Fuglekongen

Silje Aker Johnsen explores the voice at its outer edges on Fuglekongen

A solo soprano album with works by Kristine Tjøgersen, Lene Grenager, Alvin Lucier, Jan Martin Smørdal, Therese Birkelund Ulvo, Georges Aperghis and Silje Aker Johnsen

Fuglekongen (The Bird King), the new album from soprano Silje Aker Johnsen, spins around the human voice, the human being, and nature in various forms. The voice unfolds on a journey spanning classical tradition and extended vocal techniques. Clarinettist Rolf Borch joins her on two works. The album takes its title from Johnsen’s own composition.

From Norway come Kristine Tjøgersen’s Gibbon Lieder, Lene Grenager’s Tre eller blod (Wood or Blood, text by Markus Midré, with clarinet), Jan Martin Smørdal’s The Lesser Nighthawk (with clarinet), Therese Birkelund Ulvo’s three-part Silent Songs for soprano and electronics, and Johnsen’s own work, Fuglekongen.

The American pioneer Alvin Lucier (1931–2021) is represented by Wave Songs for Female Voice and Pure Wave Oscillators, eleven brief movements in which the voice meets the pure tones of oscillators. The Greek-French composer Georges Aperghis contributes Pub 2, a compact piece of vocal theatre.

Together, the works show the voice as an instrument capable of far more than song, from whispering and speech, to animal calls and precise, shimmering interplay with electronic sound.

Fuglekongen – King of the birds

Dear Listener,

Thank you for lending your ear to these works that revolve around the human voice, the human being, and nature in various forms. From the smell of apple trees in autumn, the laws of physics in sound waves, and the wordless song of birds and gibbon monkeys, to bits and pieces of human language and communication, and a loud search for silence.

In every human being lives an embodied instrument: the voice itself. It is around this instrument that this album spins. Sometimes the voice stands alone as a solo instrument, or I, the singer, re-encounter my own voice as background, counterpart, or in calls and responses to prerecorded and sometimes processed tapes. At other times, the voice appears in collaboration with a clarinet or sine tones, evoking waves and beats. Spanning more than three octaves – ending on a high G in Fuglekongen – the human voice is explored, unfolding between classical traditions and extended vocal techniques. Gibbonlieder by Kristine Tjøgersen aims to let the gibbons’ voices speak through the human voice, the song building an arch between the two worlds. While in Tre eller Blod (‘Wood or Blood’) by Lene Grenager, the voice moves from classical techniques into vulnerable whispers, between the culturally schooled and the intimate, the human/nature duality of the Pinocchio theme.

The works on this album also represent different ways of working with music as a performer in the contemporary music field. Some of them meant tuning in to existing scores; others grew out of creating music together with composers through workshops, recordings and close collaboration. In that sense, they form a portrait of the different ways I have encountered music throughout my practice. Some pieces were commissioned and written especially for me; some I was asked to perform, and they stayed with me. Some I found – or they found me – through recommendations. After many years of working with improvisation and developing material in both music and dance, it also became natural to create a piece of my own.

I have been a singer and a dancer throughout my artistic practice. Pub 2 by Georges Aperghis has followed me since I was a student, when I first started working with movement and choreography together with the voice. I have sung it in concert halls, at dance festivals, and from the rig of a sailboat.

The meditative Wave Songs by Alvin Lucier gives a physical sensation. I strongly recommend varying your position relative to the loudspeakers as you will experience different beats.

Listening to the lesser nighthawk bird can give an unsettling feeling of breathlessness. Jan Martin Smørdal elaborates this feeling in the piece named after the bird, with his overlapping clarinet and voice parts. In the pieces by Therese Birkelund Ulvo and Kristine Tjøgersen, I meet my own voice in the tape parts. In Ulvo's piece, the recorded voice is me, fifteen and twenty years ago. In the most recent piece on the album, Tjøgersen lets layered recordings of my voice create a sense of rain forest insects and groups of gibbons responding. Both works were created in close collaboration through workshops and recordings, where colours and features of my voice get to merge into the composers’ concepts and materials towards the final scores. My own piece, Fuglekongen, is built around a myth, and I love how working with bird sounds lets me play with different kinds of rawness and beauty in the voice.

I hope you will find moments of surprise and perhaps some sense of fascination … inspiration … curiosity … Feel free to fill in the blanks.

Silje Aker Johnsen

About the works:

Kristine Tjøgersen: Gibbon Lieder (2024)

Scientists in Japan have discovered that gibbons use exactly the same techniques as professional sopranos when they sing. This has led to new theories about the evolution of the human voice.

Gibbons live in the Asian rainforest. They are fiercely territorial, and defend their territory with vocal performances. Gibbons communicate by singing, especially at night, and can make a huge variety of sounds. The song is clear and very powerful and can be heard from distances of up to a kilometre. Both males and females sing solos to attract a mate, as well as to defend their territories. The song can be used to identify not only the species of gibbon singing, but also the area it comes from.

Gibbons are highly endangered, owing to habitat destruction and logging, and they are also hunted, captured and sold as pets.

The piece was created in close collaboration with soprano Silje Aker Johnsen and it is the song of the gibbon, as well as the desire for contact with the more-than-human that is the starting point for this work.

Kristine Tjøgersen

Lene Grenager: Tre eller blod (2005)

The work Tre eller Blod (‘Wood or blood’) is based on a poem by Markus Midré. The poem investigates the duality of the Pinocchio figure, something which I have been exploring in several works: Pinocchio is neither human nor nature/tree. Because he has been carved from a branch and his heart has been wood, his belonging to nature as opposed to humanity is immanent in his being. At the same time he earns a human heart and becomes a real human. This for me is a notion and a duality that lives in all of us.

Lene Grenager

Alvin Lucier: Wave Songs (1998)

“I was trying to combine science and art and existence.” This quote is from Song X in Wave Songs, the only song in the piece that has a sung text and is extracted from the American artist Lee Lozano’s writing. These eleven short songs were composed in 1998 in response to Lozano’s ‘Wave Series’, eleven abstract canvases that explore wave phenomena.

In these songs, the voice sustains notes against two pure wave oscillators and creates beats as the sound waves collide. At certain distances apart, the beats are faster, but at unisons no beats occur. I first met Alvin Lucier and sung these songs at the Ultima Oslo contemporary music festival in 2013. He asked me then to record the songs and I am happy to include Wave Songs on this album. The quote above speaks to me and I find that it encapsulates some of the essence of Wave Songs.

Silje Aker Johnsen

Jan Martin Smørdal: The Lesser Nighthawk (2012)

Breath is fundamentally visceral, which upon hearing leaves a sensation you recognizes and mirrors: If you hear an unnaturally long exhalation the body senses the missing inhalation. Simultaneously you recognize the fiction the exhalation creates. This simple mirroring is the starting point for The Lesser Nighthawk. Like the seemingly circular breathing trills of the bird song, the piece is perceived as one long continuous vocalization. The bird’s Norwegian name translates to ‘Trilling Nighthawk’; I have used the ‘trill’ from the Norwegian name, and ‘lesser’ from the English name. A subdued slow melodic development can be sensed throughout the piece, like a camouflaged presence seeking to be noticed, but at the same time hidden. Like the bird itself. 

Jan Martin Smørdal

Therese Birkelund Ulvo: Silent Songs for soprano and electronics, Part I (2007) – Parts II & III (2012)

This work explores what might be the most elusive and paradoxical element in music: silence – and its counterpart, the act of listening.

The first part opens with an act of attention. Its text meditates on listening as a form of power and intimacy: how we construct meaning from what we hear, how we project our own imaginings onto the words of others, how restraint, leaving something unsaid, withholding a detail, creates more presence than abundance ever could. Silence, here, is not absence. It is invitation.

The second part unfolds as a catalogue of contradictions. Silence as weapon. Silence as medication. Silence as fence, as mother, as music. Each aphorism arrives like a stone dropped into still water, the electronics holding the resonance after the voice has withdrawn. The cumulative effect is one of disorientation: the more silence is defined, the more it escapes definition.

The third part turns reflective, almost elegiac. Drawn from thinkers across centuries, its texts measure silence against speech and find speech wanting. The work closes on a single bleak observation about contemporary life: that silence has become the rarest of luxuries, and perhaps the most necessary. The soprano’s final phrases do not resolve so much as recede, absorbed into the surrounding texture until the boundary between voice and electronics, between utterance and silence, becomes impossible to locate.

Silent Songs was written for soprano Silje Aker Johnsen, whose voice inhabits the space between sound and its disappearance with uncommon grace.

Therese Birkelund Ulvo

Georges Aperghis: Pub 2 (2000)

As a student I collected all the scores, CDs and DVDs of Georges Aperghis’ music, and I attended a workshop with him in music theatre. I was curious to find solo vocal music that would be suited to choreographic work. He recommended me some of his then newer pieces, Pub 1 & 2, and they have become the solo vocal pieces I have performed the most in my years as a singer, with or without different choreographies.

In his iconic Récitations (1978) for female voice, bits and pieces of language are used as rhythmical and musical components in the compositions. In Pub 2, Aperghis uses more audible words in combination with vocal sounds. Aperghis later included Pub 2 in his work Reklamen, with the name ‘Detergent’. Each Pub or movement ‘sells’ a different product and Aperghis states in a program note on his website that he uses the pretext to “continue to explore the voice”.

Silje Aker Johnsen

Silje Aker Johnsen: Fuglekongen (????)

This piece is created around a Flemish myth I read as a child. All the birds gather and are given colours from a paint box. The raven becomes shining black, the blue tit yellow and blue, the robin gets a touch of red and the greenfinch turns green. My piece imagines the queue and the cacophony of birds waiting. It opens with a paraphrase of Saint-Saëns’ musical portrait of one of the most iconic of birds, the white swan. She is interrupted by all sorts of birds until the very end, when the tiniest bird in Europe, the Goldcrest, humbly comes forth after having waited patiently in line. Unfortunately, by then all the colours have been used up. Naturally, all the birds gather again and each give a touch of their colour to the tiny bird, so that he too may be beautiful. In Norwegian the little goldcrest is called ‘the king of the birds’, Fuglekongen, and it sings with a high pitched, beautiful song.

Silje Aker Johnsen