Viking Warrior Poetry
The main thing missing from Robert Eggers' The Northman (2022) is a score from composer Jeffrey Holmes
I was quite pleased by The Northman (2022), directed by Robert Eggers. It was beautifully shot, featured an appearance from Björk, and the $70-90 million budget doesn’t appear to have been totally squandered. The film has also received much praise for the degree of historical accuracy in portraying Vikings - from Norse mythology to mycology.
Where the film fell short however, is in neglecting to employ the perfect composer to score the soundtrack, Jeffrey Holmes.
Sure, the official soundtrack provided by Robin Carolan and Sabastian Gainsborough was satisfactory - It provided some support to what was already quite convincing visual storytelling. Jeffrey’s compositions on the other hand, are Works of Art that are meant to stand on their own.
In any case, Jeffrey is a badass composer so I wanted to do this blog post to share some choice selections from his catalog as well as to discuss aspects of his compositional craft and creative outlook.
forged from blooms of steel
The first time I heard Jeffrey Holmes’ music was when the 5 Microtonal Studies were debuted by Michael Kudirka and Brian Head at USC. These studies are written for two guitars, tuned ~1/6 tone apart. You could call it a guitar duo but the guitars meld together into a sort of hyper-guitar with a smoothed out, extra dimension to the tonal palette. The 1/6 tone adjustment is done by tuning one guitar’s G string to the 7th partial of the other guitar’s A string which results in a 31 cent difference.
There are plenty of swordsmithing metaphors to run with here but suffice it to say aspects of composition having to do with tuning, temperament, proportions, and materials have been bent and honed according to Jeffrey’s will, yielding the sonic equivalent of Amleth’s Night Blade: deadly microtones that only can come out at night.
Jeffrey isn’t so much a microtonal composer as he is a composer who uses microtones. Microtones are one of the many formal materials that have been repeatedly melted down and recrystallized, allowing self-organized criticality to work its magic. This attention to proportion and symmetry is detectable at all levels of the composition. Similarly, he favors traditional acoustic instruments and you’ll never catch him playing nursery rhymes on a 31-EDO vibraphone or playing an isomorphic keyboard.
5 Microtonal Studies: No. 1, Batutto e misteriosodramatic
I enjoy this trifecta of “formalist, traditionalist, and transcendentalist” that’s been laid out in Jeff’s biography:
Jeffrey Holmes composes post-spectral, teleological music incorporating elements of mysticism and lyrical expression. His creative inspiration is rooted in primitive myths, transcendent legends, and dramatic elemental landscapes in their primal and violent natural states. As a traditionalist, he composes music for acoustic orchestral instruments, using standard notational methods; as a formalist, he works within a complex and unique non-octave diatonic, chromatic, and microtonal language; as a transcendentalist, he combines the inherent abstraction of sound with a greater meaning and possibility of interpretation through the use of lyricism and overt expression.
dramatic elemental landscapes
This inherent abstraction of sound and his use of overt, expressive lyricism is beautifully demonstrated in this work for chamber ensemble:
Myrkriða Ljósleiðá for Soprano, Flute, Percussion and Guitar (2016)
…that’s “Rider of Darkness / Path of Light”
This mixed quartet is a monodrama composed for the featured soprano, Kirsten Ashley Wiest and features Old Norse texts written and translated by Jeffrey. The program notes describe the piece as “a dramatic meditation on death, both the unknown and foreboding nature of its inevitability, as well as the imaginings of a resolved afterwards.”
Absolute Viking shit.
further listening
solo marimba : Nereus for Marimba (2012)
solo piano : Thund for Piano (2017-18) // Cyan for Piano (2007)
chamber work : String Quartet #2 [‘Kirurgi’]
Jeffrey Holmes on The Bridge Podcast
I spoke with Jeff about his compositional work some months back on The Bridge Podcast Episode #37, titled Transcendental Warrior Poetry: A Conversation w/ Jeffrey Holmes.
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