Middle-brow Modernism from Nordic Affect

from Amazon.com

This Friday Sono Luminus will release its third album of the Icelandic ensemble Nordic Affect. The first album, Clockworking, was released in 2015 and was warmly received by sources such as National Public Radio (NPR) and The New Yorker. The title of the new album is He(a)r; and, as expected, Amazon.com is currently processing pre-orders.

Regular readers should know by now that one of my strongest pet peeves concerns what Amiri Baraka (previously writing as LeRoi Jones) called the “culture of middle-brow thinking.” Jones coined this phrase back when he was writing about jazz for Down Beat; and he used his columns as a bully pulpit to bring attention to some of the boldest (and often most provocative) adventures into modernism within the jazz community. In my own writing I have extended his scope to take on modern music that has been assigned to the “classical” genre (more for the sake of marketing than for any substantive aesthetic reasons); but one thing I share with Baraka is a distaste for the way in which the productions of Columbia Records tended to pander to that middle-brow mentality when it came to trying to sell music worthy of serious listening, whether it was by Igor Stravinsky or Thelonious Monk.

These days I tend to work up the same sort of lather whenever I encounter references to institutions such as NPR or The New Yorker. I find that, for the most part, they tend to promote “modernist” perspectives that were far more advanced half a century ago than they are today. From that point of view, when I wrote about Clockworking on my Examiner.com site, I observed that the aesthetic perspective of the album tended to recall the ten albums that Brian Eno produced in the United Kingdom for his Obscure Records label between 1975 and 1978. I chose that perspective because it was a time when the American middle-brow was just beginning to adjust to composers like Philip Glass and Steve Reich while Eno was already seeking out roads “less traveled by.”

Three of the composers presented on He(a)r had contributed to selections performed on Clockworking. They are María Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir, Hildur Gudnadóttir, and Anna Thorvaldsdottir. On He(a)r Halla Steinunn Stefánsdóttir, Nordic Affect’s artistic director and its violinist, is also a contributing composer.. The other composer represented on the new album is Mirjam Tally. The entire album presents six recent compositions interleaved with verbal reflections (most of which are in English) on the nature of hearing and listening. The delivery of these texts constitutes Stefánsdóttir’s contribution as a composer. She is also one of the four readers, the other three being Carina Ehrenholm, Angela Rawlings, and Liv Kaastrup Vesterskov. This verbal landscape, involving electronic processing of the voices of the readers, situates all of the performances within a framework that spans the gamut of intellectual merit from the pedantic to the pretentious.

When I wrote about Clockworking, I concluded by observing that this music might well have been better suited for “physical” recital settings. To the best of my knowledge, the only composer on this album whose music has been given a concert performance here in San Francisco is Thorvaldsdottir, one of whose pieces, “In the Light of Air,” was selected by Steven Schick for performance by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players in the fall of 2016. I regret having missed that performance, particularly after learning that the experience was as much spatial as it was auditory. Spatial factors rarely figure significantly on recordings, even when the best of technologies are mustered to create those recordings. I suspect that listening to a concert performance by Nordic Affect might dampen my prevailing skepticism; but, even if that were to be the case, I still would probably come away feeling that Sono Luminus is not doing this ensemble any favors.