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Knut Vaage - Rabalder
(b. 14.10.1961, Sunde)
First performance: 11. March 2019, Bergen (Norway)
by Einar Røttingen.
Knut Vaage, born 1961, is a Bergen-based Norwegian composer. He graduated as a pianist and composer from the Grieg Academy in Bergen. Vaage has worked in different styles of music, with special focus on improvised and contemporary music. Many of his projects have investigated the boundaries between improvisation and composed music. Vaage’s production ranges from symphonic works and opera to solo pieces. His music is frequently performed at concerts and festivals in Norway and abroad. Much of Vaage’s instrumental music has been released on CD.
Investigation of the acoustic/electronic hybrid-sound is another important area in Vaage’s music. He has also written a number of vocal works and works for the stage.
As an improviser Vaage early on explored the boundaries between improvisation and composition as a member of the trio JKL. The tension created between acoustic instruments and electronics was an important ingredient of their style. Vaage’s work with improvisation continues with the band Fat Battery, and in staged works like “Achilles or Stupor”, premiered at Grec Festival in Barcelona in 2015.
The dissemination of contemporary music for a wider audience forms an important part of Vaage's compositional activity. He has participated in different concert projects aimed towards children, teenagers, and local choirs and orchestras. Vaage has also been deeply involved in administrative work, having served as leader and board member of several contemporary music organizations in Norway. (http://www.knutvaage.com/)
Knut Vaage has written the following about Rabalder for solo piano
The Norwegian title “Rabalder” can be translated into “Uproar”. As the title shows, it is a loud piece of music.
Will there only be noise or is it possible to reach into a vulnerability amid all the commotion? If we stand near a waterfall and listen intensely to the full spectrum of sound cacophony, the energy can be overwhelming.
But maybe this chaos can prove to be liberating for us, if we expose ourselves to it? The expression in Rabalder goes from clear-cut brutalism to the delicate and meditative. For those of us who go through life without emotional armour, uproar and its resonances can serve as a kind of picture of how our own times can be experienced.
Rabalder is an extraordinary work. All the more so because, in the hands of a lesser composer the material here used could easily have resulted into an incoherent series of meaningless "avant-garde" clichés. Vaage manages here, as is his wont, to bring us listeners into intimate contact with the latest object of his search and, in doing so, in contact also with our own personal thoughts and feelings. This writer has witnessed audience members become visibly shaken by the work.
With the short introductory text to the piece Vaage touches on the essence of the work and on its very right to exist at a time such as ours, permeated by noise at all levels: political, social, religious, artistic, interpersonal... We are living in the world of omnipresent screens and negated privacy that George Orwell anticipated in 1984. Vaage seems to realize that no amount of despair or radical action will affect this situation to any considerable extent. The spark that brings this outwardly confrontational, even at times downright unpleasant work into the realm of true music lies in Vaage making the inspired connection between the unwanted noise of “the world” and the noise found in nature. These two sources of energy may not greatly differ in terms of loudness but they are vastly different in quality. By succumbing to the overwhelming din of the waterfall, we can learn to metamorphose the noise of “the world” into something beautiful and, ultimately, useful to us.
The piece is ostensibly a spiritual journey through all the stages needed to achieve this acceptance. Towards the end of the piece noise recedes gradually into the background as a diatonic cluster moves upwards like a soul looking for its final home.
There is one single, very subdued and emotionally charged chord that keeps reappearing in the piece - see measure 29 - as if our quiet inner voice, perhaps the innocent child in us, is defiantly making itself felt in spite of all the outward forces that seem intent on smothering it. In the final page of the work, that chord takes centre stage. An e-bow placed on one of the strings of the piano sustains one of the chord’s notes. An upward series of notes is first played on the keys and then plucked directly on the strings of the instrument. These two elements create an atmosphere of disembodiment. The alchemical process (seemingly started by the pianist's impassioned incantation a few minutes earlier) – that alone can turn noise into silence – is complete.
Ricardo Odriozola 28. August 2022
German preface not available ....
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