Jóhann Jóhannsson | News | Booklettext: Jóhann Jóhannsson - Drone Mass - 18.3.2022 (VÖ) (English only)

English only

 

Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Drone Mass is an electroacoustic oratorio. It can also be seen as an exercise in apophenia – the tendency of the human brain to draw connections between apparently unrelated things, to find patterns and meanings where none was intended. As the composer himself admitted, he was inspired by the musical concept of the drone, but he was also keenly aware of the drones that patrol our skies. “I have no specific thoughts about how these ideas relate to each other,” he wrote, “but for me they have some kind of poetic resonance, which is usually enough for me.”

Over the course of nearly an hour, the Icelandic composer can be heard searching for, and finding, unexpected connections: between the cryptic texts of the ancient Nag Hammadi scriptures and the distorted views of reality in the digital age; between the vocal polyphony of the Renaissance and the alien effects of Ableton software; between the beatific or malevolent eye that watches us from above (whether god or machine) and the long-held tones that paradoxically both ground a piece of music and enable it to take flight.

Despite its title, Drone Mass is neither a setting of the Mass nor a piece that simply drones. In fact, much of it is full of movement. “I still feel like the title is completely apt,” says cellist Clarice Jensen, the artistic director of ACME, the American Contemporary Music Ensemble. ACME commissioned the work and premiered it at the Temple of Dendur in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2015. “Drones are like a recurring motif throughout the work, and I feel like, if it was all drones, it wouldn’t have as much dimension. And it’s not a Mass structure, but it feels like Holy Minimalism to me. Especially now that he’s gone.”

Jóhannsson, who died suddenly in 2018, took part in all the early live performances of Drone Mass, which calls for string quartet, eight voices, and electronics. In it, he makes good use of the dramatic sensibility that made him an award-winning film score composer: the striking, step-wise rhythm of the opening movement “One Is True” grows out of the short, vowel-heavy Coptic text, and suggests the beginning of a mysterious procession or ritual. The slowly undulating lines in the strings and voices in the following “Two Is Apocryphal” create the feeling of suspended time that characterizes the so-called Holy Minimalism of composers like Arvo Pärt or Henryk Górecki.

Later movements in the work grow out of Jóhannsson’s experience in electronic music. Both “To Fold & Remain Dormant” and “The Low Drone of Circulating Blood, Diminishes with Time” offer an unsettling mix of highly processed and distorted sound files – like voices heard from outer space – with live singing and strings. A remarkable late movement, “Take the Night Air,” reminds us that, if “drone” can have multiple meanings, so can “mass.” The electronic sounds here seem to be weightless, or floating; but Jóhannsson uses distortion as a kind of Higgs boson – the particle that gives mass to the other particles. By the middle of the movement, “Take the Night Air” has become heavy, massive, so that, when the voices enter with their hocket phrases, it sounds like ghostly voices echoing in a darkened cathedral.

While the score for the vocal parts is clearly defined, Jóhannsson would often leave instrumental parts slightly open, especially when working with musicians, like ACME, to whom he felt close. “He wasn’t meticulous about putting everything in the score,” Jensen recalls. “I think Jóhann liked working with us, and he had his live electronics and Ableton files, which were always different too. So nothing was ever set.” (For this recording, the musician and sound engineer Francesco Donadello, who worked closely with  Jóhannsson, was able to locate the composer’s sound files and used them to create a fixed part.)

British conductor Paul Hillier and Theatre of Voices also point to playful experimentation and chance operations as central elements in their collaboration with Jóhannsson. Drone Mass and other works Jóhann would keep working on the specific sound quality of any given passage till it had the right feeling of Renaissance purity, Bulgarian belting or Stockhausen overtones – so we spent a lot of time discussing the shades of each vowel. This piece really uses both the full, raw force of the ensemble and every possible other color of the voices, giving each section full exposure at different times.” (Else Torp, soprano and Manager of Theatre of Voices)

Jóhannsson seems to have enjoyed that unpredictability; in “Divine Objects,” he lays out a gently rocking figure for the strings, and soon a subtle but striking moment occurs when one of the violins sounds like it is being shadowed electronically. In fact, it is the other violin, moving in and out of phase with the first one – not in the pulsing way of a Steve Reich piece, but erratically. Jóhannsson was certainly familiar with Reich’s idea of “music as a gradual process,” though, because “Divine Objects” builds gradually to an expansive crescendo, which then recedes, leaving at the movement’s end some of the work’s most glowing musical moments.

Part of the mystery of Drone Mass lies in the texts. Written in Coptic and full of imagery that’s both Gnostic and gnomic, the words become interesting for their sounds rather than their meaning. Jóhannsson used one hymn that seemed to consist of nothing but a “seemingly meaningless series of vowels,” as he wrote in his notes to the piece. However, he continued, “the vowels of the final paragraph (u aei eis aei ei os ei ei os ei) can be read (in Greek) as ‘who exists as Son for ever and ever. You are what you are, you are what you are.’ This, along with other Gnostic texts, is the main text material used in the piece.”

Divorced from their semantic value – if indeed they ever had any – these syllables come very close to vocalise when set to music; and it is almost impossible, and probably pointless, to try to determine when Jóhannsson is actually setting text and when he is using the voices in a purely instrumental way. Better by far to simply revel in the beauty of the vocal writing in “Moral Vacuums,” which, despite its uncertain title, seems to look back at the choral music of the Renaissance – when composers set texts in such complex ways that even familiar words lost their meaning. With its hypnotic string accompaniment and soaring harmonies, “Moral Vacuums” might be the most Mass-like part of the piece. But, towards the end, an electronic intrusion adds a disquieting note.

Drone Mass concludes with “The Mountain View, the Majesty of the Snow-Clad Peaks, from a Place of Contemplation and Reflection,” a title that promises a peaceful, untroubled finale. Instead the sliding textures heard earlier in the piece return, in both the voices and strings, so that, as the electronic drone continues beneath, the repeated glissandi make the singers and the string quartet sound slightly unmoored. When the piece ends, with the voices finally holding their steady tones, it is unclear whether this is resolution or resignation.