A Closer Listen
Hope. Such a positive word. Yet, as Hara Alonso writes in the thoughtful introduction to her new album, when different groups have different hopes, serious conflict can arise. While many in our parents’ generation hoped that hard work would secure a stable financial future, our generation witnesses that much of our parents’ toil has contributed to the degradation of the world we will inherit. Their hopes have inadvertently eroded our confidence in the future.
Alonso, a Stockholm-based pianist, composer and sound artist originally from Spain, has often included electronic treatment in her work (including in Somatic Suspension, which we reviewed in 2021) but this is an album of pure solo piano. The ten sparse tracks are unnamed beyond “notion 1”, “notion 2”, so beyond knowing that each explores one aspect of “hope”, we are left to speculate what precisely inspired each one. There is an intriguing musical commonality between the ten pieces: a melodic fragment is repeated, ostinato-style, generally with a bleak-sounding harmonic language, often rising gradually up the keyboard, while other fragments rotate around them. It is like listening to a kaleidoscope, in that one musical idea is viewed critically from multiple perspectives, until it is fully understood. This metaphor works both on a micro- and macro-scale, i.e. for each track, and for the album as a whole.
Despite its subject matter, I must confess that it doesn’t stir feelings of hope in my heart. It feels cold, logical, sober, and as the final notes recede I find myself feeling somehow bereft, craving something more emotional. But I suspect I’m wrong to feel that way. I think maybe this album shows us precisely what we need to find our way out of our current mess. We do not need yet another populist braggart to play with our hopes and fears. We need a rational analysis of what we are doing wrong, and a clear-eyed exploration of the routes towards salvation. At the end of her introduction, Alonso quotes Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön, who writes:
“In a nontheistic state of mind,
abandoning hope is an affirmation,
the beginning of the beginning.”
Wise words. Will we heed them? (Garreth Brooke)
Sat Sep 30 00:01:36 GMT 2023