Gramophone Magazine
Awards Issue 2024
Editor's Choice

Eirin Rognerud, Astrid Nordstad, Ingvild Nesdal Sandnes, Ulrikke Henninen, TERJUNGENSEMBLE, Lars-Erik ter Jung

Tyler Futrell: Stabat Mater
Tyler Futrell: Brittle Fluid
Tyler Futrell: Vuggesang

Originally from northern California, Tyler Futrell is an eclectic Oslo-based composer. His music attempts to synthesise almost contradictory historical branches yet his goal remains to write coherent music combining intellectual interest and perceptual fascination. His influences include musique concrète instrumentale, sacred minimalism, late romanticism, spectral music, formalism, and contemporary choreography and theatre. Tyler Futrell’s Stabat Mater immerses us in the rich history of this religious text. Preserving the melancholic beauty of the Stabat Mater settings composed over the last 600 years, Futrell exposes aspects that have previously been obscured and incorporates the concept of the glorification of suffering more generally, alluding to Samuel Barber’s Adagio. A modern take on a sacred text, and music that raises such questions as ‘why so beautiful?’ and ‘can we tolerate this beauty?’. Two other works by Futrell are also included. Vuggesang – ‘lullaby’ in Norwegian – is a meditative piece directly linked to a quotation from Brahms’s famous piece in the Stabat Mater. Brittle Fluid is also thematically and causally linked to the Stabat Mater. The title evokes a frozen waterfall, and the composer wanted to represent something both static and dynamic in which death is also present, inspired by Tarjei Vesaas’s novel The Ice Palace.

"The music’s beauty is arresting, all the more so for the scuttling, juddering, convulsive sonic violence from which it often emerges: a radiant Raphael Madonna who has strayed into an El Greco Crucifixion." - Gramophone Magazine, Editor's Choice