Elsa Bergman: Playon Crayon

Ever since 1967, when British composer Cornelius Cardew's 193-page graphic score Treatise was published, there has been controversy about the role graphic scores play in improvised music. Having worked on Treatise from 1963 to 1967, once it was published and discussed, Cardew wrote Treatise Handbook, published in 1971, which shed no light on how Treatise's complex graphics should be interpreted.

The reason for the historical note is that with Playon Crayon Elsa Bergman may be following in Cardew's footprints. The album cover and its enclosed booklet contain seven brightly coloured artworks by Bergman which share their titles with the album's tracks. Yes, they are the graphic scores of those tracks, which were performed by Bergman on double bass, Susanna Santos Silva on trumpet, David Stackenäs on guitar, Katt Hernandez on violin and Matilda Rolfsson on drums, and recorded at Fylkingen, Stockholm, on August 22, 2021.

At this point, readers are invited to look at the album cover which features part of "Kaleidoscope" and think about the music which that graphic score might trigger. The album's booklet explains that "Each musician was assigned a specific color-coded part—red for Silva, yellow for Stackenäs, green for Hernandez, purple for Rolfsson, blue for Bergman—but, apart from briefly explaining her ideas and providing some loose directions, the musicians were asked to bring their own imaginations to the performance." If that sounds like a basis for free improvisation, the album's music bears that out. This is particularly true of the two versions of "Kaleidoscope" which bookend the album; if one listens to the tracks while looking at the score, it is nigh on impossible to say that a particular sound was played because of a particular mark in the score; listening to the two tracks, they sound different enough not to be interpretations of the same score.

Of the six scores apart from "Kaleidoscope," those for "Rosmarie," "Heartbeats" "Maths" and "Telephone Cords" all have some conventional musical notation—notes on staves— -mixed in with more abstract elements and, so, follow in the footsteps of Treatise. Occasionally in those pieces a phrase or riff is played which could have been quoted from the piece's graphical score. However, none of the pieces sounds through-composed and improvisation is dominant. Berman has said, "The idea for Playon Canyon came from an urge to find new directions for my music, while still maintaining the feel of freedom and improvisation." Throughout, Bergman's bass is a mainstay of the quintet's music, to the extent that her playing has more effect on the ensemble sound than her scores do. In both ways, she can be proud of the end results, as can her bandmates.

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