Blog: Building Heterochrony 2

Photo: Heli Sorjonen

In her series of blogs, TMF’s Artist-in-Residence gives the audience a closer look at the background to her 2024 concert trilogy and her process in preparing it. In the second issue, Barrière discusses Resonant Humours, which will be performed at the Hirvensalo Art Chapel on 13th August.

In Resonant Humours I wanted to create an experience of harmony. This concert brings together two worlds – that of Renaissance composer Tobias Hume and his Musicall Humours (originally written for viola da gamba) and the colorful writing of Kaija Saariaho (1952-2023) with her duo Concordia (literally “harmony” in latin).

Concordia was written for Jakob Kullberg and myself – after attending Jakob’s festival Open Strings in 2013, Kaija was inspired by our complicity playing chamber music despite our age gap. Concordia is a wonderful blend of her instantly recognizable musical language and our personalities. After the piece was completed, Jakob and I wanted to find something else to pair it with. We somehow started talking about a recording of Tobias Hume’s viola da gamba pieces Musicall Humours by Jordi Savall and wondered if we could arrange some of those pieces for violin and cello.

I made a suggestion of five pieces (with the arrangers in mind who, to my delight gravitated exactly to the pieces I expected them to!): we asked Kaija to contribute with one arrangement, while Jakob and I both arranged one as a duo and another one as a solo.

Touch me lightly, arranged by Kaija, truly has her delicate and personal touch, whereas Jakob’s arrangement of The Soldiers Resolution is both unruly and funny. My arrangement of Good Again strives for more historical influences (as I was 23 when I did the first draft and still soaking in academia) with written improvisation on a canvas of homely, colorful music.

The solo movements, A Question and An Answer still maintain the idea of a dialogue, yet in a reversal of roles. I often felt working with Jakob included a lot of him asking questions, so I decided it was time to switch it up!

The first movement of Concordia, Tuning plays around the idea of string instruments tuning to play in perfect harmony. Traveling, as its title indicates, is in constant movement violin and cello play a sort of ping-pong, running away from each other, although occasionally meeting in unison.

Mist was born as a self-caricature. When planning for the Open Strings festival, we related to Kaija that Jakob often used the word ‘atmospheric’ as a shorthand to describe Kaija’s slow movements when planning the flow of a concert. This amused her a lot, and thus Mist was born – carrying, in lieu of a tempo indication at the start – the word ‘atmosferico’.

Dual carries a lot of the humor our interactions with Jakob have. As you will hear, it is also quite jazzy!

Sursum corda brings this work to its brilliant finish. Starting with crushing waves and brilliance, the piece slowly evaporates. A last, fragile, celestial fragment reminds us of the fragility of the journey we went through, yet in a full catharsis, the instruments have now reached perfect harmony and become one with the air.