Magnus Granberg & Skogen
Ist gefallen in den Schnee
+ Despairs Had Governed Me Too Long

Disc One:
'Ist gefallen in den Schnee'   (2010)                        61:10

Disc Two:
'Despairs Had Governed Me Too Long'    (2012)   56:45

Magnus Granberg, piano, clarinet
Erik Carlsson, percussion
Angharad Davies, violin
John Eriksson, vibraphone, marimba, crotales
Ko Ishikawa, sho  (disc two)
Anna Lindal, violin
Toshimaru Nakamura, no-input mixing board
Henrik Olsson, bowls, glasses
Leo Svensson Sander, cello
Petter Wastberg, contact microphones, objects

Interview with Magnus Granberg

on release of ‘Ist gefallen in den Schnee’ (2010)

First of all where do the ideas for the piece come from?  I know that Schubert was important in some way, but don’t know how. Could you explain this?

The way the piece relates to Schubert is that the rhythmic material as well some other temporal proportions are derived from two different songs from Schubert's well known (well, that's an obvious understatement!) song cycle Die Winterreise; the title of the piece, Ist gefallen in den Schnee, is a text fragment derived from one of these songs. The tonal material, on the other hand, is derived from a jazz song, which one I have actually forgotten. The rhythmic as well as the tonal material is then transformed by means of different methods, in some cases rather mildly, in other cases rather heavily.

So, why did I choose to do like this when writing the piece? For a couple of different reasons, I think. For me it's a very concrete way of relating to and at the same time transcending musics that have, in one way or the other, been of a certain importance to me. Coming more or less from a working class background as I do, choosing Schubert is a way to approach a music that I haven't really have had access to (but which I somehow have come to like), without giving in to it fully. Jazz, on the other hand, is more or less what I grew up listening to, so partially basing the piece on a jazz song is a simple way to relate to that heritage without reproducing the actual music. It's obviously also a (perhaps both naïve and pretentious) way of trying try to reconcile musics with different social connotations, and a way to reconcile oneself with history and the contemporary world. 

That’s interesting because listening to it without knowing this, I don’t think of either Schubert or jazz.  The music it reminds me of most is Feldman – though obviously as a kind of improvised or semi-improvised re-working of Feldman’s sound.  Can you explain to what extent the piece was composed or improvised, and whether Feldman is in there at all?

Yes, it's more or less impossible to identify the source material, the Schubert songs and the jazz music are very much to be found in the subtexts, but in a very concrete way, though. The musics and ideas of the composers associated with the so called New York School have, among many other things, also been very influential and dear to me. The early music of  Morton Feldman was probably the first modern classical music I could thoroughly relate to when I first heard it in my late teens; it seemed informal and at the same time very much open to the outside world, even more so than Cage's music, which I of course still love as well!

Regarding the piece on the record, it is an attempt to thoroughly integrate composition and improvisation. In my role as a composer I provide different pools of material (pitches, rhythms, timbres, melodic fragments, chords etc), suggestions regarding how to treat the material and a temporal structure which regulates which pool of material should be used when. Perhaps one could say that I provide a potential which could be realized in innumerable ways, but the actual realizations are always the result of what decisions the musicians make throughout the piece; formal differentiation occurs spontaneously as a result of an improvisational process.

Duration is another aspect of the piece that reminded me of Feldman. It’s unusual to have a single movement piece, whether composed or improvised, that lasts over an hour.  And for me there’s a similar sense as in Feldman of hearing patterns slowly unfold rather than having dramatic changes or developments across the piece.  Is duration a factor that you were consciously addressing?

Well, duration is quite an important factor in our music in that it allows certain things to happen or potentials to be realised that probably wouldn't occur within a shorter time span. The totality of all different factors constituting the music at the particular time when playing and/or listening is to me mainly a sense of spatiality, though: everything which takes place or even that could take place but actually does not during that particular time are all part of that experience. When I first formed Skogen (which is Swedish and translates as “The Forest” or The Woods”) I also had a feeling and an idea that the music should be like an environment, perhaps a forest in which inhabitants with different characteristics could move freely in accordance with the environment and their own and each other's properties and abilities; the piece, the time and the space could be the forest and the musicians its inhabitants.

Yes, I was going to ask what Skogen meant.  The ‘environment’ of the group on this occasion involves several Swedish musicians, but also Toshi Nakamura and Angharad Davies.  How did this come about – and is the Swedish core of the group consistent, or do different musicians come and go within that as well?

I had known and admired Toshi's work since the beginning of the 2000s, and Erik and Henrik (the two percussionists in Skogen) had also made a tour of Sweden in 2008 together with Toshi and Tetuzi Akiyama, so there was already some sort of connection there. The first time I heard Angharad must have been on the album Endspace together with Tisha Mukarji, which was released on your label. I had also heard some marvellous solo violin pieces that thoroughly convinced me that Angharad's playing would fit very well with the ensemble, so I simply asked her to join us. The core of the ensemble has so far consisted of five Swedish musicians, but on this occasion was enlarged with the addition of another two wonderful Swedish musicians -  violinist Anna Lindal and vibraphone player John Eriksson – and will continue as an ensemble of nine in the future.

I listened to the disc again today, and it struck me that although the dominant feel of the piece is one of  beauty, at times different players – perhaps especially Toshi Nakamura and Petter Wästberg – are gently pushing against that and playing a subversive role.  That tension between an almost static beauty, and an energy that pushes the music along really works for me.  As the composer, do you see it like this at all?  

I think that's a correct observation, the roles of Petter and Toshi are very free indeed. They were provided with some suggestions and some rather vague materials that they could choose to relate to if they wanted to, but their primary function is one of free improvisation. Apart from that, all players are provided with more or less specified materials and suggestions on how to treat them and are also encouraged to choose how much they would like to adhere to them and how and when to deviate from them. The players all make different choices at different times, all in accordance with their personal inclinations as well as how the music is shaped through the dynamics of group improvisation. I myself, for example, mostly tend to limit the elements of improvisation to what material is played when, how many times the materials are repeated, how notes are accentuated, minor changes in tempo, slight fragmentations and permutations of the materials et cetera. Other players obviously and happily make other choices, which makes the music come alive in ways I wouldn't have been able to come up with myself. To take part in how something rather well known is transcended and transformed into something previously unknown is a blissful and rewarding experience quite central to how and why I choose to make music.

My feeling is that improvising in large groups doesn’t generally work very well, and I usually much prefer small groups.  Now Ist gefallen in den Schnee is largely composed and so avoids the messiness that large group improvisation often involves, but – as you seem to be expanding the Skogen group - I’m interested to know if you generally prefer working with larger ensembles?  Or do you work in small group projects as well?

Well, Skogen has up until recently mainly been working as a quintet, but I myself have in the last few years felt an increasing inclination for conceiving and taking part in a musical environment made up of a larger number of independent and interdependent voices. I would very much try to develop these things further, but recently I have also been writing some music for somewhat smaller ensembles in which I will be playing the clarinet. In general, considerations regarding the size of the ensembles in improvised and other non-institutionalised forms of contemporary music are to a large extent also a question of funding, or perhaps rather a lack of funding: it is, quite simply, quite difficult to gather many people in the same place at the same time (let alone go on tour with them!) when there is no economic foundation which allows you to. The working conditions are, generally speaking, obviously very different from, say, operas or symphony orchestras...

Reviews

“Ist gefallen in den Schnee, lasting sixty-one minutes, consists entirely of a November 2010 recording of the title composition by Magnus Granberg. For the recording Granberg's group Skogen—in which he plays piano—is expanded to a nonet including two non-Swedish guest musicians, Angarad Davies on violin and Toshimaru Nakamura on his instrument of choice, the no-input mixing board. Strings, vibraphone, percussion, bowls and glasses plus electronics complete the group's line-up, giving it a soundscape that extends way beyond that of a chamber group.

Opening with delicate, carefully-spaced piano notes, the composition initially sounds most reminiscent of Morton Feldman. Remarkably, Granberg himself says its rhythmic material and other temporal proportions are derived from two different songs from Schubert's song cycle Die Winterreise (the album title is definitely a line from one of its songs, "Wasserflut"). Its tonal material, however, is derived from a jazz song that he has forgotten. If the composer had not dropped such clues, those sources would not be at all apparent from the music itself.

The piece subtly combines composition and improvisation. Granberg comments, "Perhaps one could say that I provide a potential which could be realized in innumerable ways, but the actual realizations are always the result of what decisions the musicians make throughout the piece; formal differentiation occurs spontaneously as a result of an improvisational process."

With any nine-member ensemble that includes improvisation, there will always be the risk that the players will get in each other's way or that the music degenerates into a series of individual contributions leading to cacophony overall. Granberg's composition deftly manages to sidestep these potential problems, avoiding any feeling of clutter or messiness, while achieving a beautiful sense of space, openness and tranquility. The composer's own piano playing is central to that—his economical contributions set an example to the other players and act as the backbone of the piece.

The ringing sounds of Henrik Olsson's bowls and glasses plus the electronic tones from Nakamura and Petter Wästberg contrast effectively with the ensemble's conventional instruments while being entirely consistent with the mood of the piece and the sound of the rest of the group. Across its duration, Ist gefallen in den Schnee creates its own rules and logic, resulting in a composition that demands to be heard again and again. Sublime.”
John Eyles, All About Jazz

“Rarely has a title been as precise as for this album, capturing a feeling in mid-phrase "has fallen in the snow", offering possibly one of the most delightful and lightest musical dishes you may have consumed ever.  

Magnus Granberg takes the lead on piano, using sparse notes as the reference for the other musicians who intervene with the beauty and transparance of single snow flakes, single-toned, well-paced and creating an atmosphere of perfect tranquility and peace.

The album contains one single track, lasting just over an hour, and despite its minimalism is not boring for one second. On a superficial level you might say that nothing much happens, but quite the contrary is true, nothing is ever the same, as the partly composed piece evolves with subtle and sometimes unexpected sounds. As with other bands using the same approach, such as "Dans Les Arbres", "Silencers" or "Mural", the musicians' utter instrumental control and restraint are astonishing, resulting in this wonderful coherence that is the result of high level common improvisation, made interesting because of the real intensity of the created soundscapes.

Again, as with lots of new music in the past decades, Scandinavian musicians offer us new aural experiences, and indeed very welcoming ones. Highly recommended!”
Stef, Free Jazz

“Ist gefallen in den Schnee is a single, hour long composition scored by Magnus Granberg and performed by the group Skogen, which on this occasion consisted of nine musicians, seven of them Swedish and two of them (Toshimau Nakaumra playing no-input mixer and Angharad Davies playing violin) guest musicians visiting the country. The Swedish line up were, Anna Lindal, (violin) Leo Svensson Sander, (cello) John Eriksson, (vibraphone and crotales) Erik Carlsson, (selected percussion) Henrik Olsson, (bowls and glasses) Petter Wastberg (objects, contact mics and mixing board) and Granberg himself playing piano. In an in-depth interview about the composition at the AT website, Granberg states that the score uses two points of source material; a couple of Schubert’s songs, which he has somehow used to drive the rhythmic sections of the composition, and a jazz melody, from which he has derived the tonal parts. Exactly how he has done this is far from clear, and before I had read the interview I was in firm agreement with the AT label owner Simon Reynell’s viewpoint that the music seems to be a kind of collision between the music of Morton Feldman and an intervening improvised sense of disruption.

The music is extremely lovely to listen to, a really nice balance between semi-classical instrumentation and the abstraction of raw electronics. Ist gefallen in den Schnee (the title apparently comes from a line in a Schubert song and might translate to Is fallen in the snow) opens with a slow, clockwork like structure of chiming percussion and plucked strings mixed with twittering electronics from (I think) Nakamura. Immediately I think of Feldman, and when the violin strings join the chains of simple, slowly picked out piano the resemblance is even more striking, but all along the chamber feel of the music is disrupted slightly by the electronics, which are apparently much more loosely scored for than the other parts, so allowing the improvisatory qualities of these musicians to interact with an otherwise slowly turning, lethargic but steady rhythmic pulse. It really does feel like a late Feldman work with electronic accompaniment, and that’s not a bad thing at all in my opinion.

As the piece slowly develops it becomes more dense, with less room for silence and individual sounds less easy to pick out and focus upon, but the sense of precise timing very apparent and the slow pace maintained immaculately throughout, even when the thickness of the varying sounds together could prosily have lead to an excited quickening of the pace. Several of the musicians’ inputs are familiar to me; Carlsson’s particular use of circular percussive chimes, the lightness of Angharad Davies’ violin stroke, the filigree scribbles of Toshi Nakamura behind a mixing board, but this CD isn’t about individual voices but rather a carefully structured work for a nine piece group that maintain a sense of control throughout, even with some of their input entirely improvised. There are some gloriously beautiful moments. At nine minutes in when the piano mixes its way through some glowing cyclical percussion is one such moment to savour, but they actually come thick, if not fast. While first listening to this music a couple of weeks back I found myself asking myself why the two electronics musicians were here on this CD, when their role seems only ever to be about disrupting what might otherwise be a very typically New York School piece of composition. I didn’t think this way for too long though, as I soon realised that the real intrigue in this music comes from the way two musical worlds seem to collide, the almost regimentally arranged acoustic instruments and the free flowing electronics. While the feedback and fizzing remain very slightly in the background throughout and never try and push to the acoustic sounds out of the way their presence here is a telling one, reminding us that we aren’t listening to something tightly dictated but an experiment in such a collision of approaches and outcomes. The end result of all of this is a quite enchanting, often intrinsically fascinating hour of music that questions itself as much as it challenges the individual taste of its listenership. Lovely stuff, quite beautiful but open to examining exactly that notion about itself.“     
Richard Pinnell, The Watchful Ear