Artist: Magnus Granberg
Title: Night Will Fade And Fall Apart
Label: Thanatosis Production
Cat nr: THT15
Format: CD
Style: Classical/Modern classical
Tracklist:
| 1 | Night Will Fade And Fall Apart (for Ensemble) | 43:46 | |
| 2 | Night Will Fade And Fall Apart (for Percussion) | 2:25 | |
| 3 | Night Will Fade And Fall Apart (for Violin) | 5:29 | |
| 4 | Night Will Fade And Fall Apart (for Cello) | 5:50 | |
| 5 | Night Will Fade and Fall Apart (for Guitar) | 6:34 | |
| 6 | Night Will Fade and Fall Apart (for Piano and Vibraphone) | 31:28 |
Music composed by Magnus Granberg (STIM). Produced by Magnus Granberg.
Co-producer and executive producer, Alex Zethson.
Recorded by Niclas Lindström on February 18 2022 at Atlantis Metronome, Stockholm.
Mixed and mastered by Anders Dahl.
Cover design by Torbjörn Zetterberg.
Cover photo: ’Bethlehem-Fairfield shipyards, Baltimore, Maryland. A night view looking toward the ways’ by Arthur S. Siegel, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-DIG-fsa- 8d28741.
TYA ENSEMBLE
Josefin Runsteen, violin My Hellgren, cello
Ryan Packard, percussion Finn Loxbo, guitar
John Eriksson, vibraphone Anna Christensson, piano
Night Will Fade and Fall Apart is a large piece by Swedish composer and musician Magnus Granberg. It was commissioned by Thanatosis produktion in December 2020 and was written for the newly formed Tya Ensemble the following year. Night Will Fade and Fall Apart is conceived as an ensemble piece where individual parts also may be performed as solo pieces. On this double-CD some of these pieces are presented: not only the full ensemble version, but also four solos and a duo. In the liner notes to the album, David Sylvian describes the music as “music for the twilight, the final rays, as our impaired vision of the solidity of things and their accompanying certainties, fall away.”
Magnus Granberg is a composer and performer operating at an intersection between improvisation and contemporary chamber music. He is based in Stockholm, Sweden. Born in Umeå in 1974, he studied saxophone and improvised music in Gothenburg and New York in his late teens and early to mid twenties. Self-taught as a composer, he formed his own ensemble Skogen in 2005 aiming to synthesize experiences, methods and materials from various strands of improvised and composed musics into a new modus operandi.
Apart from his ongoing work with Skogen he is also increasingly writing music on commission for different ensembles and projects. Recent work includes pieces for Tya Ensemble, Ordinary Affects, Ensemble Grizzana and Insub Meta Orchestra, which have been performed at festivals and various venues in Europe, Japan and the USA. Granberg’s work has so far mainly been published by the renowned British record label Another Timbre with occasional releases on record labels such as Ftarri and Insub.
NOTES ON NIGHT WILL FADE AND FALL APART, BY MAGNUS GRANBERG:
Night Will Fade and Fall Apart was commissioned by Thanatosis Produktion in December 2020 and was written for the newly formed Tya Ensemble the following year. The piece takes as its points of departure a tiny handful of songs from two very different times and places: Tres gentil cuer and En l’amoureux vergier by the French, late medieval composer Solage as well as My Foolish Heart, a popular song (and subsequent jazz standard) from the late 1940s by Victor Young and Ned Washington from whose lyrics the piece also borrows its title, albeit in a slightly modified manner. The rhythmic materials of the piece are all extracted from the songs of Solage and treated in different ways, whereas the harmonic materials are loosely derived from the above-mentioned jazz-standard.
Night Will Fade and Fall Apart is conceived as an ensemble piece where individual parts also may be performed as solo pieces. The ensemble piece consists of seven sets of musical materials as well as a set of guidelines on how to treat and navigate (individually as well as collectively) the different materials. The solo pieces in turn are compiled from the individual parts and may be organized and presented in a multitude of different ways. Night Will Fade and Fall Apart (for piano and vibraphone) consists of the harmonic materials from all seven sets and may also be performed as solo or duo pieces for either instruments. Here it is presented as a ”canon of chords”. The piano presents the extensive ”theme” before the vibraphone enters and the piece ends with the vibraphone playing the complete sequence of chords backwards.
LINER NOTES, BY DAVID SYLVIAN:
As I perceive it, in much of Magnus’ work, going back as far as projects such as Sheriff, there’s an in-drawing nurturing of self. However one may read the beautifully poetic, frequently melancholic nature of the titles of the pieces, this is far from a flattening of the nature of existence but rather a celebration of the interior life of the individual, both of the composer and his growing, attentive, audience, accumulated over time due to a remarkably consistent series of releases. Those familiar with Magnus’ work will likely be aware of a ‘looseness’, an integrated opening for variations in the reading of the work that gently ‘undermine’ the pre-determined elements of composition.
There’s a meditative, haunting stillness to much of Magnus’ work, particularly on this double album of variations on a composition based upon a series of propositions, carefully defined parameters that suggest as much as they direct. The compositional information demarcating boundaries while gamefully opening them up to inter- pretation allowing for intricate readings by an empathetic company of musicians true to Magnus’ high standards.
