Slågedalen
Prelude #10: birthplace of the Hardanger d'Amore (among other things)
In the summer of 2019, Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh and I traveled to the home and workshop of Salve Håkedal, the maker of the glorious Hardanger d’Amore. Nine years before that I had commissioned the first Hardanger d’Amore from Salve, and Caoimhín commissioned the second; we were returning to Salve’s for the first time since we originally got them, to get the instruments a check up and setup.
Salve lives in Birkeland, in southern Norway, where generations of his family have lived. His shop is in the back of his house, butted up against a sheer stone cliff that becomes a wall of ice in winter. It’s a beautiful area, which Caoimhín and I hiked through for a couple days while Salve worked on the instruments.
Caoimhín and I have a shared cloud folder where we put scraps of tunes that we come up with, for the other to check out and potentially respond to. After I returned from Birkeland, I dropped this little scrap in there, made with Salve’s Hardanger d’Amore (roughly recorded, forgive the imperfections!):
Slågedalen fiddle scrap:
This became the starting point for Prelude #10: Slågedalen for bitKlavier, recorded here by Adam Sliwinski:
Slågedalen, performed by Adam Sliwinski:
from Adam:
About ten years ago, I had this unusual gig where I conducted Schoenberg's arrangement of Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun for a quirky mixed ensemble. It was on a program with Steve Reich's Different Trains, and he was at the concert. Sō Percussion is known for very metronomic and precise recordings of his music. When the concert was over, he made a beeline for me, and exclaimed in his typical mischievous way, without any pleasantries or small talk: "you're a Romantic!!"
This is basically my dirty new music secret. I love lyrical phrasing and shifting phrase-weight, and I love it more as I get older and increasingly see the world as something that will keep slipping through your fingers.
I started by recording Slågedalen to a click track, as I do many things these days. After the first draft, Dan was happy, but he asked me to do a draft where I threw the metronome out the window and just felt my way through it. Releasing myself from the clock, in this case, produced much better results. Like any great slow introspective work, Slågedalen works not by abandoning rhythmic tension, but by stretching it out like taffy until you're certain it's about to split apart. The click track couldn't capture that urge and withholding — it's like walking so slowly that you can barely keep your next foot from landing.
Slågedalen uses just some subtle bitKlavier programming: two of the same piano, with slightly different envelopes, layered. It has a clear attack, but with a shadow of sorts, and then a decay that feels like a slow, quiet melt, made the more watery by a barely perceptible wobble in the tuning of the pianos.
Later I created a version of Slågedalen for Longleash, the wonderful piano trio, and removed most of the melodic lines from bitKlavier, giving them to the strings, and accentuating the “quiet melt” through the use of overtone-tuned, slowly reversed piano (via the Nostalgic preparation in bitKlavier); the icy shadow here feels more like a glacier, and takes a moment to show itself:
Here is the score and bitKlavier gallery for the solo prelude:
and here is the score and bitKlavier gallery for the trio version as well:
personal aside….
On our last evening in Birkeland in 2019, Caoimhín and I were sitting outside in the barely-fading Nordic sun with Salve and Inger (Salve’s wife), when Inger revealed that her cousin lives in Princeton, and her cousin’s husband is a professor at Princeton University (where I am also a professor). A bit further sleuthing revealed the cousin and husband to be Norma and Stew Smith. I lost my mind there for a moment, because Stew Smith is a physicist who worked closely with my father at Brookhaven National Lab for many years, so I knew the name if not the person. Fine fine, but still: my father is also the person who introduced Caoimhín and me to each other! Some kind of crazy full circle there! And a bridge to the past… Norma and Stew subsequently reached out, so the circle is now complete.
Nice drawings here. And amazing piece. I'll definitely visit that online folder for tunes.
Anyway, I'm a music writer. Let's collaborate or subscribe to each other's newsletters.