SUNLEIF RASMUSSEN – "I"

Sunleif Rasmussen belongs to the new generation of Nordic composers and is the first conservatory-trained Faroese composer. Born on Sandoy, (“the sand island”) Faroe Islands in 1961, Rasmussen received his preliminary musical training in Norway. Upon returning home, he supported himself teaching music and playing in various jazz and experimental rock bands.

From 1990 to 1995, he studied composition at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen with Ib Nørholm and electronic music with Ivar Frounberg. At this time he discovered the music of the French composer Tristan Murail. This encounter with spectralism would influence a number of Rasmussen’s subsequent works.

Rasmussen has composed in numerous idioms, including orchestral music, solo concertos, chamber music, solo pieces, electroacoustic compositions for tape and live elec- tronics as well as a great deal of choral music. His approach to orchestration and performance is highly personal, frequently calling for specific spatial placements of musicians throughout the performing space as well as singing and vocal effects.

Rasmussen’s Faroese origins are central to his self-definition as an artist. The composer cites both the natural setting of his homeland and traditional Faroese songs and hymnody as providing the musical building blocks for his works, utilizing spectral and serial techniques to transform the original folk materials to generate new sonic possibilities. In addition to being a composer, Rasmussen is founder and director of the "Tarira" choir, composer of the first Faroese language opera The Madman’s Garden and has received numerous international awards, including the Nordic Council Music Prize for his Symphony no. 1, Oceanic Days, and the Faroese Cultural Prize of Honour, the youngest individual to receive this distinction.

“I” (in danish Jeg) is Rasmussen’s setting of the Danish modernist poet Inger Christensen’s deconstructed, confessional response to Wallace Steven’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. Rasmussen has interpreted Christensen’s ellipti- cal verse as a meditation on the human condition, intimacy, ultimately freedom and creativity, utilizing the poem’s numerological imagery to provide a coherent structure.

The composer writes, “I have used the numbers 1, 2, and 3 to characterize the words A man and a woman are one, and the blackbird. In the first strophe I use the word You three times, followed by the phrase You and a blackbird’s wing. In the second strophe, every line repeats twice while in the third strophe, every line is repeated three times. Throughout, I have arranged the text so that the last line of each strophe can be read as the first line in the following strophe. For example, I am the one who is watching - Twilight of bliss. The soloists define the formal structure, highlighting the text by singing only the first line in each strophe and the word “I”. I diverged from this pattern only twice - in the first strophe the soloists also sing the text I am the one, and in the last strophe the soloists join the choir in singing the last line, I am the one who is open”.

A lonely melody on the Bass Recorder slowly unfolds as semitones and minor thirds mark its ascent. The voices of the Woman and the Man (alto and tenor soloists) enter, weaving sinuous, intertwining lines of dissonant melodies, their ambiguous roles emphasized by frequent overlaps and crossing of vocal ranges. Throughout, Rasmussen places the soprano voices in opposition to the rest of the choir, sometimes in call and response patterns, but often in densely scored imitative passages, while the recorder plays a continuously unfolding melody. The work reaches its climax at the words: Grasping the bird's speech / Calling Am I a woman over which the music of the opening prelude reappears, now sounding frantic and shrill when played on the soprano recorder.

The choral texture briefly thins out before one last wave of passion, with all the voices singing together (for the only time) on the word “Open” before fragmenting, and dissolving into silence, as the broken shards of the Blackbird’s plaintive song fades from memory.