Very happy to see the work of Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson is appearing on more labels outside of the Traktorinn label in Iceland and his own home-produced CDRs. This Icelandic fellow has been represented on Carrier Records in the USA, but here he is now on Col Legno, the Austrian label and home of contemporary classical which has sometimes exhibited a taste for very severe and complex modernism.
Clavis Metrica (col legno WWE CD 20465) stems from an interest in poetry. The term is used by academics in assessing ancient Scandinavian and Norse epic poems; one example might be the Háttalykill inn forni, which (like the works of Homer) can’t really be attributed to a single author. It consists of a list of ancient and modern heroes and presumably describes their bold exploits. Certain scholars are interested in the forms of the stanzas; studies reveal how “each stanzaic pair displays one metrical peculiarity or verse-form” (from Skaldic.org) and it’s that kind of detail that might tell us something about the evolution of the authorship of this aspect of historic culture, the development of that specific verse form, and the writing skills of the author or authors.
It so happens Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson has also studied the form. The music today is inspired by Icelandic epic poetry (although it seems Clavis Metrica can also apply to Irish poetry), and Gunnarsson has devised his own innovative metrical format based on this ancient template. At one level, I suppose the composition emphasises rhythm and metre, but it’s a very idiosyncratic take. I think the main point is to build something very “flexible” and open-ended for the musicians to play; which fits entirely with the intuitive skills of this most human of composers. Even an untrained ear like mine can make it out; the rhythms here are as natural as breathing, not driven by strict tempo, metronomic structures, or beats to the bar scored ruthlessly on the page.
The Ensemble Adapter, a Berlin-based musical group, are the talented individuals who interpret and realise this work, playing flute, clarinet, harp, harmonica, and whistles; not too far away from the gentle, acoustic instrumentation we have heard on previous works by Gunnarsson. Three of the musicians play assorted forms of percussion, including rattles, and the 18 parts of the programme creak along in a beautifully rustic manner. Alongside the eccentric and halting rhythms, the gaps in the phrasing and the repeated short phrases also puts me in mind of Morton Feldman, although I realise I do make that comparison a lot. Matthias Engler (percussion) and Gunnhildur Einarsdóttir (harp) are the two founders of Ensemble Adapter; they are very open to international collaborative works, and we have heard them before in 2011 on A Guide For The Dead Through The Underworld composed by another Icelandic genius, Davíð Brynjar Franzson. (24/07/2025)