Symphony
god spoke and the mountain answered
for orchestra (2017)
duration 33 minutes
premiere 23rd March 2018 by the Copenhagen Phil, conducted by Lan Shui, at the Concert Hall of the Royal Danish Academy of Music, Copenhagen
score available from Donemus
duration 33 minutes
premiere 23rd March 2018 by the Copenhagen Phil, conducted by Lan Shui, at the Concert Hall of the Royal Danish Academy of Music, Copenhagen
score available from Donemus
program
The year was 1997. The place was the Pacific Northwest American state of Oregon, surrounded by the southern part of a huge chain of volcanic mountains called The Cascades. Here I was, on a journey with my parents, with the typical teenage dream of writing a big symphony. I asked my mother what she thought the symphony should be called and the answer came without doubt or hesitation - God Spoke and the Mountain Answered. A title that note only brings associations to another era in which nature and religion were fashionable in the artistic world, but which can be seen as a kind of fusion of Richard Strauss's titles Also Sprach Zarathustra and Eine Alpensinfonie. How should one handle such a topic musically?
Unfortunately, my mother died a few years later, long before I got the chance to take up the title's challenge. After the performance of my trombone concerto, written for the Copenhagen Phil in 2012, I grabbed the chance and introduced the idea to the orchestra's artistic director, Uffe Savery; could I write a symphony for the orchestra? The response was enthusiastic and I have been fortunate and honoured that it eventually developed into me becoming the orchestra's composer-in-residence for three years - with the symphony as the last part of the agreement.
But the question about the title was still there. If you take God as the idea of everything, my thoughts simply land on the universe. When I think of the universe, I am hit by what is unimaginably huge, incomprehensibly enormous. At an art exhibition about the sublime at the museum Louisiana, I suddenly knew what to do; I should try to recreate a sensation of the universe's size through some kind of disproportional, overwhelming music. To me there are two kinds of music or sound that I imagine when I look up at the night sky: the enormously violent and the colossally silent. I would try to portray both, so the piece was divided into two movements that together form a dialogue between the universe and the mountain, between the master and the apprentice, the incomprehensible and the fathomable.
Both movements have the same starting point, where the universe first speaks. After a brief introductory 'Bb', the universe comes as a kind of overture for the rest of each movement, in the first compressed into a core of extreme explosive forces, and in the second movement as a hovering musical fog approaching nothingness. After these 'universe overtures' it is then the job of the mountain to gather all of these elements into a more transparent and comprehensible development. The Bb has been chosen as the source of the music because, in 2003, British scientists managed to measure the frequency of the black hole in the Perseus constellation, which turned out to be a 'Bb' (only 57 octaves below the middle C!).
When I was about nineteen years old I had a dream about a piece of orchestral music. It was built around a series of brass chords that went upwards and upwards until it seemed they couldn't go any further, but managed to continue anyway until it finally gave rise to an anti-climax that triggered a fast and aggressive string counterpoint over which an oboe started building a theme. The wildest thing about the dream was that I followed the score along the way - however, a kind of dream-score where everything was possible.
For a composer it is a huge challenge to take an abstract sense of something and shape it into a concrete reality. Therefore, many years past before I felt I had the craftsmanship to take on this challenge. The answer to how to create the illusion of an infinite rise was found in electronic music, where composers have used overlapping glissandi to great effect. Taking my inspiration from this technique, I let the instruments overlap and take over each other's roles, in an ever-tranposing series of upwards-rising chords. After an anti-climax, the melody is born in the oboe before it dramatically unfolds in the strings. The last element of the first movement is the "avalanche", a contrasting world of fast floating strings set against massive, deep brass and percussion.
The middle part of the first movement acts as a kind of development section from the good old sonata form. All elements are turned and twisted and thrown together in one big six-minute crescendo and accelerando. After a moment of peace, the orchestra takes up the chords and the melody and combines them into the whole that has been searched throughout the movement. The mountain has found its answer.
The second movement is a slow one with great contrasts. Here the focus is on floating, dancing motifs that descend from the high registers of the orchestra going up against heavy energetic chords that build from the bottom reaches. Together they grow into progressively more violent climaxes, which with a final push unleashes the symphony's complete, soaring theme that floats in several layers. Groups of deep, relaxed chords drag down the music, both in register and pace, until the sonic landscape finally melts into one: the 'Bb' that has anchored the piece throughout. And so, the dialogue in the symphony reveals itself to have been not only the back-and-forth conversation, but also the up-and-down development that has strived to merge two harmonic worlds.
And it only took twenty years for the teenager's dream to become a reality ...
The year was 1997. The place was the Pacific Northwest American state of Oregon, surrounded by the southern part of a huge chain of volcanic mountains called The Cascades. Here I was, on a journey with my parents, with the typical teenage dream of writing a big symphony. I asked my mother what she thought the symphony should be called and the answer came without doubt or hesitation - God Spoke and the Mountain Answered. A title that note only brings associations to another era in which nature and religion were fashionable in the artistic world, but which can be seen as a kind of fusion of Richard Strauss's titles Also Sprach Zarathustra and Eine Alpensinfonie. How should one handle such a topic musically?
Unfortunately, my mother died a few years later, long before I got the chance to take up the title's challenge. After the performance of my trombone concerto, written for the Copenhagen Phil in 2012, I grabbed the chance and introduced the idea to the orchestra's artistic director, Uffe Savery; could I write a symphony for the orchestra? The response was enthusiastic and I have been fortunate and honoured that it eventually developed into me becoming the orchestra's composer-in-residence for three years - with the symphony as the last part of the agreement.
But the question about the title was still there. If you take God as the idea of everything, my thoughts simply land on the universe. When I think of the universe, I am hit by what is unimaginably huge, incomprehensibly enormous. At an art exhibition about the sublime at the museum Louisiana, I suddenly knew what to do; I should try to recreate a sensation of the universe's size through some kind of disproportional, overwhelming music. To me there are two kinds of music or sound that I imagine when I look up at the night sky: the enormously violent and the colossally silent. I would try to portray both, so the piece was divided into two movements that together form a dialogue between the universe and the mountain, between the master and the apprentice, the incomprehensible and the fathomable.
Both movements have the same starting point, where the universe first speaks. After a brief introductory 'Bb', the universe comes as a kind of overture for the rest of each movement, in the first compressed into a core of extreme explosive forces, and in the second movement as a hovering musical fog approaching nothingness. After these 'universe overtures' it is then the job of the mountain to gather all of these elements into a more transparent and comprehensible development. The Bb has been chosen as the source of the music because, in 2003, British scientists managed to measure the frequency of the black hole in the Perseus constellation, which turned out to be a 'Bb' (only 57 octaves below the middle C!).
When I was about nineteen years old I had a dream about a piece of orchestral music. It was built around a series of brass chords that went upwards and upwards until it seemed they couldn't go any further, but managed to continue anyway until it finally gave rise to an anti-climax that triggered a fast and aggressive string counterpoint over which an oboe started building a theme. The wildest thing about the dream was that I followed the score along the way - however, a kind of dream-score where everything was possible.
For a composer it is a huge challenge to take an abstract sense of something and shape it into a concrete reality. Therefore, many years past before I felt I had the craftsmanship to take on this challenge. The answer to how to create the illusion of an infinite rise was found in electronic music, where composers have used overlapping glissandi to great effect. Taking my inspiration from this technique, I let the instruments overlap and take over each other's roles, in an ever-tranposing series of upwards-rising chords. After an anti-climax, the melody is born in the oboe before it dramatically unfolds in the strings. The last element of the first movement is the "avalanche", a contrasting world of fast floating strings set against massive, deep brass and percussion.
The middle part of the first movement acts as a kind of development section from the good old sonata form. All elements are turned and twisted and thrown together in one big six-minute crescendo and accelerando. After a moment of peace, the orchestra takes up the chords and the melody and combines them into the whole that has been searched throughout the movement. The mountain has found its answer.
The second movement is a slow one with great contrasts. Here the focus is on floating, dancing motifs that descend from the high registers of the orchestra going up against heavy energetic chords that build from the bottom reaches. Together they grow into progressively more violent climaxes, which with a final push unleashes the symphony's complete, soaring theme that floats in several layers. Groups of deep, relaxed chords drag down the music, both in register and pace, until the sonic landscape finally melts into one: the 'Bb' that has anchored the piece throughout. And so, the dialogue in the symphony reveals itself to have been not only the back-and-forth conversation, but also the up-and-down development that has strived to merge two harmonic worlds.
And it only took twenty years for the teenager's dream to become a reality ...