{"id":10428,"date":"2025-05-01T17:29:48","date_gmt":"2025-05-01T22:29:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/postgenre.org\/staging\/4567\/?p=10428"},"modified":"2025-12-02T15:56:01","modified_gmt":"2025-12-02T21:56:01","slug":"trust-courvoisier-halvorson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/postgenre.org\/staging\/4567\/trust-courvoisier-halvorson\/","title":{"rendered":"Trust: A Conversation with Sylvie Courvoisier and Mary Halvorson"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

An artistic spark leads humanity to create wonders of beauty. Philosophers will debate the origins of this creative impetus.\u00a0 Some credit a higher, more divine power. But, regardless of its source, it is indisputable that there is a force that drives toward creation, one that transcends cultural norms, stylistic restrictions, and temporal limitations. Consider how cultures spread all over the globe – before the advent of modern instruments – all saw some need to take the substances of nature and turn them into instruments. People in places as diverse as Turkey, Russia, Greece, Ireland, and throughout the Americas took bones and skins of the animals they consumed and turned them into rhythmic tools. There was an undeniable need to say something through music, even if technology did not easily cooperate. Another commonality across cultures is the importance of interpersonal communication through sound. Music has never been a solitary exercise. Even in \u201csolo\u201d performances, there are at least two figures: the artist and the listener. Like any other relationship, investing time and effort inevitably produces richer and fuller results than mere cursory conversations. As such, in our modern system that often emphasizes novel collaborations, a secret power hides in further delving into existing relationships. Bone Bells<\/em> (Pyroclastic, 2025) by Sylvie Courvoisier and Mary Halvorson excels as a recording because of both artists\u2019 open willingness to commit to these shared musical expressions.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The duo\u2019s third recorded outing, Bone Bells<\/em>, finds the pianist and guitarist increasingly moving as a coherent unit while retaining the power of their idiosyncratic voices. Crop Circles<\/em> (Relative Pitch, 2017) was a place of initial exploration: an arena where the artists test one another’s already far-reaching boundaries and how they are sonically compatible. The follow-up Searching for the Disappeared Hour<\/em> (Pyroclastic, 2021) presents lessons learned from these initial explorations. But Bone Bells finds them at the furthest depths yet in their ongoing musical conversations.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The result is shifting textures and ideas that move freely along skeletal sketches rather than hard-set pieces. The unpredictability of the affair makes Bone Bells<\/em> a delight to listen to as you continue to find surprise in your surroundings. With \u201cBeclouded,\u201d a dreamy atmosphere becomes stormy with a thunderous torrential downpour of notes only to abruptly drift back to a more ethereal environment. And in \u201cUnfolding Secret,\u201d the timbre of Courvoisier\u2019s altered piano evokes a highly spun-up clock clanging fractured chimes. The piece is abstract and unstable until its folk-bluesy melody gradually emerges. Further underscoring the album’s focus on the primacy of the conversation itself over a pre-set destination, each track also ends seemingly abruptly instead of resolving to a natural end. We are witnessing an intimate real-time look into the artists’ uncovering of bright moments of their shared creativity.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We sat down with Courvoisier and Halvorson to discuss Bone Bells<\/em> and how their working relationship continues to evolve. This conversation does not aim to provide insight into what brings them together or their processes. You can read more about both of those things here. <\/a>Instead, we seek to provide a glimpse into where that relationship stands today, with a hint of perhaps where it has yet to go.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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PostGenre: Before getting into the recording, would you mind talking about the recently departed Susan Alcorn a bit? Mary, you performed with Susan a lot, and, Sylvie, you had a duo with her. Any thoughts you would like to share about Susan?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Mary Halvorson: Oh, yeah, I would say that she has been pretty constantly on my mind. She was very close to my heart. She played in my octet, and I played as a duo with her. I also played in her band. We actually had a gig coming up at Big Ears when I found out she had passed. I found out she had died when I was in Europe to start a tour. Her husband called me and told me, about half an hour before my sound check on the first day of the tour, that she had passed. Finding out she died left me in total shock. I don’t think anybody was expecting it. When stuff like this happens out of the blue, it’s really hard. It was very much a struggle to get through that first week. It was such a huge loss. Susan was a totally unique and brilliant musician who did things no one else could. But she was also a wonderful person. I loved working with her. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I will say, however, that it has been nice to see the real outpouring of love from the music community. She was a deeply loved musician in the community. I’ve seen a lot of things written about her, tributes to her, and obituaries in all kinds of different magazines. Hopefully, there’ll be a lot of tributes to her in the future as well. The one solace to me is that her music lives on. We still have her music to listen to and to keep with us. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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