Listen to This

by Alex Ross

  Although Björk disavowed the classical world at an early age, she never entirely detached from it. She has a good working knowledge of the twentieth-century repertory, and is happy to discuss the pros and cons of Morton Feldman, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Steve Reich. (“Minimalism is my abyss!” she says, meaning that she does not like it.) She has experimented from time to time with a direct pop-classical fusion: one version of her song “Cover Me” incorporates the dance of the shepherds from Messiaen’s La Nativité du Seigneur. Her most daring venture was to sing excerpts from Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire at the Verbier Festival, in Switzerland, in 1996. She sallied into high atonal Schoenberg at the invitation of the conductor Kent Nagano. “It was an amazing experience for me,” she recalled. “The songs left so much to the imagination of the singer—you know, they were originally written for a cabaret singer or an untrained singer like me. Kent Nagano wanted to make a recording of it, but I really felt like I would be invading the territory of people who sing this for a lifetime.”

  Medúlla, the successor to Vespertine, performs a typical Björkian maneuver, moving forward and looking backward at once. “Who Is It” and “Triumph of a Heart” are reassuring for those who cherish the big-time sensuality of Björk’s early work. Yet, with contrapuntal layerings of choral parts and tricky harmonies throughout, the record is perhaps Björk’s most “classical” and “composed” to date. The short interludes are not so much songs as studies in vocal texture, in the manner of Meredith Monk. But they are crucial to Björk’s conception of the album, forging the links among its diverse vocal styles, from Inuit throat-singing to African-American beat-boxing, with the “old-woman melodies” of Iceland still at the core. I had the sense that Medúlla was the realization of something that Björk had first imagined when she was still very young. “Sometimes after a long time you end up back where you started,” she told me while riding in the van in Brazil.

  After a while, the effort to find a place for Björk in the geography of popular, classical, art, folk, Icelandic, or non-Icelandic music seems fussy. What’s most precious in her work is the glimpse that it affords, in flashing moments, of a future world in which the ideologies, teleologies, style wars, and subdivisions that have so defined music in the past hundred years slip away. Music is restored to its original bliss, free both of the fear of pretension that limits popular music and of the fear of vulgarity that limits classical music. The creative artist once more moves along an unbroken continuum, from folk to art and back again. So far, though, this utopia has only one inhabitant.

  Two months after her trip to Brazil, Björk went to London to oversee the mixing of Medúlla. She settled into Olympic Studios, in Barnes, a quiet neighborhood south of the Thames. First, Mark Bell came in to co-produce four of the songs, and he worked his ambient magic on them, processing the voices in ways that sometimes rendered them unrecognizable. The mixing itself was handled by another eminence grise of English electronica, Mark (Spike) Stent, who has worked with Björk since the time of Post. The control room overlooked a not very glamorous English back garden. Adjoining the studio was a converted greenhouse, which had warmed to a boil on this sunny day. Björk sat on a swivel chair behind a ten-foot-wide mixing console. Two candles were burning in front of six speakers on top of the board.

  The songs had rapidly evolved since I had last heard them, in a studio in downtown Manhattan the previous month. The session with Beyonce had fallen victim to scheduling problems, but the beatbox crew—Rahzel and Dokaka—had reported for duty and heated up the sound. If the Icelandic choral singers and Tagaq demonstrated the voice’s power to imitate nature, the beatboxers showed its power to imitate technology. A “human beatbox” is a hip-hop performer who mimics beats, turntable scratches, and other electronic effects when the equipment itself isn’t available. Rahzel is considered the heavyweight of the art, and provides much of the album’s bass end. Dokaka, a Japanese-born beatboxer, lets loose rapid-fire noises in the middle range. You could also now hear Mike Patton growling incisively beneath the opening line of “Where Is the Line.” “Yeah, now it’s got some balls,” Björk said when Patton’s voice butted in.

  “Who Is It” had become a trouble spot. Björk’s idea of having the grand, brash anthem emerge from a mist of Icelandic choral harmony wasn’t panning out. The “long version” of the song sat uncomfortably with the music around it. The minor-key radiance of “Vökuró” was sufficient to anchor the album in the Nordic idea. Instead, “Who Is It” wound down with what sounds like tones of a wheezy old organ: it’s actually a sample of Björk’s voice played on a keyboard. The Afro-Brazilian drummers also fell to the wayside, hopefully to see the light of day on one of Björk’s archival collections, although you can still hear a ghost of their rhythms in the beatboxing on “Mouth’s Cradle.” There was even talk of cutting the track “Desired Constellation,” on the ground that its softly chiming electronic production, by the Frenchman Olivier Alary, was too Vespertine-like in mood. “It doesn’t fit into the concept,” Björk said. “But you cannot always be locked into the concept. You have to kick your way out of it sometimes.” The fact that everyone who heard it went into a trance swayed Björk toward including it after all.

  On “Mouth’s Cradle,” Björk was unhappy with the recorded quality of the Icelandic singers. “The chorus should be more in the middle of the mix, not in the background,” she told Spike. “More earthy, more scruffy.” She drew three diagrams to illustrate what she wanted. The first one was a box with a line straight across the middle. “This is the convention,” she said. “Voices this much, beats this much. Now here”—she drew a second diagram, with a thin band labeled “Björk” at the bottom—“this is Vespertine, where I was whispering, not taking up too much space in the mix. Finally”—she made a box with a broad ellipse in the middle—“this is what we want now. The voices taking the place of guitars, drums, et cetera.” Spike studied the diagram with a baffled look. It was cogent in itself, but he seemed unsure how to convert it into sound. “I’m just a little worried,” she added. “I’m not trying to be negative. The one thing I’m not so crazy about …”

  Recordings were mobilized to back up her diagram. Björk mentioned Ariel Ramirez’s Misa Criolla, an Andean folk-song setting of the Mass, in which the chorus has a raw, penetrating edge. Mark Bell downloaded the music from the Internet, but in that version the chorus sounded tame. Eventually, someone found the original recording at Björk’s flat. This was played and discussed. Björk brought her iBook laptop into the studio in order to play other music files from her MP3 library. A whirlwind tour of modern and ancient music followed: a track or two from Meredith Monk’s Dolmen Music; the Hamrahlid Choir singing the doleful Christmas carol “Maríukvæi”; the veteran avant-garde vocalist Joan La Barbara and the former Soft Machine drummer Robert Wyatt singing pieces by John Cage. The really dizzying moment came when Björk followed thirty seconds of Justin Timberlake singing “Rock Your Body” with thirty seconds of Stockhausen’s Stimmung.

  “It’s very simple,” Björk said. “A little Justin, a little Karlheinz. But not world music. And not pop, and not avant-garde, and not classical, and not church music. Don’t you see? Kind of—” She gave out a soft roar, with her hand held out in a stylized gesture.

  “Slavic?” Spike asked.

  “Exactly,” Björk said. “‘Slavic’ is the word. But wi’ a li’l bit of David Beckham.” David Beckham’s allegedly troubled marriage to Victoria (Posh Spice) Beckham was all over the British tabloids at the time, and Björk professed to find the story riveting.

  “Right,” Spike said, light dawning in his face. “I think I’m getting the vibe. All these things have a really natural sound in the vocal. A single voice in a natural room, like an old hall or a cathedral.”

  “No church!” Björk shouted.

  “Right, no church,” Spike said. He turned to one of his assistants and said, “Order me a TC 6000.” The TC 6000, Valgeir told me, is a reverb device that allowed Spike to a
dd spatial effects to the voices without upsetting the balance.

  Björk played the entire exchange for laughs, but, as usual, she was driving at something serious and specific. Afterward, she talked more about her “Slavic” idea. “I use words like ‘pagan’ sometimes,” she said. “But these are things I say just to get something across, not because I have a picture in my head. But there is a feeling. A feeling I carry around in me, and that I really want to put at the center of this album. Kind of like folk music, but without any folk attached.”

  She asked me for a definition of the word “iconoclastic.” Remembering lessons from Greek Orthodox Sunday school, I said that it was a radical movement within the Church to end the use of icons, any visual representation of Jesus. Björk looked a little disappointed. “OK,” she said. “Someone told me it meant not only smashing icons but also forming new ones to take their place. Making your own icons to replace the old.”

  There were a few more major changes in the weeks to come. Björk recorded a throaty song called “Submarine,” with Robert Wyatt, at his home. She worked out a piano-vocal version of “Oceania,” the Olympic song, with the young New York-based composer Nico Muhly; then she decided once again to stick with the concept and use electronically tweaked choral voices. There was some last-minute polishing by Mark Bell. But, for the most part, Medúlla was complete, and Björk seemed cautiously elated with her work.

  On the last night I was in London, Matthew Barney came to the studio. He sat down with headphones to hear what Björk had done. Isadora, their daughter, played with wooden blocks representing the animals of Noah’s Ark. Mark Bell cranked up music on the speakers, to compete against the sound of a hard spring rain drumming on the roof. Björk began dancing slowly around the room with her child in her arms. “The pleasure is all mine,” the composer sang, “to finally let go.”

  9

  SYMPHONY OF MILLIONS

  CLASSICAL MUSIC IN CHINA

  In the spring of 2008, Chen Qigang, a Chinese composer who was supervising the music program for the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, received a National Spirit Achievers Award at a press event in Beijing. He was one of ten artists and businesspeople to receive the prize, which came courtesy of the Chinese magazine Life and of Mercedes-AMG, the high-performance-vehicle division of Mercedes-Benz. The award ceremony, typical of modern China in its mixture of nationalist bombast, materialist excess, and cultural bizarrerie, took place in the 798 art zone—a cavernous factory complex that has been converted into exhibition space. Four AMG vehicles were on display, surrounded by models clad in silver-lamé outfits, in presumably inadvertent homage to Goldfinger. Projected on the walls and the ceiling of the factory were the words “Will,” “Power,” and “Dream,” with Chinese characters to match. “We believe that Mercedes-AMG will infuse powerful new vigor into China’s national car culture,” Klaus Maier, the head of Mercedes-Benz China, said. Chen stood to one side, a quizzical expression on his face. Before the ceremony began, he had said to me, “I have no idea what is happening.”

  While classical musicians around the world yearn for a glint of media attention, their counterparts in China have no trouble drawing the spotlight. Western classical music is big business, or, at least, official business. Chen Qigang, a mild-mannered man whose works elegantly synthesize Western-modernist and traditional Chinese elements, had been reminded of this the previous year, when he moved from Paris, where he had resided since 1984, back to Beijing, where he had lived during the Cultural Revolution. In a conversation at his Beijing apartment, he recalled the world of his youth as a repressive, barbaric place, where classical music was forbidden. Then, in Paris, he had grown accustomed to a culture in which the same small cohort of connoisseurs attended new-music concerts night after night. On a visit to Beijing in 2007, Chen was summoned to meet the film director Zhang Yimou, who made Hero and House of Flying Daggers, and who was in charge of the Olympic ceremonies. Zhang inquired if Chen had any “free time” in 2008. The next day, the composer met with Olympic officials, who asked him to cancel future plans. Chen agreed, and accepted an offer to run the music program, not only because he felt official pressure but because he relished the challenge of directing a retinue of fifty composers, from both classical and popular genres, to entertain a global audience. In America, he noted, no classical composer would be given such a task.

  “For the past fifteen or twenty years, classical music has been very à la mode in China,” Chen told me, in French. “The halls are full. There are many students. There might also be some difficulties. But there is a very powerful phenomenon at work in the education system. When I visited my old primary school, I found that, out of a class of forty students, thirty-six were studying piano. This points to the future.”

  Western musicians, administrators, and critics who visit China have lately come away murmuring observations along the lines of “classical music is exploding” and “the future of classical music lies in China.” Between thirty million and a hundred million children are said to be learning piano, violin, or both, depending on which source you consult. When the New York Philharmonic came to Beijing in February 2008, the Associated Press offered this summary of a press conference given by Lorin Maazel: “Facing dwindling popularity in the West, classical music could find its savior among China’s large population that is increasingly interested in other cultures, the music director of the New York Philharmonic said.”

  After a visit to Beijing, I had some doubts about China’s putative lock on the musical future. Concert halls may be full and conservatories mobbed, but classical music is hobbled by commercial and political pressures. The creative climate, with its system of punishments and rewards, still resembles that of the late-period Soviet Union, which heavily influenced the development of China’s musical institutions. At the same time, the sonic landscape of Beijing is as chaotically rich as that of any Western city: nights of experimental fare, indie-rock shows soaked in hipster attitude, pop idols cavorting on HD monitors in malls, retirees singing Peking opera in parks. In the Li Chi, or Book of Rites, it is written, “The music of a well-ruled state is peaceful and joyous … that of a country in confusion is full of resentment … and that of a dying country is mournful and pensive.” All three kinds of music, together with others that might well have confounded Confucian scholars, intersect in the People’s Republic.

  The most outwardly impressive symbol of China’s musical ambition is the National Center for the Performing Arts, a colossal, low-slung, titanium-clad dome west of Tiananmen Square. Representations of the well-ruled state surround it: the Great Hall of the People is next door, and Zhongnanhai, the Party-leadership compound, lies across the avenue. An inscription above the center’s entrance bears the signature of Jiang Zemin, who was China’s president from 1993 to 2003, and who made a show of admiring classical music. (After the death of Deng Xiaoping, Jiang told the press that he had consoled himself by listening to Mozart’s Requiem through the night.) The president of the center, which Beijingers call the Egg, is a local potentate named Chen Ping, who has developed deluxe shopping malls in the eastern part of the city. The complex was originally scheduled to open in 2004, but Paul Andreu, the architect, had to reevaluate the design after another of his projects, a terminal at Charles de Gaulle International Airport, partially collapsed. When the building finally opened, at the end of 2007, Chen Ping described it as a “concrete example of China’s rising soft power and comprehensive national strength.”

  As architecture, the building may live up to its pompous billing, but, as a place for music, the Egg is problematic. There are two main halls: the opera house, which seats 2,400, and the concert hall, which seats 2,000. The concert hall has reasonably clear acoustics but lacks warmth. In the top gallery of the opera house, where the sound should be best, the orchestra comes across as tinny and colorless. There is little evidence that musical considerations played a role in the design. No serious acoustician would have approved the halls’ pockets of extra
space, where sound bounces around and gets lost.

  The performances themselves suffered in comparison with what you hear on even a so-so night in New York, London, Paris, or Berlin. They showed the inevitable limitations of a classical culture that is less than a century old and has been periodically roiled by political upheaval. China’s music-education system may yield notable soloists, but it has yet to develop the breadth of talent and the collaborative mentality that make for great orchestras. Strings are generally polished; winds and brass threaten to puncture the ears. On my first visit to the Egg, I saw a production of Turandot featuring the orchestra and the chorus of the Shanghai Opera House. The trumpets let out a piercing flubbed note in the first bar, and many misadventures followed; at times, it sounded as though a civic orchestra had been augmented by members of a college marching band. Yet the raucousness was oddly compelling. The idea of the production was to reclaim Puccini’s Italianized, Romanticized fantasy of imperial China; Chen Xinyi, the director, emulated the values of traditional Chinese theater, and the composer Hao Weiya supplied a fluid if somewhat watery ending for the opera, which Puccini left unfinished at his death. In that sense, the rawness of the sound added to the effect, though it wasn’t an experience I’d want to repeat.