States of Matter

The second half of the Mahler in the Mountains concert series consists of Hakenberg’s song cycle, States of Matter, which connects movements two to six of Mahler’s Third Symphony. However, as part of his vision for these works, Hakenberg included aspects of Mahler’s symphony with creative works by local Métis poet Marilyn Dumont. Thanks to the support of the Wirth Institute, Hakenberg met Dumont. Together, they chose five poems, all of which were reactions to the titles Mahler provided for movements two to six of Symphony No. 3: “What the Flowers Tell Me,” “What the Animals Tell Me,” “What Humanity Tells Me,” “What the Angels Tell Me,” and “What Love Tells Me.” The poems Hakenberg and Dumont chose evoke a strong connection to water but in different states of matter.

The first song—“Sky Berry and Water Berry”—muses upon Métis beadwork traditions. The text describes beadwork as representations of blossoms, leaves, and fruit. Yet, each of these symbols act as a transmitter of meaning. Specifically, the similarities between the shapes of beads and water droplets signify women both giving birth and acting as guardians of the water. Drawing from this metaphor, beadwork thus reflects upon life, passes down knowledge, and adds spiritual depth to items of everyday use. While setting the text, Hakenberg shares that he fantasized about doing this beadwork. Compositionally, he conveys the act of beading by composing a musical gesture representing a drop falling into the water and immediately bouncing back up. Varying this gesture gave Hakenberg the “beads” from which he composed the song. Hakenberg also freely quotes the molto espressivo violin motive and the contrasting dotted eighth rhythm of measure 27 in Mahler’s third symphony. Hakenberg’s song is set for two voices, suggesting a remembrance of an old tune sung communally.

In the second song, with the Michif title “Notre Frères,” Dumont describes buffalo as the brothers of the Métis. She suggests that the Métis gather strength from identifying with the animal and direct their energy towards the continuing struggle for self-determination and the rights to the land. Gabriel Dumont, the most prominent fighter in this cause and the poet's ancestor, appears as a character in the poem. “Notre Frères” calls on the Métis Nation to unite around their collective identity. Dumont creates a metaphor of buffalo rising from the bottom of a lake under the Milky Way, an image she describes as "dust of buffalo spirits passing." To set this poem, Hakenberg scanned the first pages of Mahler’s third movement, along with the orchestration of “Ablösung im Sommer,” for a pitch sequence to serve as a structural ostinato. For the violin parts, he refers to the vibrant Métis fiddle tradition for inspiration. In the song's opening, there is a hocketing sixteenth-note pulse that ultimately drives the song. As with the first song of the cycle, “Notre Frères” is set for two singers. Here, however, they depict sisters gathering strength from singing in counterpoint.

In her poem “Your Image Waits,” Dumont describes the working conditions and exhaustion of a waiter commuting home after their shift. Here, water depicts a metaphor of life, and its presence is ubiquitous throughout the poem: it appears as slush, it is forced through pipes and spray-blades on a commercial dishwasher, it is excess water on a tray, as steam, and as a component of milk. To evoke the poem’s meaning, Hakenberg draws elements from the fourth movement of Mahler’s symphony, which suggests a sense of nightly stillness that, in Friedrich Nietzsche’s words, expresses the loneliness inherent in human existence. Like the slow tempo and sustained notes in Mahler’s movement, Hakenberg sets Dumont’s poem similarly. The song’s accompaniment centers on a progression of softly sustained triads developed from the horn section in measures 86ff of Mahler’s score. The accordion plays these triads as a drone, further adding to the theme of stillness. The song is composed for mezzo-soprano, accordion, and additional instruments to evoke the waiter's working environment.

In “Breakfast of the Spirit,” Dumont conveys reconnecting with one's roots. The setting depicts a festive breakfast celebrating the familiarity that comes with self-rediscovery after being hidden. Dumont’s poem is a joyous, multilayered evocation of spiritual bliss. Similarly, Mahler’s multilayering technique in his fifth movement evokes a sense of spiritual rootedness. He builds into the texture church bells ringing, children mimicking those bells, a women's choir singing about Christian redemption, and sounds of a symphonic wind band, all interacting acoustically in a way that may have inspired Charles Ives. Because the scale of the Wirth Institute Sinfonietta and solo voices is significantly smaller than a symphony orchestra with choruses, Hakenberg composed numerous textures representing metaphors found in Dumont’s poem: the "chickadees" in the woodwinds, the "mute spruce" in the brass, and the bubbly spring in the drums. With these, Hakenberg builds the accompaniment to engage with an energetic melody alternating fluidly between even and odd meters for the soprano.

“We Are Made Of Water” reflects the hardships of keeping ancestral spirituality alive. To portray this sombre theme, Hakenberg builds his setting of Dumont’s poem on the characteristic quarter note pulse from Mahler’s sixth movement. Aurally, this creates a sense of eternal continuation. Additionally, Hakenberg quotes Mahler’s melody and bass lines, albeit irregularly, by shifting and displacing metric accents to intentionally blur the musical material – the "ancestral" – and to give an impression of weathering. Hakenberg complements the melody and the bass with an inner voice free of the quarter note pulse. At first, he chose the pitches of this inner voice to create a dissonance with Mahler’s outer voices, only to gradually resolve. Energized by this revolving resolution pattern, the inner voice develops musical gestures inspired by the poem. The vocal parts are designed to fit into this instrumental framework, vacillating between Mahler and Hakenberg. The resulting instrumental textures pass gradually between the sinfonietta's instrumental sections as if to create a sense of floating on waves while simultaneously striving to evoke an aural image of a twisted DNA molecule.