Context
Performance
- Instrumentation
- bl.kör
- Classification
- Blandad kör a cappella
- Subject heading
- Xp
- Language
- eng
First performance
- Date
- 1984-10-13
- Location
- Södertälje, Sta Ragnhilds kyrka
- Performers
- Kammarkören, dir Eric Ericson
Background
- Comments about the work
- May Swenson's English version of Thomas Tranströmer's poem Andrum juli,included in the collection entitled Mörkerseende (1970), provides the startingpoint for Anders Eliasson's composition for unaccompanied mixed choir,Breathing Room : July. Not that Tranströmer's poetry demands musical interpretation; Eliasson's musicdoes not purport to add anything to the original text. Nor is Breathing Room :July a choral composition in the traditional sense. Tranströmer's poem serves,in Eliasson's own words, "as a key to that big room". In Breathing Room : July,Eliasson penetrates behind the words and tries to capture what is beyond andbetween them. The words are illuminated from many different angles at once. Ifanything one is entitled here to speak of holistic music, of states andprocesses at work in different strata of time and space which are superimposedon each other. The text is treated contrapuntally and freely, certain important words are highlighted, sticking in the mind and moving with the music in any directionwhatsoever. Words and music move in a living water, in its swell, ripples andcurrents. Internal and external reality are mingled. Tranströmer's poem consists of three fourline verses. Eliasson's choralcomposition, of considerable length in relation to the next material, also hasthree clearly distinguishable, interconnected parts - movements, one is temptedto say. The vigorous middle section is surrounded by external episodes in aquieter tempo. In this way the work describes an arc. Anders Eliasson points out that the fact of voices conveying the music is reallyof little interest - it "just happens" to have become a vocal composition. In factBreathing Room : July is instrumentally, symphonically conceived. It was written in 1984, mainly by coincidence, and first performed on 10thOctober that year by the Swedish Radio Chamber Choir conducted by EricEricson, at a concert in the Main Hall of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music.Text: Birgitta Huldt. From Phono Suecia nr 44 (1990)
List
The work
- Composer
- Lyricist
-
Tomas Tranströmer
- Title
- Breathing room: July
- Duration
- 20 minutes
- Composition year
- 1984
Information
- Identification number
- 132151
- Publication year
- 1990
- Work administrator
-
ER (Edition Reimers AB (c/o Gehrmans Musikförlag))
Box 42026
126 12 Stockholm
Phone: 08-610 06 00
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.gehrmans.se - Edition number
- 101106
- Format
- SCORE
- Reference to physical copy
- L-fol