Unander-Scharin, Carl
SATB div
I lager
Verkkommentar
I have been an avid reader of Guillaume Apollinaire’s surrealistic poetry ever since I travelled to Paris as a teenager in the late 1970s. There I discovered his poetry and brought it back with me when I returned home to my native Sweden.
I immediately fell for the blend of humour, sorrow, longing for love and peace – and innovation – that I found in Apollinaire’s poems. He was at the forefront when modernism was established in Paris, and he even coined the term ”surrealism”. Today, however, he is best known for his poems – and in particular in the form that he called a “Calligramme”. A Calligramme is a figurative poem in which the typographical appearance also forms part of the theme of the poem. I decided to try to set some of these poems to music one day – also, if possible, to try to find a way of turning the visual component into musical form in one way or another.
In 2017 the choral suite Calligrammes was premiered by the Swedish Radio Choir together with a dancer and a vocal soloist. Here some of the parts were performed on custom-built digital musical instruments that enabled artistic interaction between physical movement, musical soundscapes and vocal performance*. Later, in collaboration with my publisher Gehrmans, we decided to create an a cappella version of the choral suite. In order to do that, I recomposed some of the parts, while other parts remained unchanged.
I would like to thank the choirmasters Peter Dijkstra and Marc Korovich for their invaluable help in providing feedback on the processes of creating and re-creating this piece of music; my ever-supportive publisher Karin Ekedahl; as well as my collaborators Åsa Unander-Scharin and Ludvig Elblaus, who were part of the creative process leading up to the original version of Calligrammes.
Carl Unander-Scharin, Möja and Röder, June 2020.
* See www.electronic-opera.com/calligrammes for more information
Radiokören och Peter Dijkstra framför Mutation vid uruppförandet av Calligrammes i Berwaldhallen 2017.
