In the autumn of 2020, when Malin Broman came up with the idea that I would compose something that she could play ‘with herself’, my thoughts went to Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own. Woolf’s title refers to the purely practical privacy that women too need in order to write (‘A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’). I thought more of the great joy of creating in solitude, and of the magical moments that appear in the artistic process. This magic remains during a pandemic too; even though we’ve seen the music industry take a terrible hit this year, the joy of creation lives on, invulnerable in its own rooms.
In addition to playing eight parts on three different string instruments – violin, viola and cello – Malin also whistles and sings in harmony with herself. The brief text she sings is also from A Room of One’s Own, and reads, having taken on something of a new meaning during this musical lockdown: ‘there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind’.
The piece also constitutes a smaller companion piece to a bigger one that I have composed for Malin and double bassist Rick Stotijn: double concerto Infinite Rooms. That was about orchestral eternity rooms, inspired by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. So now, we’re moving from big orchestral rooms to a small, separate chamber, but the principle is the same; your own room is also a kind of eternity room, where small, musical details multiply ad infinitum through mirrors.
Did anyone think that Malin Broman is extrovert ? Looks can be deceiving. She is, she says, an introvert. So she needs a room of her own.
Britta Byström
Mirror mirror- director’s note
This project shouldn’t work. It should be impossible. Yet it can only exist like this as a film or as a recording. Malin can’t play 8 parts to you live. I hope 8 people will play it often but that will be a version of this piece, an altered reflection of its intention – not the “real” thing. Yet in this concert hall the real thing can’t be played. It’s a charming paradox, and one that gave us much inspiration.
Due to quarantine restrictions and everybody’s tight schedules I wasn’t able to be in Stockholm during the two filming days. We knew this would happen so we had to make a plan – an ambitious and detailed plan for how we would create this film. We needed to plan all the shots for the edit rather than edit what we film but film what we needed to edit. We all had to imagine the outcome and make that real. Again an altered reflection or mirror image of the typical way.
To do this we needed to build a unique collaboration across Zoom and FaceTime between artist, composer, director, technical team and sound producer.
For instance I’ve never actually met Britta in the flesh – but I feel we have genuinely worked together to create what you now see before you.
Of course I know Malin, Karl and Aurélie so well, and having worked together with them during these last 18 months on Don Giovanni, Siegfried Idyll and the St John Passion, we had already established a strong collaborative spirit and fostered all the trust you need to make a project like this work.
Britta’s piece is built from gleaming fragments and bold ideas. The music reflects itself and as you listen, the patterns and colours play over your mind’s eye as well as your ear. Understanding Britta’s composition process was my leaping-off point for how we might build this film together.
She told us about her dual inspirations; the first being of course the essay by Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s Own. The second being the mirror-rooms created by Japanese contemporary artist Yayoi Kusama. These infinitely reflective finite spaces are often quite small but the experience of entering one is as mind-expanding as it is beautiful. One’s sense of boundary and structure slips away into the iterating distance as reflection bounces off reflection, questioning the reality of the very surface from which they are reflecting. You are at once in a solid room and an undefinable space – neither real nor imagined.
Within one of these simple yet highly unusual rooms, you are able to examine increasingly fading versions of you, as you appear to yourself trapped in a series of self-consuming dimensional planes.
In short you could spend hours in there.
After creating models – both physical and digital, it quickly became clear that we needed to build our own mirror room – and it needed to be big enough for Malin to play and film herself inside.
Karl and Bo Söderström took on this challenge, and they found their answer in a well-known Swedish furniture company’s wardrobe doors.
The piece requires other construction beyond physical sets, namely that of a virtual octet of Malins playing the 8 parts. We wanted to bring the ideas of true mirror reflections and altered versions of the same thing together to explore this.
A reflection in light is to an echo in sound.
Our task was to create visual echoes of Malin, in the same way that Britta had created musical reflections. We used green-screen techniques to composite many Malins into a virtual space. We used editing techniques such as cross fades and opacity blending to layer Malins over herself. And my favorite is the video-echo technique achieved by connecting the camera to a screen and filming it with the subject in the foreground. This causes in-camera video echoes as the camera captures the image it is sending.
Combining and refining these tools we were able to use them to examine the ideas of self-reflection, introspection and the paradox of perception. Malin is at the same time trapped by this mirror box and able to escape and travel across space and time. Through shear willpower and exceptional talent, Malin herself is able to crossover the boundaries of what is usually possible. She is living proof of the truth behind Woolf’s assertion that “there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of (her) mind.”
I don’t think anything like this has been done before in this way. And I think it’s fair to say that without all the very special set of circumstances, singular talents and generous souls that combined to make this happen, it would have been genuinely impossible.
What happens to you happens to you. If it is perceived, it is real. If it can be seen, heard, or perceived, it can be confronted or changed. We cannot escape our reflection. Light travels. Sound bounces. We are trapped and we are free.
Andy Staples
