Click here to see an excerpt of the finished piece with music and images combined.
There are those who expand boundaries and those who create new ones. Minneapolis composer Mike Olson’s new a cappella choral composition, Noopiming, places him among the innovators. Cognizant of many traditions while beholden to none, Olson has employed sophisticated technology in the service of his intuition to compose a twenty-minute work of protean power, dark-tinged beauty, and above all, of astonishing originality.
“Noopiming” is an Ojibwe word, meaning “in the north, inland, in the woods.” The title was chosen as a direct reference to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northern Minnesota. The evocative landscapes of this rugged border lakes area served as the inspiration and aesthetic focus of the piece. Noopiming embodies the primordial power and beauty of the natural world. Olson captures nature’s minute moment-to-moment changes in sound and environment with an eloquent grace born of acute attention to detail. Where much of his previous work has explored vastly differing soundscapes, Noopiming is a study in what can be done with a single timbre, that of the human voice. “I've written choral music in the past, but it's been about twenty years. My latest work, Incidental, took years to complete and was constructed using a wide variety of source material. In the case of Noopiming, I wanted to do the opposite. I intentionally limited myself to using unaccompanied singers exclusively as my instrumentation. I also limited the scope to a single movement with a tightly focused aesthetic vision.”
The path toward Noopiming has indeed been a long and circuitous one, though Olson’s interest in choral music is lifelong. Even while he played keyboards in jazz-rock bands, he was always involved in choirs. “I sang in choirs all through high school and in college as well.” Simultaneously, he studied all manner of composition at the University of Minnesota, his most influential teacher being Eric Stokes, who ultimately taught him freedom. “As a composition student in the late 20th century,” he explains, “it was the normal course of affairs for me to learn many compositional systems, and I’ve always enjoyed a wide variety of music, but eventually, my compositional methods came back around full circle to writing by ear. Of course now, my ear has been conditioned by my Classical training, but I'm still basically just trying to create music that feels right to me.” After a long period of more conceptual and performance-art pieces, he brought to fruition his working method of the past eight years. “It’s not really what you would think of as a system,” elucidates Olson. “I gradually adopted the approach of working with relatively short musical fragments – combining and reordering them in ways that sound good to me. This process has evolved over time and I've now refined it to the point where I feel I'm creating the purest most personal and complete musical expressions that I've ever been able to achieve.” His earlier fragment-based pieces used carefully selected excerpts from preexisting music as source material, which he then manipulated. He then moved on to creating his own custom source material, sometimes through the use of traditional music notation, but more often by means of graphic notation or verbal instructions for performers to follow. This material is then recorded and subjected to countless edits, reordering and other manipulations, creating entirely new structures and forms.
This is the approach used on Noopiming. Olson gathered eight singers—four female and four male—for a single recording session, during which all of the fragments were recorded. Olson guided the singers through the session, adjusting their interpretations of his instructions as needed in order to get the results he was looking for. “Sometimes, my instructions do not achieve the desired outcomes,” muses Olson, “but at other times, they produce results far beyond what I had anticipated, changing my conception of the piece in the process.”
Olson’s decision to employ only the human voice was a significant and intentional limitation, and a departure from some of his more recent works. What emerges is powerful indeed. Vowels and consonants taken from the word “Noopiming” converge, elide and create friction. The whole work brims with sublimated energy as Olson manipulates the eight voices so that the actual ensemble size becomes irrelevant. Solo voices emerge, swell and fade amidst glacial passages of powerfully soaring chords and multiregistral ensemble polyphony whose scope and texture morph in a series of slow swells and fades. If influences are to be heard, Ligeti, Penderecki and even Schoenberg are the closest points of comparison. Yet, Olson’s music bears only slight resemblance to theirs and leans toward a darker and more translucent beauty.
Despite the complexities of Noopiming’s construction and execution, it is on the emotional level that Olson hopes his work will have the greatest impact. “My highest goal as a creator of new music, is for my music to transcend the actual musical materials and methods employed in it's creation. It has to feel good to me – it has to feel right. In other words, 'it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing'. I hope that those who listen to this piece will be as immersed in it as I was during it's creation.” Noopiming’s success is due precisely to these transcendental qualities and it confirms Olson’s position as a unique voice in contemporary music.
- Marc Medwin
Noopiming is another in my recent series of fragment-based compositions. It's an a cappella choral piece, which consists of a single movement with a clearly defined aesthetic focus. The duration of the finished work is a little over 20 minutes.
I followed my usual fragment-based compositional process, in this case recording a group of eight singers performing various musical gestures, that I then went on to construct the finished piece from. The recording was done in the St. Paul Seminary chapel. This space was recommended by some of the singers. It sounds great and it's also visually stunning. The only problem with the space was that the air handling had NOT been shut off. I had arranged for this well in advance, but it didn't get done and nobody could do it for us at the time of the session. We had no choice but to go ahead and record. I've done a lot of work with the recordings in postproduction to clean up the noise. I also worked around it as I constructed the piece to make sure it's not evident. One interesting positive effect of the air handling noise has been that I've been able to use the very low frequency rumble, that is part of that noise, in some of the low, all male humming sections. It adds an otherworldly weight to their low rumbling clusters.
Noopiming is an Ojibwe word which translates as "in the North, inland, in the woods". All of the vocalizations in the piece use various constituent elements of this word, Noopiming, as their "text". The complete word was never sung in the recording session - only the separate parts of it. I like the idea of using this word because it reenforces my aesthetic focus of visualizing the landscape as a wild and natural place of great beauty, the way it would have looked long ago, before the arrival of Europeans. I've drawn on the deep personal feelings I have for the powerfully beautiful landscapes of far Northern Minnesota, as inspiration for the piece. I started out expecting the piece to have a more or less "beautiful" overall character, with a low, soft and amorphous underpinning of shifting clusters of indeterminant pitch, over which would be constructed specifically pitched, shifting and dissolving long sustained harmonic textures drawn from three distinct harmonic sonorities. Now that the piece is done, I can say that this is still somewhat true. The piece is at any given moment, beautiful, dark or darkly beautiful. It's coming out somewhat darker than I had anticipated, but that's OK. That's just the kind of material that I got out of the session. Most of the best sounding stuff is the darker stuff.
I'm happy to be working with the photographer, Dale Robert Klous on synching up some of his beautiful BWCA photographs with this piece. Of all the photographers who's work I reviewed, Dale's was the most suitable. Much of his work has a primordial quality that I found to be in keeping with the spirit of the piece. I'm looking forward to our collaboration and the synergy that an artful combination of these two mediums can create.
This activity is made possible in part by a grant provided by the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature from the Minnesota arts and cultural heritage fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008.
This project is also supported in part through Subito, the quick advancement grant program of the American Composers Forum.