Magnus Granberg, Skogen ensemble - Magnus Granberg: Nun, es wird nicht weit mehr gehn (2019)

Tell us about your new piece, 'Nun, es wird nicht weit mehr gehn'

The title of the piece, which roughly translates as ’Now, there won’t be much more walking’, is a fragment from Wilhelm Müller’s lyrics to Die Krähe', the fifteenth song in Schubert’s song cycle Die Winterreise, which I had listened to several times before writing the piece. I guess I have an ongoing relationship with Schubert’s music, his songs in particular, and I had also used a couple of other songs from Die Winterreise as a point of departure when writing an earlier piece, ’Ist gefallen in den Schnee’, which also was the first piece of mine to be released on Another Timbre. So, I happened to revisit Schubert’s song cycle and somehow got attached to a couple of adjoining songs, 'Der greise Kopf’ and ’Die Krähe’, which I then used as points of departure when writing the piece. After starting to compose, materials from a couple of other sources crept in as well: the medieval English song ’The Woods So Wilde’, and also a song by Dowland, ’Can She Excuse My Wrongs’, which uses part of 'The Woods So Wilde’ in one of its inner voices. The idea of using ’The Woods So Wilde’ as a source material is a kind of silly, (and until now) private and playful tribute to the wild members of my ensemble Skogen, which translates as ’The Woods’ or ’The Forest’ in English. So I used rhythmic materials from all the different sources and tonal materials from the two Schubert songs, which I then kind of deconstructed, transformed and recomposed into something different. In the end the piece turned out to use four pools of material using slightly different tonal modes, all containing comparatively large collections of melodic fragments, extended melodies, chords, timbres, single sounds and rhythms. The different pools of materials were then combined with different time values and ordered into a temporal framework consisting of a number of different sequences, through which the performers navigate with (hopefully) some help from a set of guidelines or suggestions provided by the composer.