SOREN NILS EICHBERG
by Michael Berest

The one work of Søren Nils Eichberg that was recently available for download on this web site is Antithesis, something brimming with crossover techno-funk. To judge Eichberg by this however, would be like judging Igor Stravinski on the basis of his setting of Happy Birthday To You. If Eichberg crosses over to anything, it's not from a disco in the 21st Century but a concert hall in the 20th or even 19th.

In a work like his both beautiful and powerful violin concerto, Qilaatersorneq, we hear the lush throbbing of late 19th century romantic music loud and clear. And many of the etudes in Scherben seem a just a leap or two past the Debussy of Preludes, Book II.

But this is not to say Eichberg is anymore retrogressive a composer than Charles Ives or Alban Berg just because one can recognize tonal or traditional passages in the works of all three men.

There is an unmistakable personality behind this music, no matter what influences one can point to. Qilaatersorneq may remind one of the Bartòk Violin Concerto with its effusive main theme, but there the similarities cease. This is not music about music, as Bartòk's is, but about sounds, specifically those of the Inuit of Greenland. The romantic melody gives way to an ancient Inuit ritual. What's more the texture is not from Wagner, Mahler, or even Bartòk, but something through the prism of composers beyond the Second Viennese School.

That leads to the issue of harmony in Eichberg's music. One can speak of the tonal implications in works of Schoenberg or Berg, but that's just the point, tonality is implied, not self-evident. Eichberg's works are often unashamedly tonal.

It is not, however, the tonality of neotonalists like David Del Tredici, or of minimalists like Phillip Glass or Steve Reich. It is tonality peeking through an atonal mesh curtain-or vice-versa. Is Qilaatersorneq tonal or atonal? The violin part immediately tells us tonal, but is it tonal through the prism of atonality, or vice-versa? What the prism is changes from work to work or even between one part of a work or another.

The last chord of Qilaatersorneq may be ambiguous and hazy. The final pizzicato of the 'cello in the String Quartet may sound very much like a tonic. But it would be erroneous to claim victory for either end of the musical spectrum.

Eichberg's work calls to mind another composer referenced above, Charles Ives, not that Eichberg's music sounds like that of the American composer, but that Ives had no problem doing something like just prior to the coda of the finale of his 4th symphony, throwing in a dominant 7th chord in the midst of the dissonant clashes of three orchestral groups going on in their own separate tempi.

Similarly, in an etude from Scherben, Eichberg might have one hand playing tonal chords, while the other does chromatic runs that sound like something out of Boulez's Notations. Eichberg is at his most accessible when the 21st Century Romanticist comes through. But the juxtaposition of the tonal and atonal is not just the product of a romanticist point of view. The most difficult of the three works discussed, the String Quartet, is most definitely not romantic, but the tension (rather than reconciliation or juxtaposition) of tonal, and atonal and microtonal elements, is still Eichbergian.

What initially seems like a microtonal version of Schoenberg's String Trio, col legno batuttos and sul ponticellos galore, is transcended by the dogged endurance of an E natural, that keeps popping in, often unexpectedly, in different lines to set the harmony off-balance (or, in this case, would that be on-balance?). It is the opening note in second violin, and final note, pizzicato, in the 'cello. Somehow, it is the prevailing element in the harmonic landscape, if far from the only one.

Eichberg is a force to be reckoned with. I'd estimate Qilaatersorneq, the String Quartet, and Scherben could all easily be added to the standard repertoire of their respective genres in the next ten to twenty years. The only bar to that would be the close-mindedness of adding anything by a living composer to the repertoire, especially when the innovation in it is as subtle and personal as that of Eichberg.