You know why you are here
You have come to hear about the birds
How their song filled the summer mornings
And the evenings
They kept on and on and on
We can’t imagine that today:
Thousands of little creatures flying around, singing
Like stenographers spelling words
from an unknown language
And they kept repeating over and over
Because we didn’t understand
— Niels Rønsholdt
In Archive of Emotions and Experiences, Book 1: Birds The pianist is an oracle-like figure from an imagined future who records and archives human emotions and experiences before they are gone, and it is too late. The pianist tells the story of birds that in this imagined future scenario have long been extinct.
Archive of Emotions and Experiences is structured as a collection of many small single movements: miniatures put together in a conglomeration of related, but never completely identical movements.
The composer explains his fascination with the miniature format in the booklet of the album: “To me, this musical form reminds me of the display cases in a museum: many small objects are shown in them. Some may resemble each other, but come from entirely different places. And especially, that their presentation beside each other makes them interesting. It is the old way of keeping and showing them in this way which inspires me, as in historical museums. Transferring this image to music helps me to counter the classical idea of a single musical story with a large development arc.”
Find the album at Dacapo Records here >>
Find the score for Archive of Emotions and Experiences, Book 1: Birds here >>