LEMUR on LEMUR
MD: I think the idea of composing together is yet another component in the investigations that characterise Lemur. It might not have been an articulated aim, but in the compositional process of Critical Band we worked as usual, only we this time made all the rules beforehand rather than on stage.
HST: It’s hard to say exactly where a project starts. In a way Critical Band is an extension of Lemur’s activities. We like investigating things together and look at where improvisation can start. To investigate a room became one such starting point, looking for the idiosyncrasies that an acoustician would remove.This has always been our method, to investigate and experiment with everything we can. Register, orchestration, timbre, sounds.
BH: Considering our scores: Some people see them as a loose, poetic descriptions of the music and not an proper score. Now, on one level that’s true, but what is lost here are all the things that are defined by the rehearsal process. It’s not a coincidence what take place in the end, the material comes out of a rigorous rehearsal process. Yes, it is true that the text is open to interpretation, but the rehearsal process, our comments, the way we practice all contribute towards the composition. So, there is freedom in this form of notation, but a freedom that is governed by a kind of social control that comes from working together.
LG: I think it was a great strength that we didn’t write the score down until we had finished the rehearsals. I had actually imagined that we might have a sketch of the form ready when we met the singers for the first time. But we didn’t. We had a lot of material, a vague idea of maybe something a bit worn like this, we had a lot of lyrics, a theme song, a matrix, different entrances, we transcribed the calm song from the previous record etc. But I felt that what we achieved in this composition process was to be open to input from our own material, right up to the final phase.
From XYZ
Composing with and for Lemur
by Lene Grenager and Bjørnar Habbestad
Composition and improvisation are seemingly opposing activities, and music history is full of polarised positions and opinions on their difference. Not so in the case of Lemur. With the formation of the ensemble in 2009, four musicians came together with backgrounds comprising a veritable pamphlet of contemporary sound practices. Our skills and interests ranged from noise and sound art through new complexity instrumental and notational virtuosity, free jazz, electroacoustics and idiomatic improvisation. In this heterogeneous landscape, methodical or stylistic single mindedness was never a choice. That the activities of the quartet gradually trans-formed towards collective composition could probably best be thought of as an organic process more than a change of direction. While continuing to perform as an improvising unit, Lemur has composed 12 large scale works for the ensemble and its various exten-sions in the time between 2012 and 2025.
Each of these bears titles borrowed from canonical works of the 20th and 21st century. By framing the works as a recontextualisation, we tied our entire oeuvre to the mast of history, inevitably confirming the canon as we know it, even as we attempt to criticise it. By connecting our own practice with ideas and concepts warped and transformed by history and its many prophets, we are able to imagine, speculate, and reformulate our perspectives. This allows us to reflect on what has been, what is, and what should have been important in both past and present generations of music-making. In this way, the musical map made out by our twelve or so points of orientation tells its own history, alongside our music.
From XYZ
Aspects of Lemuria
by Hild Borchgrevink
Madagascar is still home to the lemurs, a primate that lives exclusively on this island. At the same time, more than a hundred different types of lemurs have been documented — a fact that essentially challenges biological taxonomy: a myriad of different subspecies challenge the concept of a species as such. Both this diversity and the fact that lemurs communicate with cries and loud, jarring sounds may have inspired Lemur as the name of a musical quartet with an unconventional instrumental lineup. When Carl Linnaeus classified these animals, however, he named them lemurs because lemurs are nocturnal. In the writings of Virgil and Ovid, lemures are described as mythological ghosts haunting their living relatives at night. Every May, the Romans held ceremonies called lemuria, intended to keep these evil spirits away. “I call them lemurs, because they primarily move around at night,” Linnaeus wrote, “– in a way somewhat similar to humans, they roam with a slow pace.”
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When musicians have played together for as long as Lemur, individual practices and collective experiences built over years concentrate in musical moments. Also, even though sounds in Lemuria do not seem to refer to anything specific, no sound is entirely abstract. Sounds have sources and directions. They follow a course and have timbral colours shaped by movements, bodies, materials, spaces, instruments.
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Having followed Lemur for many years, my experience is that for this quartet, the social and musical collaboration between them is just as important as the music it yields.
Lemur places great emphasis on method, on testing and reflecting around how they interact to make music together. In this sense, Lemuria is a self-study. Sometimes, it is as if one can hear how the parameters of sound and strategies of composing that drive the music forward, have been collaboratively evaluated, discussed and democratically agreed upon, and one might search for some – thing unplanned or unfinished, for the crack in everything. Cracks may inspire listening. At least, certainty might leave less responsibility to a listener: she can board the passing musical train and let herself be transported along its track.
From XYZ
On notation
by Lene Grenager
Lemur has for many years worked on translating various aspects of spatiality into musical works. In collaboration with Arup Acoustics in New York we developed the piece Critical Band (2012), a modular and site-specific work for large spaces in which the score must be recomposed for each individual performance. With Mikrophonie (2014) we explored the acoustics and inner spaces of our instruments with the help of miniature microphones and the French engineer and sound artist Benjamin Maumus, in collaboration with GMEA, the centre for music and technology in Albi. In Lemuria, this work is carried further, taking as its point of departure the composer Luigi Nono and the architect Renzo Piano’s use of islands as a compositional and spatial metaphor.
Over the roughly two years we have spent developing Lemuria, the process has moved in fits and starts, with frequent shifts between different vantage points in the compositional work. The preparations encompassed technical solutions, spatiality, text material, mythological framework, and musical approaches. In the final workshops with the full ensemble, we worked on resolving the relationship between the individual performers’ material and how it should be realised in time. In other words, many different processes ran in parallel, and the work on the design of the performance score itself entered at a late stage. The premise of all Lemur’s collective compositions is the negotiation between a compositional or conceptual framework and an improvised concretisation of the material. In exploring the concrete material, we find out whether our compositional hypotheses take us where we want to go. Because we are first and foremost an improvisation ensemble, the collective work with the concrete material is absolutely decisive in the process. We therefore allowed ourselves to keep the work in an open form right up until the final rehearsal period. This left room for input and ideas that emerged throughout the work with the concrete material and the concrete ensemble.
From XYZ
Perspectives on Critical Band
Asbjørn Tiller:
By including and emphasising the environmental sounds of the church and its
surroundings in Critical Band, Lemur make the church itself a major ‘instrument’ or ‘musician’ in the piece. The building provides a soundscape of its own that is set into play in different ways throughout Critical Band’s many scenarios and modules
Sometimes the soundscape of the church is highlighted, at other times the performed soundscape. Together, the two elements of environmental sounds and musical sound form the overall sound ‘landscape’ of the concert.
Gunnar Danbolt:
It is tempting to ask one more question regarding church music: since Critical Band is designed for church rooms, might the music be perceived as religious art? One
cannot compare Critical Band to a regular church concert – it is adapted to the
specific room in a completely different way to the music usually played in church concerts. But it is also different to an altarpiece or a glass painting. Critical Band relates to the room so that the work on the one hand becomes an integral part of it, and on the other defines it. In this way it resembles what we now call architecturally integrated art, where the architect and an artist work together to develop an artistic expression within the frame of the architecture. An example of such decoration is Søm Church in Kristiansand, conceived by architects Arne Åmland and Arild Lauvland and artist Kjell Nupen. Nupen’s stained-glass painting creates an axis that runs from the back wall of the middle part of the roof down to the front door. It would have been impossible to insert the painting after the building was finished. Art and space become inextricably united – and this is the case with the music of Critical Band. Even though it is made long after a church is completed, it is adapted to the room as if they had been moulded together.
One can argue that music is temporal, and not a permanent component of the room
like Nupen’s glass paintings. But temporary church art – such as installations
inserted into churches only for a certain period of time – are becoming more and
more commonplace. They are also adapted to the space, and in some cases also to
the mass. Despite obvious analogies between Critical Band and temporary church art installations, there is one key difference: whereas in modern religious art there is a growing tendency to coordinate art and liturgy, this is not the case with Critical Band. The work and the performers see themselves as agents, engaging with the culture and history of the architecture without entering into a liturgical discourse.
From XYZ