Review
More emotionally neutral was James Tenney‘s In a Large Open Space, performed by the combined forces of Skerpla, an ensemble based at Iceland University of the Arts, and the Bozzini Quartet. Living up to the work’s title, the players were dispersed across all four floors of the Harpa concert hall’s vast vestibule. As such, it was absolutely vital to move around, though this raised the first of many questions about what we were hearing: were the apparent changes in the make-up of Tenney’s huge floating chord due to actual changes or merely the result of moving throughout the space? Beyond this, it was fascinating to hear again the way large-scale drones seem to absorb everything, such that all sonic ephemera not part of the performance somehow became assimilated and integrated into the total musical fabric. (One of the most prevalent of these sounds, which i thought was a recurring phone ping from a surprisingly unobservant listener, turned out to be the sound of Harpa’s lifts, which themselves became a component part of Tenney’s drone.)
It was particularly impressive how, despite being constructed from disparate players arranged across four levels, the result was a translucent but cohesive sonic totality, its verticality not corresponding to a conventional low-high continuum, underdoing a steady but capricious process of adjusting, shifting, tilting and transforming of its inner structure. Though ostensibly dynamically flat, its longer-term reality was anything but, both in terms of actual or imagined small-scale fluctuations as well as the palpable sense that what we were hearing was a vibrant, living organism, flowing with vitality and lifeforce, such that nothing about it felt remotely flat.