Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s latest E.P. Enigma is a thoughtful, imaginative soundscape of liminal and transitional tones— transforming, floating, breathing collectively in a cosmic universe.
It’s not an easy world to understand. In all honesty, contemporary classical music rarely is, and even my “classically trained” ears aren’t going to sit here and try to convince you otherwise. But the power of Thorvaldsdottir’s string quartet reveals itself when the listener surrenders to its intimate and expansive world of sound, its poignant exploration of the gray spaces in-between.
Since the start of the pandemic, uncertainty has become the new normal and our minds have learned how to teeter on the edge of hope and despair, within the limbo of what is and what could’ve been. The gray areas have become familiar territory.
When light turns to dark and objects are obscured by shadows and human consciousness becomes disorienting, ambiguous, and strange, the relationship between conflicting states – night versus day, hallucination versus reality, fragment versus totality – comes to the forefront. For Icelandic composer Thorvaldsdottir, expressing this gray space through music just makes sense. She plays on the complicated identity of the contemporary classical genre to illuminate the beauty of conflicting states and the relationships between them. What results is a hyper fixation on entirely new entities that we didn’t know were there in the first place.
Enigma blossomed out of the puzzling nature of the 2017 “Great American Eclipse:” the first total solar eclipse with an exclusive path of totality in 14 states in the United States since 1918. Though the culmination of the solar eclipse was a beautiful glow, the underlying beauty of this anomaly comes from the momentary passing stages, the relationship between the sun, the moon, and the transitional phases in-between. And Thorvaldsdottir’s Enigma expresses these natural states of limbo sonically.
When I first listened to Enigma, I was home alone, imagining the eclipse outside my bedroom window. The music felt close, so much so, it made me introspective. My imagination was free to roam, reveling in an atmosphere of haunting tones, thrusting me out of my own headspace and into Thorvaldsdottir’s cosmic world, which somehow managed to make uncertainty rather comforting.
Though the three-movement work is only 27 minutes long, the sonic experience is very much like an iceberg: a collection of distinct tones and motifs with vast, underlying texture.
The piece begins with a dry trembling, like the sound of buzzing insects but with a rustic, mechanical timbre. Like the low hum of a refrigerator or a machine, but breathing and expanding as a living organism. Thorvalsdottir describes this pitchless tremolo in the score as “white noise,” resembling film grain, or radio static, or a sensation of something more begging to come through. The perpetual state of in-between is subtle here, but riddled with tension, yearning for either a fully formed melodic line or total silence to emerge.
While white noise floods into dark sonorities, growing and ebbing in dynamics, sustained pitches are juxtaposed with static and grainy textures, captivating and suspending the listener in cosmos.
Then, in the vastness of outer space, a bird calls.
High pitched screeching and glissandos rapidly sweep from high to low registers. Harmonies become less distinct, bleeding into one another. Rich, low tones are held without quavering while higher voices are free to breathe. Though the separation of voices is clear during this moment, the lines between them have already started to blur.
The second movement begins with the fragments separating and colliding but in amplified ways, with overlapping pizzicato strings, low rumbling tones, screeches, howls, and sustained notes. The listener expects complete silence between these fragments, but is never given the satisfaction as overtones linger in the air before the next section begins again.
By the third movement, these motifs have become so familiar, the ear naturally perceives them as part of a larger soundscape, searching for new sounds and spaces to fill the void. With every new fragment, however, the ear is taken momentarily out of the whole and into an unstable transitional state of in-between. The tension continues in cyclical search for totality.
How appropriately enigmatic.
The piece ends as it began – in the unstable state of white noise. Oscillating between microtones, resembling the perpetual transitional state we find ourselves in or the abandoned place our mind goes to when we try to understand what we simply can’t.
Thorvaldsdottir’s first (and, so far, only) string quartet was introduced in 2019 as a performance by the GRAMMY-nominated Chicago based Spektral Quartet, co-commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts, Carnegie Hall, and Washington Performing Arts. The performance was accompanied by a sophisticated 360-degree video art by Icelandic innovative media artist Sigurdur Gudjonsson, projected onto the Adler’s Grainger Sky Theater. In a space like this, the motives for spectators entering a planetarium and a concert hall become the same: to experience the unknown.
Enigma was relevant in 2019. But given the timeless nature of classical and contemporary classical music, it is becoming increasingly relevant with the passing years. In August, Enigma was recorded by the Spektral Quartet and released as an album. It was named in the Top 10 classical albums of 2021 by NPR Music, in the Top 25 by the New York Times, and is scheduled to resume as an immersive concert experience in early April–performed, of course, by the Spektral Quartet.
The recorded version certainly misses out on a few things: for example, there’s no open space for sound to resonate in and it’s missing the energetic spontaneity that naturally comes from a live performance. Sure, this version may not be as elaborate or grandiose as the concert hall-planetarium experience, but it doesn’t have to be. With its humble simplicity, the E.P. offers something else: an intimate listening experience.
Thorvaldsdottir was born and raised in Bogarnes, a small town in Iceland between the mountains and the sea. Her music is often speculated to be inspired by the connections made between music, sound, and nature, like Icelandic glaciers, mountainous peaks, and lava fields.
According to Gramophone, Thorvaldsdottir imagines her music visually, drawing and mapping sounds out before notating the notes on a staff. The cover art for her album Rhizoma is one of these abstract sketches: squiggly lines in the background, like hills in the distance, and a tree at the forefront that stems roots and fraying branches longing toward the sky.
If Enigma was sketched out, I imagine it would look something like how the constellations look in a cosmic sky: a foreground of scattered broken lines attempting to complete a full circle, and specks of all shapes and sizes floating in the empty space. But what Thorvaldsdottir actually had in mind, we might never know.
I’ll be honest. My classically trained ears do struggle sometimes to surrender to the unpredictable nature of such puzzling soundscapes. I want to trust my ears to finish a melodic line. I want to know the music is building toward an epic climax or when it’s about to satisfy me with a resolving cadence. I want to know what to expect, and that it all makes sense somehow. While Western classical music exists within a kind of rigid framework that tells us why certain voices must resolve in a stepwise motion, or why it sounds right when a dominant chord leads to the tonic, contemporary classical ignores the rules, without offering an explanation for why something does or doesn’t make sense.
But maybe that’s the point of Enigma. It doesn’t have to make much sense.
When music intentionally fails to follow the rules of traditional harmony, structure, and tonality, we’re given a special opportunity to surrender to new worlds the sound takes us. And, with the form of a string quartet (arguably one of the more traditional, sacred, classical forms to exist) the stakes for such a piece are certainly high. But Thorvaldsdottir’s experimental approach to her first string quartet turns the form into one that transcends “sacred,” by living in a space that is between heaven and hell. It pulls out and twists our conflicting thoughts, confronts paradoxes, and places the listener at the center of their discomfort. And, at the same time, that’s what makes the piece a cathartic, and largely introspective experience.
Enigma, while experimental and unconventional and dark, is just as soft and poetic. It translates into sonification of our most conflicting thoughts and feelings we know to exist, yet are afraid to confront. And perhaps that’s what we need. Only by surrendering to exploring the space of unexplainable things can we resonate with the beauty found in the unsettling nature of the gray space in-between.