Reykjavík Grapevine - 21.06.2019, Síða 20

At first, there’s a loud hissing, like a
hard wind whipping up sand from
a barren plain. It’s joined by a high,
persistent screech wrung, perhaps,
from a violin at full stretch. Steadily
and purposefully, other elements start
to appear in this suggested space; some
woody knocks provide a foreground
that’s distinct from that rasping, dusty
foundation. Bass starts to rumble
beneath it all, and the gaps in the swirl-
ing mass of sound are gradually filled
by short string shrieks, tremulous
gong strikes, and alarming scrapes and
scratches from a menagerie of instru-
ments that quickly become difficult to
discern from one another.
As the range of sounds expands,
they tumble together, picked up and
thrown around invisibly as if by a
violent night storm. Those knocks
were, in retrospect, the first clattering
pebbles of a sonic avalanche that now
sweeps down, enveloping the listener
like a wall of wild weather. It rises
and intensifies to a mighty crescendo,
peaking and abating, unravelling and
settling into a barely audible drone,
over as suddenly as it began.
I’m not even half way through
listening to Anna Þorvaldsdóttir’s
‘Streaming Arhythmia,’ and I’m both
enthralled and exhausted. The evoca-
tive power of this opening salvo—
and, as I’ll discover, Anna’s oeuvre as
a whole—is breathtaking. The piece
seems to channel not just the atmo-
sphere of a specific place or scene, but
to conjure up an impression of the
unknowable scale and power of nature
itself.
Big nature and
open space
Sitting in the airy café of Harpa some
days later with sun streaming colour-
fully through the faceted windows,
Anna’s sound world seems like a half-
remembered dream. The petite black-
clad composer sits sipping from a cup
of green tea, upright and attentive. Her
dark eyes gleam and a smile crosses her
lips as her childhood home of Borgar-
nes is mentioned. Anna spent some of
her formative years is this small town,
surrounded by a dramatic vista of the
ocean and the ever-changing skies.
“When you grow up in a place where
you’re surrounded by water and moun-
tains, and you can get quickly into
untouched nature, this is what you
feel is normal,” she says, softly and
thoughtfully. “I would listen—both
internally, and also to the way that
nature sounds. We had so much wind,
and all these natural phenomena that I
felt very close to. I feel that I still carry
that now—these roots have stayed
with me.”
As well as paying attention to what
was around her, Anna was foundation-
ally shaped by what was absent. Unlike
the busyness, cacophony and clutter of
urban environments, she became used
to a feeling of small-town ease under
the wide sky, and between distant hori-
zons and the unencumbered openness
of the Icelandic countryside.
“There’s so much space,” she says.
“You can usually see quite far in
Iceland. That space is present in my
music, and it’s another thing that has
stayed with me. I didn’t really recog-
nise this initially. It was just there,
and I didn’t know how it related. But
as I have continued, and people ask me
more questions, I realised that it prob-
ably came from those roots. It plays a
big part.”
Anna is also quick to point out that
her work isn’t “about” nature, so much
as it takes cues from natural forces.
“From the point of inspiration, it’s
more about proportions, flow, and
natural phenomena,” she explains.
“I’m not trying to describe nature—I’m
breathing in inspiration. A lot of my
music is constructed around this natu-
ral flow and how different elements
can come together seamlessly through
transitions. Nature does that beauti-
fully.”
Setting the
focus
Anna’s music, in all of its diversity,
certainly has a grand scope in mind.
Her orchestration is based more on
drones, events and transitions than
melodic progressions—sounds often
linger for long periods, mingling
together and creating a tense scene-
setting atmosphere before the intro-
duction of new elements, whether it’s a
slow build or a shocking one-off burst.
However, even at its most subtle and
discrete moments, it rarely contains
any true emptiness. “I feel silence
always has a presence,” Anna says. “In
my music, with very few exceptions,
there is never complete silence. I do
intuitively feel that there’s an under-
current in the music, and many layers.
Sometimes when you remove some
layers, and leave just one or a couple,
you get different perspectives. That’s
something I work with a lot in my
music: how do you set the focus? How
do you zoom in on some things, or
zoom out? How do you use perspective
between looking at the whole thing, or
the details within that structure?”
This careful description of build-
ing a composition offers some insight
into the methods and perhaps even the
concerns of Anna’s music. Her orches-
tral works can begin quietly and unfold
slowly, building a tense atmosphere as
a foundation on which a further narra-
tive is based; or, they can start emphat-
ically and spiral onwards from there.
“I’m obsessed with structure, and
that’s something I spend a lot of time
working on in the initial stages,” Anna
explains. “Finding the structure is one
of the first things that comes with each
piece. In these initial stages I spend a
lot of time finding materials for the
various places in the music, and decid-
ing how it’s built in the flow. I do, very
much, build atmospheres. That’s one
way I experience sounds, and think
about sounds and music. To me, after
getting a good sense of where you are,
then you can go somewhere else. If
you set the ground, then you can go to
different places, and that‘s something I
try to think a lot about when I’m work-
ing.”
Layers and
structures
Anna speaks most animatedly when
discussing the possibilities of writing
for orchestra. “My kind of listening—
that is, internal listening—resonates
very well with orchestra,” she says.
“I have a huge passion for writing for
large ensembles and orchestras. I
think one of the main reasons for that
is that I like to build many layers and
large structures. And they don’t have to
be loud to be large. You can make a—
quote, unquote—drone; that is, a very
complicated ocean of sound. And that’s
something I really enjoy doing.”
Working to create a detailed,
immersive composition is a process
that begins with Anna, and is then
passed on to the conductors and musi-
cians who perform her music. She
speaks with high regard for the people
who execute her taut, layered music.
“It’s so important in that kind
of situation that you listen, and are
connected to the other performers,”
she explains. “Also, a bit more tech-
nically, the way I write is to move the
layers between groups. A layer might
20 The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 10— 2019
“A lot of my music is
constructed around
natural flow, and how
different elements can
come together seam-
lessly through tran-
sitions. Nature does
that beautifully.”
“Something I be-
lieve in is tension in
music. It’s very im-
portant for creat-
ing structures and
contrasts, and how
things flow from one
place to the next.
And maybe it’s this
tension that comes
across as darkness.”