Soccorsi – Works by Morten Eide Pedersen

SOCCORSI – MORTEN EIDE PEDERSEN IN MEMORIAM

On the CD «Soccorsi» we are introduced to Morten Eide Pedersen’s collected piano pieces, in addition to some of his works for ensemble. Signe Bakke – pianist and prime mover for the release – says the following about the title: The title of the CD had to be Soccorsi – this mellifluous Italian word, also the title of one of Morten Eide Pedersen’s piano works. Soccorsi means supportive, helpful, and so was Morten: he who supported, created, and helped when called upon. With his deep and extensive knowledge, he became a mentor to many and an artistic force within society.

When Morten Eide Pedersen unexpectedly and suddenly passed away in 2014, not one of his scores had yet been published or recorded. In other words, the musical map that he had left behind contains much uncharted terrain. This recording is an initial contribution towards making his work readily available to the public and builds on a search in his archives for scores, sound files, sketches, and creative logics that itself did require an essayistic approach similar to the one that was so crucial in Eide Pedersen’s artistic practice.

Tittelverket «Soccorsi» is part of an unfinished series of short works and sketches titled Tagebücher. The music combines the concepts of the future and past overlapping in time with the thought of the score’s page as an open, continuous space.The work is performed by Signe Bakke who had a close personal and collegial relationship with Pedersen that yielded great artistic collaboration over many years. The other musicians on the release are pianist James Clapperton, saxophonists Kjetil Møster and René Wiik, percussionist Craig Farr and BIT20 Ensemble, who all have a strong relationship with Pedersen’s music.

This release is the first of two on LAWO Classics with Pedersen’s compositions. The repertoire on CD 2 are mainly ensemble works.

Foreword

The title of the CD had to be Soccorsi – this mellifluous Italian word meaning supportive, helpful. So was Morten Eide Pedersen: he who supported, created, and helped when called upon. With his broad and extensive knowledge, he became a mentor to many and an artistic force within society. And he filled many roles: educator, writer, lecturer, and creator of culture.

In 1996, when the chance arose, he seized the opportunity to create a new composition program, a program where there should be space for the entire spectrum of budding composers, and also for all those voices that just quite didn't fit in. He entered into dialogue-based guidance with a burning passion to help students find and develop their own artistic voices. And new ideas emerged: international composers' meetings in Bergen, a concert series for the city's composers and composition students, a contemporary music festival. 'Everything is connected,' he said, and in his own unpretentious way, he constantly erected new arenas and forged new connections.

At the foundation of this all was an expressive force – his own composer's voice. With this CD, it is this voice that shall emerge – a seeking, singular composer's voice that shines with its own power and poetry.

— Signe Bakke

Like the Clapper of a Bell

Many composers build monuments. Morten Eide Pedersen (1958–2014) preferred the relational to the monumental. In addition to musicology and composition, he was educated in philosophy, sociology, mathematics, and informatics. This interdisciplinary approach reflects a kaleidoscopic curiosity that could twist any conversation on almost any topic in unexpected directions. During Pedersen's long career as a teacher and advisor, it was that curiosity that enabled him to see the world from the perspective of his students and associates while he, often almost imperceptibly, challenged those same perspectives. He was the editor of the music magazine Ballade for five years, and from 1996 he quietly and precisely built up a complete, professional education program in composition at the Grieg Academy in Bergen.

For a period in the 2000s Morten Eide Pedersen co-hosted annual, week-long workshops in Bergen where composers such as Brian Ferneyhough, Helmut Lachenmann, Klaus Lang, and Salvatore Sciarrino were invited to teach. Young composers from all over Norway attended and became acquainted with these significant individuals both as artists and as human beings. Morten Eide Pedersen's office door was always open to composers, musicians, and musicologists, and his work brought an important practical and theoretical pluralism into Norwegian contemporary music and musical academia.

When Morten Eide Pedersen unexpectedly and suddenly passed away in 2014, not one of his scores had yet been published or recorded. In other words, the musical map that he had left behind contains much uncharted terrain. This recording is an initial contribution towards making his work readily available to the public and builds on a search in his archives for scores, sound files, sketches, and creative logics that itself did require an essayistic approach similar to the one that was so crucial in Eide Pedersen's artistic practice.

Morten Eide Pedersen described his work as an unfinished exploration of the 'intertwining between text – sound – language – music.' The span between silence, sound, and words is already present in his dissertation in musicology from 1985.¹ It opens with an epigraph in which Ludwig Wittgenstein asks, by paraphrase of Heraclitus, what a beginning really is. The dissertation discusses music's relationship to history and another significant relationship: that between sound and listener. Pedersen draws lines from Anton Webern's isolation of single notes to American minimalism, where musical structure and harmony are directly audible and point to the listener's active role in what he calls a postmodern music: '[...] it is the very activity of consciousness that constitutes the experience of a work.' Music as a dialogue with a listener is also evident in what Morten Eide Pedersen considered his own first work – a wind quintet from the same year as his dissertation – a work that steers us through a tonal landscape with an organic, open contemplation.

¹ Morten Eide Pedersen: Music in Postmodernism – Minimal Music? Institute for Musicology, University of Oslo 1985.

The earliest work on this recording, Storyboard (1992), is from almost a decade later. Here, Pedersen's focus on listening becomes a compositional technique, with musicians asked to improvise around the tasks written in their part and to respond to what the other players are doing. As a result, the musicians must listen more closely to each other than they would have needed in a metrical score. This approach already exists in another form in the instrumentation: a freely improvising saxophone vs. a string quartet. The score brings to mind an editing interface for film or sound, where small, stand-alone musical events and verbal instructions are written in weak pencil inside horizontal, wide tracks, one for each instrument. Any graphic modesty must not be interpreted as a lack of will or precision, because in texture, progress, and form, Storyboard exposes its performers to a well-thought-out mixture of trust and coercion. The short written messages for the strings call for them to both listen and take responsibility: 'eventually, capture the playing style of the cello,' 'play more hesitantly, and independently of the first violin,' 'give a cue when the development seems to be "saturated."'

When Silence Becomes Singing (1994) immediately makes me think of two human voices speaking softly over each other. With a few exceptions, the two instruments – marimba and saxophone – are rhythmically independent and without any clear division of roles. In other words, the space between the two voices in the score is understood visually and concretely as open. A closer listening reveals a nice dialectic where the sharper contour in the saxophone and the marimba's round, soft, full sound point toward each other, and elevate one another. Harmonically, the roles are reversed: a darker E-flat tonality in the saxophone alternates with a more open, brighter E minor world in the marimba. The title itself contains a transition between silence and sound. Beneath the surface also lurks the language, in and with the singing. The passage is taken from e.e. cummings' poem i am a little church (1958) which touches on finding peace in the small things, about how a small church can be just as important as a cathedral. Perhaps the composer also found inspiration in cummings' work with typography. The poet had a background in the visual arts, and in these poems the space and silence around the words on the page are as important as the words themselves.

When Morten Eide Pedersen draws a title from a poem, it floats a little bit like an iceberg on the water's surface. One must know the poem in question well to recognize an excerpt, and it is left open how much of the poetic subtext is meant to resonate. Time and Bell have buried the Day [–at the still Point of the turning World] (1998) for solo piano is written over short quotes from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets (1936–1942), four long, meditative poems that revolve around time and the perception of time. The title combines the first and last line of a stanza, as if the verse lines between have merged and only the contours of the stanza remain. The bell that has 'buried the day' also appears in the music. In church bells, the harmonics are denser than on other instruments. Bell-like spectra with three-, four-, and five-note clusters in close proximity (with alternating low and high thirds), along with a harmonious universe that orbits around E or E-flat – historically a common tuning of large church bells – continually recur in the music on this recording. The bell-like is also reflected in how the music unfolds: tones scattered in vast, broad intervals descend in consonance in a slow, unpredictable articulation, reminiscent of the pendular swinging motion of the clapper of a bell.

Both Time and Bell… and Impossible Images (1999) are written for the pianist James Clapperton, with whom Morten Eide Pedersen worked closely for several years. In the latter work, the composer moves into a visual domain. The music is composed in response to the abstract animated film Tusalava (1929), a film by Len Lye that originally was accompanied by live music. The film title is Samoan and means 'time cycle.' Lye grew up in New Zealand, and the circles and dots that gradually clump together into larger chains and organisms on the screen are said to be inspired by visual expressions of indigenous people in Oceania. The film exhibits contrasts between circular and linear understandings of time and illustrates how the idea of evolution can lead to conflict. The score contains an introductory text explaining that the piece is still a work in progress. The text also describes an interesting musical idea of tonal wedges or impulses that are clearly audible throughout the piece – small, added notes that should 'stand out, contrast, be sharper' without taking note values from the main time signature.

Just as with poetry, Morten Eide Pedersen practices a form of silent musical inspiration where kinship with other music is only gently hinted at, like a kind of tacit knowledge. In the two solo pieces, Slowness Studies and Soccorsi for piano, both from 2007, the dialectic between the spoken and the unspoken is incorporated into the musical material in a way that is reminiscent of how composers such as Luigi Nono (1924–1990) or Salvatore Sciarrino (1947–) negotiate transitions between sound and silence. Also for Nono, the sound of bells, and their fluid and acoustically complex timbre, is key, as his music begins to explore sound as phenomenology and the limits of the audible. Specifically, Nono draws inspiration from the bell towers in his hometown of Venice. Both composers belong to an Italian tradition where music is closely linked to language, voice, and poetry, and they both think of listening as a sort of inner, personal theater: Sciarrino talks about azione invisibile (invisible action), Nono about teatro della coscienza (theater of consciousness). They both also bring a sensibility into their work with the outer limits of listening into an electronic music world.

On his Slowness Studies, Morten Eide Pedersen writes in the score that the piece should 'listen to itself,' and specifically, that notes and chords should act 'almost like the clapper of a bell.' Along with the active foreground runs an undercurrent of mute four-note and five-note clusters that are to be held down on the keyboard, without the keys actually being struck, sounding as tuned shadows. These two musical layers point towards each other, are equally important, and the performer must explore how these actively struck chords can awaken the passive ones. The musical objects presented are either very long or very short, and the articulation is in the same way either sharply marked or light as a feather, the latter termed farfallandoso – like a butterfly. The flowing tempo of the piece, where concentrated musical events are surrounded by long pauses and fermatas that invite the listener into the resonance of the instrument, may be reminiscent of the music being in a dialogue with Salvatore Sciarrino's early piano sonatas, even though the material in Slowness Studies is more clarified and transparent. The two composers knew each other and were in regular contact, and Morten Eide Pedersen even visited Sciarrino in Città del Castello one year with a group of students.

Where Slowness Studies works with simultaneous resonance, Soccorsi extends the reverberation over a longer period of time, akin to the experience of remembering something. Soccorsi is also part of an unfinished series of short works and sketches titled Tagebücher. The music combines the concepts of the future and past overlapping in time with the thought of the score's page as an open, continuous space. The title is the past tense of an Italian verb that means to come to the rescue or support. Pairs of staves in the score are thought to support each other and should be played simultaneously, similar to the conversation between the two instruments in When Silence Becomes Singing. But after lines 1 and 2 are played to the end, line 2 should be repeated along with the next line, 3, and so on. The newest line at any given time is thus played together with music we have just heard: an immediate past shines through the present. Although the repetitions are actually similar, it can be fascinatingly difficult to hear, because the moment a musical line finds a new tonal environment, a listener's perception of musical roles, rhythm, and tonality also changes. The score itself lies between metric and graphic notation, since the composer has removed some rests so that the beats no longer add up metrically. Instead of inventing new graphics, he tries out intermediate forms where conventional musical characters are freed from chronology, but still convey a tempo or a musical character to a classically trained musician who has these symbols deeply ingrained.

Around 2013, Morten Eide Pedersen expands his dialog with T.S. Eliot via a cycle of five short, essayistic movements for solo piano, Eliot Impressions, written for and developed over time in collaboration with pianist Signe Bakke. The pieces can be performed individually, or wedged between other works in a concert. In one program note, the composer writes that the music meditates over Eliot's verses. On this recording, the movements are presented in the order in which they were composed. It opens with Time and Bell… The next, Other echoes inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?, also takes its title from the quartets. In the text we find two people walking in an old garden where they sense invisible motion – wind moving dead leaves, an echo, an 'unheard music.' Morten Eide Pedersen's audible music displays contrasts between light tremolos and dark, marked chords with added notes. Two opposites are in an open dialog, perhaps like the two people in the garden. The score has clear meter, dynamics, and articulation and a more diverse harmonic structure, even though the openness and fragility is recognizable from previous works.

The light that fractures through unquiet water could have been an impression from the same garden, but is derived from one of the choruses in The Rock (1934), one of T.S. Eliot's first plays, which he wrote at about the same time as the quartets. The music consists of light, sparkling runs in the right hand over a slower middle voice, both set out in an organic polyrhythm that doesn't coincide vertically. Some deep, marked chords attach like a kind of backstay to the ground, and eventually some of the fast runs are scattered all the way into the lowest register.

The title of the fourth movement comes from a narrator who doubts his ability to love. I know the voices dying with a dying fall / Beneath the music from a farther room belong to Eliot's poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, written around 1910. From the poet's point of view, the words are also an allusion to the scene in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (ca.1601) where Orsino listens to music, is reminded of a love story, and exclaims: 'That strain again, it had a dying fall.' The music pursues the idea of this fall and throws itself into a slender but precisely shaped line of falling intervals, often fourths. The line falls forward in open, punctuated rhythms – inverted arcs that here too can conjure the movement of a bell's clapper, not least where the line, after falling for a while, springs itself up again in giant leaps, back towards previous heights, before it again slips into nothingness. In the score, the composer has left two staves blank between each new line of music. These apparently have no active musical function, but in line with the idea of the score as a visual space, they are probably there to increase the visual drop. Given that there is loss or death waiting down there at the bottom, there must be hope, for the fatalistic leap of the melody finally ends in the light, upper stratosphere of the keyboard, an octave above where it all began. In this sleek and in a way simple, but also nuanced and open musical course, it's as if Morten Eide Pedersen reached a fragile balance between the notated and the un-notated, the written and the played, opening a space and a peace around his musical sound that he sought.

The last part of Eliot Impressions borrows its title from an entire poem. In Ash Wednesday (1930), T.S. Eliot's narrator doubts his way into believing in God. Eliot wrote both this poem and the four quartets after he himself found his way back to religion, converting to an Anglican variant of Catholicism. In In this brief transit where the dreams cross // Ash Wednesday, Morten Eide Pedersen connects the title of the poem with a line from one of the stanzas. The music has an open form. The first time heard through it without the score in front, it can be experienced as through-composed – something that touches on interesting questions about where the boundaries of the composed can be drawn. The performer builds a course of 21 loose motives or cadences, arranged in three sections, combined with several detached lines of poetry. Signe Bakke worked out different possible ways of sequencing these motives in dialog with the composer before the premiere in 2013. Some of the fragments occasionally return as a kind of ritornello with new neighbors around them, and they all look as though they have been cut out of other musical sequences and music, in the same way that the composer cuts T.S. Eliot's lines out of context.

In the 1919 essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, T.S. Eliot writes that 'No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.' This idea that even the innovative and avant-garde belong to a tradition where it's possible to enter into critical dialogue, but neither possible nor desirable to detach oneself from it, is echoed in Morten Eide Pedersen's artistic practice. When he died, he had just started a research project where ideas about open form in newly-written music were to meet open form in music from the 14th century, that is, music that – as far as we know – was written down before ideas about musical works, authenticity, or individual artistic signatures were allowed to take root in our consciousness.

Music's potential as a time machine, to physically perform leaps in time by setting a 14th century musical idea beside a contemporary one, playing and listening to them together, is a game that is unique for the experience of score-based, composed music. A recording like this allows us to experience Morten Eide Pedersen's musical ideas and continue to interpret them further.

— Hild Borchgrevink