ANDERS HULTQVIST

The orchestral piece Time and the Bell has already started. Or: it has already been there for a while when it starts. For how long we do not know. Suddenly the drums rumble. There is no presentation, no building up, nothing is being introduced. It is just there, as if a hole was opened in a wall of silence. And just as suddenly as they started, the drums stop; now instead we hear a shimmering swarm of tones in the woodwinds, horns and trumpets. Then again the drums, and after that the winds. A short part by the drums and then over to the strings. A door opens, a door closes. That is how the music is structured; large blocks separated by dramatic cuts, different sections that has been crudely forged together.

This "moment form" structure is typical for the music of Anders Hultqvist and is perhaps revealing a Nordic mentality, a striving away from the compositional principles that has been the basis for European music during the last two or three centuries. Hultqvist is constantly viewing the cultural and historical horizons in order to test preliminary standpoints as an artist, both as a Scandinavian and as part of tradition. A certain affinity with Asian sounds, for example the Javanese gamelan and the Japanese Noh-thatre, can be felt in many of his pieces. Time and the Bell easily makes you associate with the Middle Ages and the ancient Greeks.

Time and the Bell has disclosed its material already in its first bars: a syncopated rythm (the drums) and a descending series of four tones (the winds and later on the strings). All pitches are connected to the "tetrachords" of the Greek antiquity. The archaisms are in that way immanent in the musical material itself and lends the music a certain colour. The introduction alternates between warlike fanfares and lithurgical severity along with outbursts of exactic primitivism - or maybe it is the chaos of modern civilization? Past and present side by side.

The first dramatic turn comes after about a third of the way into the piece. The rumbling drums, by now familiar to us, are interrupted in the same abrupt way as earlier and we are facing a totally new scenario. Long held chords are spreading out, the strings start to glide and melt. The previously heard block structure is about to crack, and the chords merge together and flow forward in a meandering way like a stream of lava. Reminiscences of the tetrachords try to make their proud voices heard but are submerged by the unevenly pulsating body of sound. After a while you hear drums in short attacks, like the poundering of a battering-ram. The beating becomes more and more intense - something is about to happen.

The course of events stops with a break. Stillness takes over, like the silence that immediatly follows awakening. Over the landscape rests a mist of strings. Slowly dissonances rise. The primordial tetrachords emerge again, distorted by quarter tones, like the ruins of what we heard at the beginning of the piece. Time has dissolved, and the fragments form an ancient lamentation. 

Soon the music gravitates towards the resting point, i.e. the initial tone A. Suddenly: high bells, so important in Hultqvists music with their signalling function. The bells pierce through the gloominess and lets a gleam of hope shine against the horizon.

Slowly the beats diminish into the wind, time encloses them, and their fading away leaves room for the pedal point of silence.

Björn Billing, 1993