Maria W Horn
‘Panoptikon’
2nd February
XKatedral
‘Panoptikon’ is a suite of vocal and electronic music originally composed by Maria W Horn for an installation in the decommissioned Vita Duvan (White Dove) panopticon prison in Luleå, Sweden. From opening in 1856 until its closure in 1979, prisoners were detained there for theft, perjury, drunkenness, domestic violence, and vagrancy.
Through the extensive reform of the Western penal system from the 18th century onwards, the former corporal punishments of torture and public humiliation were replaced by new technologies for social control through spatial isolation and surveillance.
The circular prison structure of Vita Duvan, which enabled central monitoring, was meant to create a sense of omniscient surveillance. The panopticon made the inmates aware that they could be monitored at any time, without having any way of checking if this was actually the case.
The prison interior was seen as an efficient and silent machinery whereby an inner psychological change would gradually occur in the prisoner through solitary confinement and isolation. The individual prisoner often spent the first three years in complete isolation, during which all contact with other prisoners was strictly forbidden.
‘Panopitkon’ was originally presented at the prison in 2020 as a multichannel sound and light installation entitled ‘Vita Duvans Lament’, where the imagined individual voices of the inmates were represented by loudspeakers placed in the various cells of the prison – each voice striving for community, but hindered by the forced isolation of the prison architecture.
Both the ‘Vita Duvans Lament’ installation and the album ‘Panoptikon’ can be seen as a musical excavation into the imagined perspectives of the prison inmates. Maria combined site specific source material and spectral sound processing techniques in order to explore the inherent memories of Vita Duvan.
A passage found in one of the prison diaries describes the Sunday church service, during which the prisoners were allowed to sing along with the hymns from inside their cells. This inspired the idea of composing a vocal cycle – an invitation to the imagined inmates of the Vita Duvan prison to evade isolation by partaking in a communal singing ceremony.
In the album’s compositional process, Horn has tried to imagine how consciousness is affected by the sensory deprivation of the isolation cell, where the only indication of the passing of time was found in cycles of daylight. A recurrent synthesized chord progression forms a sounding body that slowly pluses, reminiscent of those cycles of illumination which punctuated the silence, uncertainty, and solitude. This framework is completed by three vocal parts that add chordal colorings, melodies and ornaments to the original harmonic progression – sung by the ghost choir of Sara Fors, Sara Parkman, Vilhelm Bromander and David Åhlen.
‘Omnia Citra Mortem’ can be translated as everything until death. This is a legal term which meant that an accused person who did not confess their crime could not be sentenced to death, but only to torture, omnia citra mortem, until a confession was made. This part is composed as a kind of call-response between the prisoners, starting from singular sparse vocal fragments that gradually build into a canonical web of voices.
The second part ‘Hæc Est Regula Recti’ translates as this is the rule for straightness/correctness, which is taken from an illustration used as the opening plate of Foucault's ‘Discipline and Punish’. This part is sung with conviction and hope of penance, followed by multilayered echoes of the underlying electronic lines. As they gradually decrease, we are left with the bare voices of inmates quietly reciting to themselves the kind of memorial rhymes used by prisoners to keep sane and cope with the isolation – listing northern Sweden's largest rivers, logical connections, memory games and so forth.
The melody and text used in the third part of the composition, ‘Längtans Vita Duva’ (Lamentation of the White Dove), is a traditional folk song from Närke which has been arranged to fit within the harmonic context of the vocal cycle. The Swedish lyric could be translated as follows:
The mountain of Hell will crack like ice
The sun will lose its shine
The forest will turn into a dove
Before I forsake you, my friend
___
Maria W Horn is a Swedish composer whose work explores the inherent spectral properties of sound. Her compositions employ a varied instrumentation ranging from analogue synthesizers to choir, string instruments, pipe organ and various chamber music formats. Synthetic sound is often paired with acoustic instruments in order to extend the instruments timbral capacities with precise control of timbre, tuning and texture. Maria combines spectralist techniques and site-specific source material in order to explore the inherent memories of a building, object or geographical area.
In her recent compositions she uses acoustic artifacts from physical spaces to create musical frameworks for her compositions. Using these acoustic imprints as starting point Maria weaves intricate harmonic patterns that slowly transform from intimate fragility to searing high-density aural monoliths. Her debut album ‘Kontrapoetik’ (2018) is a historical investigation, and a kind of counter-exorcism tackling the deceivingly serene, yet turmoiled past of her home region Ångermanland in the North of Sweden. ‘Dies Irae’ (2021) derives from the resonant frequencies of an empty machine hall from the mining region of Bergslagen and ‘Vita Duvans Lament’ (2020) is a sonic excavation of what used to be the only panoptic cell prison built in Sweden. In addition to her artistic practice she is also the co-founder of Swedish record label XKatedral.
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Track-list
A
1. Omnia Cittra Mortem
B
2. Haec Est Regula Recti
3. Panoptikon
4. Vita Duvans Lament (trad. Närke, arr. Maria W Horn)
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