Participants
Fredrik Österling (Sweden)
Tyst är det rum
Lyrics: Pär Lagerkvist
Tyst är det rum (Silent is the room) is a song set to lyrics by the Swedish poet and Nobel Prize winner Pär Lagerkvist (1891–1974).
Mattias Svensson Sandell (Sweden)
Latin, ett krångligt språk som ändå ganska få av oss begriper
Latin – ett krångligt språk som ändå ganska få av oss begriper (Latin – a complicated language that rather few of us understand anyway) was written for VOX in 2004. ”The piece was meant to have dramatic qualities without using a text as primary means. My solution was to use a text by Lennart Hellsing (b. 1919) as a silent background. The silent text appears at the end of the piece and functions as an inspiration for a nonsense improvisation. The first part of the piece consists of slow permutations, chords turning into melodies and melodies into chords, accentuations changing and consonants developing into more complex sounds.”
Julia Gomelskaya (Ukraine)
Winter Pastoral ISCM
“Winter Pastoral is a combination of the Slavic-Ukrainian and European musical traditions, apiece that hopefully fits into the space between these two spheres of culture.”
Maija Hynninen (Finland)
In case of emergency URUPPFÖRANDE
In Case of Emergency was commissioned by Visby International Centre for Composers: ”While gathering material for something in the news caught my eye. There’s a place in Russia where they pour nuclear waste into lakes. It is absorbed by the mud, which turns into dust and is carried everywhere by the wind if the lake dries too much in the summer. The lyrics are a mix of simultaneously sung Finnish, Swedish and English, and the text is a combination of the emergency guide from the phonebook, Monopoly rules, an advertisement from an airport brochure for business travellers, and an old comic book. ‘It is wise to build as many sites as possible’, thinks the business traveler and parks her/his car conveniently just a few steps away from the main entrance of the airport, while somewhere else people breathe in the nuclear dust of the waste that we have sent there to be put away from our sight and into their lakes. The world that revolves around money is a bit like a game of Monopoly, where ‘the wealthiest is the eventual winner’.”
Folke Rabe (Sweden)
From 12 Madrigals URUPPFÖRANDE ISCM
Lyrics: Ann Jäderlund
“In 2000 I came to read a poem by Ann Jäderlund (b. 1955). There, like in several others of the same collection by her, some key-words are repeated. I got the idea that a setting of music to her poetry could take advantage of this so that certain words are connected to certain notes or sounds and, thus, become furthermore integrated with each other. Early on I decided on a quartet of vocal soloists as the medium, eventually giving it the title 12 Madrigals, because of notes and words being so well integrated in the Italian madrigals of the 16th century …”
Catharina Backman (Sweden)
Tre scener
Lyrics: Virgil, Cicero, Terentius
“By way of short sentences in Latin, these three short pieces deal with man’s littleness and delusion of grandeur.”
Kim Hedås (Sweden)
Hur går det?
Anders Hultqvist (Sweden)
Vad kostar ett mästerverk?
Lyrics: Gertrude Stein
Vad kostar ett mästerverk? (How much is a masterpiece?), music set to words by the Paris-based American avant-garde author Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), was composed in 2005.
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