Music from Northern Europe – Scandinavia, Finland and the Baltics
Author: Blogger in Residence, Rory Johnston
I’ve spent the last two weeks getting back into the groove of work and learning new repertoire, as well as thinking ahead and planning for new projects. Someone I know recently put out a message on social media asking for peoples’ ‘desert island discs’ with regards to choral music by Scandinavian or Baltic composers and it got me remembering lots of great music that I had not heard in a while, and I thought I’d use this post to talk about a few of them.
Now, this question gives a large collection of countries from which to find composers from: from the Scandinavian side we have Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, but lets include Finland aswell and label them Nordic instead; and from the Baltic side we have Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. So many places all with many great composers from which to draw compositions, but I’m going to just give you a few specifics now, with perhaps a few names to go and research after that.
Mäntyjärvi – Canticum calamitatis maritimae
Working as both a translator and composer, Jaakko Mäntyjärvi is a Finnish composer who likes to label himself as an eclectic traditionalist, with his music taking influence and resources from lots of different styles and genres whilst reaching for modern, ‘avant-garde’ tools only sparingly. This piece, Canticum calamitatis maritimae (translating as ‘The maritime disaster song), shows this very clearly with a mix of modern harmony and more traditional progressions, the mixture of a choral sound and a folk one, and the use of extra techniques like the whispers in the opening.
The composer himself describes the piece and its origin:
"This work is dedicated to the memory of those who lost their lives in the shipwreck of the Estonia on September 28, 1994. Although fragments of the Requiem text are quoted, the work is not really intended for liturgical use, but rather as a meditation involving three distinct elements: firstly, the individual aspect - the ‘folk song’ soprano solo that begins and ends the work (and that can, but does not have to be, interpreted as the keening or lament of a sailor’s widow); secondly, the objective aspect - the ‘precentor’ intoning the bare facts of the event in newsreader style; and thirdly, the collective aspect - the extensive setting of the psalm text Qui descendunt navibus mare in navibus (‘They that go down to the sea in ships’).”
For me the most spectacular bit is the harsh justaposition of the choral and folk singer sound at the climax of the piece (b.51). The difference in tone quality gives the music a dramatic sense of depth and brings it alive in a really visceral way.
Pärt – Da pacem Domine
Arvo Pärt is, and has been for the last 8 years, the most performed living composer and I don’t see that changing for a while. The Estonian composer’s music is accessible, beautiful, and unique in a way that it is very difficult for people to mimic his sound without sounding like they have completely ripped him off – for those reasons I don’t see his throne being stolen away from him.
Pärt has written a lot of music over his life, and I’ve talked about his compositional technique in tintinnabuli before which most – if not all – of his compositions use. The piece that I’ve chosen is his Da pacem Domine because it uses the tintinnabulation effect in a way that I don’t see him use it very frequently (correct me if I’m wrong Pärt-scholars). Normally the voices individually utilise this technique of either being the tintinnabular voice, where a line will arpeggiate around a broken chord, or being the step-wise voice, where a line will rise or fall in diatonic intervals. But in this piece he seems, especially at the beginning, to be mixing the two parts together, so you are not sure which part is going to arpeggiate and which is going to step up or down.
Nystedt – Immortal Bach
I think I’ve mentioned this piece before, but I just think it’s so special it deserves to be listened to lots and lots and lots (and lots).
Knut Nystedt, who died in 2014 at the ripe old age of 99, was a Norwegian composer of both choral and orchestral music. Most of his influences came from early music, like Palestrina and Gregorian Chant, but he also at one point studied with Aaron Copeland.
This piece is essentially an arrangement of a Bach chorale-like piece, ‘Komm, süßer Tod’, in which Nystedt splits the choir into five different groups. After the whole ensemble sings the piece together through once, they then start again with each of the five groups singing the material at a different speed, between 4, 6, 8, 10 or 12 seconds per crotchet. This leads to an artificially created resonance and reverb that pulls apart the harmonic relationships of the piece and lays them bare for the listener to hear. As the piece progresses you are then able to appreciate how each part pushes and pulls against each other and it makes the resolution at the end of each phrase all the more satisfying.
That was just a few pieces to have a listen to and read along with, but here are some more composers to have a listen to:
Kaija Saariaho
Veljo Tormis
Pēteris Vasks
Per Nørgård
Einojuhani Rautavaara
Ēriks Ešenvalds
Written by Rory Johnston