First Laboratorium concert!
Thank you to everyone who joined the first LABORATORIUM concert at Sørum Saturday June 10th! And thanks to the musicians, Tanja Orning, Torben Snekkestad and Jon Balke, for outstanding and enriching musicianship in this first meeting with what will eventuelly become the commissioned work Extinction sounds in Tynset Kulturhus on Saturday 21 October during TronTalks. The festival director Glenn Erik Haugland was also present at the concert, giving a short talk in which he annonced me as the festival profile of the year. I am honoured to accept this task, following in the footsteps of earlier festival profiles Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Lena Lindgren and Tommy Olsson. As the festival profile I will participate in various talks, and also give the opening speech.
In addition to presenting a taste of the commissioned work, the concert on Sørum also included another project, kindly supported by the Norwegian Composers Association: INTEROBJECTIVE SOUNDSCAPES. This idea, which has seen its debut in solo format in Kunstbanken in Hamar, explores the spatial experience of sound and music (the space-time of sound, if you will) through, among other things, graphic scores and various concert forms. At Sørum, the ensemble version of the Interobjective soundscapes-idea was tried out for the first time.
The score below was the starting point. The four letters denote four different rooms, with a musician placed in each room. The notes represent musical ideas and gestures as a starting point for improvisation. The key word was "sonic transformation". The musicians, myself included, were tasked with developing the idea they started with into the idea that comes out at the other end of their diagonal staff. In the middle, all sounds meet and melt together, before disappearing in opposite directions.
The audience could move freely between the different rooms during the performance, and experience both the sound of each musician up close and the relationship between the different instruments moving from room to room, in what appeared as a kind of sound installation with live musicians. When I strolled through the sound of Tanja, Torben and Jon at the rehearsal earlier in the day, it was a very special experience, and I hope the audience experienced something of the same at the concert. Many different parameters come into play, ranging from the size and layout of the rooms, the distance between them and what is contained in them, to the nature of the music and the relationship between improvisation and composition of the different parts. Still lots of work to be done, and I look forward to developing this idea further!
Thanks to the Arts council Norway, Creo's vederlagsfond, the Norsk Jazzforum, Stange municipality and the Norwegian Composers' Association for kindly supporting the concert and my work! And thank you Knut would, for opening the wonderful barn for my musical explorations, and for letting me rent the world's best workplace at beautiful Sørum farm (the house with the round window) 🙏🌿
Photo: Kristian Osmundsvaag
