Ecognosis

Instrumentation | bass clarinet, bassoon, violin, viola, cello (can vary) and 5-10 transduced tam-tams,
Date | 2021
Duration | 15-25’
Premiere | Commissioned by the International Contemporary Ensemble as their Artist In Residence (2019-2021), premiered by the International Contemporary Ensemble at two locations simultaneously (due to COVID-19) at Roulette NY and Harpa Reykjavík for Dark Music Days 2021.

Simon Cummings for 5:4 - Caput Ensemble / International Contemporary Ensemble / Dark Music Days 2022

The composition that proved most compelling of all was presented in two forms, live and as an installation. Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir’s Ecognosis takes its title from a term coined by Timothy Morton to refer to a particular kind of ecological, specifically self-, awareness, described by Morton in this way:

It is like becoming accustomed to something strange, yet it is also becoming accustomed to strangeness that doesn’t become less strange through acclimation. Ecognosis is like a knowing that knows itself. Knowing in a loop—a weird knowing.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology, p.5

That phrase, “becoming accustomed to something strange”, is a good description for my own experience of beginning to get to know Bergrún’s music, since first contact at the Nordic Music Days in 2019. Her piece Ecognosis takes the sounds being made by a quintet of bass clarinet, bassoon, violin, viola and cello and channels them into an array of tam-tams dispersed throughout the space, both distant and up close to the audience. The nature of these transduced sounds exhibits another kind of strangeness in terms of their relation to the ensemble, sometimes resonating them as a clear source, but just as often becoming something oblique, the tam-tams appearing almost to breath and snort ominously, or ganging up to form dense networks of noise.

The entirety of Ecognosis was intoxicating, veering between episodes of achingly intimate chamber music (during which the tam-tams fell silent) and huge, hyperreal sonic expansions that saturated the hall, drowning us in reverberation, all the while progressing from a starting point of clear, almost-unison, pitch focus toward increasingly harsh distortions and clusters, before gradually finding its way back to that initial intimacy, ending in a soft echo of the wavering almost-unisons from which it began. This was the Dark Music Days at its most literal – Ecognosis is in almost every sense of the word “dark” music – but also at its absolute best: weird, mesmeric and gorgeous.

Simon Cummings for 5:4

“…an ambitious work by arguably Iceland’s most exciting and radically forward-looking composer of recent years, Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir. Ecognosis was composed in 2021, a work for bass clarinet, bassoon, violin, viola, cello and various transduced tam-tams. It was intended to be premièred at the Dark Music Days festival in 2021, but as that festival was cancelled due to the pandemic, it ended up as one of the multitude of online-only non-concert casualties that took place throughout that year, in April. As such, the members of the International Contemporary Ensemble performed in Roulette, New York, while the collection of tam-tams influenced by their playing was situated within the Norðurljós space in Harpa, in Reykjavík. The first public performance of Ecognosis, which i experienced, was nearly a year later, at the 2022 Dark Music Days.

The piece takes inspiration from Timothy Morton’s conception of ecognosis, defined as “like becoming accustomed to something strange, yet it is also becoming accustomed to strangeness that doesn’t become less strange through acclimation. Ecognosis is like a knowing that knows itself. Knowing in a loop – a weird knowing.” Snæbjörnsdóttir’s piece speaks as a fittingly strange relationship between a source (the ensemble), and a filtered reproduction (the tam-tams), though as the work progresses the tam-tams evidently do, and are, a lot more than simple resonators. What we hear is an engrossingly complex and intricate exploration of those most basic fundamentals of all music, pitch and noise, poles at each end of a continuum between clarity and unclarity. However, to say that the ensemble are all about the former, and the tam-tams the latter, is over-simplistic, as the aural experience is far more ambiguous than that. Furthermore, from my own experience – both listening to the work in situ as well as at home – Ecognosis doesn’t even feel as if such a polarisation as this is its main point.

The work’s narrative is fascinating from the outset, an intimate passing of pitch, one instrument to the next, in an act of sharing that already introduces microtonal shimmers and traces of overtones. Even before the tam-tams have really made their presence felt the players have reached what sounds like a “timbral pulse” (~4:06), a marvellous accelerating throb less about dynamic than the internal make-up of the sound itself. Octave displacements appear, more glimpses of overtones, whereupon the pitch focus becomes less and less centralised, a pivotal point that seems to work against the fluid continuity established through the first seven minutes.

In due course, as the tam-tams pulsate, all pitch content is steadily erased, and Ecognosis arrives at the other end of the continuum, in a complex, non-pitched noisescape. In what follows i hear something of Morton’s “becoming accustomed to strangeness that doesn’t become less strange”, in the way that loud, halting, strenuous outbursts from the ensemble mangle obvious pitch into a kind of noise-like non-noise (~12:00), in the way pitch subsequently becomes strained and unstable, fighting to speak (~14:16), in the subsequent intermingling of the instruments and tam-tams (~15:22), and in the eventual emergence beyond in an intense metallic sequence filled with an array of pitches (~17:01).

Pitch and noise may be poles on a continuum, but at no point through these sequences could we be said to be at just one particular point on that continuum; we’re in multiple places, or perhaps the continuum itself has been turned in on itself, becoming a non- or even anti-continuum. Distinctions have become blurred, as has the role of both the instruments and the tam-tams. All of which makes Ecognosis‘ denouement so logical: more unstable pitches speaking with increasing force and determination, surrounded by tam-tam clamour, before passing into a network of undulating, sliding notes, clashing yet also in sympathy with each other. Ostensibly a place of fragility, it reveals how Ecognosis has explored another, parallel continuum, beginning at one pole, in a place of united focus on a single note, ending at the other pole, a place of united freedom, the players related but individuated, in a lovely chorus of tam-tam-coloured calls and sighs.”