A composer with integrity
Anders Nilsson is a multi-award-winning contemporary Swedish composer whose music is distinguished by both breadth and depth. He composes everything from piano pieces and chamber music to concertos, symphonies, operas and large choral works.
Anders Nilsson and I met to prepare our conversation about music over lunch at the pleasant neighbourhood restaurant located on his street in Kärrtorp in Stockholm. The area was built before the days of the million program and has the harmonious architecture of the slightly older Stockholm suburbs with narrow houses.
After finishing our meal, Anders Nilsson buys buns from the local pastry shop on the same street as the restaurant. We then walked to his house at the end of the street, protected from the light rain by my golf umbrella.
With the coffee table set in the cozy living room, and with a view of the "holiest of all," the study room with sheet music, keyboard, computer, and large computer screens, we began our conversation just as the rain stopped.
How did music come to you?
– It was always there. My parents had no musical background, but music had been in the family for a long time: an ancestor was a village fiddler from Loos and my grandfather was a fiddler too.
– In the 1950s, when I was two or three years old, my parents got a radiogram that I was completely fascinated by. They tried to put ropes around the expensive piece of status furniture, but I managed to get under them, put shellac records on the record changer, and listened to the radio stations.
– A few years later I sang some kind of opera to myself. Where I got it from, I don't know – I hadn't been to the opera. Maybe I had heard something on the radiogram.
When Anders Nilsson was nine or ten years old, he and a classmate found an abandoned record collection in the friend's apartment building basement - a cardboard box filled with records with Beethoven, Mozart, Bach and a few other things.
– We split the records, and I must have already then had some kind of idea about what kind of music I like, because I made sure I got the records with Beethoven, Mozart and Bach, while my friend got the operetta records.
– When I got home, I put on Beethoven's "Egmont Overture", and it was a formidable experience for me that changed a lot. This was music! I still get goosebumps when I think about it. Such powerful music – that's the kind of music I wanted to play and write!
– My first musical instrument was a zither that I still have, and after that I got a battery organ on which I played Bach's "Toccata in D minor”.
In ninth grade, Anders Nilsson was lucky enough to have a very good piano and ear training teacher.
– She didn’t put me on any piano school – instead I had to play Bach’s “Inventions”. We didn’t have a piano at home, so I went with my mother to her cleaning job at a daycare center and practiced there. At the same time, there were other musical instruments nearby: Björkhagen’s music store sold electronic church organs.
– The kind old man who owned the shop let me sit there and play, so I would stop there on the way to and from school and sit for hours at the organs. I quickly became quite skilled in improvising in Bach style, short fugues and things like that, so I eventually got to demonstrate organs for organists in various Free Church congregations who came there to shop.
– Of course, I bought my first electric organ there when I formed the band “Östan Sol, Västan Måne” with some classmates shortly after high school. We started in 1970, and in 1979 I think we had our last gig. We had different members who came and went, and there were many good musicians, for example saxophonist Kenneth Arnström and bassist Teddy Walter.
If we delve a little into your composing, I have understood that independence and integrity are important aspects for you in the context.
– Yes, absolutely. I have gone my own way, I can definitely say that. It has to do with my need for artistic integrity. If you order a work from me, you cannot order the substance of it, I am responsible for that myself – you can only order the external form.
– But sometimes even the external form can change. I'm thinking, for example, of my "Requiem". I was going to write a piece to commemorate the 175th anniversary of the founding of Allmänna Sången, preferably with a connection to Uppsala, so I first looked at texts by Karin Boye and Dag Hammarskjöld. But then I was hit by the news that one of my musician friends, a close friend, had chosen to end his life by himself, and that hit me hard. So, I changed the commission to a requiem, which the client accepted without further ado.
– The commission was for 20 minutes of music, so I wrote a work of about 20 minutes which then ended with the Lacrimosa movement. The Requiem was premiered in that version with Allmänna Sången and the Uppsala Chamber Orchestra under the baton of Cecilia Rydinger, and was a huge success with standing ovations. It was also broadcast on the radio.
– During a break in the rehearsals I mentioned that I had started the sequel, and then they commissioned the complete version. It was premiered in 2010 in Uppsala and in St. James' Church in Stockholm by the St. James' Chamber Choir and the Sancta Clara Motett Choir with the Uppsala Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Paul Mägi with Olle Persson as soloist.
I find your “Requiem” to be central in your production, and I also think your third symphony with the subtitle “Orpheus and Eurydice” is. Can you tell us a little about your creative process and what role intuition plays in it based on that very symphony?
– The symphony is very close to me as a form, inasmuch that I preferably want to say something in music in the form of a longer “story”. Opera has also attracted me due on the same need for
expression, as in the opera success “Zarah”, which was performed to sold-out houses at the Folkoperan.
– I am not clearly aware why the symphony begins as it does, it was a purely intuitive process, but the harmonics initially have a starting point that I have used before. It can be interpreted as Locrian modality, a scale type with built-in instability that can be described as B to B on only the white keys of the piano.
– The harp sweeps the entire orchestra into motion with an ascending scale and then comes a powerful chord in the full orchestra and a kind of encouraging signals in the brass. But nothing of that is created based on any preanalysis, it is rather a result from an intuitive feeling of the power that is in the opening tutti chord. Even the continuation, when motifs develop and new motifs enter, is in principle completely intuitively created in a spontaneous flow, where everything gradually forms a context.
I think that the sounds in the symphony make just as strong an impression in themselves and carry just as much expression as the motifs and rhythms and their development. How do you work with the instrumentation?
– I don't make any preliminary sketches, and I don't orchestrate separately. I hear the complete orchestral sounds inside me and compose them directly in the score. When I then listen to the result – nowadays you can play back what you've done on the computer – and feel that I should build on this, then more ideas trickle out.
– The intuitive introduction became a kind of engine for the entire composition process, and the same thing really applies to everything I've written. At the beginning it feels like running out into a fresh summer meadow. After a while, a large form emerges that I follow, and where I wait on myself and try out different ideas.
- Sometimes everything comes naturally, but sometimes I back the process and try something new or change. But it's always intuition that does the work, whether I'm in a phase where the composition happens as if in a trance, or if the conscious mind is in control. Then it's such an interaction right through, in phases of varying lengths until the work is finished. And when I've written a certain part, and at a certain point I feel that this is right so far, I don't go back and change.
Why have you called the symphony “Orpheus and Eurydice”?
– It has to do with the harp, which first begins the music dramatically and then comes back in a different role in the second movement with a dreamy loop, which is moving, appealing and very beautiful. This at the same time as the first movement is quite dramatic and eventful.
– After I had finished the symphony, I began to ponder what it really was about. I felt that the harp personified Orpheus and that the languishing motif that looms in the first movement could be Eurydice.
– I am convinced that we humans have a common collective consciousness in the way that Carl Jung talks about with his archetypes, and that this includes the myths of antiquity which sometimes can be expressed in different ways in art and music.
– In this case, I felt that they had done so, and that is why the symphony was named “Orpheus and Eurydice”. What you hear first is a furious, incantatory but later plaintive harp voice that tells the story, and then you can interpret the two remaining movements as Orpheus being killed by the maenads, the forest people.
– The last movement is a rhythmic, orgiastic bacchanal where one can imagine the triumphant dances of the maenads, but where in the end Orpheus' mournful harp returns.
– What is heard again at the end of the entire symphony is precisely the harp, the modern equivalent of Orpheus' lyre, and Orpheus was revered by the classical Greeks as the greatest of all musicians.
If I have understood you correctly, you feel that you became a bit like a creative vessel through which this archaic myth passed to express itself as your symphony.
– Yes, that's right. It is certainly me, my intuition and my musical knowledge that have been actively involved in the creation of the work. But at the same time, I feel that my subconscious became a tool for a version of, or interpretation of, the collective myth that was somehow filtered through me.
What major work of yours will be performed next, and what are you composing right now?
– Next, my “Requiem” will be performed again for the first time in 15 years, and it will be on November 2nd in Engelbrektskyrkan in Stockholm.
– I have also recently finished writing a viola concerto that has not yet been premiered. There is both an interested soloist and a conductor, so now we just need an orchestra. When we find it, it is most welcome to play my fifth or sixth symphony as well – both are finished and waiting for premieres.
Magnus Löwendahl
