Swedish Music

	literature on music published in Sweden or by Swedish authors regardless of subject matter or audience (scholarly as well as popular)
	a selection of foreign literature on Swedish music ("suecana")
	all genres and types of music
	all musicological sub-disciplines (history, acoustics, philosophy, psychology, gender studies, popular music studies, etc.)

	books by individual authors (monographs)
	articles in periodical and collective volumes A search on the periodical title will bring up all articles indexed from the periodical. There is also a link from the record for the periodical itself to the indexed articles.
	sections on music in monographs on other subjects. Individual chapters in a book on music by one author are not indexed (but may be covered by subject terms)
	unpublished theses and undergraduate papers. (Swedish doctoral dissertations are always published and are treated as any other book.)
	From Music of Sweden

by Stig Jacobson, writer and programme director for the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra

Exhibitions of Swedish art from the previous century have met growing appreciation around the world. Music composed in the first half of the 20th century also has many secrets to reveal to a non-Swedish audience. Increasing interest, not least from CD producers, has astonished many abroad that this music has not been available earlier.

A romantic tradition For the first decades of the 20th century, a national-romanticist ideal still dominated in Sweden. The majority of composers wrote music suited for home use by skilled amateurs. There were violin sonatas, songs and genre exercises for the piano. Emil Sjögren (1853-1918) was a typical poet who never tested his skills with an orchestra but who wrote decidedly memorable violin sonatas, songs and piano pieces. Much the same can be said of other composers born even later in the 19th century. Wilhelm Peterson-Berger (1867-1942) was most loved for his folk music-inspired songs and his three collections of Frösöblomster (Flowers from Fröso Island), with their finely sculpted piano pieces permeated with folklore feelings. It has long been ignored that he also composed great operas, a masterful violin concerto and five splendid symphonies (especially the No. 2 Sunnanfärd and No. 3 Same Ätnam). Not until the last decade have these works rewon public interest. His career as a much-feared music critic may have overshadowed the composer too greatly. He was an educated man with a good knowledge of European thinking, and produced an excellent translation of Nietzsche's Also sprach Zarathustra.   Even if Hugo Alfvén (1872-1960) also established a reputation through his smaller pieces, not least his virtuoso choral arrangements of Swedish folk music, he was the first composer in the last years of the 19th century to dive courageously and very successfully into music for the orchestra. He too wrote five symphonies but is most famous for his three Swedish rhapsodies: Midsummer Vigil (sometimes known as the Swedish Rhapsody), the Dala Rhapsody and the Uppsala Rhapsody. A pre-condition was the founding of several orchestras in Sweden during this period. To the Royal Swedish Chamber Orchestra (one of the world's oldest in existence) were added orchestral societies in Stockholm, Göteborg, Malmö, Helsingborg, Norrköping and Gävle. In his lifetime, Kurt Atterberg (1887-1974) was one of the most performed Swedish composers, at home and on the Continent. He attracted special attention when his sixth symphony, the Dollar Symphony, won an international competition sponsored by the Columbia Graphophone Company in 1928. Swedish folk music influences were a major element in many of Atterberg's orchestral works.   Ture Rangström (1884-1947) also wrote massive symphonies and other works for the orchestra, but is most known for his dramatic songs, revealing an unsurpassed insight into the demands and potential of vocal music. He was himself a trained singer and singing teacher and his songs are included in the repertoires of all Swedish singers, not least Birgit Nilsson and Anne Sofie von Otter. In contrast to these often romantic ecstatics, Wilhelm Stenhammar (1871-1927) seems a sober and business-like classicist, whose technical skill and safe, aristocratic taste place him in a category of his own. His six string quartets are exceptional and his two symphonies and two piano concertos masterful, as is the almost impressionistically glowing orchestral serenade. His songs have stature and class. In addition to composing, he was also one of the most prominent pianists of his day and a far-seeing conductor who brought to Göteborg numerous first-performances of European avant-garde compositions. The first modernists The ever-curious Stenhammar supported his younger colleagues even when not seeing eye-to-eye with them regarding musicality. Hilding Rosenberg (1892-1985) was one such innovator; when European borders reopened after the First World War, he was quick to absorb all kinds of modernity - to the horror of his countrymen, especially Peterson-Berger, the critic, who thunderously decried such madness. In his extremely long career, Rosenberg was able to witness how the musical breeding ground radically changed with time. The scandal greeting his first string quartet had transformed into reverence and national acclaim by the time he produced his twelfth and last. This series of quartets has no match in the modern era and is as strongly established as Stenhammar's. Rosenberg composed in all the genres of his time and his symphonies, solo concertos and major oratorios (Holy Night, The Revelation of St. John) are still regularly performed. Gösta Nystroem (1890-1966) delighted in the openness of Paris in the 1920s. He let himself be influenced by French modernism and composed for the Ballets Suédois that scandalised Paris. But even this troupe found the Skating Rink ballet, with Cubist-inspired costumes by Fernand Léger, far too rich. The sea fascinated Nystroem and his magnum opus is the gripping Sinfonia del Mare. As well as composing for large orchestras, he also wrote well-formed and touching songs, here too, often with sea motifs. The neo-classicists For Swedish music in the first half of the 20th century, each new decade often brought a reorientation in style. After the modernism of the 20s-generation with its outlook on the Continent, the next decade brought a reaction in the shape of a neo-classicist, neo-romanticist, simple folkloric ideal. A textbook example of this was Lars-Erik Larsson's (1908-86) immeasurably popular A Swedish Pastorale (especially the middle movement, Romance) for orchestra and the choral suite, Förklädd Gud (God in Disguise). Both these works, completed in the 1930s, were originally for radio, a medium of wide range and impact. But nothing would be further from the truth than to label Larsson a lightweight neo-classicist. His profound scholarship, humility and great technical skill produced memorable music in all genres, and it is not to be forgotten that he visited Alban Berg and was the first in Sweden to compose according to the twelve-tone system. Larsson's many solo concertos are well worth listening to. Larsson was also a recognised professor of composition and several of his pupils had their breakthroughs as moderate modernists in the 1950s: Jan Carlstedt, Bo Linde, Hans Eklund and Maurice Karkoff. Dag Wirén's (1905-86) Serenade for Strings belongs like Larsson's A Swedish Pastorale among the most often performed Swedish orchestral works - but should a composer strike it lucky in this fashion, there is the related risk that the rest of his or her production will be overshadowed. Such is the case with Wirén, who rarely had the opportunity to listen to his own fastidious but enormously skilfully written symphonies and concertos, often shaped by a personal, transmutative technique. Also a part of this generation was the brilliant composer of romances, Gunnar de Frumerie (1908-87) and the multi-faceted Erland von Koch (b. 1910) with his rich and valuable production of orchestral works, often with folkloric elements but equally as often with a tight, unequivocal tone language. A new wave of modernists Alongside his copious composing, Hilding Rosenberg was also much in demand as a teacher of composition, nurturing several generations of composers. The Swedish composers who broke through in the 1940s had mostly been tutored by Rosenberg and reflected his modernistic view. At the beginning of that decade, young innovators would gather in the tiny Stockholm flat of Karl-Birger Blomdahl (1916-68) to listen to each other's works and study Paul Hindemith's ideas. The meetings were held on Monday evenings, leading to the name Monday Group. Among members were working musicians and music theorists, many of them later to occupy important positions in Swedish music. They had great insights and admirable intentions - but also a lack of understanding of those who, in the 1950s, rediscovered an interest in a less avant-gardistic view of music creation. Blomdahl's own music was widely noticed; he introduced jazz rhythms into his oratorio I speglarnas sal (In the Hall of Mirrors), and in the world's first space opera, Aniara, there are early examples of electro-acoustic tones. Ingvar Lidholm (b. 1921) has shown, in work after work, strong humanistic passion and each new work has thrown up another new imaginary world. Not infrequently, Lidholm has upset the contemporary applecart, as with his festival music for the Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra's 50th anniversary in 1963, when the organisers were perhaps not expecting radical musical theatre in the shape of the now-classic orchestral work Poesis. His Kontakion builds on Russian Orthodox choral music, while Greetings salutes the American Bicentennial in European mediaeval tones. His choral composition, Laudi, paved the way for the innovative Swedish choir music connected with the international success of Eric Ericson and his Chamber Choir. Also numbered among Monday Group members were Sven-Erik Bäck (1919-94) and Sven-Eric Johanson (1919-97), two multi-faceted and imaginative composers. A lone wolf Alongside all the established groups and styles, there are often mavericks who refuse to adapt. First among these in Sweden is the symphonist Allan Pettersson (1911-80) whose early production in the 1930s of folklore-based songs (Barfotasånger Barefoot Songs) was ignored because of its simple folksong air, while his symphonies from the 50s and 60s were deemed difficult because of their intense and singular tone language. But with the clever and gripping message of the seventh symphony, his uncompromising music gained almost patriotic, heroic status, which simply grew with each succeeding masterpiece. His tragic ill-health and his racy way of expressing himself boosted his popularity, but music alone made him the most performed Swedish symphonist on the world stage.

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