I Sommarluft

Program note for the clavichord piece I Sommarluft, premiered by Mats Persson at Svensk Musikvår 15/03/2019:

I Sommarluft

I. Ko kyoku

II. Nageire

III. In Nomine

IV. Azumagoto

V. Quodlibet

VI. I Sommarluft

Program note:

The suite I Sommarluft (In Summer Air) was begun in 2017, after my return to Sweden from a three-year study period in West Java, Hong Kong, and Japan. I wanted to write a piece that reflected the musical experiences of those years, and I was particularly inspired to do so after hearing several performances of Fujieda Mamoru’s music in Japan, to whom this suite is dedicated.

One such performance was Kame no Otanashi, a work of 'contemporary Kagura' presented at the Nō theater at Sumiyoshi Shrine in Fukuoka. It combined elements of ancient Japanese music, Fujieda’s own compositions, improvisations by Ami Yamasaki and Ko Ishikawa, and abstract electronic sounds (which were, in fact, recordings of fermenting shōchū). Another was held in an art gallery in Tenjin, where Renaissance consort music for recorders was paired with Fujieda’s compositions (for consort and clavichord) and a sound installation whose source material was plankton.

I was deeply moved by how, despite the music’s diverse origins—free improvisation and Japanese music, experimental sound art and Renaissance polyphony—a singular poetic vision permeated these concerts, erasing any sense of division between the elements. This was particularly inspiring, as it echoed the unified impulse that had led me to study such different musical traditions as Sundanese music in West Java, the gǔqín in Hong Kong, and Japanese traditional music and Just Intonation composition in Japan.

I was inspired to see if I could express these passions in a suite, and the clavichord proved to be the perfect instrument. Its light, quiet, and intimate sound invites detailed listening to its timbre, while effortlessly mingling with the surrounding smells, sights, and sounds. In this sense, it could be seen as the European sister of the gǔqín: despite their distant origins, the two instruments share a similar pathos. Yet while the gǔqín has a rich repertoire that celebrates these qualities, the clavichord—apart from recent exceptions—has often been confined to music intended for organ or harpsichord, serving mainly as a 'practice instrument'. The gǔqín, too, was not primarily a concert instrument for the Chinese literati but a vehicle for a different kind of practice: a spiritual exercise of musical meditation and contemplation.

A common motif in Chinese painting since the Song dynasty is that of a scholar—or sometimes a Daoist immortal—playing the gǔqín outdoors or in an open pavilion, letting the sounds of the instrument mingle with those of nature. In reality, such scenes are idealized, as the gǔqín’s extremely soft tone almost requires an indoor setting, even when playing just for oneself. A more realistic expression of this desire to experience the intermingling of tones and nature can instead be found in the art of Arimoto Toshio.

As an artist, Arimoto shared much with Fujieda: both created works of an archaic tone, deeply informed by both European and Japanese traditions. Arimoto’s paintings evoke Russian icons by Andrei Rublev, Tibetan thangkas by Situ Panchen, the frescoes of Fra Angelico, and Chinese Buddhist mural painting. A lover of Baroque music, Arimoto often depicted people playing early-music instruments—recorders, keyboards—indoors, yet with doors and windows open to the outside. The first movement of this suite takes its title from one of these paintings, portraying a keyboard player before an opening in a wall that reveals a vast landscape of hilltops (or perhaps sand dunes). Flower petals float through the room, and, according to the painting’s title, she is playing an ancient song—Ko kyoku—harmonizing past and present.

Three of the movements in the suite explicitly evoke ancient music. In Nomine, as its name suggests, is based on the popular cantus firmus by John Taverner that gave rise to the English Renaissance In Nomine genre. Azumagoto is based on—or rather, a transcription of—the wagon (or azumagoto) pattern accompanying mi-kagura chanting in court Shinto ritual. At one point in Fujieda's Kame no Otanashi, an ajime-saho section of mi-kagura was performed with this wagon pattern. In Quodlibet, a fragment from Sundanese tarawangsa—a trance-inducing ritual music—is combined with a bass line reminiscent of Fujieda’s Patterns of Plants. In Fukuoka, I learned that Fujieda himself was deeply involved with Sundanese music: he had written works for Sundanese gamelan and annually invited teachers to instruct the degung group he helped found there. This movement is a homage to that shared passion.

A quotation from Patterns of Plants also provides the motivic basis for the second movement, Nageire—named after the “informal” or “thrown” style of ikebana. In this movement, Fujieda’s motif is combined with a fragment from a piece by Jürg Frey.

After listening to Fujieda’s album Kuravikōdo no shokubutsu monyō (Patterns of Plants for Clavichord), performed by Satoru Sahara, one might be surprised to learn that none of the pieces were written specifically for clavichord but rather for any unspecified keyboard instrument—a practice noticeably unmodern but reminiscent of European baroque keyboard practice. Moreover, the score contains no information about tuning. While such omissions persist in Western art music, they are unusual for Fujieda, known for his work in Just Intonation. When I asked him why, he explained that he simply never had access to a tuner who could retune keyboards for him, and thus focused his Just Intonation work on instruments like the koto, which he could easily retune himself.

In this suite, I have not followed those older practices, but instead written specifically for the clavichord, which is tuned in a particular Just Intonation system I call Kirnberger–Svensson. There is nonetheless a trace of Baroque influence—not only because this tuning is based on Johann Philipp Kirnberger’s models, but also in the organization of the movements into a suite, and in the treatment of tuning as a late-Baroque temperament, modulating through key signatures to explore their contrasting affects within the unequal tuning.

When composing I Sommarluft, I imagined the kind of informal, domestic, solitary, middle-of-the-day setting familiar from gǔqín culture as the music’s ideal context. Could I write a piece meant for no audience, intended solely for the musician’s contemplation? Could I create music that mingles unobtrusively with the ordinariness of everyday life? Could I write music fit for the woman in Arimoto’s Ko kyoku, or the scholar with his gǔqín in those Song dynasty paintings? Could I avoid having the music form a self-contained virtual space for immersion and escape—and instead reach a state where the instrument’s sounds resemble the aroma of burning incense, mingling effortlessly with air and light, and then being carried away by the wind like the petals in Arimoto’s painting?

This aspiration is embodied in the title of the suite and its final movement: I Sommarluft—In Summer Air.