Kernel & Grit
Victoria Jordanova — harp, organ, electronics
Also on Pandora, Deezer, YouTube Music, Google Music Store, iHeartRadio and Tidal.
Jordanova’s seventh studio album is a diptych: a six-movement suite for harp and electronics, and a single-movement work for organ and electronics, recorded on a damaged eighteenth-century instrument in Mexico.
Musical storytelling can be about the creative potential of something as humble as an unwatered seed or a layer of dust. Jordanova presents us with a pair of pieces that reveals the transformative within the deceptively minimal.
John Dante Prevedini, Classical Music Daily
Tracks
Kernel for harp and electronicsDormancy · Germination · Shoots · Summer · Wilting · WinterGrit for organ and electronics
- Catalogue number
- AV 012CD
- Released
- August 21, 2021
- Format
- Digital · limited edition CD
- Recorded
- Grit at Santa Prisca, Taxco, Guerrero, Mexico
- Duration
- About 57 minutes
Meeting Victoria Jordanova in person is an experience in cosmopolitan style, elegance, and sophistication. The woman is also serious and purposeful without being dour or humorless. Jordanova is a native of Serbia and a long-time resident of the United States, becoming a citizen in 2000. Her worldview has been shaped by an international career and informed by contemporary politics and culture.
Those same qualities and concerns are reflected in Jordanova’s body of work as a harpist, composer, and media artist. Requiem for Bosnia, her 1992 breakthrough debut as a composer, was a somber and urgent essay for broken piano, harp and child’s voice. As with the Requiem, there’s also a haunted soul in her homage to the fallen of 9/11, titled Outer Voices. In other projects, Jordanova puts aside tragedy and mortality and instead dusts off older musical forms, in pieces like Short Attention Span Symphony, New York Love Songs, and Piano Sonatina.
The two selections on Jordanova’s latest CD continue in her characteristic sound world, an evocative studio mix of harp, field recordings and electronics. What’s new in the main work, Kernel, is that her programmatic focus goes green. While it’s not exactly true that her past works are all about city life, there’s often a feel of urban sophistication, plus the aura of electronics tends to suggest modern and temporal concerns. By contrast, the six movements of Kernel progress through the seasonal life cycle of a plant.
Jordanova’s self-awareness and understated humor come through when she remarks: I’m a typical urban person who loves to escape to nature, loves other people’s gardens, and finds plants intriguing. As an observer with a certain distance, she comes up with a fresh reframing of the relationship between nature and music. Rather than fashion something that’s about the pleasures of meadows and forests, she examines the biology of it all and posits that the vibrational structure of a musical pitch is parallel to the genetic growth of a plant.
While taking a walk recently, I began comparing pitches with seeds, says the composer. Similar to how a seed is a capsule containing the genetic material of the plant, roots, stems, leaves, and flowers, the fundamental in music is comprised of all its overtones, as its sound is defined by all of the component frequencies of a vibrating string.
Overtones, also known as harmonics or partials, aren’t new ground for harpists. Yet according to Jordanova, performers are seldom called on to use anything beyond the first harmonic, usually referred to as at the octave. It’s also possible to get three additional harmonics on the longer harp strings, which sound the partials at an octave and a fifth, an octave and a seventh, and two octaves above the fundamental. This is the realm, the rising leaves and flowers of sound, where Jordanova mostly dwells in Kernel.
The construction of each movement began with an informed improvisation, meaning that she gave herself some preset parameters before starting, including the particular key, electronic setup, and the gestures or small sounds that would be the starting point of the music. After the recording came more electronic processing. The fifth movement, Wilting, is the only section with no post-production editing or sound treatments, the echo and distortion effects all being made in real time. The final movement, Winter, departs from the emphasis on harmonics and is built from multiphonics, the generation of multiple pitches from a single attack on the instrument.
Harpists are no more conservative than other instrumentalists, but they don’t think about their instrument the same way as I do. Being a composer means you are interested in new things, open-minded to adventures in music, says Jordanova. She cites John Cage and Igor Stravinsky as two of her favorite gurus, because they looked beyond the standard parameters of how instruments can be used and thereby found new sounds fostering new growth. Challenges make us more creative or more imaginative because they inspire us to stretch the limits or go around the obstacles. I think that both the composer and the gardener should keep their wisdom in mind. Growth is possible from all kinds of seeds.
Grit, the companion work on this disc, represents Jordanova’s return to working with the new and unpredictable sounds of a distressed instrument, in this case a pipe organ. The site was the church of Santa Prisca in Taxco, in the state of Guerrero, Mexico. Built in the late eighteenth century, the imposing structure is in a traditional and ornate style with two bell towers, and is considered a world monument. By the late twentieth century, some of the walls and plaster were in decay due to the vibrations from earthquakes, local mining, and automobile traffic. Substantial falling debris landed in the pipes of the resident organ. Some would consider this a tragedy, but to Jordanova it was an opportunity.
I played on this organ a little the first day of my visit and was fascinated by its distorted sounds. The next day, a priest was very surprised by my request but kindly permitted me, despite my foolishness, to sample its sounds. Her visit happened to coincide with Semana Santa, Holy Week, the most sacred period of the Christian calendar, culminating with Easter Sunday.
Seated at the organ console, Jordanova experimented with the keyboards, pedals, and stops, and found the results enchanting. Meanwhile, the people were flocking into the church. The Nahuatl people were dressed in their beautiful folk attire, and other people were dressed in their Sunday best. Some were praying, some listening, and some whispering, wondering what were those strange sounds.
Grit is a searing collage of sounds collected in those public sessions. Ambient noise from the worshippers was not edited or filtered out, and only sounds recorded at Santa Prisca were included in the final mix. Given the circumstances of the generative material, the grit of the title is self-evident. But for Jordanova, there’s a larger theme to the work.
The grit in the pipes also represents the grit people get. We are fed words, beliefs, ideas, and prejudices from stupid and dangerous politicians, priests, and technocrats. All that is the distortion of the truth. The true organ sound is to be found somewhere underneath. But is the organ ever going to be restored?
— Joseph Dalton
A former classical music record producer, Joseph Dalton arrived in upstate New York in 2002 and plunged into writing about the far-flung arts scene. He has twice received the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for music journalism, in 2004 and 2010, and took a first-place award from the New York State Associated Press for arts and entertainment writing in 2005. Dalton has also contributed to Time Out New York, The Advocate, Opera News, American Record Guide and Symphony, and to the websites NewMusicBox and Musical America.
Victoria Jordanova is a composer, harpist, and media artist. She has a tightly controlled focus to her work, melding experimental techniques, electronics, and improvisation with her classical music education, described as a singularity of vision by NewMusicBox.
Jordanova’s music is informed by an international career, by the San Francisco and New York alternative and avant-garde music environment, and by contemporary politics and culture. She has released six albums on the CRI, Innova, and Arpaviva labels, with her music included in Forty Years of Discovery, the CRI anniversary anthology of American music.
In the US she has performed at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, Merkin Concert Hall, MoMA, LACMA, the Yerba Buena Forum, and other venues. Her large-scale multidisciplinary work Panopticon was supported by a grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission.
Abroad, she was awarded a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and was composer-in-residence at the Bogliasco Foundation in Genoa, Italy. She has performed at the Cité Internationale des Arts, the Gubbio Music Festival in Italy, the Festival de Gargilesse in France, and in recital at the Bogliasco Foundation.
Her work has been described as strange and fascinating, very personal and delicate, full of great imagination by Jan de Kruijff in Musicalifeiten, Netherlands, and as still very beautiful in a traditional sense by Tim Page in Newsday. In 2002 Jordanova founded Arpaviva Recordings, a Los Angeles-based independent music and media label.
The title Kernel & Grit suggests a story behind the music. What would you like listeners to know about these pieces?
Yes, this album has a story; it’s programmatic. Kernel is a six-movement suite for harp and electronics. It is about nature, but it’s more about the similarity between the biology of a seed and musical pitches than about pretty flowers and meadows with brooks. The first track is Kernel, or Zrnevlje, one of those succulent Serbian words best pronounced by grinding the consonants and vowels together in your mouth. Try it: Zher-nhev-lyhe.
The music on the first track is like a seed, or a capsule, containing the genetic material of the plant: roots, stems, leaves, and flowers. The music is composed of the fundamental pitch, the overtones, and all of the component frequencies of a vibrating string. Kernel uses various overtones, percussive harmonics, and multiphonics on the harp.
On Grit, the last piece on this album, I recorded my playing on an eighteenth-century organ in the famous Santa Prisca church in Guerrero, Mexico. Plaster and fine dust had filled the organ pipes of this glorious instrument and created magnificent sound distortions. Perhaps you can imagine how blessed I felt when, years ago, I walked into that sacred sound space during one of my sweaty and dusty road experiences. It was just last year that I finally composed Grit using those recordings from that damaged organ, processing the sounds electronically. Those recordings, behaving as any other good seeds do, grew into a composition.
Tell us about a place in the world that had a significant impact on your art.
Every city I have lived in has brought me meaningful experiences, and often those experiences were different from what I had expected. But of all places, my time in San Francisco was the most unexpected. The city had one of the greatest impacts on my music and creative work. It brought a big shift in my perspectives, which had been shaped during my years in Paris, where I studied harp.
And speaking of an impact: one day a piano fell down a flight of stairs in front of me and broke into pieces. This event led me to create a piece for piano, harp, and child’s voice. After that, it felt natural to stop performing classical music and focus on composing and recording my own music. I also began to meet and improvise with some of the best musicians in the alternative music scene. During that time I learned about and incorporated electronic sounds into my work. This gave me a whole new direction in which to explore different ideas in music.
What does a perfect day look like to you?
Everything depends on how I feel about my creative work, which sometimes feels like work and not so creative. So, back to your question: let’s say on a good day, I’d make coffee early in the morning and sit on the bench in our garden, watching the sun play different colors on wet grass like shiny powdery glass. I’ll think of some idea, something that may take me to a new point in my composition if I do it right now. With that thought, I would go to my studio with the coffee, in my pajamas, and work. And if things start happening, a most splendid, gratified feeling would arise. Following that, I would have a day on the beach with sweet peaches and melon and a really, really good book. I would swim in the ocean with Relja and Annie, our canine grandchild, who also loves the waves.
John Dante Prevedini, Classical Music Daily
Arpaviva’s new release, Kernel & Grit, is a diptych of two electroacoustic works written and recorded by the US-based Serbian-born composer-performer Victoria Jordanova during the past year. The first is Kernel for solo harp and electronics, a six-movement programmatic work of about forty-five minutes exploring the archetypal life cycle of a seed. The second work is Grit for organ and electronics, a single-movement work of about thirteen minutes recorded using an eighteenth-century instrument in Mexico that was apparently selected for its disrepair. The liner notes explain that the work’s title refers to plaster dust from the church’s walls that gradually collected inside the pipes over the centuries, distorting the instrument’s sound. Jordanova performs on both instruments herself.
Both of the works presented, as well as each of the six individual movements within Kernel, convey a phenomenal structure characterized above all by an emphasis on singularity. This can be seen within multiple dimensions: the descriptive single-word titles, the use of a single pool of sonic materials to construct each movement, and the unification of solo instruments and electronics into a kind of single meta-instrument for each work. By focusing our attention on one sustained, carefully crafted, and symbolically contextualized gestalt at a time, Jordanova presents us with a pair of pieces that reveals the transformative within the deceptively minimal.
We begin with Kernel, whose inner movement titles provide a vivid programmatic structure: Dormancy, Germination, Shoots, Summer, Wilting, and Winter. This scaffolding of symbolic contextualization encourages us to listen for sonic representation of the titular kernel within each movement, and thereby discover the seed’s natural life cycle across the six movements. Movement one, Dormancy, presents us with a slow tapestry of bowed notes on the harp that gradually reveal an unfolding B-Lydian scale through fundamental tones and harmonics.
In movement two, Germination, this harmonic and timbral material is transformed into quicker textures of cascading muted plucked notes in the higher registers, suggesting the falling of raindrops. In movement three, Shoots, this texture of high-register plucked notes is transformed yet again by slowing the tempo and replacing the scalar runs with individual unmuted notes that are bent through slide glissando. Meanwhile, lower notes and harmonics remain present, linking this movement to the previous two through an element of thematic continuity.
Movement four, Summer, sees this open and resonant timbre of the plucked harp’s upper registers transformed into very quick scalar runs that blend diatonic and chromatic harmonies. In movement five, Wilting, the tempo slows, the upper registers give way to lower registers, the harmony straddles parallel major-minor relations, and the overall character of the music becomes darker and more dramatic. Finally, the sixth movement, Winter, takes the material from the fifth movement and transforms it into something more analogous to what we heard back in movement one. We are once again in the territory of very slow and spacious harmonics played on the lower notes of the harp, but here the notes are plucked rather than bowed, and the implied scale has apparently shifted to B-flat Phrygian instead of B-Lydian. Thus, by the end of all six movements of Kernel, we are left with the impression that the plant has lived its life; all that remains is the next generation of seeds, to be left dormant until the next cycle of germination.
In the final piece, the single-movement Grit, a series of sustained chords played on the historic organ are electronically made to fade in and out from silence, separated by register and degrees of dissonance and organized into phrases that seem to breathe naturally in terms of formal structure. The unique dissonances of the instrument are quite striking and clearly reflect the cumulative effect of plaster dust on the organ’s tuning. Meanwhile, the contrasting brief consonant harmonies are striking for the opposite reason; the major triadic sonorities seem even more pure and acoustically stable than those possible in modern standard tuning, something which I imagine could be explained by an original eighteenth-century temperament system remaining partially intact on the instrument. In any case, the music struggles triumphantly under the pull of these two harmonic worlds over the course of thirteen minutes, revealing a vast kaleidoscope of sympathetic and antagonistic relationships between the audibly gritty and the pristine.
In both Kernel and Grit, Jordanova draws upon a wide range of techniques, both acoustic and electronic, to craft the sonic space the pieces inhabit. Overtones, bowing, muting, and the natural detritus of a centuries-old musical space all contribute to a sophisticated acoustical palette which is further enhanced by present-day audio editing technology. Yet Jordanova’s approach to the electronics is surprising in its subtlety, being free of any of the obvious electronicisms, if I may use such a phrase, that we might normally expect from a composer employing audio processing to liberate acoustic solo instruments from the confines of their natural sound worlds. Nor do the electronics function as a synthetic contrasting voice in a duet with the instruments. Here they simply facilitate and augment the exposition of the instruments’ own sound worlds through the judicious use of basic sampling, panning, and layering functions. In this way, the electronics emphasize the rich singularities of the solo instruments rather than create a sense of dualities with them.
Over the course of the two pieces on this release, Victoria Jordanova reminds us vividly that musical storytelling does not need to be a matter of taking us across distances. It can be about plunging us into the depths of the singular. It can be about savoring the contradictions, complexities, and paradoxes hidden within the minuscule. It can be about the creative potential of something as humble as an unwatered seed or a layer of dust.
Copyright © 28 September 2021 John Dante Prevedini, Connecticut, USA
All tracks composed and performed by Victoria Jordanova
Digital sampling, editing, and mixing by Victoria Jordanova
Mastering by Hans DeKline
Album art and design by Relja Penezic
Photos by Relja Penezic ©2021
Executive Producer: Peter Vukmirovic Stevens
