Susanna on Baudelaire:
"This is how I fell down Baudelaire's rabbit hole"
Susanna Wallumrød comes to the Kongsberg Jazz Festival and Musikkteateret on Saturday 6 July with the latest edition of her long-standing immersion project in the texts of the French 1800th-century poet Charles Baudelaire. This time she is bringing the Oslo Sinfonietta and cassette magician Stina Stjern with her, with newly written arrangements adapted for the soloist orchestra.
In this text, Susanna writes about how she discovered Baudelaire's texts and how, over several years, she has grasped the Baudelaire legacy and explored it by setting the poems to music with her own music and with hand-picked collaborators.
Susanna has released three albums of Baudelaire material: "Baudelaire & Piano" (2020), "Elevation" (2022) and "Baudelaire & Orchestra" (2023), the latter with the Broadcasting Orchestra.
Buy tickets for the concert in Kongsberg Musikkteater here.
Susanna writes about her Baudelaire projects
Text: Susanna Wallumrød
It is 20 years since I made my recording debut this year, and my relationship with the French poet Charles Baudelaire spans almost this entire period.
When I released the album "Flower of Evil" in 2008, the title was inspired by a painting I saw at an exhibition that took its title from Baudelaire's collection of poems, in the original language Le Fleurs du Mal. The title has an appealing contrast between the colorful and lively that the flowers represent, and the darkness of evil. It was a nice title that I wanted to use.
Almost ten years passed before this nascent fascination with Baudelaire's texts gradually turned into a kind of obsession. It was as if I was moving from Baudelaire's fringes into the core of his work, and I kept stumbling upon him from several angles. The poems and the themes in them are more than interesting enough in themselves, but Baudelaire the person is also a deeply fascinating figure. He was in many ways the 1800th century Nick Cave; proper attitude, dark, dramatic and morbid, and with an unimaginable nerve in the expression. And controversial, several of the poems from Le Fleurs du Mal were banned because they were considered obscene in the Catholic France of the time. He was a bit of a punk, quite simply. But he was also a man who took himself excessively solemnly.
The translation that sang to me
In 2017 I came across a new English translation of Le Fleurs du Mal by retired English literature professor Anthony Mortimer. His interpretations of "Flowers of Evil" sang to me, literally. It was a more musical translation than the ones I had read before, and therefore it also hit me harder. This is what I want to sing!
There was a process to get approval for the use of these translations, but the professor himself was very pleased when he heard the music. He even complimented me on my English pronunciation, which was very nice.
Baudelaire's material has fascinated many artists in various art forms for a long time. A lot has been done in classical music, and many may have come across Diamanda Galas' Baudelaire-inspired music. Serge Gainsbourg even has a song called "Baudelaire" on his album "N° 4" from 1962. But I have consciously tried not to listen too much to what others have done, it must not get in the way of my very own associations and creative approach.
The art of exploring an idea
This may look like a very ambitious and extensive project, but actually it starts with a very intuitive process when you get such ideas. Here it started very simply with the realization that these were lyrics I could sing. So I didn't quite know what it was going to be when I started, but I had one hello that there could be something interesting here.
Eventually I saw that these lyrics triggered me to make a different kind of music than I had done up until then, music that was different in expression and approach, with other melodies and other chordal compositions. It is such redemptive creative moments that are fascinating to us as creators. It opens up new avenues to explore, it fertilizes creativity. It was fruitful in a new way.
First disc: Alone at the piano
This was not a well-thought-out plan in advance, but I chose to start completely alone at the piano. Eventually, I expanded with more collaborators and let the expression grow larger. These poems are so rich in images, so I quickly realized that this project could be expanded. But I wanted to start by showing them in their purest form. This became the album "Baudelaire & Piano" in 2020.
The first enrichment was a concert performance at the Henie-Onstad Art Center, where I expanded with scenography, lighting, video and costumes. Here I also met Stina Moltu, or Stina Stjern, who plays on cassettes with field recordings and self-produced music and other types of instruments. I wanted the mechanical sound that comes when you use cassette recordings and cassette players as instruments, the sound of buttons and rewinding. For me, there is an association with the time when Baudelaire wrote these poems, during the industrial revolution. A historical rush if you will.
Baudelaire wrote poems about the city, which was enveloped in factories, smoke and machine noise, in an upheaval period where a lot changed in a short time. Then there is perhaps also a small comment on the digitization of the music industry in here. It takes six old walkmans to play these things, and they're impossible to repair, so it takes his woman on Ebay to keep the instrument fleet going.
Second disc: French collaboration
Around the same time I also discovered the French artist Delphine Dora, I think it was American Julia Holter who recommended her in some context. I started listening to her, completely fell in love with her voice, and first asked her if she would like to recite some of the poems and record it, so that we could use this. The result of this collaboration was the album "Elevation" from 2022. The album was created during covid, so we never met during the recording, we only exchanged recordings and files. When the world opened up again, I was finally able to bring Delphine to Norway to play concerts together.
Third disc: With orchestra
The third step was to embroider this material with an orchestra. I pitched it to the Broadcasting Orchestra, which embraced the project. It was a long process in which I collaborated with Jarle Storløkken and Jan Martin Smørdal, who wrote the arrangements. The result was the album "Baudelaire & Orchestra", which came out last year. The recordings from Bærum Kulturhus are now also available as TV recordings at NRK.
And now: Baudelaire & Oslo Sinfonietta
It is fantastic to work with a large orchestra. But it is also impractical and difficult to plan in a hectic calendar for more than 40 musicians involved. So then we have arrived at what I will perform during the Kongsberg Jazz Festival, and which premiered at the Munch Museum earlier this year: Baudelaire with the Oslo Sinfonietta.
This was also a new stage and process, where we scaled the large full-scale orchestral arrangements down into a kind of symphonic pocket format. Oslo Sinfonietta is a soloist ensemble with only one musician per instrument, so it gives a completely different sound. That's why it's also so exciting - there may be variations on the same theme, but it's also something completely new and unique.
At the other extreme have Bendik Baksås made some remixes that take the material in a techno-like direction, so there are still many paths this could take.
A side effect is also that all this triggers new creative processes for own texts and new material, which brings with it inspiration and influence from my trip down the Baudelaire rabbit hole.
But just like with the start of my Baudelaire project, I don't know now what direction it will take or what it will be in the end. That's what's so nice, both for me who makes the music and for you who will listen.
Enjoy yourself!
