Tectonic plate boundaries

One of Iceland’s oldest music festivals, Dark Music Days was launched by the Society of Icelandic Composers in 1980. This year, the ISO’s annual contribution to the Dark Music Days festival is an eagerly awaited one, as the COVID-19 pandemic caused its cancellation in 2020 and 2021. The programme features five magnificent and markedly different works. Haukur Tómasson’s It Relaxes Me, the Repetition draws inspiration from Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who has been highly praised for her colourful and obsessive works. Ingibjörg Ýr Skarphéðinsdóttir describes her Pons Papilloma, commissioned by the ISO, as “the processing and mapping of trauma.” Áskell Másson wrote his Capriccio for darabuka, a copper drum from Turkey, for which the composer has developed his own performance techniques over a long career. In this performance he appears as the soloist. The score includes another unusual instrument, the aluphone, which the ISO recently received as a gift. The performance also features a work by Gunnar Andreas Kristinsson, Flekar, in which the composer juxtaposes “tonal masses that meet and overlap like tectonic plates, with the associated friction and accumulation of tension.” Kjartan Ólafsson’s orchestral work Mar is dedicated to the memory of Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara.