How do we learn a piece of music? For me, an active process of doing is required to embody the learning. This is what we typically refer to as practice.
We repeat gestures again and again with an intuition that this will have an effect in the future – a semi-voodoo ritual we reduce to simply practice – but it is about as personal as it gets when it comes to being a musician.
The date is the 22nd of May. They are travelling to the northern archipelago of Scotland called the Orkney Islands to celebrate their grandmother’s 90th birthday (and maybe catch some of the legendary folk festivals while there).
An uneasy mood permeates the familial group – changes in relationships within family members, new lovers and unsettled grudges punctuated by performative pleasantries. Another feeling is carried by the guitarist, as he will perform an hour-long solo concert in a week, and he hasn’t an instrument with which to practice.
For Norwegian guitarist and composer Fredrik Rasten, practice is an embodied process, with a serious importance given to intervals – listening to the relationships between notes.
Rasten’s performance and compositional practices also contain the restriction of a guitar’s timbre and register, which make sustained sound a short affair (later, Rasten discovers sustain through electro-magnetic bows). Hence, a continuous re-plucking of strings is needed to form this vertical conception of the music.
A nice time was had, on the decision to camp with the cousins instead of participating in all the various festivities happening on that isle. A hitch-hiking journey to Hoy1? There’s talk of a good beach there…
This re-plucking creates variation within stasis, the material properties of the instrument, the fingers, the surroundings, resound with variation as the player, seemingly unconsciously, creates microscopic timing changes.
The splinter group walks the glacier trodden valley to the Rackwick Bothy, which is reached by nightfall. Love-letter manifestos left in that place make the passing of time enjoyably faster. The goal is to skirt the western cliffs in the morning, see the Old Man2 around noon, and re-unite with the rest of the family at the folk festival in Stromness.
Through this repetitive process, another is taking place; the re-tuning of the strings, which manifest as the acoustic phenomena of beating. Giving the piece its Norwegian name: Svevning.
It’s already midday. They head out – the likelihood of reaching the last ferry becoming ever fainter – to the vexation of some in the company. Well fed stomachs and hearty laughs are left behind, as the troop unfurls into a dispersed caravan, zig-zagging up to the cliffs.
It weighs heavy on the mind – this five day intermission of practice – a desperate attempt to sing harmonics and tune, solo acappella wanes in the hiss of the Atlantic winds that surge over what was thought to be “another bloody hidden summit”.
Often, the changes which happen in the middle of this sedimentary structure of tones, are difficult to pin-point, however, re-contextualise the surrounding layers…
As the old adage goes, “one sense diminishes and the others enhance” – notice is taken of the nesting birds that hover like kites in that wind above those cliffs. Their suspension is a balance, a masterclass in control of even the smallest joint’s angle and yaw.
The piece, which took Rasten some 5 years to finally formalise, takes shape in two large movements. First, the harmony changes via small commas (fractions of intervals) and the second by larger commas.
A fundamental aspect to the piece is how to create a sense of modulation within Just Intonation Harmony: In short, a base frequency changes by a ratio of 4/3 up, shooting all the other relations of the chord up by a factor of 3; what was the 5th harmonic now becomes the 15th harmonic, what was the 3rd becomes the 9th and so on.
This image brings to mind the other meaning of Svevning – as a synonym of levitation or gliding. Taking heed of the calm repose with which this common black headed gull evokes svevning whilst simultaneously scanning the seas for fish and skies for foes, allow the white noise of the wind to slip away…
Larger numbers (in other words, harmonics) are reached with this process, for example, the 99th harmonic (11th harmonic, fundamental shifted by 3rd harmonic twice;
11 x 3 x 3 = 99).
Rasten instructs to tune this 99th down to the 98th harmonic, but how? Well, half of 98 is 49 so, we can use the previous fundamental’s seventh, which we imagine as the new fundamental. A 7th harmonic of the 7th, as 49 is indeed 7 times 7.
The young, who are still in training, take to more jittery and acrobatic flights from nest to nest slowly getting to grips with what would one day be considered svevning…
Keep in mind that the actual pitches except the returned string are exactly the same the whole time – only one tiny change – a retuning of less than a fraction of a semi-tone, gives claims to feel a new, distinct fundamental.
It is the job of the player to unpack these relationships and understand where to shift the awareness in the chordal structure using the voice to gently re-affirm the pitch and aid in tuning of the next step.
…It is a counterpoint of self-reflexivity, utter concentration, a flow of energy and motivation that drive these creatures…
So the piece continues, re-establishing landing spots before diving into the next series of harmonic modulations.
Like marionettes suspended from above, micro adjustments keep them in both stasis and animation…
The relationships change, resulting in a felt experience of harmony.
Perhaps, the guitarist tells himself, this experience was more useful than any practice would have been after all.
- A smaller island to the southwest of mainland Orkney ↩︎
- The Old Man of Hoy is Britain’s tallest sea stack ↩︎
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