Theatre music

the winds II

A slightly reworked version of a piece I wrote for a recital of the poem "Det er den draumen" by Norwegian poet Olav H. Hauge.

Det er den draumen

Three short pieces for cello, synth and piano.

II - Wile

I - Split

This is a little medley of different projects I've been involved in as a sound engineer / producer.

1. Quatuor Ebène - Ravel: String Quartet in F major, Vif et Agité (2012)
2. Dr Kay and his Interstellar Tone Scientists - Travelling Through the Zone (2013)
3. Barchan - Soliton Intro (2014)
4. Nidarosdomens Guttekor - Juletrompeten (2013)
5. Faar - You've got a beautiful home (Wouldn't wanna ruin this) (2009)
6. Martin Myhre Olsen - Kom ikkje med heile sanningi (2014)
7. Lemur - Critical Band (2012)
8. Chris Stout & Catriona McKay - Trad.(Live) (2012)
9. Dr Kay and His Interstellar Tone Scientists - Earth Mother (2013)

Production / Recording / Mixing

All instruments and voices played, programmed and sung by yours truly. 

My music for this play is a tongue-in-cheek representation of Russian/Soviet aesthetic clichés. The text is total gibberish and has no relation to the Russian language apart from a phonetic similarity, whereas the musical form and instrumentarium is meant to convey the typical Soviet pageantry that has been fetishized in the West and, perhaps increasingly, in Russia itself. In essence the music is intended to symbolize the emptied aesthetics of a political project that, when applied to our age of fleeting capitalism, finds itself an anachronism. This is tying into the play's theme: 

"In the small Fife town of Lumphinnans there is a street named in honour of the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. It reflects Lumphinnans' history as a hotbed of radical socialism. During the 1930s Fife returned Britain's only communist MP; many from the area fought in the Spanish civil war, and right into modern times the mining tradition kept political fervour alive. But now the mines have gone, the Berlin wall has come down, capitalism appears to have won the war and all that seems to remain for the left-over generation are high-street T-shirts proclaiming Bolshevik chic, dead-end jobs and either complete apathy or a desperate nihilism.

In Gregory Burke's blistering, brilliant, crazily confident first play, empty rhetoric fuses with futile gestures in the store room of a Fife computer factory. Here self-educated factory worker Eddie and disillusioned Gary, who once believed in social justice but found a world where there was none, are carrying out a little direct action by kidnapping Frank, a visiting factory manager. Only things don't go according to plan. Security guard Tom, a naive graduate in political science who believes that you can take your pick from socialism and capitalism like a food-combining crank, gets in the way of this human heist. And the weary cynicism of middle-aged Frank, who turns out to be a former local boy and not from Japan as expected, is more than a match for Eddie's alienation. "  (The Guardian, 2001)

Theatre music: GAGARIN WAY (Gregory Burke, Norwegian staging, 2012)

PUGS is a newly written play by Norwegian playwrights Stian Toft and Guro Næss. Set in a near future, the play compares the transhumanistic project to the egoistic and superficial mindset of dog breeders. The music is intended to support the play's quirky mixture of talking dogs, high science and stupid, extravagant show culture.

Theatre Music: PUGS (Toft/Næss, 2013)

“In the mid-00s a large number of children fell ill in Sweden. They stopped eating and drinking, they lost contact with the outside world, they became apathetic. The only thing they had in common was that their parents were all refugees who were in the process of seeking asylum. Many had already had their applications rejected. What was going on? Welcome to Apathetic for Dummies, a manipulation machine where the truth is turned inside out.”  (www.khemiri.se)

This play consist of many different but thematically related and overlapping stories. (Six actors cover 34 different roles!) I chose to make several variations of one main musical theme, tying the myriad of different stories closer together in an effort to make the audience FEEL their similarities rather than just rationally acknowledge them.

Theatre music: APATHETIC FOR DUMMIES (Apatiska för nybörjare, Khemiri, Norwegian staging 2011)

Short piece for cello and electronics in which the acoustic sound is picked up, processed and fed back into the cello using transducers. Using this technique, I can expand the cello's timbral and tonal characteristics without separating the sound from the instrument, hence the title. All of the sound in this recording is emanating from the cello itself, not from external speakers. 

Live recording from the BLANK concert series, Trondheim, Norway, 2015.

Magnet

Short medley of musical sketches (without vocals) for the children's play ET! (eng: EAT!).

ET! medley

Chroma I

multim

A piece for cello and electronics, where the sound of the cello is processed and fed back into the instrument via transducers. This is a live recording and all of the sound is coming from one cello - no external speakers are in use.

Amund Ulvestad

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