The Six Tones performing May 29th 2014. A work for three musicians, video and electronics. A collaboration with Teatr Weimar

Arrival Cities Hanoi (work - In - Progress) Part III

Cây Trúc Xinh is a Vietnamese folk song, here performed as a layer in an piece building also on a mode from Swedish folk music.  A particular sonority also emerges from the blend of the Latin-American charango with the viola d'amore. The recording was made in the first workshop with "Lydarslått", a trio project with The Six Tones and the Swedish fiddle player Mats Edén. 

Cây Trúc Xinh

Though the marimba and the Japanese koto come from divergent musical cultures, their timbres complement each other: both have a particular contemplative quality. Oesterle exploits the sonic texture of this unusual combination of instruments extensively throughout this piece, drifting from extremes of density and volume within a restrained melodic contour. Each instrument’s sounds reflects the other’s in a relationship that the composer has compared to a conversation taking place on either side of a glass. Mostly the glass acts as a mirror, keeping each half of the conversation one-sided, but occasionally it is penetrated, allowing for a true dialogue. 

The work is structured in four miniature movements, each a kind of musical haiku; Oesterle, who wrote it in early spring, has dedicated it to the “annual promise of emergence from beneath what seems an impenetrable and unforgiving surface of hardened earth and snow.

This work was premiered on April 27, 2010 during the Cool Drummings International Percussion Festival presented by Soundstreams in Toronto (Canada) and performed by Kazue Sawai (koto) and Ryan Scott (marimba).

For more information about Michael Oesterle and his work, please visit our SoundMakers website: http://www.SoundMakers.ca/composers/michael-oesterle

About the Composer

Look On Glass (2012) by Michael Oesterle

an improvisation between me and Stefan Ostersjo on a giant "tree-guitar" in the woods outside of Morpeth - a very slow start, listening to the distant sounds gradually coming into focus. An old guitar is wedged into the branch of a tree, and then fishing line strings stretched from the tuning heads about fifteen to twenty feet, around the trunk of a nearby oak tree. I am mostly playing the long strings with a stem of dry nettle (the brittle stinging hairs, when dry, act rather like horsehair), and Stefan is playing the strings as they pass over the guitar neck. A hazel branch serves as a mobile bridge/whammy bar. I should also say that we are also improvising with the environment itself, being influenced by external sounds, which at two points in the music include the delicate percussion of icy pellets of snow falling on the guitar body, and (if you listen closely) the strings too. These moments really capture the exquisite stillness when the poise of the environmental sounds - the wind and the snow - seem to offer us the gift of holding back the flow of time for a few moments.  

Cây Trúc Xinh

Stefan Östersjö

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