Jóhann Jóhannsson: How to give electricity its magic again

2023-11-10 13:19:49

Kultur Jóhann Jóhannsson

How to give electricity its magic again

As of: 12:19 p.m. | Reading time: 3 minutes

Jóhann Jóhannsson (1969 to 2018)

Source: Jonatan Gretarsson / Deutsche Grammophon

Not for fans of combustion engines: Icelandic Oscar winner Jóhann Jóhannsson mystifies electricity in his symphony “A Prayer to the Dynamo”. And builds a cathedral of electric and concrete sounds.

The beginning of all sound world was once an E flat major chord. It slowly rose from the nothingness of an orchestra pit, began to flow, everything began to flow, first the Rhine, then a powerful narrative. This was the case at the beginning of Wagner’s “Ring of the Nibelung”.

A century and a half later, the beginning of all sound is a hum. Harmoniously impossible to pin down, it roars darkly. String pads are added, layered, shimmering clarinets fly over it, horns call. The space expands, a cathedral of sound emerges. This is the case every time in the four movements of “A Prayer to the Dynamo,” the lost symphony by Icelandic film music revolutionary (and Oscar winner) Jóhann Jóhannsson.

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Jóhannsson recorded the hum like his Icelandic film music combatant (and Oscar winner) Hildur Guðnadóttir recorded the sound base for her music for the “Chernobyl” series in a former Lithuanian nuclear power plant. Elliðaár provided the primal sound for Jóhannsson’s symphony. The first hydroelectric power station in Iceland was opened in 1921 on a river in an idyllic valley not far from Reykjavík and closed in 1990. It is now a museum and cultural center; it is switched on once a year to keep the machines and generators running smoothly.

Bruckner of the 21st century

Jóhannsson wanted to shoot a black-and-white film in Elliðaár using Super 8. The interfaces between faith and electronics, between technology and religion have always fascinated the son of a computer tinkerer, who himself composed music with his IBM. The film remained unfinished until Jóhannsson’s death in Berlin in 2018.

The musical prayer to the dynamo was finished and premiered in Vinipeg in 2012. The first recording, made in Reykjavík’s legendary Harpa concert hall with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra under Daníel Bjarnason, has now been released on Jóhannsson’s (and Guðnadóttir’s) house label Deutsche Grammophon.

As always, there are variations on silence, stories about the origins of energy, attempts to make the inaudible audible, to make spaces out of silence and whirring. Nobody could do that like Jóhann Jóhannsson, who made the universe sound in the sound dress he wore for Denis Villeneuve’s alien drama “Arrival” and in James Marsh’s Stephen Hawking biopic “The Theory of Everything.” Jóhannsson’s film music always stayed away and free from what was specifically discussed in the film, never acoustically illustrated what was seen anyway, provided the echo chamber of the story, provided a narrative beneath the narrative.

“A Prayer to the Dynamo” marks Jóhannsson’s final escape into the outdoors. The four-movement set is loosely based on a book by the American cultural philosopher (and anti-Semite) Henry Adams (1938 to 1918), who wrote in 1900 after his visit to the World’s Fair in Paris about the “Dynamo and the Virgin,” the connection between belief in God and belief in technology.

What “A Prayer to the Dynamo” accomplishes is the re-mystification of the technical, the recovery of the magical from within the electricity. Bruckner with the means of the 21st century, so to speak.