Note: The Ekelund aphorisms quoted throughout (blue text in white fields) are given in Swedish. It would be blasphemous of me to imagine that I could do them justice in an English interpretation. I hold them in much too high a regard to even try. Lennart Bruce has made some English translations of Vilhelm Ekelund texts, for example Det andra ljuset (The Second Light) from 1935, published by North Point Press (1986), available on the web.

Ten years ago, early fall 1995, my best friend Lars-Erik poured fire-lighting fluid all over himself in a park in Lund, Sweden, and lit his lighter. He was so severely burned that the medical examiners couldn’t identify his remains for two weeks. Even his fingerprints were destroyed – and my friend was scared of dentists, so there were no dental records.
The day after he incinerated himself I received a postcard from him. On top it said “Lund, Fire Night”. Apparently he had mailed it on his way to the park. I didn’t know what to make of it at that time, until his younger brother called me two weeks later and told me.

Almost thirty years before that fateful night in Lund, in Nykoping, Sweden in 1967, Lars-Erik hade made me aware of Swedish poet and aphorist Vilhelm Ekelund (Stehag 1880 – Saltsjöbaden 1949). This had a significant effect on my life thereafter. I practically lived with Vilhelm Ekelund for many years on, and he's still one of my best companions. At the very beginning of this important awakening of my more fine-tuned spiritual senses Lars-Erik copied some of his favorite Ekelund aphorisms and poems for me. I have kept those sheets of papers. Here is a part of one of those sheets. This is one of the aphorisms that Lars-Erik copied for me:

I vividly recall those endless nights of fierce studying delight that I spent in a large, apple-smelling day room with a fireplace at Jära, a people’s high school in the dark forests of Småland, Sweden (a boarding school) outside the town of Nässjö, where I lived from 1968 to 1969. I went to Stockholm by train now and then, walking between the antiquarian bookshops, retrieving the rare first editions of Vilhelm Ekelund’s books. At that time there were only first editions to get, except for Veri Similia and Agenda and the collected poetry, because the later re-issuing of Ekelund had not started back in the 1960s. The proprietor of one of the antiquarian book stores asked me whether it was the content of the books that was important to me, or the state of the books, because he had some copies that weren't exactly well kept. I assured him it was the content!

Now I listen, late 2005, to this Lars Hallnäs’ CD from Björn Nilsson’s Content label, and I’m re-introduced to those strong, transparent feelings and atmospheres of the golden age of my adolescence, when my senses were wide ajar to the influences that Vilhelm Ekelund brought me of Pre-Socrates Greek poetry and his own lilies of the valley poetic fragrances, etched in my mind for ever:

Lars Hallnäs’ first work on the CD is Sommardagar (Summer Days) – eight chorales for piano, from 1995.
As soon as I started to listen I was magically carried into the years of my barelegged 4-years age, strolling the meadows, communicating with the flowers and the oaks in the countryside where I lived with my parents. This was the first golden age, when communication between me and nature was immediate, obvious, without hidden motives or second thoughts – when I was one with the wind and with the oak that the wind blew through, and with the grass around my bareleggedness.

Lars Hallnäs’ eight chorales for piano, played by wonderful, wonderful pianist Kristine Scholz, talks to me from this earliest golden age, stroking my hair and my forehead like my mother did back then, assuring me of love, unconditional love, the kind of love all children take for granted and should take for granted and should be granted.

These pure, restful piano pieces also speak from my second golden age, which, indeed, through the poetry and aphorisms of Vilhelm Ekelund, was tightly connected to my barelegged first golden age. It brought the incredible sensitivity of my four-year-old self back to me in my nineteenth year, at the boarding school in the forest.
I would sit by my window in my study room at the school, looking at the patterns that the branches of the trees made. I could sit like that for hours, sipping coffee, reading Ekelund, and just looking out, resting in my gaze.

Lars Hallnäs means the same to me now, awakens the same sensitivity in me, albeit perhaps in an afterglow, in a September nuance of it, as I’m much older now, even getting old – but the origin is the same of these Hallnäs chorales and Vilhelm Ekelund’s aphorisms and my own talks with oaks when four years old and my wanderings between Stockholm antiquarian book stores along the streets of the falls of the 1960s.

Hallnäs says that he envisions that the music be played like the pianist trod a trail of glass, cautious not to break the surface tension of the sound.

Lars Hallnäs’ music is low-key; very much so: withheld, unassuming – but (maybe because of this) completely persuasive. Entering this music is like entering a retreat with the monks at the Valamo monastery in Karelia. It’s cleansing and restoring, just like the encounters and rendezvous with Anemone Hepaticas in April aspen groves: the clarity of undefiled spirit, the way you really are, beyond all this. Vilhelm Ekelund, especially late Vilhelm Ekelund, is the literary correspondence to Lars Hallnäs music. I’m more assured of the nobility of the human spirit after hearing Lars Hallnäs through Kristine Scholz’s hands: as the Bible has it: a little lower than angels.

This transparence of spirit; this motion of refined thought, of aimless acceptance of the circumstances of sentient beings along the topography of benevolence, hover in the bleak light over a September sea horizon: the sparse piano notes…
My thoughts soar like seagulls in an Apollonian September light of the mind, in Lars Hallnäs’ eight chorales, in Vilhelm Ekelund’s best aphorisms.

The next set of tunes (tracks 9 – 13) is called Augustidagar 96 (August Days 96); five meditations for violin and piano. Björn Nilsson says in his liner notes that this set might be heard as an independent continuation of the former set; the eight chorales for piano.

Anna Lindal is the violinist; the probably most distinguished Swedish contemporary violinist, with an uncanny feel for the brittle, the withheld, the fine-tuned, the un-said and the hinted. Her playing can be perceived like the careful, hardly discernable application of Indian ink on Japanese rice paper by a master calligrapher. She is, just as much as Lars Hallnäs, a contemporary heir of Vilhelm Ekelund’s clearly sketched sensitivity and burning artistic vision: complete honesty; nothing less.

Hearing Kristine Scholz and Anna Lindal simultaneously is precious, but to hear them speak the musical aphorisms of Lars Hallnäs elevates the experience several Swedenborgian heavens!

Even without all these references to the aphorism, or to Vilhelm Ekelund or my personal golden ages, this music will amplify the very best tendencies and properties of any watchful listener, any attentive contemporary!
The musical touch is so simple, yet so complete: nothing to be added, nothing subtracted. It’s just this musical moment; these moments musicaux, - and you: you and your perception: a picture of a naked tree in late fall, on a misty backdrop of silent thoughts.

You sit in your rowing-boat, resting the oars, the oars lifted in silence, your boat slowly adrift; drops of water falling from the blades of the oars, into the surface of the lake: a roaring silent Here; a spiraling Now. This is Lars Hallnäs’ August Days; five meditations for violin and piano – and I feel light and refined inside this temporary body of mine, in this particular expression of the Universe and Eternity. Now. Here. Hallnäs. Scholz. Lindal. Ekelund.

The next work is Die Sternseherin Lise, played by Anna Lindal alone. This set of four melodies (tracks 14 – 17) is based on a Matthias Claudius poem:

Anna Lindal – in my imagination – takes her violin bow and draws hard-earned signs and messages in the sand; thoughtful, absentminded codes out of an all but involuntary need for expression, an almost automatic desire for formulation – effortlessly like the hypnotic play of a child by itself under the sky in the wind, forgetful of its mother, forgetful of its father… forgetful of itself… and I believe the true and wonderful significance of wonderful, wonderful Anna Lindal’s ascetic playing of Lars Hallnäs’ Sterneseherin Lise lies in the forgetfulness of oneself, in the state of mind that John Cage always sought throughout his chance operations and his indeterminacy: this will to abstain from Self, to be at one with the All, to finally, in practice, be at one with the Universe as oneself: to travel to oneself by forgetting oneself, to come home by leaving: the wind moving a lock of hair of the absentminded child at hypnotic play, in forgetfulness of its mother, forgetfulness of its father… forgetfulness of itself…

När han vaknar en gång (When he awakes once upon a time) is a text by Swedish poet Erik Johan Stagnelius (1793 – 1823), sung here by renowned Swedish soprano Susanne Rydén.

Susanne Rydén travels her pristine voice a cappella through Lars Hallnäs’ winding musical laconisms, expressing Stagnelius’ words through a turned-away attitude, her inclinations leaning toward dissolution and moldering: pale gazes across bleak landscapes: someone bidding some kind of farewell deep inside my mind: fairies dissolving into the sunlight of a low celestial furnace.
This loneliness is talking to itself. Words might just as well not have been used. Voice might just as well been silent. Whispering thoughts might as well have carried this along winding roads of the past. The wind might as well have blown through a meadow in a far away forest. I rest in Susanne Rydén’s voice of clean, wind-dried white sheets in the garden… I’m not scared of Forever.

In the last piece – Wo der Wind den Steg umwehet – Hallnäs has set to music a poem by Friedrich Hölderlin (1770 – 1843). All the three musicians partake in this concluding work, on tracks 24 – 28: Kristine Scholz on piano, Anna Lindal on violin, and Susanne Rydén, soprano voice.

Incidentally, Hölderlin is a poet and writer that Vilhelm Ekelund refers to many times in his texts. In a little leaflet called Personregister till Vilhelm Ekelunds skrifter (personal index for the texts of Vilhelm Ekelund) issued in 1962 by Lundensiska litteratursällskapet, Lund (The Literary Society of Lund), issued in an extended version called Andar i den ekelundska sfären (Spirits in the Ekelund sphere) by Ellerström Publishing House in 1989, you can find out that Friedrich Hölderlin is referred to at 34 different places in the writings of Ekelund. Erik Johan Stagnelius gets 28 references in the Ekelund oeuvre.

Björn Nilsson observes that Wo der Wind den Steg umwehet may be considered a development of Sommardagar and Augustidagar 96, being, like them, a kind of meditation over a contemplated chorale fragment. The composer states that the music observes a contemplative attitude.
This is true of this set of works for soprano, piano and violin as a whole. Your entire being rests in this attentive listening and looking attitude throughout. The composition Wo der Wind den Steg umwehet is good medicine! All the works on this CD are much more than music, and this is very true for this concluding composition.

In this music I circle magic signs, I circle the rune stones and the Anemone Hepaticas of my own youth and Vilhelm Ekelund’s finest moments. This is high praise. This is high praise!