The sheer mass of the Royal Norwegian Naval Forces Band at times threatens to overwhelm. Instruments polished, their uniforms clearly exquisitely laundered and pressed. Their presence felt uncanny, yet no one seemed to bat an eye. At the conclusion of Jason Yarde’s new piece for the group, clarinets and cornets are pointed skyward, to wail joyfully into the ceiling of Bergen Cathedral.
If the mood elsewhere is sombre, or brokenhearted, or panicked, at Borealis experimental music festival in Bergen, it is unseasonably sunny virtually all weekend. Things seem somehow reconcilable. The festival’s programme is varied and eclectic, with events hosted all over the city. And almost throughout, Bergen, famous for being the wettest city in Norway, is crisp and yellow. The festival’s yellow branding seems to have known this in advance.
Three years ago, British saxophonist Jason Yarde suffered a stroke on stage. The following period was an arduous physical and psychological recovery – unhelped by landlords, who took the opportunity to evict him. This new Borealis commission, Places Stars Above [And Beware the Marches of Distraction] was long in coming, but it is neither self-pitying nor mournful. A stack of noble, bare fifths stretch out across the 29 winds, brass and percussion, who mobilise into a series of ever-accelerating 5-time dances. Eventually the entire band rises to its feet to yowl and squeal in abandon. Lolloping and lopsided, it is hopeful music.
So too was the other new piece the band performed, by Sámi composer Herborg Rundberg. The Sámi are the indigenous peoples of the northern part of the Scandinavian peninsula, and this piece’s title bárru bára juxtaposes two words for wave, in the Northern Sámi language and Old Norse. The piece seeks not only to musicalise the Norwegian Sea but also to find bridges across the Norwegian and Sámi communities. Its seascapes are not so stark or barren, but rather romantic, sometimes recalling Britten and Sibelius. In the anglophone world, we are not generally used to indigenous artists seeking to build bridges with the regimes responsible for historical oppression – but presently, the relationship between the multifarious Sámi and the Norwegian state seems focused on reconciliation.
Two days later, I’m on top of Mount Fløyen in the Jiennagoahti, a listening hut constructed in traditional Sámi style. The piece I’m listening to, by Sámi composer Sondre Närva Pettersen, is dominated by joik, a type of singing closely linked to Sámi oral tradition and spirituality. During the period of Norwegianisation, it was declared sinful and not permitted in churches. Yet in this audio piece, recorded earlier this year, Pettersen joiks in Bergen Cathedral – together with fat, cinematic chords from its imposing modern church organ. Bells ring out from the bell tower to celebrate King Harald’s birthday, and Pettersen joiks alongside them.
The next day, I’m swimming with two hundred well-moisturised Norwegians in a heated, seawater swimming pool on the edge of Bergen’s fjord. Vilde Tuv is performing recorder and tin whistle, and singing in her high, warbling soprano, against a bed of her own brand of gentle eurotrance. The audience in the swimming pool hums a low G. The sun is shining. What on earth is going on?
Immersion in water was a similar gambit in Ocean Cage, a dramatic work at the Bergen Kunsthall from Chinese artist Tianzhuo Chen, Indonesian dancer-choreographer Siko Setyanto and musicians Nova Ruth and Kadapat. In a great blue room, under a giant plush sculpture of a sperm whale, Setyanto acts out a series of magical realist characters: a representation of the ancestors, replete with headdress; a deity, with bright red eyes and a cobra’s head emerging from his nose; and later a seafaring fisherman. Setyanto’s yells of “Baleo! Baleo!”, the fisherman’s invocation that a whale has emerged, are set against music combining traditional Balinese percussion with hypermodern electronics. The boom of the subwoofer envelops – and whatever kind of invented ritual we’re watching, it’s clearly being conducted in a kind of digitally mediated present. In the evening, Kadapat play a set on their own: gamelan meets hardstyle EDM.
Maybe it’s inevitable that any Norwegian festival would end up being about fish, though the arresting sight – and aroma – of a pyramid of fish carcasses hanging in the Kunsthalle atrium does make me think about what we’re really looking at when we look at animals. In one concert, a young Norwegian composer has a piece called Laksesanger (Salmon Songs), and at one moment the musicians don sunglasses and throw paper money at us with pictures of salmon on it. Sat beneath the giant whale later the same evening, I wonder what whales and salmon think about.
“We know what beaver and bears and salmon and other creatures need because once our men were married to them and they acquired this knowledge from their animal wives.” So say the indigenous Hawaiians quoted by Levi-Strauss in La Pensée sauvage. The animal husband was the literal topic of Bastard Assignments’ Pigspigspigs, a bizarre am-dram folk-horror play-with-musical-interludes that the British composers-collective had put together for the festival.
Set in a kind of half-finished 1940s, four stock characters – a bullying father, stepped-upon mother, pathetic son and hippy daughter-in-law – enjoy the farce created by the father’s abrupt transformation into a pig. Dad-pig is represented by hedge sheers in a blanket, and the daughter-in-law (responsible for witchily transforming him) eventually gives birth to a piglet, represented by secateurs in swaddling cloths. Catch it at Wigmore Hall later this year.
The final performance of the festival saw South Korean improviser and composer Okkyung Lee mobilise the forces of Bergen’s own BIT20 ensemble, arrayed across the 750-year-old King Håkon’s Hall. Lee’s music is typically noisy, even harsh, but this piece, titled Skylight, felt at times so deliberately coy and childlike to be almost domesticated. The opening plaintive, pastoral oboe recalled Grieg; rhythmic vibraphone loops recalled Reich. Lee stood in the middle with cue cards, occasionally signalling to the musicians something like “NOISE”.
But the BIT20 musicians are all nice middle-aged Norwegians. In one section, they had to improvise duos, and chase each other around the middle lectern, like very silly billies. Eventually they all wander off stage while playing – the oldest trick in the book, pioneered by Haydn. It was as if Lee was living out the child inside her, in her playroom, pointing at all her music machines and making them go. As music, it felt disconnected from the wider world, and almost consequence-free. Where two days earlier, Jason Yarde’s music had felt like a personal essay, Okkyung Lee’s felt like watching someone play a music video game they’d made. It got a standing ovation.
Lawrence attended Borealis Festival as part of its International Delegates Programme.
