Premier recueil officiel de partitions pour claviers de Björk, 34 Scores for Piano, Organ, Harpsichord and Celeste inclut des chansons issues de tous ses albums, excepté Biophilia.
Imaginé en collaboration avec le pianiste et collaborateur de longue date Jonas Sen, la maison M/M (Paris) et le graveur Werner Wolff, les 34 partitions bénéficient d’une mise en page spéciale sur trois niveaux de lecture.
Le livre, disponible en précommande chez One Little Indian, a également été proposé à la vente en avant-première lors de l’exposition Björk Digital à Los Angeles à partir du 19 mai.
Photo de couverture : Stephen Sweet, 1996.
in the autumn of 2009 i sat down and wanted to decipher and reevaluate what musical education meant to me . the frustrated musicologist in me went ahead and completed the educational biophilia which since has been tought all around the world and is now a permanent part of scandinavias curriculum
i also wanted to question how i felt about musical documentation , when cds were slowly becoming obsolete , i was curious about the difference of midi ( digital notation ) and classical notation and enthusiastic in blurring the lines and at which occasions and how one would share music in these new times . what is the difference of karaoke and the lyrical recitals of the 19th century ? can one meet at bonfires and sing techno songs ? ( well icelanders do obvs ) maybe i should share digital notation that people could connect to their synths or do harpsichord versions of electronic beats to enjoy in the living rooms and hopefully families singalong to 100 years ago most music was shared through scores , does that even apply to today ? and if so how ?
from these questions i started working with jónas sen on gathering together my string , choir , vocal and brass arrangements through the years and arranging them for different keyboards such as organs , pianos , celestas and harpsichords .
i also talked to my longtime collaborators m/m and asked them to design a font for notes in the same way they would for letters . that of course became technically almost impossible but we believe we have now somehow found a program were everyone can design their own fonts to align gracefully to their music
and last but not least : as a soft feminist stance i decided to put importance on my arrangements through the years ( i feel still today most people are not aware of i have done the majority of the choir , brass , string and vocal arrangements myself through the years ) by doing concerts where we have transformed all these arrangements over to strings to emphasizing that part of my work . so far we have played albert hall , harpa hall in reykjavík , the auditorio in mexico city and will be playing the disney hall on the 30th of may . and i will be singing on top
hope you enjoy it !!
warmthnessbjörk
The score book alone took eight years to put together. She met two times a year with composer, keyboardist and former bandmate Jonas Sen to go through her back catalog. They merged her arrangements for choir, strings, brass and vocals into versions for keyboards. She also worked with designers on what turned into a challenging task : creating a font for her music in the same way one would be created for letters. If you’re not quite sure what this means, you’re not alone. When pressed to elaborate, Björk said she could talk about the process for hours and that a documentary could be made about it, but it still wouldn’t be easy to understand.
“We had to do a Kofi Annan situation between the [music] notation universe and the font universe,” she said, referring to the seemingly impossible negotiations undertaken by the former secretary general of the United Nations. “That actually took two years, but hopefully now other musicians can do the same with their own notations.”LA Times - mai 2017
“With the score book coming out now, that’s also another side of me in which I’m trying to be even more intimate with people,” Björk explained. “They can stay at home and play their piano and sing along with my songs… with their loved ones, which we sort of do a lot in Iceland, especially after a couple of drinks — or maybe it’s more screaming than singing, actually.”
Variety - mai 2017
