Another Timbre Interview with Kristofer Svensson

'For a Lemon Tree' consists of two pieces: the title track, which lasts 12 minutes, and the much longer 'Improvisation on Prakāśa'. Both tracks are played by the trio of Maya Bennardo (violin), Erik Blennow Calälv (bass clarinet) and yourself on kacapi (a kind of zither from Indonesia). I'm not clear how much of the music is improvised. Could you explain how both pieces work?

In Improvisation on Prakāśa the music is improvised within a tuning and form, while For a lemon tree is fully notated.

The instructions to Prakāśa are quite brief. The first page of the score gives the tuning and maps the harmonic terrain: sub-modal regions, tunable paths, and a few implied near-pitches that intonating instruments can lean toward when they're clearly suggested. The second (and last) page gives a simple large-scale form — an order for introducing and omitting materials — so the piece tends to generate a similar harmonic shape each time it's played.

What this gives us in practice is not just a palette of notes to improvise with, but a set of constraints and affordances. Because the intervals are unequal and highly specific, the mode doesn't behave like a neutral scale: it suggests which pitch combinations can actually settle, which dyads resist stabilizing on their own, which three-note constellations feel calm, and where tension naturally collects. All of this adds up to a distinct attunemental tone: an affective atmosphere, a kind of 'rasa'.

At the same time, it would be misleading to say that this affect is built into the tuning itself. It arises relationally, in performance, through how we move through the mode. Rehearsal becomes a kind of perceptual learning where we internalize the tuning by performing it, and we work out our version of the piece. While improvisation is our method, we don't treat it as an obligation to do something new every time. Our practice is more about going deeper into the mode and letting the piece gradually clarify for us — not as something we study from the outside, but as something that can only arise through playing.

For a lemon tree came about directly from this process. We wanted a shorter fully notated piece that could function as a condensed version of how we had learned to play this material. So Maya and I wrote a composition based on Prakāśa, using the same tuning and the same attunemental field we had developed as an ensemble. In that sense, I would say that the shorter piece captures something like the essence of our way of playing Prakāśa.

Part of what I love about 'Prakāśa' is its melancholic mood, which I'm always a sucker for. Now, I don't understand the detail of Just Intonation at all, but on the CD cover you describe the piece as an "11-limit Just Intonation tuning and accompanying rules for modal improvisation". Combining this with your previous answer, are you saying that the intervals in this tuning are predisposed to a particular affective atmosphere - in this case melancholy - in the same sort of way as a minor key in tonal music? Or does this atmosphere arise only because of the 'rules' you give yourselves in the improvisation, which limit your choice of pitches?

It's a great question, and it gets at a real puzzle in just Intonation: does the atmosphere come from the scale itself, or from how we treat it? With Just Intonation those two are usually hard to separate. Designing a JI scale is already a compositional act, like designing a seed while thinking through the ways the plant might grow.In many modal traditions, the affect isn't 'in the mode' by itself so much as in the style. In Renaissance polyphony, for example, moods aren't tied to modes themselves (Dorian, Mixolydian, or what later becomes our major/minor distinction) but arise largely through compositional constraint: what melodic motions are favoured, how cadences work, how steps and leaps are balanced, and which degrees are repeatedly affirmed.What JI adds is that some of those constraints become acoustically explicit. Certain simultaneities stabilise readily while others resist; some motions feel natural and settle easily, while others feel like deliberate tension. Of course, one can disregard that and treat the scale as generic microtonality, but if you play it as a relational system, the scale starts to teach you its own grammar and atmosphere through perceptual learning.In Prakāśa, the form and the order in which the material is introduced matter to the atmosphere because they help establish a tonal centre - especially since I tend to design scales with multiple plausible centres - but most of the 'rules' we follow, and the melodies and harmonies we tend to play, are really extractions from the scale itself: things that, I would argue, any player would discover by living with the tuning long enough.

So yes: for us it can feel as if melancholy is built into the tuning - but it depends on a way of playing that lets the tuning's asymmetries and moments of settling actually come into focus. And of course tuning is only one parameter: pacing, density, phrasing, and timbre all matter too.

Also relating to the question of mood, or affective atmosphere, can you explain a bit more about the concept of 'rasa' which you referred to? I know it comes from Indian classical music, but that's about all, so can you elaborate on what you are taking from it?

Yes, rasa is a term from classical Indian aesthetics (it's also used quite ordinarily in Indonesia to talk about musical feel, and I heard it often while studying kacapi in West Java), and it literally means 'taste'. In a loose sense it can overlap with what we call a mood or atmosphere, but the reason I tend to use it is actually that it connects aesthetic moods to soteriological goals. Beyond the more familiar rasas that a piece might attune a listener to (melancholy, tenderness, romance, joy), Abhinavagupta (one of the main theorists of rasa) places śāntarasa, the 'taste' of peace, at the apex: an aesthetic serenity that is less entangled with emotional reactivity, and that can intimate liberation. Buddhism has a related but sharper notion: samarasa — the 'taste of sameness', where like and dislike dissolve altogether. To what extent music, which often attunes us to a mood, can intimate śāntarasa — and perhaps even approach samarasa — is a question I've returned to for years: whether musical atmospheres can become quiet, thin, and spacious enough to open into these less emotionally bound attunements — or, in other words, to what extent musical attunement can, through sound, begin to resemble the feeling of meditating in silence.