Oliver Schroer-O2 Essay

THE FOLLOWING ESSAY ON THE SOLO O2 MATERIAL APPEARS IN THE LINER NOTES OF THE O2 ALBUM.

I HAVE HAD SUCH POSITIVE FEEDBACK ON THIS THAT I'VE DECIDED TO REPRINT IT HERE IN ITS ENTIRETY.

O2 - SOLO VIOLIN

Vibrations travelling through air. Vibrations created by scraping horsehair across five strings. Vibrations that convey meaning. Vibrations that express a complex architecture. Vibrations that go into your ears and change the way you feel. I do a little dance with my fingers, digits skip over the strings of my fiddle, and as if by magic, something of myself is communicated to you. And after all of these years of playing, it does still feel like magic.

I have always loved to explore. When I was a kid, I roamed around the forests and valleys of Grey County. Later I studied philosophy in University, and I explored the world of ideas. But I guess I am ultimately a sensualist, and the world of music drew me in. And what a world to explore. 'What if I discovered a music that no one had heard before? What would it sound like?' That's often what motivates me to play. On these explorations, I may go to strange and distant places, but the fiddle dialect of my playing roots always pokes through in the end. I consider myself a fiddler, not a violinist, because my music primarily comes out of my body, my feet, my belly - not just my mind.

At the end of my brooding twenties, I got deeply into fiddle music, and began busking full-time. Playing those cheery tunes five hours a day for four years literally rearranged my body chemistry. My whole personality lightened up. Those busking years made me very aware of the power of music to alter people.

Back then, I used to write a lot of jigs, reels and waltzes - as a matter of fact I still do. But over the years new kinds of melodies emerged - more rarefied, harder to pin down. There were prayers, incantations, whimsies. melismas, mysteriosos, heisenbergs, fractal reels, forest blues, blessings.... They are not so much entertainment tunes, but music that expresses other important things about my relationship to life. This music is, dare I say, more spiritual. It makes me want to kick up different things than my heels. But my heels are never far behind!

In fact, I'm not even sure if these can be called tunes any more. They are a bit more fluid and larger in scope. 'Compositions' sounds too pretentious and rigid. Let's just call them shapes. Shapes made out of smaller shapes, which in turn, are made out of smaller shapes. Sound gestures arranged in an aesthetically comprehensible pattern. Gestures which repeat and subtly mutate. Concatenations of vibrations.

Shapes and stories...

These new melodies are like strings of carnival lights draped over a series of nails on a fence, swaying in the wind. The nails in this case are the strong beats that always intersect with a specific melody note. In between these fixed strong beats there is a great deal of flex - room for expansion and contraction. This results in music that is both gestural and pulse driven, reminiscent of the cycles and pulses of nature.

This music came to me in playing, not in thinking. In fact, I didn't really write these pieces at all. Rather, they announced themselves to me, and I was quick enough and lucky enough to catch them as they flitted by.

These pieces the result of many hours of taped improvisation. Material would surface and resurface in a cyclical way. I began recognizing melodies from the same families - melodies with the same musical DNA, as it were. After much playing, one version would assert itself as the strongest and most eloquent member of it's family. This means that for every piece on this album, there are between five and sixty previous versions that are not quite there yet. It also means that the tunes are constantly evolving. Every time I play them, I do some things differently, and I have some new insights. This is very much living music for me.

The pieces on this double CD may not at first sound like fiddle music. Think of it more like the spirit of fiddle music projected into different landscapes and alternate dimensions. The great Cajun fiddler Dewey Balfa said about traditional music: "It's like a tree. The roots have to be strong, but you can't go cutting the branches off every time they want to grow." Wise words, those. When we think of fiddle tunes (with our typical pan-Celtic mindset) we usually think of dancing and celebrating. In Norway, there are certain fiddle tunes that are specifically for listening, not for dancing. A different kind of celebration. This is what my music is. Stories, flights of fancy, explorations of melody, all told with the warm twang, the familiar brogue of a language called 'fiddle'.

The two CDs are not really arranged thematically. They are like two siblings with related yet distinct personalities. You will probably notice a subtle difference in mood, and sometimes prefer the one over the other.

These tunes were born out of silence. Silence is not an absence, necessarily. It can also be a fertile void. Silence can be listened to. And as there are no hills without valleys, so the high level noise we call music needs the low level noise we call silence to achieve it's full effect. This is why I have ended each disc with five minutes of silence. It lets you gently decompress and assimilate what you have just heard. It lets you reset your brain.

It has been a long journey from solo busking in the subway to playing these solo 5-string violin pieces. This album has been a long time growing, and I am so happy to finally present my violin, alone, clear, and direct. Please join me on this exploration, this celebration, played on a single instrument of wood, wire, and glue. Together, in the words of painter Paul Klee, we will "take a line for a walk".