Public Behaviour – new album
This tension between internal and external, the self and the other, is etched into the music on this album, being as it is concerned with the anxieties, desires and uncertainties that lurk within each of us and guide, shape, distort and determine our relationship with everyone else. In one sense, everything about these compositions, from their titles – Public Behaviour and Together – to their modes of expression and every single word uttered in them, suggests that they are directed outward, to society in general and to those individuals in particular with whom some form of intimacy is desired. Yet listen again and the perspective shifts; it’s not difficult to hear much of what is expressed as being part of an intense inner monologue: a litany of doubt, affirmation and frustration being whispered, said, sung and shouted in a way that, though musically loud, one can imagine is actually silent, playing out as an unspoken, internal argument derived from the thoughts, feelings and fantasies that we either wish we could or never would dare to say out loud. – Simon Cummings
Hans Kristian Kjos Sørensen – percussion/voice, Nordic Voices, Jennifer Torrence – percussion/voice,Ellen Ugelvik – piano/kayboard, Ilan Volkov – conductor, Kai Myrann – conductor, Stavanger Symphony Orchestra
Producers Christian Starke/Geoff Miles
Web:bis.se
Liner notes by Simon Cummings:
Jean-Paul Sartre’s well-known maxim “L’enfer, c’est les autres” – Hell is other people – could well be regarded as an extreme response to the struggles we all face in our attempts to form meaningful, beneficial relationships. In that context, in Sartre’s play Huis Clos (No Exit), the characters facing this struggle are trapped in limbo, but the essence of the problem extends no less to all of us who, every day, must navigate the complexities of human interaction. We, also, have no exit.
Sartre is by no means alone in highlighting these interpersonal challenges. The specific filter through which Henrik Hellstenius’ inspiration has been channelled is the parallel insight and thinking of American sociologist Richard Sennett. For Sennett, the problem is intimate and personal, located at the level of the individual, and it is there that the composer’s attention also is fixed: on you, me, all of us: how we regard and relate to one another, and our concomitant decisions about if, when and how to interact or cooperate.
There is a fundamental tension here, between internal and external, that Sennett, in his 1977 book The Fall of Public Man, referred to as the “tyranny of intimacy”. For Sennett, the cause was to be found in the development of psychoanalysis, which
was founded on the faith that in understanding the inner workings of the self sui generis, without transcendental ideas of evil or of sin, people might free themselves from these horrors and be liberated to participate more fully and rationally in a life outside the boundaries of their own desires.[1]
As a result, Sennett claims, society has become increasingly egocentric, moving from “an other-directed condition to an inner-directed condition”, with individuals becoming focused above all on their own lives, emotions and feelings. The consequence of this is not “rugged individualism” but a self-absorbed “anxiety about individual feeling”, that Sennett defines as a particular form of narcissism. This leads to a binary opposition between an aspiration to the warmth and closeness of intimacy, and a perception of societal problems as the product of “impersonality, alienation and coldness”. Emotion thus becomes all-important, to the extent that feelings override concerns about actions, in the process colouring perceptions of others.
The questioning of the motives of others … works to devalue their actions, because what matters is not what they do, but fantasies one has of what they are feeling when they do it. Reality is thus rendered “illegitimate”, and as a result, in perceiving others in terms of fantasised motives, one’s actual relations with them become apathetic or colourless.[2]
This tension between internal and external, the self and the other, is etched into the music on this album, being as it is concerned with the anxieties, desires and uncertainties that lurk within each of us and guide, shape, distort and determine our relationship with everyone else. In one sense, everything about these compositions, from their titles – Public Behaviour and Together – to their modes of expression and every single word uttered in them, suggests that they are directed outward, to society in general and to those individuals in particular with whom some form of intimacy is desired. Yet listen again and the perspective shifts; it’s not difficult to hear much of what is expressed as being part of an intense inner monologue: a litany of doubt, affirmation and frustration being whispered, said, sung and shouted in a way that, though musically loud, one can imagine is actually silent, playing out as an unspoken, internal argument derived from the thoughts, feelings and fantasies that we either wish we could or never would dare to say out loud.
The music thereby embodies not merely a tension, but a paradox, being simultaneously internal and external, spoken and silent. And this paradox goes further: Hellstenius has assembled groups of singers and instrumentalists who must perform together, and it is only through that act of performative unity that the disunity underlying the music can be fully articulated. Another way of putting this would be to say that the singers are united in their disunity. It is this that dominates Public Behaviour and Together, to the extent that the vocalisation of the disunity actually seems to precede the music. Conventionally we tend to think of vocal compositions as a musical ‘setting’ of text, but the situation here is otherwise: the music often appears to be a resulting by-product of the articulation of the words.
In both works this articulation is highly stylised with a shifting nature and behaviour. The first two movements of Public Behaviour, ‘Do I?’ and ‘No Matter’, demonstrate unity, the singers enunciating the words and syllables of a shared text as if they were fractured components of a single expressive voice. Contrast this with what follows: after an instrumental section tellingly titled ‘Falling Apart’, we arrive at the fourth movement, ‘Politeness and Anger’, where the singers are now a fragmented diaspora, an array of disconnected voices united only by their mutual insecurities and frustrations, featuring a loud crying motif that encapsulates pure desperation. Language and sentiment have become similarly disjunct, veering wildly between positive and negative, politeness and vulgarity, with a pervasive undercurrent of internal and external questioning: “Why am I nice to you?”, “Why can’t you be nice to me?”.
By contrast, Together begins in a state of diaspora, the singers making their way through an atomised vocabulary in a plethora of languages, united only in an apparent yearning for contact and, ultimately, to be heard. Initially inward, this turns outward in the second movement, where a spoken part acts as a proxy mouthpiece for the singers, whose ongoing sentiments become like inner thoughts fuelling the more forceful frustration being spoken aloud. The push-pull effect of inner and outer continues in the following two movements, the third reverting to a communal sequence of internalised self-questioning, the fourth an earnest acknowledgment of the reciprocal nature of togetherness, now set in a beautifully sustained atmosphere.
The inextricability of the music from the words – the latter seemingly generating the former – lends these compositions a somewhat abstract quality that further reinforces their paradoxical nature. It begs the question: if abstract, as they often seem, why do they also feel so emotionally fraught? Public Behaviour continues through the arguably even more abstract yet earnest 90 seconds of ‘Am I?’ before a finale, ‘The Square’, where the music’s punchy directness is militated against by a Sartre-like alienation and a breakdown of language itself, with loud exclamations of meaningless babble. The conclusion of Together leaves the question similarly unresolved. Its fifth movement is more blank than ever – “Do I / Can I / Will I / Need I” – yet also more expansive, intensifying the scrutiny, a process made meditative in the instrumental sixth movement. Yet in its final movement things break down, focused again through the spoken mouthpiece, but dissolving into fatalistic resignation, culminating in the same motif of despair heard in Public Behaviour.
Henrik Hellstenius’ music provides a telling demonstration of the need for, and the perils (internal and external) pertaining to community. They are in some respect stark works, offering neither consolation nor resolution, but instead manifesting the problem directly. Yet in so doing, Hellstenius makes clear that, for all the doubts and despair that might plague or even thwart our efforts, the ultimate prize – connection, community – makes the attempt not merely worthwhile but utterly necessary.
[1] Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, p. 5.
[2] Op. cit, pp. 325-6.