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.