. (Music, it’s been said, tends to lag about fifty years behind the rest of history.) Society as Beat Furrer experiences it is the result of intertwined developments in industry and urbanisation which were well under way by the time Janáček was born, and which were celebrated by the Futurist movement that published its manifesto in 1909, during Janáček’s lifetime.
The works by Furrer featured in our concert, in particular spur and still, are notable for the way they contrast passages of extreme rhythmic density with moments of near-stasis. Their rhythmic energy is somewhat reminiscent of Janáček’s joie-de-vivre in works such as the Říkadla, but much more manic, and often hushed. Joyful celebration of the life force has become a hurried tangle of busy commuters, none of whom dare to raise their voice in the crowd. Only occasionally is one of the many layers revealed clearly, and then but momentarily.
Furrer’s way of thinking in layers of texture is exemplified by the case of still and voices-still. still, for instrumental ensemble, was composed in 1998. Two years later, he added an additional layer for a choir of twelve voices to the instrumental texture and called the resulting piece voices-still. You can hear still and voices-still side-by-side in our concert and, if you’re inclined to muse on such matters, decide for yourself whether they are two separate works, two versions of the same work, or whether such shoe-horning has any real meaning given that music as such resists being reduced to a single state, time and place, being more of an ever-evolving process.
The surface of Beat Furrer’s music can appear bright and shimmering and yet the listening experience is unsettling, particularly in the moments of stasis, which evoke exhaustion or emptiness more than they do calmness or introspection. As a picture of contemporary life, it doesn’t judge too much, it just observes. But is it some great Darwinian joke that the arrogance and insatiability of our species will yet lead it to self-destruct?
Nils Schweckendiek, Helsinki Chamber Choir & Uusinta Chamber Ensemble concert 21st August at 7.30 pm in Sibelius-Academy
Nils Schweckendiek, conductor
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