Jacob Mühlrad: RESIL I

When the lights are dimmed, in the silence that follows the applause, you hear something – you are not sure what: a collection of quiet sounds drowned in excessive air, vibration, and resonance, some of them very low, others uncomfortably shrill, some actually inaudible to the human ear. Noise, out of which anything could appear. As we are drawn to listen intently, tensions appear towards pitches, chords, like a camera lens trying to focus on an object, found and lost again in a colorful blur. We are beginning to enjoy the cinematic effect, but intervals emerge, stretching on individual instruments into scales and simple rhythmical cells. Instruments start collaborating, based on timbral affinities, structures get more complex, something larger forms, that has a pulse. Seamlessly melodies appear, and you start following them, only to get lost in a factory of mechanical pounding that overcomes the heartfelt tunes. As we seem to have anticlimactically returned to shapeless noise, something unexpected happens: these different components start overlapping, assisting each other, in a motley combination of musical worlds that shouldn’t belong together, both epic in breadth and full to the brim with heterogeneous fragments and ideas. The sound masses grow leaner, settle around the fundamental overtone series, like iron dust under the influence of an invisible magnet. The piece ends in almost liturgical recollection, as we process the whirlwind of these dense ten minutes that feel like a fast forward, or maybe a rewind.

Perhaps all of this should be experienced by the listener before reading in this program note that the composer Jacob Mühlrad was inspired by the writings of environmental scientist Carl Folke and his concept of panarchy: the idea that, understood as a whole, our Earth is an aggregate of systems (biological and social, among others) nested in each other, bound by complex relationships of mutual influence. Then we understand RESIL I not just as a symphonic movement, but a symphonic poem that presents us with an accelerated history of life on our planet, from its humble beginnings to the incredible diversity of biological forms spawned by the Cambrian Explosion, and the many complications that followed, in which our species has come to leave its controversial mark. Knowing all this in advance, the listener might be tempted to try to read the events of this chronology in the details of the music, looking to decipher them as a story; and in doing so one might miss out on the fact that the work does not simply deliver an encrypted message on what Professor Folke calls resilience, meaning our planet’s systems’ ability to transform by adaptation and integration, to constantly reinvent themselves – rather, we are offered an opportunity to experience resilience for ourselves. Jacob Mühlrad doesn’t challenge our ability to understand meanings hidden in music, but the very ways in which we listen, by repeatedly switching between styles and techniques, therefore demanding continuous refocusing of our ears and attention. Our recent history shows that comprehending such a process of resilience intellectually is insufficient: if we are to invent sustainable ways of living on Earth, it has to be a skill that we train actively. In making that experience in a controlled environment, more concentrated in space and time than any natural scenery, we might actually get a glimpse of a humbling realization: the deeper under-standing of ourselves as a fleeting state of an ever-changing system, bound to the lives, speeds, and accidents of other ever-changing systems.

Aleksi Barrière, November 2024