The physical aspect of music

Signe Emmeluth's commissioned work for the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra at Moldejazz 2021 is a multi-sensory concert where sound and light interpret the physical aspect of music.

Signe says that "the physical aspect of music has always fascinated me. The energy and contrasts. How frequencies affect the body through phenomena, such as interference, when two or more notes stand and glide between each other in the listener's head. Or the experience of a vacuum, where a lack of sound or light can feel completely overwhelming. How does the physical affect us emotionally? And not least, how is the musician's own physique affected when pushed to extremes? It's all connected."

The title Physicality in / emotion, refers to the physicality of the music and its movements – hence "in motion", and how the physicality affects the mood and presence of both listener and musician, for example through the volumes and exhaustion – "emotion".

The work was premiered at Moldejazz in July 2021 and later in Trondheim, Oslo, and Umeå that same year. 

"On first hearing Signe Emmeluth's work Physicality in / emotion, it feels like a work that early defines the breadth it comes to explore – in the energetic, in the tight, the expansive, and the abstract – though it takes some time to adjust to the depth and the big story. When the band finally comes together, first around a weird, skewed ostinato with wavy, swallowed flats of sound and later in a gigantic riff, founded on two electric basses, guitar and drums, with extroverted vocals from Maja S.K. Ratkje and a characteristically sputtering alto sax duet with Signe Emmeluth and Amalie Dahl, shrouded in light and smoke, this listener's childish urge to get the big meaning of it all falls a bit flat. As if what we have heard earlier in the concert's seven stretches has been a smoldering, ever-growing mass that suddenly stirs and thunders out into the hall ... ."
Filip Roshauw, Jazznytt.

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