Why Swedish contemporary music over the past few decades has been such a provincial affair is a mystery. Most of the pieces receiving critical attention from the media are using neo-Romantic aesthetics – bombastic orchestral sounds more connected to the world of Richard Strauss than Helmut Lachenmann. Hearing this type of music, often characterised by its excesses of art nouveau ornamentations, one may wonder what century one is living in. Where is the contemporary world?
Of course there are exceptions. There are quite a few very talented experimental musicians coming from Sweden, many of them moving back and forth between free improvisation and composed music. For example, the pianist Lisa Ullén, the saxophone player Anna Högberg, the violinist Anna Lindal and the clarinet and saxophone player Magnus Granberg. The two last names have collaborated in a series of wonderful pieces released on CD by the Another Timbre label. This is quiet music in the post-Feldman tradition, but with an open door to a new and unknown landscape, full of musical wonders.
Another exception is the Stockholm-based Curious Chamber Players, run by the composer Malin Bång and the conductor/composer Rei Munakata. Since its inception in 2003 the group has premiered and introduced an immense number of new pieces, engaging in a most needed dialogue with an international experimental music scene.
Rei Munakata is also the musical director of Mimitabu, a smaller group based in Gothenburg, consisting of eight musicians. One of the intentions of the group is to work as a fruitful ground for younger composers, and several of the members are active as composers as well. In the beginning of December, 2016, the group presented an alternative Christmas concert in Atalante, a space for contemporary dance, music and performance art in Gothenburg. Four pieces by four Swedish composers were played: Kylan, plötslig (The Cold, Sudden) by Lina Järnegård, Vox Terminus by Fredrik Gran, Rita cirklar (Draw Circles) by Johan Svensson and Anti Focus by Tony Blomdahl. The programme also included one piece by the French composer Maria Misael Gauchat, Le cinquième element (The Fifth Element), and one, Glam, by the Norwegian composer Kristine Tjøgersen, who additionally performed in most of the other pieces as a clarinet player.
The most interesting thing about this concert, apart from the high quality of the performances, is the emergent alternative map. Taken together, the six pieces say a lot about the possibilities of sounds and no sounds, how to combine them and how to read the contemporary landscape. Both parts of the concert started with the humorous lighting of sparklers. The tiny crackling sound of these objects, so reminiscent of Christmas, was a reminder of the energy fields of the silence and the ambiences of the room, and all of the pieces more or less paid respect to this dialogue, acknowledging the fact that all sound situations have theatrical aspects.
Lina Järnegård's Kylan, plötslig (2013), for clarinet, violin, percussion and piano, has an icy character. The opening piano figure uses the trills of Beethoven's Für Elise as a colouring effect, a bit like getting stuck in the physical memory of the phrase. But the friction created, with the other instruments bringing a combination of fragile and sturdy sounds, has its own intensity, and the piece uses an interesting combination of controlled and erratic forces.
Fredrik Gran's Vox Terminus (2015), for clarinets/objects, percussion, violin and cello, uses an animated graphic score that is shown to the audience while the piece is performed. Each musician is represented by a colour on screen and interprets the respective signs on the screen. An abstract visual language, easy to follow, with harsh noises, small breathing sounds, stuttering attacks and fluttering harmonics, like an updated version of the Bauhaus aesthetic, open to the irrationalities of our media-focused times.
Rita cirklar, for flutes, piano, percussion, violin, viola and cello, is a fairly old piece by Johan Svensson, written in 2010. It creates a series of fragmented moments by the playing of the strings against a monochrome, repetitive piano tone, a superfast figure reminiscent of Terry Riley's In C. After a while, silence takes over, creating bigger and bigger holes, and then, at the end of the piece, a quite brutal cluster chord on the piano is played against the delicate character of the other instruments.
Tony Blomdahl's music uses noise sounds, often played at aggressive strong volumes. But Anti Focus, for flute, washboard, piano, violin, cello and electronics, is more sublime and timid, in all its harsh repetitiveness. The overtones make it beautiful.
But the best piece of all was Kristine Tjøgersen's Glam, for violin and cello, from 2016. It starts like an ironic version of the rhetoric of Lachenmann's early scrape music à la Pression and Streichtrio. But after about two minutes the sound activities are accompanied by visuals from the 1980s heavy metal band Ratt's video Round and Round, and suddenly a most fascinating counterpoint takes place between the physical movements of the music and the strange action going on in the video. A bourgeois dinner is invaded by rats, and the video is invaded by the strictly choreographed avant-garde sounds. It's a funny piece, playing intelligently with collage effects. It's also the piece with the most obvious connections to the conceptual methods of fellow Scandinavian composers Øyvind Torvund and Trond Reinholdtsen from Norway and Simon Steen Andersen from Denmark. It's a new kind of realism, hypnagogic and freewheeling, saying yes to the disturbances of the world. It has nothing to do with Richard Strauss, but hardly with Lachenmann either. It's the music of today.
