Speculative Polskas is a three-movement work. The first movement explores the specific pulse of the polska and its function as music for, or with, dance. The second movement introduces a different sound-world where more lyrical sonic materials enter. The score of those two movements applies musical notation. The third movement mainly consists of verbal instructions and is a space of indeterminacy where aspects of the sounding outcome are left open.
I will first explore two different aspects of Speculative Polskas where Liza is weaving the tradition I carry and my embodied knowledge into the score. I discuss how my practice of ornamentation, as well as my experience of performing the polska to dance, influence the work in the first two movements of the work. Then, I analyse the third movement and the practice of recalling a specific polska as a way of deconstructing my embodied knowledge through decoupling the actions of my left and right hands.
The dance floor of the violin
Recollection: I’m playing from the corner of a dancefloor filled with spinning couples. It’s late night in the village of Bingsjö, Dalarna. The barn’s wooden floor is creaking under feet that keep moving in controlled synchronisation. Faces reveal concentration, presence, joy, and connection. Intuitively, the couples avoid colliding in the dusky room. The connection I’m experiencing with those dancers is like a two-way puppet show. Not only am I escorting them through the lineages of the polska, at the same time, their presence and actions draw strings back to me, influencing how the music unfolds. I’m inside the pulsating heartbeat of the polska. As a rubber band, it connects every cell in my body. Its heavy first beat opens the flow of melody, connecting me to the ground as my left foot taps the rhythm. Soon, the second beat responds, now expanding the pulse beyond regularity. This is an airy, elastic, and light beat, but at the same time, it is the centre of motion. It swirls up, as if caught by a sudden wind. I inhale. Muscles gain tension, and for a fraction of a second, time freezes. Then, after this thrilling moment of weightlessness, the third beat falls. It injects renewed focus and direction to the pulse, it draws me back to a new first beat. The melody continues to unfold and the cycle repeats.
As described in my recollection of playing the polska, the pulse of the music is present in my whole body. I can best describe it as a cyclical whole-body motion grounded in, and sparked by, the feet. The polska rhythm is irregular. It emphasises the first and third beats of the 3/4 bar, while the second beat is lighter and slightly syncopated. My feet and toes tap the rhythm of the first beat of the polska. During the second beat, my toes, or sometimes a whole foot, are lifted in the air. This elastic motion sends sensory signals up my legs. The muscles of my calves become tense. Tension is directed toward the third beat that falls almost as heavily as the first, but with the function to inject the pulse with energy directed toward a new first beat. Then, the cycle repeats. My left foot usually leads this movement, but the right foot and toes joins in. Sometimes, when expecting an especially heavy downbeat, the foot is lifted, and knee is bent backwards during the second beat. During this wave through my lower body, my arms are floating horizontally on the surface of the motion of feet and legs. In the typical polska cycle of three beats, I play the downbeat on a downbow, where the right arm moves the bow from heel to tip. This emphasis gives the downbow a heavy character from the weight of the arm. The second beat falls on the upbow where the bow travels the other direction. Where it starts, at the tip, there is less weight from the arm and thus the bow stroke becomes lighter. In order to move back to a new downbow for the next cycle’s downbeat, the third beat makes a short down plus up bow. Beside the two cyclical movements of vertical and horizontal activity in feet, legs and arms, there is a level of movement across the left and right sides of the body too. The falling heavy beats shift irregularly between right and left sides of the body. My breathing becomes organised to fit with the pulse of the polska. The change between breathing in and out shifts on the beats. As I play the polska, my body is engaged in an internal dance-like movement.
The expression ‘mindset’ captures a specific way of thinking. When playing the violin, I enter an expanded mindset, embracing my whole body, a body-mindset. It captures a specific way of being in the body. This body-mindset feels different depending on the music I perform and the degree of how internalised the music is in my body. In contemporary classical music, works can be complex and demanding in terms of rhythm or technique, oftentimes resulting in limited focus on my body-mindset. When it comes to traditional music, my body knows how to connect to the inner, dancing body-mindset of the polska, and all body parts join in the dance. I can enter this body-mindset through the act of playing folk music but also by recalling it or imagining it. This body-mindset is necessary for me to enter in order to play a polska. Just as my bow arm needs to move the bow over the strings, the pulse of the polska needs to flow in my body. Sometimes, when I perform a difficult repertoire of classical music where the body-mindset feels stiff or ungrounded, I notice I become tense. I remind myself of the body-mindset my body has when playing a polska. I enter this body-mindset and become aware of how my breathing pattern changes and my muscles use tension in a dynamic rather than in a static way. I cannot stay stiff or breathe shallowly when involved in this inner dance. When entering the polska body-mindset in contemporary classical music, I utilise the embodied knowledge connected to the polska in a different artistic environment.
The polska dance consists of a forward-directed walking part, the försteg (pre-dance steps), alternated by a clockwise omdans (round dance), where the dancing couple embrace each other and spin at the same time clockwise around each other and counter clockwise around the room. The försteg patterns of the footsteps of the polska dancers and the possibility to draw their movements onto the violin become an area of exploration. How can the specific polska dance floor be mapped onto the violin’s fingerboard? In September 2021 through a first sketch, Liza introduces me to a violin technique mainly directed by the bow hand – chopping. Originally a developed by fiddler Richard Greene in the mid-1960s and used in bluegrass music, today it is also an incorporated feature in contemporary music, through violinists such as Casey Driessen in his ‘The Chop Notation Project’ (Driessen 2019).
This chopping technique, Liza suggests, represents the footsteps of the polska dancers. In this sketch (Figure 1), the polska’s pulse is in the first bar of the piece, represented in a triplet over two beats. The first beat of the polska-triplet is played by a dry ‘chop’ – or perhaps rather in this case a ‘step’, into the string. The bow stays resting on the violin’s second and third strings. On the second beat of the polska-triplet, the bow is lifted, and the two strings are left open to give a somewhat resonating sound. The third beat again steps onto the string whereupon it is lifted half-way through its duration as an upbeat, preparing for the new first beat. While this motion of step-and-lift marks the pulse of the polska, the bow further gradually moves along the fingerboard, from the bridge of the violin toward and over the fingerboard. During the next polska-triplet the bow moves back again to the starting position. The two patterns of step–lift and movement along the string is elaborated over the first four bars of the piece. Parameters of tempo and dynamics are used to build up tension toward the fifth bar where more melodic material takes over. This step–lift–move technique provides me with a rhythmical template resembling the polska. The step-and-lift also translates the down–up–down–up bowing of the bar.
In her paper on the collaborative process of creating Axis Mundi (2013), Liza describes how she views the process of collaboration with performers. She writes:
I would describe these processes [of collaboration] as a reciprocal joining and weaving with, a travelling along and being caught up by, the threads and knots of a collaborative relationship with materials that are sonorous, gestural-motoric, perceptual, inscriptive and inter-social, and which arrive out of the wider ‘life-worlds’ of the participants. The musical work that arises is both fruit and archive of the traces of those reciprocations and itinerations. (Lim 2013: 4)
A process of weaving with the threads of the history, tradition(s), and artistic palettes inscribes the dance floor of the polska in the opening of the work. Gestural-motoric and sonorous aspects of the polska dance are combined with aspects of the tradition of bluegrass chopping. The wider life-world of my artistic palette is brought into the piece and woven together with the artistic palette of Liza.
Recollection: It is the first time I am about to perform Liza’s and my new work in concert. I am alone on stage in the lit-down Luxembourg Philharmonie. There’s no music-stand between me and the faces I distinguish in the dusk, just me and the octave-stringed violin with its otherworldly sound. In this trembling moment, feelings are racing through my body. The joy of sharing the work with the audience collides with the nervous feeling of not knowing if I my memorisation of the piece is successful. I lift my bow and open the world of the piece through entering the dance floor of the fingerboard. Sweeping lateral bow strokes and percussive chops of friction reminds me of wooden floors creaking under the dancing couples’ feet. I recall their footsteps, their knees lightly bending, how they are being inside of the heartbeat of the polska together with me. Soon, the light and syncopated second beat gains a different structure. Swirls of harmonics and fragile overtones start suggesting the ghostly presence of other bodies and time dimensions. It opens a space for other kinds of materials to enter. The further I go into the piece, the more relaxed I feel. My body remembers the polska and its sense of concentrated presence
The beats of the traditional polska are characteristically irregular. In the notation of Speculative Polskas, those fine nuances of the polska’s beat structure are not precisely notated. Probably, such an attempt would result in a very complex notation. The notation of a traditional polska also does not specify the uneven beat structure. Obviously, Speculative Polskas is not a traditional polska, as the ones I recorded at the Stjärnsund mansion and sent to Liza were. Rather, it is a piece of contemporary classical music, speculating on a polska. As I play it, I relate to its detailed notational structure with several demanding playing techniques and a complex twelve-minute-long form that I have memorised. Nevertheless, Speculative Polskas feels significantly different to perform compared with other works in my contemporary classical repertoire. As I play it, I am situated somewhere between the polska and the contemporary piece. My feet are tapping, legs gaining tension, and my breathing adjusts: it evokes the body-mindset of the polska.
How does this body-mindset that I enter leave a mark on the sounding result of Speculative Polskas? What can be heard concretely musically from this experience, which is not visible in the score? As I play the first movement, I treat the pulse in a somewhat irregular way, with the template of the polska’s uneven beat structure. Whenever sections of the tempo signature of 3/4 opens, I treat their notated rhythm as a polska. This means that I emphasise the first and the third beats while I let the second beat be less emphasised and lighter. When playing the polska, the second beat often evokes the sense of a different tempo in me, as if this beat suddenly has a slower tempo than the first and third beats. Consequently, in Speculative Polskas, I prolong the second beat slightly while shortening the third. Through connecting with the polska’s body-mindset, the first movement gets a dance-like ‘swing’. Through my body-mindset of the polska combined with the translation of the dance floor and the sonic language and framework of a contemporary piece of contemporary music, the sound of the piece is hybridised between the two traditions. This approach is something Liza and I explore in our workshops, where Liza repeatedly encourages me to bring in the swing of the polska in the piece. Liza does not notate the swing of the polska, because I bring it into the work through the body-mindset. Through the body-mindset of the polska, my artistic palette becomes a part of the identity of the work.
In the process of studying the work leading up to the premiere in November 2022, I send recordings of the material to Liza. She encourages me to even further embrace the ‘swing’ of the polska throughout the movement. Beyond the notation of the abstracted dance floor, she is aware of how I can engage with the material through the body-mindset of the polska. The swing of the polska is difficult to fix in notation. Rather, it is realised in the act of performance, from the experiences my body has gained of playing polskas. As the piece unfolds in my performance, I may sometimes fall back into a more ‘classical approach’, as I try to master technically difficult passages. Then, the swing of the polska is not my primary focus and my body pauses the cyclical up–down motion. Throughout the first movement, I oscillate between the two approaches.
Ornamentation
Recollection: I’m playing one of my favourite polskas after Näktergal together with Stina. In the acoustic of the Stjärnsund church, our ornaments are woven together with the ticking of the pendulum clock. We move in synchronisation and our feet gently tap the rhythm. The pulse of the polska is the heartbeat that structures movements in my body, and the ornaments are the unique fingerprints, as a fine texture above it. The ornaments in my fingertips decorate the pulse of the polska as the tune unfolds, like patterns of sonic embroidery. They circulate its pulse; either anticipating the beat or commenting on it. The ornaments surrounding the first beat of the bar are firm, effective, and fast. The ornaments of the second beat are longer. They stretch into the space between the second and third beats, as if search for something. As a trill flows onto the string in my left hand, the right hand holding the bow at the same time embellishes the music through the contact between bow hair and string. As if mirrored in the movements of Stina, my wrist moves with an edgy snatch while the elbow has a softer movement, drawing an eight-like shape in the air. The ornaments are engraved in my body, influenced both by local traditions and by playing with others, as this evening with Stina.
What is ornamentation in the Swedish folk music tradition, and how is my way of ornamenting connected to my embodied knowledge?
In music, an ornament is defined as ‘an embellishing note not belonging to the essential harmony or melody’ (Merriam-Webster, “Ornament,” def.5). Ornamentation in the traditional music of my home area is a way of lending beauty to a melody, of communicating a desire to decorate and embellish. Additionally, it is a way of expressing virtuosity, skill, and one’s personality. Ornaments are an important part of the polska’s identity, both a geographical identity and an identity created by the individual fiddlers playing it. Not limited only to embellishing notes around the melody, my view of ornamentation comprises a wide spectrum of musical decoration, including elements such as advanced trills, the use of resonance strings, bowing techniques, and microtonal intonation. Ornamentation is my unique fingerprint as a performer of the polska.
In line with Nagatomo’s (1992) thoughts, ornamentation, as an example of my embodied knowing, is not only residing in my body but also being collected by it and stored over time. By playing traditional music over the span of several years, my body acquires certain automatisation in ornamentation patterns and figures. Through repetition and refinement, ornamentation skills are personalised and engraved in my body, drawing on embodied habits. When playing traditional music, those skills partly unfold in my body on a pre-reflective level, through bodily processes, rather than being calculated in my mind. I do not think of where to add trills or ornaments, where to touch a resonance string or how to add elasticity to the pulse. I generally do not think of what left-hand finger would play what note in a trill or how my bow arm would need to bend in order to get the right sound. My body knows how to do it and is taking creative responsibility as a co-creator. This means that space is freed up to for example react to things in my environment that may affect how the music is performed. This can for example be the impact of the particular acoustic situation, the desired level of intensity or the communication with other musicians. Those processes are thus facilitated by the automatised repertoire of ornaments that my body creates with.
How is ornamentation explored in Speculative Polskas?
I will begin by analysing the role of ornamentation in the first two movements of Speculative Polskas. The third part of the work, with its specific approach to embodied materials, is discussed separately.
In her programme note, Liza writes:
Various aspects of the Swedish dance form and its music are reflected in the solo work’s gestural patterns of stepping, lifting, sliding and turning, and in its elaborated trills, repetitions and interpolations. The music was composed by following the idiomatic grain of player-instrument arising from my observations of Karin’s physical and emotional relationship to her violin as a container of stories and memories. (Lim 2021–22)
Prior to our project, the Swedish folk music tradition and its particular style of ornaments have not yet been explored in depth by Liza. The recordings I have made introduce tunes from the geographical area I grew up in, as well as communicate my personal way of ornamenting. Listening to those recordings as well as my performance of polskas as we meet serves as inspiration for Liza. The first two movements of the work both apply a form for weaving with aspects of my embodied knowledge combined with open interpretational spaces where ornaments are indicated but their precise execution is left open for me to perform. Threads of the polska tradition are being woven into a structure with threads of Liza’s artistic palette, of the classical and contemporary music context, of blue grass influences, our past experiences, and the violin with the octave string.
Throughout the first two movements, Liza’s weaving with my personal way of ornamenting embellishes the line of the music. One characteristic ornament I use when playing in the style of the traditional Swedish folk music from the region is a fast three-note motif that often acts as a ‘transport ornament’ on the way to the next note (Figure 2). This ornament is picked up frequently in Speculative Polskas. It is used to decorate a transport to a new pitch, similarly to how it is used in traditional folk music. In Speculative Polskas it is often used in a repeated form, often over several bars. It is picked up as a small module that by repetition creates a longer motif and form element. By repeating the ornament and thus placing it in a new context, it is heard in a new way. Such a repetition of an ornament is found in bar sixteen of the first movement (see Figure 3). Here, the chop–lift motif of the first bars is also applied in the bow as well as a gradual change toward bowing close to the bridge (molto sul pont). This is a way of decoupling the two elements of the left hand’s ornaments and the right hand’s ‘footsteps’, a compositional technique that is further explored in the third movement.
Another frequently used embellishment in Swedish folk music is the use of open resonance strings accompanying the melody. Hence, the vast majority of polskas are played in keys where selections of the open G-D-A-E strings of the violin can be inserted to support the melody. Resonance strings are used very frequently in Speculative Polskas. As in folk music, they both act as the occasional adding of an open string as well as the sustained playing of a resonance string during the unfolding of a melody line (see Figure 4).
Perhaps the most typical ornament for the way I play the traditional Swedish folk music from my home region is the short ornament of adding one adjoining note above or below the main note to the line. In classical music, this is often referred to as a mordent (adjoining note from above) and inverted mordent (adjoining note from below), respectively. This is perhaps the most automatised ornament in my performance. It is unconscious to the degree that I would never be able to recall after playing a tune how many I have played or where I have added them.
In Speculative Polskas, trill ornaments are mainly notated with the tr sign for trill, followed with a wavy line indicating how the trill stretches over the duration of the note (Figure 5). Occasionally, the symbol for mordent also occurs. A trill is a repeated mordent, an oscillation between the pitch of the melody and an adjoining pitch. The length of the trill depends on the musical style and the duration of the pitch. When practising Speculative Polskas, my approach to how I treat those ornaments is that I follow the suggested ornament structure – the specific moments where Liza has imagined ornaments to be placed. However, I treat the style of the ornament freely. I add the kind of trill or mordent that feels natural in my fingers at a given moment. At times, I also depart somewhat from the suggested ornament structure and add ornaments in other places. Through the co-creative process shared with Liza, I perceive it to be a tacit understanding between us that my specific idiomatic style of ornamentation is what I bring with me, from my tradition and embodied knowledge, into the work.
Within the framework of a contemporary violin piece such as Speculative Polskas, this is a way of incorporating a tradition through the practice that I embody. The tradition of the Swedish folk music finds a route into the classical music, just as musical genres always are influenced by each other by the practicing musicians with roots in several idioms. The influence of traditional music on classical music is noticeable throughout history in works by composers such as von Bingen, Grieg, Chopin, and Bartók, but also in more recent compositions by Karin Renqvist and Øyvind Torvund and not least Liza Lim herself. Influences flow in the other direction as well: from classical music to the traditional music. The fact that the identity of the polska has entered a contemporary classical work raises the question of, when returning to playing the traditional polska, how is my performance and body-mindset affected by my engagement with Speculative Polskas? The piece offers a space for exploring skills of extended ornamentation as well as providing a close interaction with Liza’s compositional work. Embodied knowledge is accumulated through the experiences we make throughout our lives; it is not a static set of abilities. Rather, it keeps developing. As I return to the traditional polska after having engaged with the more contemporary style of Speculative Polskas, there is a crisscross of influences. How this influence would travel in the opposite direction, from contemporary classical work back to the polska, would be an interesting route for further research.
In the first two movements of the work, aspects of the personal folk music tradition I carry are woven into the work, suggested in musical notation and situated in the context of Liza’s compositional practice and a contemporary solo violin work. In this process, perceived musical key elements, such as the irregular pulse of the polska and my way of ornamenting, contribute significantly to the form of the movements. On her work with cello solo Invisibility (2009), written for French cellist and composer Séverine Ballon, Liza writes ‘I translate perceived qualities of the material into structural principles’ (Lim 2013: 7). Furthermore, in the same paper describing the work on Lim’s Axis Mundi (2013), Liza describes this process in the framework of her solo bassoon piece written in collaboration with Alban Wesley:
I go below the surface of the material and, rather than my acting upon it to create the music, it becomes the tool of perception itself; I align myself to the ‘behaviours’ and close-grained qualities of the material in a creative partnership. (Lim 2013: 7)
Through the act of following perceived qualities from my embodied knowledge and tradition, Liza gives her view on my ‘physical and emotional relationship to [my] violin as a container of stories and memories’ (Lim 2021-22). This act of going below the surface of the tradition and weaving with it stretches far into detail. However, as I have argued, not all aspects of style and tradition are, or can be, translated in the score. As I engage with the notation of Speculative Polskas, the creative knowing that my body holds from accumulated experiences of engaging with folk music, is also active. The pulse of the work as well as the ornamentation is affected by the embodied knowledge of my artistic palette. Those skills connect the notated score and the tradition on an embodied level. It is what breathes life into the framework of the notation.
Recalling Näktergal
Recollection: The chamber music hall of the Philharmonie is almost silent. I have reached the end of the work, and my hands and arms are trembling from the exhaustion of embodied materials set in motion and rubbed against each other. In the middle of the fingerboard, my two hands have ended up in a tiny but intense shivering motion. In this trembling knot I have landed at, I experience how a polyphony of times exists; I am connected both to the past and the present. Through the tradition, I sense how generations of fiddlers before me have participated in my performance tonight. Here on stage, my mind has wandered between the sense of connection to the past, imagination of future sounds, and the enjoyment of the present moment. I have brought layers of time together from the knot of presence
Now, I will turn to the third movement of Speculative Polskas. If the first two movements capture my specific tradition through notation and use my embodied knowing to breathe life into it, the third movement explores a somewhat different approach.
We have seen how my whole body is engaged in the pulse of the polska through a body-mindset where cyclical movements engage feet, legs, arms, and breathing. Furthermore, we have understood how my arms and hands hold a rich repertoire of ornaments that I embellish the melody with. Those include the ornaments of the left hand – trills and mordents. Additionally, the right hand also performs ornaments, through the use of resonance strings. Furthermore, the specific stress of the first and third beats typical of the polska are largely conducted by the right arm. Through my repeated engagement with Speculative Polskas, the step–lift action of the right hand that was introduced by Liza and used in the first movement becomes more and more habitual. Over time, this new technique becomes an automatised skill, situated in my embodied knowledge.
The third movement opens with a notated slow motif on the two upper strings of the violin over two bars. This is Liza’s recall of the opening bars of a specific polska after fiddler Näktergal, the first polska Liza heard me play. Since then, Liza told me, she has intentionally refrained from listening to it again, hence the act of recalling it. After this short motif, a more sketch-like notation suggests some pitches, as a vague remembrance of the polska melody. This passage reads: ‘Recall of “Näktergal Polska” gradually increasingly encrusted with trills; timbre more and more worn down – either washed out (pale) or distorted (dirty)’ (Lim 2021-22). At this moment, the musical notation as applied in the first two movements is left behind. From now on, the previous idea of notating the tradition into a set musical framework with a high degree of detail is replaced by focus on the embodied knowing that resides in my body, with a more unpredictable-sounding outcome.
In the rest of the movement, the fourth to ninth bars, the musical staff notation is replaced by boxes with verbal instructions. They read:
4: ‘ghost version’ of 1 fragment of bar 3 played with half-pressed notes and harmonics.
5: repeat ‘ghost version’ in left hand. Right hand (bow) plays ‘dance steps’ (see chops and lifts in part I).
6: develop/vary left hand. Right hand bow becomes less coordinated with left hand – add slippages (lateral sweeps) also slipping/falling onto other strings as if pushed/possessed by another hand.
7: alternate trills of Näktergal with ghost tune, increasingly solidifying into 3/4 polska rhythm. Right hand bow however continues as a separate activity with steps/slippages gradually becoming a lateral ‘trilling’ motion along the strings.
8: left hand trills with fingers gliding up and down strings. Right hand – lateral bow movements are wide/sweeping, becoming narrower.
9: both left- and right-hand movements become faster and closer in position until both fingers and bow are trembling next to each other. (Lim 2021–22)
What is happening in this movement? What kind of musical material do those instructions evoke?
This movement deconstructs my embodied knowledge in order to create new kinds of sonic materials. The different materials that have been introduced and elaborated on in the first two movements are now being confronted with one another in new ways. Central to the movement is the action of decoupling right arm/hand movements. Liza’s instructions describe how the left and right hands should become less coordinated with one another, busy with their respective separate activities.
The compositional technique of decoupling is frequently used in contemporary music in the output of composers such as Klaus K. Hübler and Brian Ferneyhough. Performance elements are being treated separately, decoupled, and then combined in new ways (Orning 2019). In ‘The Polyphonic Performer’ Tanja Orning describes how composer Klaus K. Hübler, in the solo cello work Opus breve (1987), ‘explicitly explores the continuous tension between what is written in the score (the composer’s intentions) and the performers’ capabilities and intentions’ (Orning 2019: 20). Orning further describes how Hübler is ‘stretching the performer’s reading skills, instrumental capacities, and imagination to the utmost limit’ (Orning 2019: 20).
How is the decoupling of my embodied knowledge carried out in Speculative Polskas? In the opening, after introducing the reminiscence of the Näktergal tune and its ornaments, the material is first played in a ‘ghost version’ in the left hand. It is suggested that this be done by changing the timbre of the notes. Light pressure in the left generates a washed-out quality and occasional harmonics. The left hand’s embodied ornaments of the Näktergal Polska in its abstracted ghost version unfolds at the same time as my bow arm gradually introduces both the ‘steps’ from the first movement and sweeping motions along the strings – a stylistic reminiscence of the second movement. This decoupling of the activities of the two body parts then continues in an increasingly separated and wild manner, where, by the sixth to the seventh bars, the two hands are completely occupied with their respective separate activities of trills and mordents – steps, slippages, and slipping.
As described through my idea of the body-mindset, playing the traditional polska is, for me, a full-body experience, a holistically coordinated dance-like movement that decorates the melody with ornaments of the left and right hands. In contemporary music, I had encountered the idea of separating performance parameters in order to let new sonic materials emerge. But the idea of decoupling the bodily actions of the polska never occurred to me. In an early workshop with Liza in Berlin, I remember thinking – is it at all possible?
Embodied knowledge, like the ability to ride a bike, frees space in our mind so that we do not have to consciously think of all the different actions our body needs to take in order to move the bike forward. Instead, we can pay attention to a car passing by or to the flowers in the verge. In the third movement of Speculative Polskas, the same principle applies. As I direct my attention to my left hand and how it is playing the pale ghost trills of the Näktergal Polska, in that particular moment, I cannot at the same time direct my full attention to the step and swipe motion that the bow executes. Moving through the instructions that Liza provides directs my attention to certain playing techniques closely related to performing a polska. My attention wanders between those instructions. As my focus is directed toward the right hand, the left hand draws on embodied patterns of trills that keep unfolding on a pre-reflective level. As my attention wanders back to the left hand to vary and develop the ornaments, my right hand keeps exploring ornaments that are engraved in the body both through my engagement with the folk music tradition and through the repeated practicing of the work’s two first movements. My mind is in a constant wander between materials, and my body makes the effort to continue developing embodied materials while not being supervised in the moment of my attention. Hence, new combinations of performance techniques are emerging. In the instructions, Liza suggests that my right hand is being ‘pushed’ or ‘possessed by another hand’ (third movement, bar six). I do not regard this as the workings of a composer ‘possessing’ my body to perform their work through the score. I see it as an exploration of a liminal space between control and the loss of it.
The third movement is a space with indeterminate-sounding outcome, with guided instructions by Liza. Drawing on improvisatory skills, my performance of it never is the same. I never construct a detailed picture in my mind of how it sounds. Rather, my focus is on the bodily actions of performing it, of the decoupling of the left and right hands that are becoming increasingly uncoordinated. The indeterminate aspect of it makes combinations of materials and structures unpredictable and never repeated in an exact way. Furthermore, the unconscious quality of embodied knowledge contributes to the unpredictable outcome of the movement each time I play it. As my focus shifts between materials, what underlying materials my other hand creates is difficult to control. As I reach the end of the movement, I am at times also not really sure what it has sounded like. As I play, I am not occupied with the evaluative processes that often occur with notated music. The idea of aligning actions in order to create a beautiful violin sound, that much of my music-making contains aspects of, is in this context twisted. The structure of the movement suggests a different control of my actions, a rather opposite one. I embrace the loss of control of the sounding outcome when instead controlling how my arms move. In the third movement, through the focus on the act of decoupling performative elements, my embodied knowledge becomes a part of the instrumental technique of the composition and my instrumental practice is weaved into the work.
Notation and the voice of the performer
Speculative Polskas employs two different kinds of notation. The first two movements are generally descriptive in their notational language (Kanno 2007: 232). Descriptive notation is conventional notation and describes the resulting sounds that I as a performer should create. In some parts, prescriptive notation is also used in the first two movements. Prescriptive notation describes the action taken to produce a sound, rather than the sound itself. A primarily descriptive notational structure can include elements of prescriptive notation, for example the use of mutes or pedals. An example of prescriptive notation is the action of drawing the dance floor of the polska over the fingerboard. Liza describes how the bow chops into the string, is lifted, and at the same time moves along the string.
The third movement of Speculative Polskas moves further into the territory of prescriptive notation. Owing to the speculative nature of the material, suggestions of what bodily actions to take are described, while the resultant sounds they produce are left unspecified. Instructions are further poetic and thought-evoking, as the instruction to play a ‘ghost version’ or to ‘add slippages’ (Lim 2021–22). Those instructions leave space for the performer’s imagination and personal way of shaping the material.
The notation of the third movement suggests a method of exploring embodied patterns of ornamentation. My embodied knowledge is in a state of constant development as my body registers information with the experiences I make in my life. Liza cannot know how this tacit knowledge may act in a given situation. She can speculate on it and she can suggest a method to explore it. But her purpose with the third movement is not to control the sounding outcome. By suggesting decoupling of the left and right hands, she offers me an indeterminate space with unknown sounding outcome where I decouple embodied performance patters.
In his book Listening to the Other, guitarist and researcher Stefan Östersjö describes a collaborative process with composer Richard Karpen and how the materials the work Strandlines (2006–07) is built on are ‘drawn from the embodied relation between performer and instrument in ways that differ substantially from a composition generated through musical notation’ (Östersjö 2020: 69). He notices how materials selected for the composition that are already embodied by the performer can generate qualities in the performance that can be resembled with the fluency a performer may achieve after substantial amount of practice, leading to embodiment of the materials.
Certainly, there are countless examples of how a composer may compose a score very specifically with a particular performer’s voice in mind. But, the more explicit blending of voices, which is the result of artistic collaboration in the compositional process—discussed previously by Gorton and Östersjö (2016, 2019) as a discursive voice—can in their strongest representations […] be seen as compositions created with and not merely for a performer’s voice. (Östersjö 2020: 69)
In Speculative Polskas, the embodied skills and abilities of my artistic palette can be seen as an equivalent to the performer’s voice that Östersjö describes. The work uses my voice as a performer in the compositional process. Liza weaves in elements of my tradition of Swedish folk music and artistic palette into the score. When composing, she has my voice in mind, but I also bring my voice into the work as embodied knowledge.
The octave string
As outlined in the context section, the shared work on Speculative Polskas builds further on the recent research field exploring composer–performer collaborations. It is beyond the scope of this exposition to unfold the co-creative process of our work in great detail. However, I will include a few features of the process that are important for the understanding of Speculative Polskas, as well as for the discussion around ownership and temporal ecology.
During 2021, before the work on Speculative Polskas starts, I explore octave strings on my violin. An octave string allows the instrument to sound an octave (or more) below its standard tuning. During one of our early Zoom meetings in September 2021, I mention the possibility of including this tuning to Liza, and she is interested to hear what the octave-stringed violin sounds like. I suggest using the fourth string with an octave string while the upper three are stringed in the conventional way. Liza asks me to try and record two different tunings of the low string. Combined with the regular D-A-E-tuned strings, we both find the octave scordatura of an F in the first octave to have a very unique voice (Figure 7). This expands the pitch range of the violin with more than an octave from its standard tuning. The octave string, being considerably thicker and less tense than the standard G-string of the violin, also carries different sonic characteristics. Its sound is less brilliant, yet well suited for the lateral bow strokes, which the second movement in particular will come to explore, where the bow moves along the string between bridge and fingerboard. Thus, before our first meeting in October 2021, we have already found one of the main characteristics of the piece. The octave string turns out to be so influential on our work that Liza later decides to use it in the string quartet she is composing right after, String Creatures (2022).
Pockets and nested repeats
In October 2021, I travel to Berlin to stay with Liza in the house she occupies at the Wissenschaftskolleg. The conversation that has already started to unfold online continues during three days of workshop. A first sketch exists that Liza has drawn out of the materials we have shared up to this point. This sketch is talked and played through and discussed from different angles. We listen to the sounds, techniques, and gestures together. We speak about my folk music heritage, Liza picks up threads, and ask questions. From my perspective, also eating together, talking walks, seeing concerts, and working silently on different tasks – thinking and doing things together – lends our work an additional quality of tuned-in understanding. During the days in Berlin, I am taking part in the compositional process verbally but also through suggesting-by-doing. With my violin in hand, I make imaginative and evaluative contributions and suggestions through performing.
In the material of the first sketch, there is a certain glissando figure, which I express that I like a lot. Liza then sits down at her desk to expand the material of the figure further and compose a section based entirely on it. She suggests that I can insert this material at will, when I find it suitable, possibly in different moments from time to time when I play the piece. She calls it a pocket (Figure 8). Notation-wise, it is left open as a separate ‘bubble’ in the score on the new page on which it was written. Thereby, it is breaking the linearity of the score and leaving the decision open to me where to place it. As I play the piece, searching for where to insert the pocket, I spontaneously decide to insert the pocket twice during the first movement. Liza is excited about this idea, and it becomes an important form element that we decide to keep. The pocket carries enough recognisability to observe its coming back, and we experience how the movement is enriched by the idea of hearing the material again. Form has emerged from my spontaneous way of reacting to the material, of suggesting-by-doing. Developed over the compositional span of the work is a refined system of short pockets. The second movement comprises two pockets that are inserted a total of seven times (Figures 9–10). When I play the second movement, I insert the pockets where I find it fitting, before navigating back to the initial path of the score.
Another method of breaking with the linearity of the score is the inclusion of the nested repeats Liza introduces. In Speculative Polskas, repeats are unconventionally overlapping and occurring within each other. In the second half of the first movement, four different repeats as well as a pocket are inserted over the course of seven bars (Figure 11). This way of repeating creates recognisability of separate elements but not always the order in which they occur. This complex system of nested repeats and pockets becomes somewhat like a labyrinth for me to navigate. On a conceptual level, it mirrors the cyclical and messy use of materials in the folk music tradition where materials are freely used, borrowed, elaborated on, and personalised. Of course, those repeats could instead have been written out by Liza in one long narrative. It would save some confusion in the moment of performance on where to navigate in the labyrinth of repeats. However, for me, it emphasises the cyclicality of the traditional music. Elements keep coming back in the form of pockets and repeats, just as tunes, modules, and ornaments in the folk music tradition keep circulating and evolving through repetition. To me, it also reduces the rigidity of a written-out form as the one narrative of the music. By leaving decisions on where to insert pockets to the performer and by messing up the linearity of the score through the nested repeats, my reading of Liza is how she encourages several possible outcomes of the music. The spontaneous character of the traditional music is captured in the composition. Her notation inscribes variation, uniqueness, and indeterminacy into the score.
