After the End of time

for violin, clarinet, cello, piano, recitation and tape (2012)

Music by Johan Ullén and Jonas Söderman Bohlin
Text by Lotta Erikson

Duration: 60 minutes

First excerpt: from the premiere in the Grunewald Hall in Stockholm, 21st December 2012.
Featuring music by Jonas Söderman Bohlin and Johan Ullén, text by Lotta Erikson.

Performed by Jonas Lindgård, violin, Kristian Möller, clarinet, Kati Raitinen, cello, Johan Ullén, piano and Lotta Erikson, recitation.

Voices on tape in the excerpt:
Lakhmir Chawla, assistant professor of anesthesiology at George Washington Medical Center, Washington DC, USA
Arvid Carlsson, professor of pharmacology at the Univerity of Gothenburg, recipient of the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in the year 2000.
Oliver Sacks, physician and professor of neurology and psychiatry at the Columbia University, NewYork, USA
The interviews are made by Lena Nordlund, science journalist at the Swedish Radio.

Second excerpt: from the premiere in the Grunewald Hall in Stockholm, 21st December 2012.
Featuring music by Johan Ullén: The Absence of Time, for violin and piano.

Performed by Jonas Lindgård, violin and Johan Ullén, piano.

Voice on tape in the excerpt: Arvid Carlsson, professor of pharmacology at the Univerity of Gothenburg, recipient of the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in the year 2000.

 

Score

The music in its entirety is currently not published. 

However, the final piece in After th End of Time, "The Absence of Time" by Johan Ullén, for violin and piano, is published by the Swedish Music Information Centre.

Commentary

"Efter tidens slut", (“After the End of Time”), is a new chamber music piece, that sheds new light on death. The music is composed by Jonas Söderman Bohlin and Johan Ullén. The text is written by Lotta Erikson, and the interviews on tape are made by science journalist Lena Nordlund.

In “After the end of time”, the very latest scientific discoveries finds its musical and artistic shape: death and consciousness, the electrical cascades of the collapsing brain, out-of-body-experiences and what actually happens at the end of life. Scientists are revealing new landscapes, and death is not the same as it used to be.

“When the heart stops, the activity in the brain increases to something that resembles full alertness during several minutes”, says Nobel Prize winner Arvid Carlsson. He thinks that we may loose our sense of time in this short moment, which would turn the experience into an actual eternity.

New music meets reflection and speculation based on scientifical findings, in a piece that truly transcends genres. In here, cold fact is mixed with a vertiginous new perspective, and is transformed into a story never told before. Art meets reality, and the inevitable end.

"After the end of time" is dealing with what everyone will experience, but very few will talk about.

In all times, man have made interpretations of death, the end, that we all are so painfully aware of. But what can modern science tell us about death? Is near-death-experiences something that the brain produces in a transcendent state between consciousness and clinical death? Is our consciousness separated from our brain?

In the piece, we illuminate this subject by asking the hardest questions to the most distinguished scientists of the world.

***

“After the end of time” consists of eleven musical movements*, composed for violin, clarinet, cello and piano.

The music is interlieved with live recitation as well as taped interviews with the world's foremost scientists in the fields of neurology, psychology, farmacology and anesthesia.

“After the end of time” was premiered the 21st of December 2012 in Grunewald Hall of Konserthuset in Stockholm, in front of a full and exalted audience, that greeted the new piece with standing ovations. It was recorded and broadcast by the Swedish Radio.
 

Additional links:
Lakhmir Chawla's paper in Journal of Palliative research
Wall Street Journal on Lakhmir Chawla and Sam Parnia
Article in Forskning och Framsteg (in Swedish) featuring Arvid Carlsson and L Chawla