Before it's analyzed or "appreciated," Arne Nordheim's Dodeka has to be enjoyed: listening to this record is a tactile experience. Like drops of water caught by a strobe light or slivers of ice ready to melt to water, these electronic sounds are tensing on the edge of tangibility: you can almost feel them as they pour through your fingers. Nordheim once based a work around the image of a solitaire diamond, and here, too, his compositions shimmer like stones of unmeasured preciousness.
The arch clarity and profound body of the sounds give no sign that these works are over thirty years old. Dodeka is the third Rune Grammofon release to champion and resurrect the works of Arne Nordheim. For a man who's often praised as Norway's greatest living composer, Nordheim started his career by pushing his country to keep up with him. He first discovered electronic music in Paris in the mid-50s, but back home, musicians were refusing to play new music; reportedly, Oslo's Trinity Church actually forbid the organ works of György Ligeti. Over the next decade, as a composer and critic, Nordheim challenged his country's conservative establishment to accept new music.
That's a battle he won a long time ago. He's earned renown in Norway and abroad, not only for innovative electronic music, but for acoustic works like the striking "Aftonland", for soprano and chamber ensemble, and "Greening", commissioned in 1973 by the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra. (Serious Nordheim explorers can run through the full range of his work on the staggering seven-disc box set Listen: The Art of Arne Nordheim, on Aurora.) And as much as he rebelled against demands to write more "folklorist" music, he doesn't shy away from local attachments: he's written for the Oslo City Hall Carillon, and "OHM" features the valley-sweeping bellows of a Norwegian mountain horn.
Rune Grammofon has focused on reviving his electronic works, and 1998's Electric dug up major works like "Solitaire" and "Colorazione" that were barely available for the past thirty years. By contrast, the twelve pieces on Dodeka have never been released. Nordheim's brief liner notes talk about them more than anything in sentimental terms, describing them as "too resonant to forget." The album documents a key part of his career, but Dodeka is also deeply engrossing for its obsessive refinement, and its subtle emotional depth.
Even if I could detail the working methods and technologies that went into these pieces, it would just distract from how free of context they sound: from the tinkling high notes that evade tempo like a hand-cranked music box, to the pensive echo and boom of the deep lower tones, none of the sounds betray their origin or hint at any source at all. They also defy narrative: each piece runs around three minutes, but in this set of miniatures certain sounds and motifs repeat from piece to piece, leading up to "Summa", where Nordheim runs them all together to get a sound like a city of alien clocks ringing different hours.
But although they're abstract, these works are far from dry. A halting emotional tone-- I can't call it "warmth," though its coolness makes it stronger-- suffuses these pieces, fractionally expressed in tense pauses and isolated murmurs. Nordheim has characterized it as a "yearning," and in these works he distills that feeling, without object or nostalgia, into an incredible purity. And while there's much to enjoy and study in his technique, it's that engagement which makes the music vital-- even after so many years in the vault.
