As regards the absence of electronics, I also had this somewhat vague idea (or whim, perhaps) of doing something slightly closer to a traditional chamber music setting, but which still would allow the music to take place in some sort of clair-obscur or twilight zone between pitch and noise: the piano is obviously prepared, as are the strings at times; there’s percussion and the clarinet plays multiphonics to a large extent. And the most trivial and practical reason, perhaps, was that I simply wanted to play with an ensemble where all players live in the Stockholm area.

Yes, that twilight zone between pitch and noise is still very much the place where the music is operating. But tell me more about your interest in the clarinet. As I understand it, you took it up as an alternative to the alto saxophone, which you have played for a long time. Why choose clarinet rather than saxophone for pieces such as this?

Yes, as you say, I have a background as a saxophone player; it was the first instrument I learned to play (at eleven), and it was also my main instrument for many years before I turned into a so-called composer/performer playing the piano with Skogen. And the reason for starting to play the clarinet was partly the same reason why I started writing music: around the age of twenty-five I was becoming increasingly troubled with my history with the saxophone, with the way my ’self’ and my physiognomy always seemed to be a little bit too present within the music I played. What I wanted was to find a way of dissolving or disappearing into the music. Of course other saxophonists (and other instrumentalists as well, for that matter) have found their own solutions to this problem (or sometimes perhaps don’t consider it to be a problem).  But I felt that part of the nature of the instrument was a kind of obtrusiveness, the way the saxophone tends to dominate a context with regard to timbre and projection regardless of how softly you play, and particularly when you play in a more conventional style. The clarinet, on the other hand, seems to blend more easily with other instruments, making it somewhat easier to become a part of the sound of the music itself. And the clarinet is also a wonderfully dynamic and complex instrument in regard to timbre and dynamics, which I find interesting to explore.

Tell us about the title: ’would fall from the sky, would wither and die’  Where does it come from, and why?

The title is a compound of a couple of lines from a popular song from the 1930s, ’If I Should Lose You’, from which the harmonic material of the piece was culled, and indeed rather heavily transformed. As to why I chose to use those lines as the title, I guess it’s just a rather natural and convenient way of paying homage to a music which to a certain degree has influenced me and served as an impulse for making music - in this particular respect also in a very concrete way. It’s also a song which I used to play quite often as a young aspiring jazz musician and which I’ve listened to for many years, as recorded by Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Chet Baker and others. The piece was, by the way, also composed at a time when my wife was seriously ill, so initially it was also, albeit in a very informal way, dedicated to her and our son.

Yes, I always find the end of the piece really sad as the music gradually withers away.  With this piece, and ’despairs had governed me too long’, and to some extent ’ist gefallen in den Schnee’, you seem to be generally drawn to the melancholic in your compositions. Is this a conscious thing?

Well, the concept of melancholy is of course a very old one and its meanings have shifted quite a lot through the ages, I guess. But I think that I can relate to, for example, Italo Calvino’s remark on melancholy in his ’Six Memos for the Next Millennium’: ”melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness”. Melancholy as sadness which somehow has been transformed, which has reached a state of equilibrium: a matter of gravity and moderation, perhaps. And the act of making (or listening to) music might very well serve as such an act of transformation and liberation. That’s something that has been observed by many people through the ages, from various blues musicians to Robert Burton in his ’The Anatomy of Melancholy’, to name just a couple of examples.

As I understand it, all of your compositions take melodic or harmonic material from existing works, and then re-work that material heavily so that the original is no longer recognisable, but what is left  is a kind of harmonic (or even tonal?) coherence underlying each composition.  Without asking you to reveal the detail of your method, can you say if this is roughly accurate, and why you have chosen to work in this way?

Yes, that’s more or less the way I’ve been working for some years now: letting preexisting musical materials (rhythmic fragments, tonal materials) serve as a creative impulse which then are interbred with certain methods which transform the original materials and turn them into something quite different. As to why I have chosen to work this way, I think it stems from a couple of different reasons. On the one hand it serves as a way of taking care of and treasuring certain musical impulses that have moved or influenced me in some way, but without submitting to mere reproduction of the originals, but rather to let the original material live on in a new, but different form.

On the other hand it allows me in some cases to approach musics that I’m drawn to but of which my knowledge and experience is somewhat limited, technically and historically, but which nonetheless exert a strong appeal to me. So, without perhaps being able to grasp these musics in their totality, I can at least approach fragments of them, getting more intimately acquainted with the music via these smaller fragments, and letting them become part of a new music which in turn is very much informed by fragments of other musics. And all these fragments together are formed into a new whole where the different impulses may not always be immediately traceable, but are still in some way present in the subtext of the music.

Yes, there also seems to be a particular interest in harmonic material in your composed music. The noise elements in your pieces, and several of the musicians who you choose to play with, clearly come from the soundworld of recent improvised music, but it’s obviously difficult to work with harmonic material in a purely improvised setting. Is an interest in harmony what pushed you towards composition in the first place?

What pushed me towards composition at the time was rather a certain inconvenience with how composition worked in most cases, and a similar inconvenience with how free improvisation worked. And also a certain inability or reluctance to submit to the division between these practices as well as the different unspoken, stylistic rules that governed them. That at least was the way I perceived the situation when I started thinking of a solution to the problems as I saw them, rightly or wrongly. I think I very much perceived it being presented as an either/or situation, while I felt uneasy with this division between the coherency of composition and the individual and collective freedoms of improvisation. So, the question as I saw it was something like this: how do I create a music which satisfies certain needs and interests of mine while still maintaining a great deal of individual and collective freedom for all participants that would, paradoxically enough, be coherent and unpredictable at the same time without separating the practices of composition and improvisation? And my answer to that was quite simply to compose materials with certain characteristics that the musicians could choose freely from, treating them in different ways, improvising with them according to certain guidelines. And tonality, or rather modality (and modal harmony) to be correct, was at least one aspect of that coherency (including ideas of intervallic coherence within and between harmonic and melodic materials), while aspects of unpredictability would include how all these different materials are combined and treated differently, individually and collectively in a semi-improvised heterophonic situation.

Lastly then, what are your current musical projects, and what’s next for you?

Well, I was very happy to have the opportunity rehearsing, performing and recording a new piece of mine in Basel the other month. Spinet player Christoph Schiller had put together this wonderful ensemble of (mainly Swiss) musicians with experiences from the fields of contemporary music, improvisation and early music, and it all worked out very, very well, I think. And for the time being I’m just about getting started writing some new music for a project with Skogen which will be recorded this summer. I’m very much looking forward to it.

Reviews:

If the Swedish group name Skuggorna Och Ljuset does not ring any bells, then the names of some of its members may help jog the memory—Magnus Granberg on clarinet, Anna Lindal on violin, Leo Svensson Sander on cello, Erik Carlsson on percussion. Yes? Well, all four of them have previously figured on Another Timbre releases as members of the larger ensemble Skogen, in particular playing the Granberg compositions "Ist gefallen in den Schnee" and "Despairs Had Governed Me Too Long" .

Where Skogen included nine or ten members, Skuggorna Och Ljuset (translates as "Shadows and Light") is a quintet. In addition to the four from Skogen, prepared pianist Kristine Scholz is also a member. Her presence is required as Granberg here just plays clarinet rather than also playing piano as he did before in Skogen. Another consequence of the shift from nine or ten members down to five is that the electronics that were a feature of Skogen (played by Toshimaru Nakamura) are absent. Hence, the soundscape here is radically different to Skogen's, being rather more akin to that of a chamber group—well, a chamber group with a percussionist, actually...

As with his two compositions mentioned above, for "Would Fall from the Sky, Would Wither and Die" Granberg reworked harmonic material from another composition. Whereas the previous two used harmonic material from classical pieces by Schubert and John Dowland, this composition draws on the thirties pop song "If I Should Lose You"—in fact, did you spot that the title selectively quotes from its lyrics? As before, Granberg has transformed the "borrowed" harmonic material enough that his composition is not remotely reminiscent of its source. So, "Would Fall from the Sky, Would Wither and Die" is taken at a relatively even, deliberate pace that is far removed from barnstorming versions of "If I Should Lose You" such as Sinatra's. That lack of bravado or bombast is one of the appealing qualities of Granberg's music, one which gives it a relaxed, tranquil mood that is easy on the ear.

In some ways, the presence of only five players contributes to that mood, giving each of them more time and space to play so that notes are held and can be savoured for longer. The other side of that coin is that some listeners who are accustomed to Skogen's readings of Granberg pieces may find Skuggorna Och Ljuset too sparse by comparison. Such listeners would be well advised to persist with the smaller group, as its playing is certainly different to Skogen's but ultimately just as appealing and satisfying. Would Fall from the Sky, Would Wither and Die continues Granberg's winning streak on Another Timbre.

John Eyles, All About Jazz

I’ve been listening to these two CDs from Another Timbre as a sort of diptych. Each one is a single work for ensemble, 45 to 55 minutes. Despairs Had Governed Me Too Long is credited to the group Skogen, “composition by Magnus Granberg”. Would Fall from the Sky, Would Wither and Die is credited to Magnus Granberg, “played by Skuggorna och ljuset”. Four musicians are common to both groups. I’ve heard one other Skogen disc, the rather fine Rows with Anders Dahl. Rows has an alluring sense of off-kilter formality to it, like Christian Wolff’s Exercises. These two Granberg-related discs seem to share a similar, basic principle of “composed improvisation”, but by very different means.

Both Despairs and Would Fall share other similarities. Both inhabit a sound-world somewhere between the brooding quiescence of late Morton Feldman and the uneasy stasis of AMM. Both works are built upon the skeletal remnants of song. Despairs is a sort of meditation upon the ruins of a song by the seventeenth century English composer John Dowland. Harmonic and rhythmic material from the original are deployed into an entirely new work, whose origins would be otherwise undetectable. Would Fall excavates the 1930s pop song “If I Should Lose You”. Harmonic resemblance is further denatured by the presence of a prepared piano throughout Would Fall, live electronics throughout Despairs.

Both pieces open up spaces for introspection. Small melodic fragments emerge from time to time, suggesting their songlike origins without ever recalling them; textures wind down into repeating gestures before finally breaking up and resolving into more complex debris. A melancholy sense of entropy, held barely in check, prevails in both works, allowing room for both fatalism and hope. Of the two, Despairs feels a little brighter, at least at first, thanks to the source material. The electronics and larger ensemble of ten musicians create a subtle but richly textured tapestry of sound. Would Fall is sparser, an acoustic quintet reducing the material to its essentials. The heavier sense of psychological melodrama that informs 20th century pop makes its presence felt.

I’m over-analysing. I play each disc to set a mood in the house, and each time I find myself riding a different emotional narrative through the details.

Ben Harper, Boring Like a Drill