Performers from left: Andreas Hellesøy, Sebastian Lindland, Åsmund Soldal, Jonas Evenstad (artistic leader), Martin Kvalø, Nora Sjøgren
25. July 2023 – Private discussion with second-gen Stockhausen-performer Renee Jonker in den Haag
Discussion turned mainly around different abstract layers of the score for ‘Zyklus’. Four ground layers was established: 1. The underlining musical structures provided by the composer, 2. The interpretative connections extracted by the performer, 3. The actual performative play and 4. The subjective experience of the performance.
Firsthand experience from Renee helped clarify Stockhausens personal orientations and philosophical perspective between and on the layers. A fuller understanding of my play and interpretation in relation to Stockhausens ideas was made.
Performance ULTIMA 2023 Full Audio
Words on performance: “This piece is notated in a way that challenges traditional forms of notation. The notation appears like highly detailed blueprints for the progression of a sound’s quantity and quality over time. These blueprints are actually so incredibly precisely written that we can easily get an overview of what happens during each millisecond of the music. This gives a kind of universality, which in turn allows us to incorporate broad, holistic ideas into the interpretation. In other words, we can suggest another, separate world that this music really belongs to—a world where the music is exact and free from classical paradigms. Still, the notation is beautiful!! It’s aesthetic, and in my opinion, it stands on its own as a complete work of art. What’s also really, really cool and fun is that we can actually use these blueprints/artworks to construct a piece of music.
Where the structure of the music is detailed and exact, the sonic content (the actual sound) is entirely abstract in linguistic terms. Here, it becomes more obvious that we are still situated in the human world. What is presented is essentially a large selection of very straightforward sounds, each one described with a single word. The catch is that we are to produce all of these sounds using the one instrument positioned behind me.
This is like distilled interpretation.
What are we hearing? Are we hearing what we want to hear? Are we hearing what we want to hear because we want to hear it? Do we want to hear what we hear because it is what we hear? Are we hearing what we’re hearing?
In other words, a large chunk of what this music consists of is left to the performers’ phenomenological experience.
There are two types sitting over there! (POINT) They carry out a particularly important part of the piece. Using technological tools, they filter different frequency ranges and volumes in and out through the speakers. The sound they’re filtering has been captured and processed by Sebastian Lindland and Nora Sjøgren using microphones and resonance boxes—and that sound is mostly produced by me and Åsmund Soldal.
So the distance from the concrete playing to the sounding result is actually quite long. And these layers remove the kind of control we often want to have in a performance situation, preserving the experimental nature of the piece.
Personally, I consider you in the audience pretty lucky—you get to experience more of what the final music actually sounds like than I ever have.”
– Jonas Evenstad
Fotograf: Elias Osland
JonasEvenstad 