Jan Garbarek with the Hilliard Ensemble

Officium (1994) is one of the stranger recordings in the modern classical catalog. The Hilliard Ensemble — one of the foremost early-music vocal groups in the world — performs sacred polyphony from medieval and Renaissance composers: Pérotin, Dufay, Morales, Cristóbal de Morales. Over and around this music, Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek improvises. The result is not fusion; it does not soften the medieval material into contemporary palatability, nor does it force the saxophone into an alien idiom. What it produces is something that exists between: between centuries, between sacred and secular, between composed and improvised, between West and North. The between is, appropriately, the subject.

What Happens in the Between

William Desmond’s concept of the metaxu — the between as the genuine ontological site of encounter — names precisely what Officium materializes acoustically. The medieval vocal lines have their own integrity; Garbarek’s saxophone has its own integrity; neither is subordinated to the other. What the recording presents is a third thing that could only arise from their genuine meeting.

Martin Buber wrote that all actual life is encounter, and that what happens in genuine encounter cannot be derived from either party independently. The Garbarek-Hilliard collaborations make this audible: if you listen to the Hilliard Ensemble alone, or to Garbarek alone, you hear something real. When you listen to Officium, you hear something that exists only in the space between them — something that belongs to neither alone.

Iain McGilchrist argues that music consists entirely of relations, “betweenness” — the tensions between notes, and between notes and the silence with which they live in reciprocal indebtedness. On Officium, this betweenness operates at multiple levels simultaneously: between individual notes, between vocal lines, between Garbarek’s saxophone and the choral texture, and between the recording’s two primary temporal worlds. The music is relational all the way down.

Sacred Music Across Time

The Hilliard Ensemble’s repertoire on Officium spans roughly the twelfth through sixteenth centuries. Hildegard von Bingen’s tradition — sacred music as participation in the divine life rather than representation of it — stands behind this repertoire. The composers represented were writing music for liturgical use: sound designed to create the conditions for encounter with the sacred, not for concert consumption.

Garbarek’s saxophone, an instrument invented in the nineteenth century and associated primarily with jazz and its derivatives, plays over this ancient substrate without irony and without apology. The effect is not anachronism but something stranger: the saxophone sounds as if it belongs there, as if the medieval vocal lines were calling for exactly this response. Hartmut Rosa describes resonance as what happens when something “has something to say to us” — when we encounter the world as genuinely responsive. On Officium, the centuries-old music and the contemporary improvisation are responding to each other, and the listener is drawn into that responsiveness.

The Garbarek Sound

Jan Garbarek (b. 1947) developed his saxophone voice partly through his long association with ECM Records, the Munich-based label whose aesthetic — spacious, reverberant, often Nordic in its tonal palette — provided the sonic environment for Scandinavian jazz in the 1970s and beyond. His playing has always tended toward the tonal and the modal rather than the rhythmically complex; he works more with timbre and line than with bebop’s density and speed.

This makes him an unusual fit for traditional jazz contexts and a natural fit for the Hilliard collaboration. His saxophone does not swing over the polyphony; it floats above and around it, sustaining long tones that seem to emerge from the choral texture and then dissolve back into it. The instrument functions less as a solo voice than as a kind of atmospheric presence — which is, paradoxically, precisely what makes the collaboration work. The saxophone is present without dominating. This is the quality of attention that genuine dialogue requires: full presence without overpowering the other.

Officium and Mnemosyne

Officium (1994) and its sequel Mnemosyne (1999) are the primary documents of the collaboration. Officium — the title refers to the divine office, the cycle of daily liturgical prayer — is the more crystalline of the two, the material somewhat sparser and the silences more pronounced. Mnemosyne (the title is the Greek goddess of memory, mother of the Muses) is warmer and more varied in its repertoire, including a haunting setting of an anonymous piece that sounds, somehow, like it could have been composed yesterday.

Both recordings benefit from the ECM sound: the characteristic reverb tail that gives each note its halo, the spatial positioning that places voices in an imagined acoustic rather than a recording studio. Arvo Pärt’s tintinnabuli works exist in the same sonic world; ECM created an aesthetic context in which this kind of sustained, spacious sacred music found its audience.

Temporal Dialogue

Officium can be understood as a form of temporal dialogue — conversation across seven centuries of musical history. This makes it a particularly concrete instance of what the garden explores more abstractly: that genuine encounter is possible across radical difference, that the between can accommodate distances that seem, in ordinary terms, unbridgeable.

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographic series compress or extend time in analogous ways: his long-exposure theater photographs collapse an entire film into a single image; his seascapes hold the elemental encounter between water and sky outside of historical time. Officium holds medieval sacred music and contemporary improvisation in the same acoustic space, discovering that they are not as distant as they might appear. The sacred mode of attention — receptive, unhurried, oriented toward something larger than the individual — turns out to transcend the centuries.

Key Works

• Officium (1994) — the original collaboration; ECM Records; the central document
• Mnemosyne (1999) — the sequel; broader repertoire; warmer in tone
• Garbarek’s solo recordings on ECM — Visible World (1996), In Praise of Dreams (2004) — for the broader context of his work
• The Hilliard Ensemble’s other recordings — their a cappella recordings of medieval and Renaissance polyphony provide the historical context for Officium

Connections

• Martin Buber — Officium as encounter across radical difference: the medieval and the contemporary meet in genuine dialogue; neither subordinates the other; what arises belongs to the between
• The Between — The collaboration materializest the between acoustically: the music exists only in the space between the Hilliard Ensemble and Garbarek, between medieval polyphony and contemporary improvisation
• Iain McGilchrist — Music as consisting entirely of relations; Officium makes this visible by operating at multiple levels of relation simultaneously
• Hartmut Rosa — The recording as resonance: the centuries-old music and the contemporary instrument respond to each other; the listener drawn into genuine responsiveness
• Hildegard von Bingen — The Hilliard’s repertoire stands in the tradition of sacred music as participatory encounter; Officium continues this tradition in a contemporary form
• Arvo Pärt — The ECM aesthetic; the shared sonic world of spacious, reverberant sacred music in a contemporary recording context
• Intersubjectivity — The third thing that emerges from the collaboration — neither the Hilliard alone nor Garbarek alone — as a musical instance of intersubjective creation
• Hiroshi Sugimoto — Both Officium and Sugimoto’s photography enact temporal compression: holding different historical moments in the same frame, discovering what they share
• James Turrell — Both Turrell’s light installations and Officium create immersive environments in which the viewer/listener encounters something that exceeds ordinary temporal and perceptual categories
• Resonance — The collaboration as a demonstration that resonance can occur across centuries: the medieval music and the contemporary saxophone genuinely speak to each other