There have been so many times when I’ve been tempted to start a posting here with the opening sentence of that old Rolling Stone review of Bob Dylan’s Self Portrait album: “What is this shit?” It’s a positive thing, mostly; an enouraging sign that the artist has made something that both engages and challenges the senses and the mind. The process by which the listener’s bafflement leads to a new form of understanding is fundamental to new art. The catch here is that this understanding may not always be a favourable outcome, for artist, audience, or both. All of this preamble is to say that for the past few weeks I’ve been resisting the temptation to use that quote when trying to say something about Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson’s Sinfónía.
My knowledge of Gunnarsson’s music was limited to hearing Ilan Volkov lead the Scottish BBC Orchestra in the premiere of his piece Sporgýla on the radio about five years ago. Sinfónía is a large-scale work, in four movements. Despite this formal arrangement, it’s an open composition: the score takes advantage of paperless computer-screen tech by being animated in ways intended to break down the established grid-like divisions of time and melody. Gunnarsson is part of the Icelandic art and music collective S.L.Á.T.U.R., so the concepts of collaborative working and a freer relationship between composer and performer. There’s a lo-fi, DIY element at work here too, so you’re already getting some idea in your head about what the piece might be before listening to it.
Then you put Sinfónía on and, well… it sounds like a bunch of kids blowing on toy recorders and banging crockery. There are assorted strings being twanged, too. You wonder where it will lead, and it leads to more twanging, tootling and banging. The second movement, more of the same; as with the third and fourth. It’s not a complete free-for-all, so you know it’s not a con: the balance between instruments change, the texture spreads out or tightens up, all done with a broad phrasing that indicates a compositional outline at work. (Okay, not an outline, a resultant interaction of compositional influences.) But it’s a damn job distinguishing one moment from the next.
The instruments are divided into three groups of three, played with a delicate conscientiousness by members of Fengjastrútur, another loose collective in downtown Reykjavik. The playing is noticeably restrained throughout and the recording sounds professional, not a cassette artefact. It’s all very dignified, which just raises more questions. Does the seriousness of the playing derive from the effort of musical concentration, or from keeping a poker face? It’s probably not satire: I don’t think the audience is being pranked here, nor is the concept of symphonies, or orchestras, being deflated. It isn’t even necessarily elevating the concept of a “home-made” music to symphonic status, but simply allows that such a status may exist.
The absence of rhetoric, the combination of computer-animated scores with ocarinas and found percussion, has produced a piece of music that a cultured audience literally cannot hear, in that it is almost impossible to strip away the metacultural associations and hear the music as anything other than a commentary on something else. It makes you wonder how often we hear music mediated through abstracted concepts. Listening again to Sporgýla, the relaxed, almost bucolic nature of loosely organised groups in civilised disputation, those floating wind instrument sounds, provided a better understanding of how Gunnarsson composes and that what we hear on Sinfónía is no accident. It may require patience, but not necessarily of the sort needed for forensic analysis of details. My complaint would then be my usual sticking point with arte povera, in that it shares what can seem like an overemphasis on means over ends and, with that, a compulsion for conceptual purity that will diminish the material for its own sake.
Gunnarsson’s Sinfónía has had me thinking a lot. It was worth my time but I still don’t know what to make of it. In the end, it may be fated like Self Portrait to be simultaneously praised and damned with the phrase “a qualified success”.
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