andPlay’s Translucent Harmonies allows listeners to deeply immerse themselves in sound, silence, and resonance. This hour-long program includes Vid stenmuren blir tanken blomma by Kristofer Svensson (Sweden) and Prisma Interius VIII by Catherine Lamb (USA), both composed in Just Intonation. The rare experience to hear a full program in Just Intonation invites one to listen in a very detailed way to the “sensation of tone.” This shifts the concept of intonation, which is often unnoticed by the listener, to the foreground, where it becomes a focal point to explore the most simple, yet nuanced, relationships in sound.
Though the evening is one curated experience, the two pieces complement each other in their form. Lamb, in her chant-like work, uses droned pitches to slowly build the relationships between notes and intervals, transforming them into longer phrases. Alternatively, Svensson creates their work out of silence, with brief melodic fragments appearing against a backdrop of silence and noise. Together, they pause time -- guiding the audience through an alternate reality where there is ample opportunity to sit and listen.
ABOUT THE COMPOSERS
Catherine Lamb (b. 1982, Olympia, Wa, U.S.), is a composer exploring the interaction of elemental tonal material and the variations in presence between shades and beings in a room. She has been studying and composing music since a young age. In 2003 she turned away from the conservatory in an attempt to understand the structures and intonations within Hindustani Classical Music, later finding Mani Kaul in 2006 who was directly connected to Zia Mohiuddin Dagar and whose philosophical approach to sound became important to her. She studied (experimental) composition at the California Institute of the Arts (2004-2006) under James Tenney and Michael Pisaro, who were both integral influences. It was there also that she began her work into the area of Just Intonation, which became a clear way to investigate the interaction of tones and ever-fluctuating shades, where these interactions in and of them-selves became structural elements in her work. Since then she has written various ensemble pieces (at times with liminal electronic portions) and continues to go further into elemental territories, through various kinds of research, collaboration, and practice (herself as a violist). She received her MFA from the Milton Avery School of Fine Arts at Bard College in 2012 and is currently residing in Berlin, Germany.
Kristofer Svensson is a Swedish composer whose music is characterized by simple moments of harmonic sounds appearing and disappearing in a dynamic correspondence with emptiness. Tuning harmony in Just Intonation, a characteristic feature of all their music, and often letting tones emerge from silence through noise, draws attention to music’s raw, transparent, materials — the physicality of sound and magic of pitch. Their use of Just Intonation is connected to an interest in the antique, which is revealed in their many compositions making use of 'Kirnberger-Svensson' - the tuning that they designed for performances of their music. It is inspired by an early temperament by Johann Philipp Kirnberger (d. 1783). The 'antique' is, however, not only limited to European traditions, and Svensson has spent extensive time studying Asian traditional musics such as the shakuhachi with Gunnar Jinmei Linder in Stockholm, the gǔqín with Yung-Hak Chi in Hong Kong, and Sundanese karawitan with Ade Suparman in West Java. Their music has been performed by soloists and groups such as Contemporaneous, ensemble mise-en, Quatuor Bozzini, Mats Persson & Kristine Scholz, Musica Vitae, Miyama McQueen-Tokita, the Swedish Wind Ensemble, N/A ensemble, Arcus Collective and the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble at festivals such as o/modernt (SE, 2013), Kalv (SE, 2015), Sound of Stockholm (SE, 2016), KROCH fest (SE, 2018), Ung Nordisk Musik (IS, 2017 and SE, 2019), and Svensk Musikvår (SE, 2019). He studied composition with Mamoru Fujieda in Fukuoka, Japan.