‘A sign we are, inexplicable without pain ... .’ The words are by the nineteenth-century German poet Friedrich Holderlin, taken from Mnemosyne, one of the cryptic hymns that he wrote before descending into madness. ECM publishes the entire first strophe as a sort of legend, and the reference is telling. ‘Mnemosyne’ was the mother of the muses, and the word also means ‘memory’. For Holderlin, song was an ‘abandoned, flowing nature’, a description that fits this album beautifully.
Memory, ecstasy, pain, joy, reconciliation: all are, at one time or another, signalled in the present programme. It is very different to Officium, The Hilliard’s first collaboration with Jan Garbarek (10/94). Tenor John Potter writes that for Mnemosyne, a good deal of the repertoire ‘consists of very small amounts of material with minimal notation’. Officium was a mellifluous melding of sensual sax improvisation and early choral music; Mnemosyne embraces a wider musical world and occasionally takes a harder musical line.
Garbarek spices the English thirteenth-century Alleluia nativitatis that opens the second disc with some unexpectedly Eastern-sounding modulations. The Delphic Paean that follows dives headlong among some absorbing dissonances, whereas Garbarek’s own Strophe and Counter-Strophe enjoys a more sophisticated harmonic climate. Add Basque folk-song fragments warmed by the breathy aural contours of Garbarek’s saxophone, and you have a characteristic sampling of a sequence that lasts, in total, for one-and-three-quarter hours.
The first item to reverberate within the walls of the monastery at Sankt Gerold is a Peruvian folksong fragment, the second a Tallis anthem that accommodates Garbarek’s contribution like a church spiral casting its shadow across a quiet city side street. Both discs feature twilit Estonian lullabies (placed third on disc 1, and sixth on disc 2). Dufay’s Gloria (sung sans Garbarek) ends on a desolate, protracted Amen, with Fayrfax Africanus marking an exultant point of contrast. Brumel’s Agnus Dei allows Garbarek to temporarily monopolize the main melody line, but perhaps the most striking collaboration of all is for Hildegard’s O ignis Spiritus which, by 5'59'', reaches spine-tingling levels of ecstasy.
The second CD includes a Russian Psalm where Garbarek adopts a resonant bass presence, an up-tempo Iroquois and Padleirmiut Eagle dance and, to close, works by William Billings and Mesomedes that complete the musical arch with something close to perfection. It is a difficult disc to categorize. Should we call it a ‘concept’ album’? In a sense, yes. Or perhaps jazz improvisation? Yes, that as well. ‘We may reorder the music a bit but we know more or less what we’re going to do (we never know what the saxophone is going to do’, writes Potter. So maybe we should view it as a collaborative original composition which, like Officium, balances ancient and modern, sacred and profane, body and soul. Mnemosyne spans the generations and almost as many nations, and will surely rock the musical world in much the same way as its best-selling predecessor did a few years ago. It will deserve to.'