Eivind Buene

The ruin appears as a motif among several of Buene’s composer contemporaries, often with reference to Walter Benjamin’s formulation about ruins as a path towards truth in his treatise on the origins of the German tragic drama (1925). The ideas of loss and mortality are among the points of contact between romanticism and modernism. At the same time they are also a pragmatic consequence of the quality of acoustic sound as material – it is fragile and temporary, it always baffles the attempts of the senses and writing to hold it fast. In the essay collection Dobbeltliv (Double Life) (2014) Buene makes this temporariness the starting point for a discussion of what the site of composed music is: is it the composer’s thoughts and writing, the possibilities and limita­tions of the instruments, the musicians’ reading and bodily realization of the music, or the concert hall as physical and social space?

In Stilleben (2006) for strings, musical beginnings and the dialogue with historical music both return to Buene’s production. The work was written as an introduction to Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 17 (1784), and revolves around the piano concerto’s slow middle movement, which has an unmistakable Mozartean ambivalence – on the surface clear and untroubled, but gradually the main subject and harmony turn from major to minor and take on an almost imperceptible touch of melan­choly. Buene’s music has a related clarity. Stilleben also has a literary model in Don DeLillo’s novel The Body Artist (2001), where a young female performance artist reflects on how a body in intoxication or high fever experiences time slowing down and coming to a halt.

Garland (2007) is a nod to the Baroque composer Matthew Locke (1621-1677) and the English consort tradition. On Buene’s part the approach is related to the context of the work as a commission from a British ensemble, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. Here too we find slow temporal progressions and musical beginnings. Garland is based on the introductions to three of the movements of Locke’s Consort of Fower Parts, six four-part suites which were probably performed in pairs in which the first, third and fifth suites open with a slow introduction. As with the adaptation of Mozart, the material is manipulated, while some of Locke’s parameters – rhyth­mic phrasing, melodic contour or parts of the harmonic progression – consistently remain intact. The work also bears within it the idea of abandoning something, inasmuch as Locke’s work was composed in the consort form that was on its way to becoming outdated.

From 2009 until 2012 Buene worked with the scholarship project Again and Again and Again: music as site, situation and repetition, where he explored contextual and conceptual aspects of music. The project resulted in three works ranging from the symphonic to performance art, and the text collection Again and Again and Again. After this exploration Buene began the work on the violin concerto Falling Angels/Sound Asleep Among Voices of the Dead (2013-2016). The concerto, written for Peter Herresthal, is in three parts that can also be played as independent works. The middle movement, Sound Asleep, must be played with free rhythm. The result is in an extended time which sounds as if it has been "opened up”. The dialogue between the composed and the improvised is another difference that is regularly manifested in Buene’s music in various collaborations with improvising musicians.

In Blue Mountain (2014) for chamber orchestra Buene wrote both music and text in one and the same session. The work is a kind of orchestral music theatre in which two actors are on stage together with the musicians and perform from a script. The two, a man and a woman, are the audience for the concert. She is a literary connoisseur, he is an amateur musician, and they converse about the music which both they and the other members of the audience can hear the orchestra playing. In parallel the dialogue also reveals the couple’s shared past. While the text is linear and chronological, this music too is preoccupied with beginnings and with letting something go or abandoning it: the opening motif in one of Mahler’s Rückert Lieder, Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen (1901).

Buene’s practice alternates between expanding the musical material to include the actual perfor­mance situation and more purely acoustic music as in Sea Change (2016). The latter is dedicated to the composer’s father and takes its title from Ariel’s song in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The work bears within it musical consort thinking in the soloist group of three, which is set against a large sinfonietta. Formally there are also traces of a Baroque chaconne as a layer of the musical weave.

In Invisible Cities Italo Calvino writes at one point about travelling: "Travelling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents.” Buene’s music, by comparison. is typified by a consideration and consciousness of differences.

Even where the musical structures are unstable and unclear, the unclear is precisely drawn. Work commentaries and other texts expound the music with similar clarity. Garland for example has a small essay with the subtitle "a listener’s guide”, which guides the reader through the processes to which Locke’s music is subjected. The moment the music exists – perhaps because its exists – it can also be described.

HILD BORCHGREVINK