In The Shadow of A Giant

The strangest thing writing down these thoughts you are about to read, seems to be the fact, that nearly every aspect in the process of creating the musical adventure that is The Midnight Giant, now seems to be like coming from another epoch,… or rather: another dimension in time & space. 

But, I shall start from the beginning.

In early February I just had finished my studies at the conservatory in Mannheim, Germany and was in a time of transition between student- and working-life, as I recently got a part-time position for teaching music-theory and arrangement at a university of education. In between there opened up a perfect month-long time-window that made it possible for me to attend a course at the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity in Banff, Canada, which was one of the most incredible opportunities as a young composer I had so far.

The programs offered at the Banff Centre (and especially the Choral Art program with Pro Coro Canada) are very unique in their approach of making you forget every regular schedule your life outside Banff normally would have. I am myself not a full-time composer, but working – as most other musicians I know are doing – in very diverse contexts of musical creation. As said, I am teaching music theory & arrangement, conducting a choir besides working as a arranger and composer. So my own thinking about music is very much determined by the setting I am currently working in, but of course all those aspects influence each other. For this reason, coming to the Banff Centre in the beginning of 2020 was kind of a strange thing to do, as I had to leave all those other activities behind for a month and start a new way of living (at least for a short time). It is a rare opportunity for me as a composer really being able to exclusively concentrate on the aspect of musical composition without having to take care of anything else.

The Choral Art-program started by just overwhelming everyone with new impressions with an intensity you can not even begin to process in the course of being exposed to them. One source which they were coming from were (of course) the incredible other participants taking part in this master-class (which are some of the most inspiring and creative, humble and loving people I have ever met). But of course the other big part of inspiration was carefully planned ahead by the staff of Michael Zaugg, Sven Helbig & Lone Larsen, all of which offered us insight and room for experiments in composition, conducting, singing, improvisation, electronics, choreography, theatre-pedagogy and as well: a time to reflect our experiences as a group. Only this unique combination of leaving our daily routine behind and being constantly blasted at with creative impulses made it possible to develop a piece of music of this scale in just 7 days (The Midnight Giant after all is a 8 minute long piece for six-part choir & live-electronics).

[Pro Coro Canada in concert in Banff at the award-winning Choral Art Program]

Now, as you noticed, I started this blog-post with some time-related metaphors and I will continue going into that direction: After arriving at the Calgary Airport in the middle of the night on a heavily delayed flight from Frankfurt, Germany, the concept of time seemed to be – of course caused by the jet lag – rather obscure to me, as I sat on a bus, driving through the snowy darkness ever deeper into the Rocky Mountains. After two hours or so the bus stopped in front of a massive wooden hotel, and so my delirious first thought was: „They brought me directly to Twin Peaks“ (as I had just started re-watching the television series created by David Lynch in the month before coming to Canada). This observation may as well have sprung from my total lack of knowledge of rural Canada (it was the first time ever for me being in Canada at all!) but it might also have to do with the fact that the series is set just five miles south of the Canadian border between America and Canada. But of course it was not the mighty Great Northern hotel of Twin Peaks the bus-driver dropped me off but the Professional Development Centre of the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity.

After settling into my new schedule I started working on one of the main tasks the composers had in the first week: Developing musical ideas to test them with the incredible singers of Pro Coro Canada. This kind of opportunity is rare to be found as a composer, because usually you only get to work with the ensembles performing your music after everything is written/set in stone. So normally the changes made after the first rehearsals with a professional ensemble are rather small. But not in Banff! We had the possibility to test ideas with the amazing choir first, before we even started working on the pieces we were about to write.

As I previously had been brought to Twin Peaks in a rather strange and jet-lagged dream, it seemed obvious to me, that I had to use a quote from that very series, reflecting my own state of mind:

I believe I was visited by a giant last night.
Twice.

[Carel Struycken’s Giant frequently appeared to Agent Dale Cooper as a vision in ABC’s Twin Peaks]

It is uttered by Agent Dale Cooper, an investigator of the FBI, after he receives some strange and cryptic clues by a giant, which appears to him in visions at night. The giant shows up the first time right after Cooper has been shot in his hotel room. In a way, he seems to be a messenger between the supernatural and the real world and always appears in an in-between-time of being awake and dreaming.

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[The first sketch of what would eventually become The Midnight Giant]

So my first draft for Pro Coro was entirely based on this quote, in which I used a rather reduced harmonic language, but added a certain weirdness, which came through the excessive use of glissandi. So basically every chord of the piece works like this: All singers are starting on a freely chosen (and very low) note, before they are gliding very fast into the next chord. The result is an effect which works a little bit like a fade-from-black in a movie. At first there is darkness. After some time you see blurred colors and light. And then, all of a sudden, you see everything as clear as daylight. So the poetic idea underlying all of this, was my attempt of trying to grasp the above mentioned state of being in-between of something. One thing that really worked well in my first draft were the one- and two-syllable words. Problems occurred with the words having more syllables, as it was difficult for me to put a glissando on them. So I realized, that I needed a text, that fit those criteria of containing only one- and two-syllable words. And so (as this state of being in-between of something interested me) I decided to write a text myself, which reflects on the idea of being exactly in the transition-process from being awake and being asleep (which of course is also the time, where the most absurd of all dreams are happening…).

The idea of a giant that reveals itself only at night, delivering a kind of obscured truth, struck me most in the above mentioned Twin Peaks-quote, so I decided to take this road to write my own text. This happened not because I think I am a very good writer, but out of the necessity of having all the creative freedom of completely changing the text in the composition-process when necessary (and of course: a longer poem with only one- and two-syllable words is not that easy to find either…). So the resulting lyrics are a very strange mix of ideas that have in common, that they are surreal visions of reality, describing a dreamlike and sort of otherworldly state:

At Night I am a Giant
Walking, Floating, Dancing, Falling.
Darkness
Fading inside my Heart.

My twisted fingers holding a veiled purple log.

The first source of inspiration was – of course – the Twin Peaks-giant. But even another unique character of the television-show made her way into my little poem: The Log lady. She has the habit of carrying a log in her arms with which she seems to have a psychic connection. Through this log she transmits emotional and moving visions to the above mentioned FBI agent Dale Cooper and seems to be sort of a counterpart to the giant in real life. Another facet of my Midnight Giant is based on the creature of the Forest Spirit in the Japanese anime-movie Princess Mononoke. The Forest Spirit is a deer-like creature with a human face, which transforms into a gigantic translucent humanoid during the night. Besides this strange behavior, it is also the protector of the forest (Below). And finally: the title. It is derived from a children's comic-book entitled Hilda and the Midnight Giant. The book revolves around the protagonist Hilda, a small girl, which lives together with her mother in a cottage surrounded by mountains and forests in a fictional version of 20th-century-Scandinavia. In this strange world with magical fjords and enchanted forests the line of the supernatural world and reality seem to be nonexistent. So, of course, while taking hour-long walks in the astonishingly beautiful mountains surrounding Banff, I could not help myself but feeling a little bit like Hilda, exploring her magical world.

The reason why I took that hour-long walks while having a deadline of creating a new piece of music until the end of the week, was of course exactly the process of creating it. And in this case: The creation of the electronic-part, which accompanies the choir. For the first time ever I worked exclusively with recorded material instead of programming everything in a digital environment. So basically everything you hear in the electronic-part is based on recorded sounds I collected while hiking in the Rocky Mountains around Banff. You may identify walking in the snow, ice blocks rubbing against each other, noisy wind, and the most prominent sound: a tree that fell over, creaking with every new blow of the wind grasping the treetop. So, in a way, a lot of the ideas contained in the text, the musical composition itself and of course the natural surroundings are reflected in each other and in the music that became The Midnight Giant.

But back to present time…

At the moment I find myself nearly full-time working on my teaching schedule, creating video-content for my students and working myself through the myriads of difficulties this new form of learning has to offer. And of course, my choir rehearses, like all the other choirs in the world, only via Zoom-meetings and works on its first virtual-choir-video (all of which requires a lot of new ideas to be an effective tool for creating music together). Do I find any real time for composing and arranging? Not at the moment.

So, basically everything that happened just a couple of months ago in Banff seems to be the complete opposite of the way I am working now. And: it seems rather strange to sit down and scribble down those thoughts in the current times, as all those things seem more distant than ever. But at the same time of course, this situation forces us to re-think and re-value all of the things that were possible in the past and in a way were never questioned (and maybe this little blog offers some idea on what that might be). So perhaps it is possible to reflect, what seems to be missing in this current situation, so we might artistically react to the changes that are forced upon us in the forthcoming future. After all: I really have not a clue on how my own art will change in the face of a global pandemic with a rising tendency of nationalistic thinking and violent racism, while at the same time we are facing the biggest climate-crisis in history.

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