Straight from the heart

Can a new work encourage young, classically trained string players to lose their fear of improvisation and find their individual voice? Violinist Christina Åstrand and composer Signe Lykke explain the concept to Andrew Mellor

Two years ago, Christina Åstrand, first concertmaster of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra (DNSO), got a call from the composer Signe Lykke. The two were acquaintances: Åstrand had played a solo piece by Lykke; Lykke was aware of Åstrand from her central position in Danish musical life (‘I knew her as the silver-haired woman who sits at the front of the radio orchestra’).

There had been murmurings about Åstrand commissioning a new violin concerto from Lykke. On the phone, the conversation spiralled into something bigger. It has since spawned a project that has criss-crossed northern Europe, involved hundreds of musicians from multiple ensembles and even seen the formation of a new company jointly owned by the two, through which they will work to reinvest capital into new projects. A particularly fertile meeting of minds, it has also challenged a good number of orthodoxies the classical music world holds dear – particularly that corner of it concerned with string playing.

Fifteen years separate Åstrand and Lykke. In conversation, they resemble a pair of teenagers: breathlessly talkative, frequently interrupting one another. Their effusive sparring – at Lykke’s period-featured studio in the atmospheric heart of old Copenhagen – is riddled with expletives and punctuated by cascading laughter. It bursts with the enthusiasm of ideological emancipation.

The two women’s backgrounds contrast sharply. ‘I was riding horses when you were at conservatory,’ Lykke reminds Åstrand; ‘I’m not from a home with art or music. I started all this when I was 19.’ Åstrand’s father, on the other hand, was principal trumpet in the Aarhus Symphony Orchestra and founded a training ensemble for enthusiastic local string players. His daughter was appointed leader of the DNSO, part of state broadcaster DR, in 1993. After more than three decades in post she has started to question her own saturation in violin technique and pedagogical traditions. ‘Because we start when we’re so young, many of us string players are already a bit broken by the time we’re 16,’ she says.

Lykke has reached the same conclusion but from the opposite direction. She sang and played in jazz and rock bands and studied at the Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Copenhagen, before switching tack. After obsessively reading scores in libraries, she made the ‘weird transition from playing punk and jazz and other stuff’ to studying composition in London and Austin, Texas.

Violinist Christina Åstrand and composer Signe Lykke

Signe Lykke (left) discusses the score of Crux with string players

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Classical music’s assorted doctrines were never hard-wired into Lykke. That freed her up to work in the only way she knows possible: with the collaborative instincts and intuitive freedoms she was used to through playing in bands. ‘When I started working as a composer, the whole hierarchy-driven process of “here’s a score I’ve written; go and play it” seemed horrific. Music is something you do as a collective.’

On that initial phone call, those ideas started to scratch creative itches that Åstrand had been contorting herself to reach for decades. ‘We lose our confidence as orchestral players,’ she says. ‘It starts when we’re kids, with our first teacher. Then you get to conservatory and it’s all very strict. Then you win a place in an orchestra and the conductor tells you what to do – or if they’re incompetent, the concertmaster does. You see red lights everywhere you look, which comes from a fundamental position of nervousness and fear that you’re not good enough. You lose your capacity for actual expression. Excellent young players audition for me and literally ask: “Can I play piano there? Can I phrase this?” Are you kidding me? Yes, you are allowed to phrase something!’

These frustrations poured out of Åstrand when she started to hang around at Lykke’s studio to talk about the new concerto. So did ideas about how the two could help enact meaningful change. ‘We weren’t talking about where or when the premiere would be; we were just talking for hours about different approaches to music,’ remembers Lykke. Åstrand adds: ‘It started to open up things that I had felt very alone with: the way we learn, the way we approach modern music. You, Signe, also felt alone to some degree in the way you compose. We sort of found a missing link.’

The idea of a traditional violin concerto was soon binned. ‘We wanted to go deep into the way we play, the way we educate, the way we are,’ says Åstrand. What emerged from the process is not so much a single entity, nor even a finished piece of music, as a series of principles and working methods that the two have used to build relationships with musicians across northern Europe. But the partnership harvested something more tangible: a constantly evolving work for ‘lead’ violinist and strings titled Crux (2022). A violin concerto, they insist, it is not.

‘BECAUSE WE START WHEN WE’RE SO YOUNG, MANY OF US STRING PLAYERS ARE ALREADY A BIT BROKEN BY THE TIME WE’RE 16’

First to be junked was the idea of a professional orchestra playing the piece and a conductor conducting it. ‘In band music,’ says Lykke, ‘if you’re making a noise, you’re conducting’. Lykke had previously worked with Denmark’s ensemble of young string players DUEN (Det Danske Ungdomsensemble), whose members were open to approaching a new work via improvisation and workshopping and came with the added advantage of ‘not really knowing what they’re doing with their careers so are super hungry and open-minded’. That synced with key features of Åstrand’s musical upbringing courtesy of her father: the chance to approach music as something fun, free and expressive.

Christina Åstrand, concertmaster of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra

The central conceit of Crux is that of a work which is shaped, in a structural sense, by whoever happens to be playing it at the time. There are some fundamentals, however. Reflecting the four chambers of a heart (the work is inspired by blood flow), the tutti ensemble is made up of four ‘chambers’: string quintet; two cellos; nine violins; three each of violas and basses. One chamber leads a part of the piece at any given time, while the remaining three play with two sorts of mutes.

The soloist (Åstrand), a sort of prima inter pares rather than a standalone virtuoso, takes on some of the duties of a conductor, but, says Lykke, the tutti musicians ‘have to take charge or the whole piece will fall apart’. While the work is beat-driven, there are chorale-derived passages in which players from different groups are harmonically aligned and co-dependent.

All that, however, is a mere starting point. Crux has now been performed in three countries, six times in all. Each time, it wasn’t rehearsed so much as workshopped for three days, over the course of which string players from the Danish, Norwegian and Finnish youth ensembles playing it were encouraged to pull it apart and reshape it in their own image. ‘It was the same in each place,’ says Åstrand. ‘Total fear and silence on day one. A few instances of “Can I ask a question?” on day two. And by day three, a cattle market: people standing in line with full scores, pencils and ideas.’

What were they asking? ‘First up, lots of technical stuff,’ says Åstrand. ‘“This trill isn’t good – what should I do?” or, “Where on the string should I play this?” And then issues of ensemble would come up: “There’s a moment when I am playing in seven but need to play against someone in four,” so we tell them, “Everyone will be looking at you here, so you need to use your body.”’ Lykke adds: ‘People were afraid of moving, literally moving with their instrument. How are you going to play seven against four if you’re sitting rigidly with your instrument? It can’t only be in your fingers.’

Composer Signe Lykke (third from right) takes a workshop with Ensemble Sonore from Stavanger, Norway

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Crux, both composer and soloist report, transformed the tutti musicians who were playing it – which was the whole point. ‘They really, really opened up; I could see it in their eyes,’ says Åstrand. When players encountered difficulties syncing the chorales that sprawl harmonically across all four chambers of the tutti orchestra, Åstrand and Lykke got them to lay down their instruments and sing the parts instead. ‘Suddenly everyone was spot on, because they didn’t have the difficulty of translating their musicianship on to an instrument, and that’s where music begins. Look at any string player, and the moment they put the bow on the string you can almost see them thinking: “Is it going to sound good today?” If it’s going to come from your heart, you can’t let your instrument take charge. Your own voice must be in charge.’

Even more significant were Lykke’s invitations to improvise and even rewrite. First, she had to negotiate a familiar mental block. ‘If you ask a classical musician to play like a bird, they’ll run a mile. If you write “like a bird call” in a little box in the score, they’ll do it just fine. There were a lot of extended techniques in the score that sounded rubbish when we came to it, so we got the players to freestyle – to mess around or just do what they wanted, which was far better than anything I had written.’

When a bass player in Finland sang a phrase for demonstration while asking about tuning, Lykke was enchanted by the sound of her voice and wrote a part for her to sing. ‘The initial score is just a first draft,’ she says. ‘Everything is up for grabs every time. We cut and delete and replace, freestyle or rewrite depending on how players can best express themselves or what they want.’ That’s the case up to a point, anyway. Lykke has recently set about assembling all the best bits of performer input from Crux’s outings in Stavanger, Copenhagen and Helsinki to create a new edition, which will be recorded by Åstrand and the DNSO. But the more fluid version of Crux will live on, and so will the partnerships the duo have formed with youth orchestras across the Nordic region and with the artists they are using to lubricate further explorations of the kind.

Itcan seem odd that this initiative has come from a concertmaster – a stalwart of the orchestral hierarchy. Åstrand has had plenty of opportunity for self-reflection as she enters her fourth decade leading an orchestra that has arguably never been better (in addition to leading performances on the DNSO’s acclaimed recent Nielsen recordings, Åstrand the soloist has made an award-winning recording of Else Marie Pade’s violin concerto Étude with the Malmö Opera Orchestra under Joachim Gustafsson). By her own admission, Åstrand’s communication techniques left a little to be desired in 1993. She now sits at the front of a section that thrives on mutual trust and the principle that anyone can make a decision. ‘I feel secure in the job now, so perhaps it’s time to do crazy things… and this I feel I have been waiting to do all my life.’

It’s about more than realising personal dreams; Åstrand is concerned about the future of the profession. ‘I hear young players who have amazing technical skills, but when confronted with their own musical DNA or imagination they go blank and lose all confidence,’ she says. ‘Crux has been about trying to change that. The skills young players take from it are vital for the profession and for expression. We know it works because we’ve seen it work. The ensembles we approached were hungry for it. They couldn’t get enough.’

It was contemporary music, Åstrand says, that freed her ‘from the strain of tradition and the idea of “the right way of doing things”. In new music I could ask composers questions and find my own way; I could say to them, “I think this is the sound you were after, and I actually think it works better on the instrument like this.” From that, I found a new joy in old music too – the courage to play repertoire works and concertos my way, without copying anyone.’

‘WHEN YOU’RE INTERESTED IN CO-CREATING, YOU HAVE TO COMPROMISE AND FIND JOY IN OTHER PEOPLE’

A detail from the score of Crux

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Reflecting on the string ensemble her father created in Aarhus, Åstrand admits that she ‘gets goosebumps just talking about it’. In a sense, Crux represents her mission to recreate that sense of community – to help shape young string players who need to get out of practice rooms and enjoy playing with their peers just for kicks. ‘This is lacking in our music education,’ she says. ‘We learn to play as soloists. We don’t learn togetherness and how to play as a community. Young instrumentalists need to play sports together, eat cake together and then play music together. That’s how to get rid of this constant fear of what’s going to happen – of something not being good enough.’

That principle courses through Lykke’s philosophy of composing. ‘When you’re interested in co-creating, in getting people into a room and opening up about the creative process and about your ideas, the good and the bad, you have to compromise and you have to find joy in other people. These are muscles that you need to train, so why on earth is nobody strengthening them? It’s almost like, in classical music, those things have no value. As long as you can play your orchestral excerpts really fast and they’re technically perfect, then you’re good to go. But guess what? That’s not how the world works any more.’