Vanescere

Vanescere, written for Þórunn Ósk Marinósdóttir

Premiered on the 6th of March 2022 during Myrkir Músíkdagar/ Dark Music Days, in Reykjavík.

Veronique Vaka has made it her mission to translate nature’s processes into sound. The viola concerto Vanescere follows her luminous orchestral work Lendh, nominated for the Nordic Council Music Prize, and, zooms-in on principles explored in the cello concerto Gemæltan.

Like Gemæltan, Vasnescere takes as its subject the area around the Sólheimajökull glacier in Iceland. Using geographical and geological analyses, Vaka traced the steady erosion of the glacier over the year from September 2020 and was alarmed at the rapid rate of the ice cap’s retreat. Vasnescere is an abstract representation of the harvested data that underlines the speed of the glacier’s destruction, compressing actualtime into musical time. In its direct reaction to the science, the work presents the starkest possible musical depiction of the impact of climate change on the Icelandic landscape. 

In translating her statistical and photographical data into musical notation, Vaka works in two principle ways. One is the establishment of a temporal grid that compresses the 12-month change in the glacier’s appearance into the course of the concerto’s duration. We hear the glacier’s changing shape in movements by degrees: the shifting of one note in a chord, the twisting or contracting of a texture. Within this, the narrating solo viola steps out of the strict time lapse to focus or reflect on individual events and gestures.

But the harvested data also controls the music’s surface colour, affecting shifts in instrumentation, volume and general expression. A crevice or waterfall might be imagined as a trill or a glissando; a melodic motif might represent ‘calving’ – a piece of ice breaking off as the glacier’s state alters under pressure. Ultimately, elements of the orchestra lose their ability to sustain a quality of sound altogether – the starkest warning yet of the effects of climate change on Vaka’s generation of Icelanders.-Andrew Mellor, 2022