Music changes us. It can reorder our synapses and send us into trance like states. I’ve long been fascinated by the relationship between time and music, and the way it can produce an altered perception of the passing of time. I also experience a sense of physical movement when I listen to some music - particularly propulsive rhythmic music - like I’m sitting on a train that is all of a sudden in motion as the beat starts. 

As I listen to Erkki’s solo I have the feeling that I am sitting very still while the rest of the world moves around me. The unison double-stopped notes he produces with long even strokes seem to bend the space-time continuum as they gradually divide and form oscillations that bring a third note into existence. Is this a kind of relativity? Perhaps years flash by according to the laws discovered by Einstein as the world accelerates into a whorl around this point of stillness. 

Erkki says he enjoys that feeling, where, “you lose your sense of time and where time in a way becomes spatialised.” 

It’s a fascinating conversation, which begins with me asking him about the level of pre-conception in the work. He tells me that for this video he recorded two quite different solos trying to find a way, “to be part of the acoustical system of the violin and the room.” It took him one pass to develop some kind of understanding of the relationships in play before arriving at the approach that is documented. 

“The interest for me in this style of playing lies in trying to get into the phenomenology of sound in real time - it can’t be pre-composed. It’s essential that the work responds to the moment and place, and deals with sound as a phenomenon rather than a codified musical syntax.”

As listeners, we experience the aural phenomena he produces: the slowly changing beats of the microtonal oscillations between the drones, and the subtle timbrel shifts. But we also cannot escape the fact that we are listening to the violin with all of its associations around musical styles and expectations of what ‘virtuosity’ is. With this solo Erkki not only bends space-time with two notes, but also completely upends these associations and expectations. He creates a piece that is, in terms of violin traditions, ‘anti-virtuosic’, but in which a strange and exquisitely different virtuosity gradually reveals itself over the course of 13 minutes and 37 seconds. 

As our conversation continues he tells me a little about his violin. About how this particular instrument has influenced these explorations in sound because of how it responds to this kind of playing: "The instrument does start to change after a while of being saturated in a particular pitch… It makes you feel subjective and objective at the same time, like you are controlling some of the system but not all of it.”

I wonder about the instrument and its history. About this notion of it changing as it’s played, and being changed by what is played. And I think more about time. Erkki tells me this violin was made 245 years ago in 1774 in southern Germany by a violin maker called, Aegidius Klotz. That it had been played right through the classical and romantic eras, into modernism. That’s a lot of music. A lot of information which has passed through those thin pieces of wood and those mysterious internal chambers. And now here we are in the cool dark of Leo Dale’s studio in West Footscray in 2019. Two notes bringing that structure to life again. Violin as time machine.

Solo Series #11
Performance: Erkki Veltheim
Photo: Sarah Walker
Audio and Video producer: Leo Dale
Text: Peter Knight