Contrasts are the fulcrum of Lisa Streich’s audacious and engrossing compositions: barely audible sounds of still environments alongside works that quake with a near-apocalyptic loudness; music that’s slow and cautious, but ridden with bursts of brisk passages; seemingly impulsive expressions, yet tailored to the physical theatrics of performance. Even the motorised instruments she engineers open up possibilities of the intimate, rather than the impersonal. Hers is the business of augmenting instruments at their core so that they might reach their acoustic potential, and subverting harmony to properly consider what beauty might truly sound like in the contemporary now.
Born in Norra Råda, Sweden in 1985, Streich’s first endeavours in music involved a piano at her fingertips and a violin in her hands. More interested in contributing from beyond the stage, she took to the organ bench before embracing composition as her craft. Her studies have taken her across Berlin, Stockholm, Salzburg, Paris and Cologne to learn from various renowned teachers, leading up to her current scholarship at NMH Oslo under the guidance of Helmut Lachenmann. This is fitting, given how her practice can be pinpointed through an aperture of sound opened up by Lachenmann previously: music in the expanded field, incorporating every sound an instrument might possibly produce interlinked with the acoustics of the actions taken to produce them.
Streich achieves this through building motorised instruments – usually in a mechanical manner, rather than through electronic amplification and modulation. Take the motorised violoncello, the first instrument she engineered, which works such as PIETÀ and SAI BALLARE? are written around. In PIETÀ, four motors appendaged with paper strips are attached; one rotates to scrape on the wood, another in the f-hole, one on the tailpiece and one on the bridge, plucking strings. Yet Streich presents this such that the motors are perhaps not merely attached. Perhaps the motors, like the warm grasp of the performing musician, or the mournful cradle of Mary of Nazareth, hold their instrument in embrace. This is the root of one of Streich’s many contrasts, this instance where industrial machinations heighten the sense of physical intimacy shared with an instrument.
At the same time, this embrace is bondage. The motorised scraping on the violoncello or grazing on piano strings are slow lacerations. In intimacy there is vulnerability, and in softness a certain brutality. The presence of machine in works of the sacred and divine is violent and beautiful, much in the same way canonical artistic interpretations of Christianity are. Such visual, symbolic and dramatic elements reveal themselves in Streich’s compositions along with the dualities at play. PRIMA, written for turning flautist and light, goes about this in the starkest of ways, rendering both musician and sonic as silhouette.
One of many works receiving their UK Premiere as part of her programme at hcmf// 2022, OFELIA is a continuation of Streich’s attempts to manufacture a means into the instrument as previously traversed in PIETÀ and ASKAR. Its motorised piano allows the pianist’s silently pressed chords to coax out the sounds of the plucked strings within; the inner and outer worlds of the piano are brought into light, presented side by side. “The further I got into the piece, the more I felt like a brutal intruder into the instrument’s very own body,” Streich admits of her quest to get to the soul the instrument. “Even though it was never intended as a brutal act but rather a loving one.” The dualism running through her work shows itself once more. “It reminded me of the character Ophelia in Hamlet, who is seen through the eyes of the father and love and is motherless. Exposed to certain expectation, she loses herself. The piece turned out to be the pain or the beauty of the unintentional.”
Dynamics of loudness and quiet are another of those contrasts. On occasion, Streich is assumed to be a composer of small sounds but this is inaccurate – she has spoken of receiving hate mail for how loud her works can be. It isn’t unusual for delicate, barely discernible sounds surrounded in seas of quiet in her music to erupt into all-enveloping monoliths bearing down, tidal and inescapable. These sudden transitions transpose the tension and release of performance directly onto the audience in all their physicality. They hit like whiplash.
When it comes to choral compositions, Streich takes her trained ear to amateur groups, the microtonal quirks of her works inspired by the imperfections of their singing. She strives to find the beauty of music in supposedly ugly places, diligently engineering chords to be broken somehow, as if to redefine what beauty sounds like on the avant edge.
This is an artist in pursuit of sound’s new destinations, however uncanny, however unlikely. The chase has led her to the fringe, neglected spaces of human voice, and to the unearthed acoustic and relational potentials within instruments. She will navigate every polarity, reconcile every paradox in order to stay the course.
Find out more about the Swedish programme at hcmf// 2022
Profile by Tayyab Amin, with thanks to Tim Rutherford-Johnson