Earth Ears Ensemble: Alone Together

Julkaistu 5.2.2025 | Päivitetty 5.2.2025

Program

Carola Bauckholt: Oh, I see (2015-2016)
Elias Schomers: ebclebclebclebcle (2024) (World premiere, commission)
Catherine Lamb: frame/frames (2009/2013)
Þorkell Nordal: dwellings (2022)

Performers

Livia Schweizer – flute, bass flute, and balloon
Lucy Abrams-Husso – clarinet and bass clarinet
Iida-Vilhelmiina Sinivalo – cello
Maritta Manner – piano
Robert Fleitz – balloon
Tuukka Tervo – electronics

About the program

Alone, Together gathers four contemporary classical music works that encourage and discourage the formation of connections between musicians, instruments, sounds, and audience. In their own ways, each work performed today pushes audience members and performers to feel alone at some moments and together as a collective at others. We might even feel alone and together at the same time.

While this sounds needlessly conflicting, and hyperbolic, it is a feeling that many performers of classical music actually feel normally during most musical performances. On one hand, performers must focus on what they are doing as an individual, but at the same time, they connect with those performers, sounds, and bodies around them. Audience members experience each performance uniquely – what you hear today, and how you hear it, is exceptional to you. And yet, everyone here today listening will experience the performance together.

About the works

The first work on the program is Oh, I see (2016), one of the best-known works by German composer Carola Bauckholt. Like many of her works, Oh, I see combines concert music, visual arts, and musical theater. This work includes prepared piano, cello and clarinet alongside two large balloons, upon which a video of eyes is projected. All members of the ensemble incorporate traditional and non-traditional playing techniques, reflecting Bauckholt’s fondness for using “noisy sounds”. 

Oh, I see also explores how we perceive and how we understand experiences. Of this piece, Bauckholt has said that she took inspiration from dreams and cognition: ”I have always been fascinated by our brain and especially by the logic of our dreams. Perhaps art and especially music could come closest to the processes in our brain.” Perception and understanding are both phenomena that we experience individually, but collective participation helps to forge connections and create community.

In Oh, I see, aloneness and togetherness are experienced differently depending on your position within the performance. The clarinetist, cellist, and pianist in this piece are more alone, connecting to each other mainly through a click track playing in their ears to ensure coordination and precision in performance. The balloon players, on the other hand, connect more closely with each other because they must coordinate and move together, since the eyes are one unit, together. And the audience are the only ones who are able to absorb the entire performance, visually and aurally, together en masse.

Second on the program is the World Premiere of ebclebclebclebcle (2024) for bass clarinet and electronics by Norwegian composer Elias Schomers. This work was commissioned for the Earth Ears Ensemble as part of Northern Connection, a project started by the Nordic Music art music export organizations to promote new Nordic music.

Schomers met with the ensemble in Helsinki in November 2024 and was interested in exploring the sound possibilities of the bass clarinet. Under his guidance, Tuukka and Lucy made a library of recordings of various pitches, articulations, multiphonics, and key clicks, relying on several microphones placed at different positions around the bass clarinet. Schomers then mapped these sonic perspectives of the bass clarinet sound onto four loudspeakers, which are placed around the audience. During the performance, the bass clarinetist moves through this field of sound, which is both concrete and disembodied, creating different relations to the bass clarinet that coming from the loudspeakers.

Each person listening to ebclebclebclebcle will experience the work individually. In this sense, each audience member is alone, absorbing sound based on where you are sitting in relation to the bass clarinetist and to the speakers. At the same time, with a formal stage removed, performer and audience are together as one body. In similar way, the performing bass clarinetist is playing alone, as a soloist, but always connecting and relating to her sounds that are being replayed through the surrounding speakers.

Dissection and multiplicity of sound is also a theme in the work of American composer Catherine Lamb. frame/frames(2009/2013) for bass flute (or recorder) and cello offers the possibility for both performers and listeners to experience the variety of tones and resonances created when two instruments sustain single pitches.

Lamb’s work challenges traditional understandings of harmony through attempts to design a ”multi-dimensional harmonic space” rather than a flattened, vertical one. This approach draws upon her ongoing investigations into tonal interaction and harmony and her attempts to create sonic spaces that are alive. Lamb’s intricate use of microintervals creates a auditory environment where the harmonic structures evolve continuously, resonating in new and unexpected ways.

In performance, the cellist and flutist must focus individually on their own precise tones, which rely on just intonation and the Helmholtz-Ellis JI Pitch Notation system. However, they cannot ignore – cannot not react to – the resulting overtone combinations and microtonal shifts, which encourage the players to hear new harmonic balances together. Similarly, the atmosphere created in frame/frames is experienced both individually and collectively by the audience, who are encouraged to absorb the shifting soundscape, constantly noticing new characteristics within the vibrations.

The final work on the program is dwellings (2022) by Icelandic composer Þorkell Nordal. The title comes from the idea of electronics being inhabited by acoustic instruments. Within the piece, Nordal imagined two contrasting habitats: the first marked by precise desynchronization between the ensemble and the electronics, and in the second, the ensemble seems to shed temporal rigidity in favor of a more flexible and responsive relationship. The electronic sounds in the first part come from external sound sources, while in the second part, only sounds from the ensemble are used.

These two habitats also involve two distinct approaches in performance. During the first part of the work, each performer is playing very strictly in their own tempo. In addition to the ensemble being out of sync with the electronics, the performers themselves are completely out of alignment with each other. This requires solitary focus on one’s own part, ignoring completely what all the others are playing. Though the ensemble plays together, each performer is entirely alone.

During the second part of the piece, the musical approach changes completely. The ensemble creates entirely together, in a rhythmically free space, reacting only to each other’s sounds and the relationships between instruments. The performers also operate pedals to record and trigger sounds, incorporating the live electronics together within the chamber music setting.

About the ensemble

The Earth Ears Ensemble has established itself on the Finnish contemporary music scene as an ensemble focused on fostering experimentation and audience connections. Following a successful debut at the Elollinen Concert Series in 2021, the ensemble performed concerts at such events as Musica Nova Helsinki, GÁTT Nordic Arts Festival and SibaFest. The ensemble has worked closely with composers such as Clara Iannotta, Helena Tulve, Jouni Hirvelä, Jaime Belmonte, Jacob Ridderberg, Tytti Arola and Þorkell Nordal. The Ensemble’s upcoming performances include a return to Musica nova Helsinki 2025 and a debut at the Tampere Biennale 2026. The ensemble has been featured on Ville Raasakka’s album “Coal, Wood, Oil”.