Compositions by Norwegian composers Lasse Thoresen and Cecilie Ore will open the program at 8 p.m., and the Oslo-based a cappella vocal sextet Nordic Voices will perform Thoresen’s and Ore’s works and the Book of Madrigals, by Englishman Gavin Bryars. Ore and Lassen also will be present at 7 p.m. for a panel discussion led by Other Minds co-founder and executive director Charles Amirkhanian. Bryars also will sit on the panel, alongside composers Michael Gordon and Phil Kline, featured in the second half of that evening’s program.
“This international interaction is wonderful,” Ore (pronounced, ‘Oo-ra’) exclaimed in accented English, by phone from her home. “Of course I’m Scandinavian, but I think I am more a citizen of the world because music is limitless.” Thoresen adds, “I know I’m going to learn to appreciate a lot of music I never heard before.”
Of the pair, Thoresen is the more closely influenced by the music of his native land. Amirkhanian has dubbed him “the Norwegian Lou Harrison,” but Thoresen himself attests to “a long-standing involvement with Norwegian folk music,” in which “there are 30 different ways to tune the fiddle, and a lot of refinement in microtonality.”
The 66-year-old Thoresen acknowledges that, a century before him, his countryman Edvard Grieg had been contacted by a violinist, Knut Dahle, eager to have his adaptation of folk styles immortalized in notation. Grieg sent his niece’s husband, Johan Halvorsen, to accomplish the transcription. But the manuscript, as Thoresen points out, omitted quarter-tones and microtones and misinterpreted the rhythm. “So that’s what Grieg had when he made his own [folk-based] pieces . . . all filtered through Western notation, in a conservatory way.”
Ironically, it was a field recording on the American Folkways record label that originally turned Thoresen on to Norwegian folk music in the 1970s, after his graduation from the Norwegian Academy of Music. “Then I started [composing with microtones and other folk elements] in the mid-‘80s.” “When you start to look at scales used in the Middle East, there are several that you find more or less the same in Norway, except that in Norwegian tradition, there is no concept of a scale at all; the music is learned phrase-by-phrase.” - Lasse Thoresen
Adopting the Baha’i faith, of Persian origin, Thoresen made a surprise discovery. “When you start to look at scales used in the Middle East, there are several that you find more or less the same in Norway, except that in Norwegian tradition, there is no concept of a scale at all; the music is learned phrase-by-phrase.” As Thoresen began to integrate these sources in his own composition, he also realized that, “It sounded kind of Medieval. One could imagine that motets by Machaut and Landini could have been tuned in such a way.”
All of this represented a challenge not only to the composer but to classically trained vocalists performing his works. “First of all, you cannot make microtones if you have a strongly vibrating voice. It’s impossible. You have to be able to sing without vibrato, like people who sing Renaissance and Baroque music usually do . . . You find also that the position of the larynx is an important vehicle. In classical singing, that position is fixed, as low as possible. Whereas, if you raise [the position], you get a harder, folk-like sound, more raucous. While singers are still young, I can specify their vocal timbre, vary it like the position of a bow on a stringed instrument.”
Thoresen worked with the Nordic Voices sextet for almost two years, before introducing his music to their performance repertoire. “And I involved a number of other composers, and did a similar thing with the Latvian Radio Choir.” As instructors, he brought in Vietnamese overtone singer Tran Quang Hai, “who has a sort of Mongolian throat-singing take on it,” and a Swiss singer, Christian Zehnder, “who’s a virtuoso at producing overtones.”
For Solbøn (pronounced,‘Soolben’), the Festival’s opening offering next Friday, Thoresen made use of a Norwegian lullaby, reimagined for the six Nordic Voices. “The text is a prayer for light and warmth, to envelop everything we love,” the composer writes in his program notes. “The work describes a process toward light, translated into sound. And the inner light bursts forth from inside the vocal sounds, when the overtones that reside in every singer’s voice emerge.” Following is Himmelske Fader, based on a Pietist hymn in which notes “deviate slightly from the tempered scale.” Both texts are in Norwegian, with English translation provided.
The evening’s third piece, by Ore, will be sung by Nordic Voices in English, and the text, co-written with dramaturg Bibbi Moslet, is true to the odd title, Dead Pope on Trial. “The story tells us about Pope Formosus, who died in 887,” Ore relates. “There were people angry with him [he’d rebelled against church and secular authority], and he was dug up and buried six times.” The exhumed corpse was actually arrayed in papal garments, seated on a throne, and subjected to a trial. “It’s about how religious beliefs can be guided by superstition and hunger for power, and can lead to ridiculous actions,” says Ore.
This is only one of several Ore works dealing with social and cultural issues, including sexual harassment, freedom of speech, and the death penalty. She says that the importance of her messages, as well as her expanding from instrumental to operatic writing over the past decade, have influenced her approach to composition.
“My music has become less atonal, because very dissonant music can very easily make the text impossible to hear,” Ore explains. In Dead Pope, “I can have six-voice canons going on, but in the end I synchronize everything, to be clearly understood.” She praises Nordic Voices as “the composer’s dream, eager for new material and new technique. There’s almost no limit to what they can do.”
The 61-year-old Ore played some folk fiddle when she was younger, “but it doesn’t directly go into my music. I’ve been more influenced by Baroque music. . . I’m working with polyphony a lot.” In her latest opera, “I have, as an underlying musical scene, something from Purcell’s ‘Dido’s Lament’, because it’s about violence against women.”
The tonal trend of her work matches wider social change. “We had a very abstract period in European music for the last 30 years,” Ore observes. “But it’s possible now to be more political, and critical.” It also furthers that, in Norway, “We have official government scholarships and stipends which enable artists to work full-time, at least for certain periods. Together with commissions, it’s possible to survive.”
During their pre-Festival bucolic retreat at Djerassi in Woodside and the two evenings and afternoon of Festival performances, the Norwegians will be networking with fellow composers Michael Gordon, Phil Kline, Nicole Lizée, John Oswald, Oliver Lake, Larry Polansky, Gavin Bryars, and Meredith Monk alongside the scheduled performers. Ore was originally invited to the Festival 20 years ago, but is only just now making her first voyage to San Francisco. “So I’ll stay for three of four days more,” she insists, “just to be able to walk around.”