Click here to listen to excerpts of Marte Røyeng's works as a contemporary composer
Marte's composition for solo piano has been selected to be performed at the Ung Nordisk Musik festival in Aarhus, Denmark in August 2021.
Sounds from tourists on a whale watching tour are juxtaposed with underwater recordings of killer whales and pilot whales. The whale sounds might remind one of singing, cries or a baby cooing, and give associations to human emotions. Connections rise up, if only as fantasies of something common. A whale is different from us. As is a machine. All the same, we might listen to both to find signs of life that are similar to our own. The sound of whale clicks is a pulse without breath. A boat motor humming is a presence with changing intensity.
The piano might be heard as a foreign element among these sounds. Or as a link. The instrument contains bonds to the mechanical, to the human body, and to neutral sounds in nature (like the tinkling of a water surface). The piano plays several roles: as an imitator of real world sounds, as an instrumental sound with its own unique associations, and as a translator – creating abstractions of the experience of diving or soaring. It absorbs parts of the rest of what we hear, and creates its own signs out of sounds that move through water, air, flesh and metal.