- Finally going to finish a guitar piece commissioned by Thomas Kjekstad.

- The work with the string quartet is comming to an end, and will be performed next year by the Arditti quartet

- Saxophone concerto sort of, to be performed by Oslo Sinfonietta next year if everything comes together. The idea for this project was conceived about five years ago, so it’s about time I get it out of my mind.

- Piece for solo voice. I’ve been wanting to write something for Silje Aker Johnson for a long time. She’s just a brilliant singer, and finally I’ve cleared some time in my calendar to do it.

- Project with the Copenhagen Art Ensemble, was supposed to happen in 2009, but as you probably know, the three Ts: things take time.

The piece I was supposed to work on this spring, a large piece for orchestra for the Oslo Philharmonic, is probably beeing pushed one year into the future. Haven’t decided if it’s a good or a bad thing.

Not for the concert, which was great, but for the incredibly incompetent recording the NRK technicians managed to make.

It was spectacularly, not to say astoundingly bad.

On my piece there was additional noise problems, I suppose due to the extensive use of electronics. There was no way to hear the ensemble through the sea of noise, crackle and general misery.  I feel the recording does not represent the piece at all.

I’m not surprised that one of the composers denied NRK to broadcast his piece, except for a couple of 15 second snippets he approved.

In retrospect I regret not doing the same thing.
//

A couple of days ago ensemble neoN performed my piece Against Method at the Ultima festival. The title is taken from a book by the same name written by Paul Feyerabend. In this book Feyerabend is dealing with the philosophy of science and the whys/why-nots and hows/how-nots to go about the development of knowledge. He’s frequently been dubbed the “anything goes” philosopher, but from what I understand he is simply trying to make the point that there might be different and even conflicting, still equally valid , paths that one might follow in the quest for knowledge, as pompous as it may sound.

I’m not going to defend or propagate his views; I don’t even know for sure I like them (especially when his arguments are used as religious apologies). What I DO know is that when I start writing music, even the strictest plan and rules fail. I usually start out with a clear idea of what to make. Then at some point in the process of executing it, the importance of keeping the ideas separate and clean evaporate, and I end up choosing several, often conflicting, solutions to the same musical idea.

In the piece Against Method I chose to let this aspect of the process be the center of the piece, and to let these conflicting esthetical, methodical and formal approcahes exist side by side.

There are several ways to convey a musical idea from composer to musician to audience. A musical score for example, is an information transmitter.

Think of a line from zero information to absolute maximum information. Every musical score could be placed somewhere on this line.

Some scores contain enough info; It is easy to decode. The amount of information leaves little doubt on how the performer should deal with it. When in doubt, the score often lends itself on convention and collective knowledge or it points outside itself so that it is possible to find the necessary info to make it happen.

Other scores have so much info that much of it might be overlooked to make a performance happen.  The amount even might prevent performances because it is too complicated to decode the instructions. Brian Ferneyhough and Karlheinz Stockhausen might have made a couple of these. (though I see that the coice of examples might be a moot point)

Again, other scores have so little information that it is impossible to know what was the intention of whoever wrote it. An example of this kind of score is a sketch written on a napkin late at night, just to remind someone of something important, possibly impossible for anyone but the person writing it to decode. Another example of this is the leftovers from the fire at Geirr Tveitts home, where almost all his scores were completely destroyed in the fire; the few remaining sheets of music were almost impossible to read.

In most of my pieces between 2000-2007 I’ve been closer to the maximum info limit than the zero info limit. Since 2007 I’ve gradually changed this. It’s been a combination of changing interest, as well as esthetical reasons, and probably some other stuff as well; stuff that Freud would be happy to dig into. In any case, it has changed. Before doing Against Method, I had thought about this for some time, while working on a piece for the Arditti string quartet, and decided that in this piece I wanted to reach my all time low of information output, if information at all, for the musicians, while still being able to say I made a piece.

The conductor didn’t get a proper score (in the end he made one himself), he didn’t even get all the music required to conduct. The musicians didn’t get proper parts (not until very very extremely late in the rehearsals at least), the soloist didn’t know what to sing before entering stage, and when musicians asked I tried to say as little as possible, and if I had to, I often gave contradictory answers at different times to different people.

I was afraid it would collapse. And I certainly think it was about to at one point. But in the end the concert happened and most of the 25 minute piece sounded pretty close to my intentions, and not too far away from pieces where I’ve given very precise, accurate and useful information in good time before the concert.

Now looking back, I even think I could have stretched it very much further when it comes to limiting the information output. On the other hand, I don’t think I ever will try, unless I one day wake up and want to loose friends and alienate people.

The piece wasn’t perfect, and I never expected it to be. As a whole I’m very torn about the resulting 25 min stretch of sound. But some of the in-between moments are amongst the best I’ve ever made, and I have no choice but to say:

J.Karlstrøm – 0

P. Feyerabend – 1

//

A couple of years ago I did an installation together with artist Lisa Jørgensen, and “Architecture in Europe” is a development of some of the material from this installation, and some material from an etude for clarinet that I wrote for my good friend Gunhild Molund Pedersen a year back. When writing the etude I read an interview with someone, I think it was Elvis Costello
but I’m not quite sure. Anyway, he said something like “writing about music is like dancing about architecture!” a view I find not only anti intellectual, but also, well, just dead wrong. So, I decided to make something that would include all three: architecture, dance and writing about music. The dancer somehow got lost on the way, but I tried to keep the music as danceable and beat-based as the material would let me, and instead make the buildings dance.

Behind the clarinetist there is a huge screen with a panoramic picture of oslo. As you can see from the picture above  it is a bit manipulated with buildings from all across Europe. As the piece progresses the architectural landscape changes according the sound input from the clarinet. New buildings appear, and a few disappear, some grow and some shrink. The music is built up from small bits and loops, just like the animated architecture in the picture is. The perspective on some of the buildings is very distorted, a parallell to the very processed and distorted sounds from the clarinet. And the list of (metaphorical) links could go on forever, or maybe not, but at least for a very long time! The point being, that there are a million billion potential lingual and aesthetical links between language, music, and any other phenomenon we may percieve as humans, that enable us to create and exchange ideas, (and enabled me to make this piece) and thereby making statements such as the one mentioned at the beginning nonsensical, and maybe even pretentious; “My art is so deep that it cannot be explained with words.”

The complete program for the concert is:

Ignas Krunglevicius – “Knight” (for bass clarinet, cello and video)

Julian Skar – “Essay om eksludering” (for typewriter, percussion and electronics)

Jørgen Karlstrøm – “Arkitektur i Europa” (for clarinet, electronics and video)

Jan Martin Smørdal -  ”Play me – next episode”. (for percussion, voice and video)

Julian Skar – “Schrieb” (for blackboard, electronics and video)

Ignas Krunglevicius – “Interrogation” (for saxophone, electronics and video)

There will also be a exhibition of the SIMPEL/NY/NORSK/MUSIKK/MASKIN installation I did together with Therese Birkelund, and this time it’s going to work!

Don’t miss it!

I’ve spoken to quite a few people who before the award saw Risto as the underdog nominee, compared to the more extrovert (and famous) Maja Ratkje, and the (in the past 2-3 years) critically acclaimed Ole Henrik Moe whose work with the Arditti quartet has won him international recognition.

I had hoped that Risto would win, but of course I couldn’t be sure. In retrospect it seems obvious. While they are all three composers with a very personal and distinctive voice, only Risto had made a record that I really find important, although they are all good. It’s equal parts art statement, music, idea, and good craftmanship. No matter if you like the resulting sound or not, it would be hard to disregard the critical potential immanent in this release. As in many important discoursive works dicotomies are inherent; the distance between the obvious messiness of the sound comming out of the speakers, and the strikingly tidy underlaying concept, complex – simple; the excessive length of the project, and the minute internal form-parts of the work; the trashy idea, and the incredibly cultivated and intelligent treatment of it. All in all a release worth a bit of your valuable time, and then some. 

So, congratulations Risto! You rock, (or something to that effect)

(Risto was not at the show, so me and Knut Olaf Sunde had to pick it up for him. )

First, I came to realize that the interaction between human and machine is a very delicate one. In our litte piece for example, we had the computerscreen presenting the audience with only one option: to press the ENTER key. Still, I noticed that about 90% of the people trying the installation pressed the spacebar, some of them immediately as they entered the little box we had set up, and some of them again even before looking at the screen for instructions. Some of the people who pressed the spacebar never got to the next step, trying the installation, because they left when nothing happened..(I even saw someone I would call something of a norwegian programming and electronic art guru (whos name I’ll keep a secret) entering, looking at the screen, putting one ear to the headphones, and then leave before even touching the keyboard.)

Another experience I had with the unwillingnes to follow simple instructions was during a preview of an installation (which still has no tiltle, hence the reference Still, no title ), I did together with artist Lisa Jørgensen. In this installation you got a panoramic projected view of Oslo. In front of the screen we had placed a snare drum, a cymbal and a piano. With the help of these instruments you could rearrange and rebuild the architecture of the city.

At the preview a man came in and started banging the drums, with his back to the gigantic projected video (about 12×4 meters big), so he didn’t notice how the view of the city was changed by his banging. He went on for about 35 minutes and then left. I think we were all releaved when he left and we finally could get some silence. But then suddenly he jumped back into the room, carrying a motorized leafblower (!!) and started to blow into the microphones with it, still with his back to the screen. He went on for about 10 minutes, but then suddenly discovered that what he was doing was affecting the images on the screen. He stopped, stared at it in silence for about 2 minutes, and left. I think many would like to do what he did..just go ahead and beat the crap out those drums.

I’m not blaming anyone. I suppose I’d do the same things. I’m just concluding that sometimes the response you get from people is not what you’d expect. I have myself left installations because I thought they didn’t work, or they didn’t give the response I had imagined when approaching them. I guess in general as an artist you have about  two seconds to get someones attention, and then the next two seconds to convince them that they should spend the next ten minutes on your work and not the piece next to yours at the gallery. The thing is that in ordinary human to human interaction we can respond and correct the course of irrational, sudden and unexpected behavior, something our machine  can’t, or at least would have to be heavily programmed to do. Maybe that is the next necessary step in interactive art.

Second, even the simplest things can go wrong. And they do. Quite frequently. The patch I made to control the sound (in MAX/msp) is probably the most complex part of the installation. It ran smoothly all day long, whithout so much as a hickup. It was rock solid. A simple thing like making the projector cable stick to the videocard, was just one of the many unfunny things I had to worry about. Conclusion: It is important to make things solid. Interactive art can’t be fragile. It should be as solid as an anvil, and even heavier to move.

(Last minute hack)

Third: Installations with human-machine interactivity in common all have challenges when it comes to form. Many people don’t care about interacting with machines, I know I don’t. Most of all we want to interact with people. And most people certainly don’t want a machine to dictate how they are supposed to interact with it. To make electronic installations like this work, it is necessary to get past the technological part of it, and reach the aesthetical and human part of it. The interfaces need to be adaptable, and yet self explaining. Only then will we be able to communicate something other than the excitement of making fairly complex technology do things humans in many cases do better.

(and then praying to the apple god to make it work)