This summer I wrote an organ piece to the swedish organist Larsåke Sjöstedt. My idea was right from the start to deal with the issue of ethnic and cultural openness. As I was working with the piece the topic of racism and ethnic discrimination (again) came into the spotlight in a major way with the terrible mass murder in Norway. That of course only strenghtened my initial purpose.

Today Larsåke and I got time to go through the piece. It went very well. We found some nice registrations, and what I heard corresponded to my mental “sound-image” of the piece.

To create an extra context for the piece in the purpose of giving the main context of ethnic and cultural openness an additional weight, the piece utilises six different sources from the music literature. My own view is that I use these sources in much the same way that for instance Picasso used references to famous paintings by e.g. Velázquez, Delacroix and Manet to create original pieces of art.

Picasso – “Luncheon on the Grass. After Manet”, 1961.

To emphasize the point of openness I have decided to give the piece a creative commons license and upload it to my account at IMSLP.

My contribution to the project is called absorb, alter and dissolve. A piece where I explore three different approaches to this integration between art music and jazz. Simply put, the first section is about a possible mix between classical art music and mainstraim jazz; the second is about an acceptance of the jazz idioms but with minor tweaks; and the third is with a more radical disassemblage of the jazz style but with havens of more ordinary jazz sounds.

These three approaches is not to be seen as only different solutions to the problem at hand though. My aim is also to somehow explore some more general cultural and sociological phenomenons. How can traditional cultures change over time? There are of course several possible answers to this question but what I’m dealing with in this piece is perhaps three major aspects of cultural change: a culture can change by lending from elsewhere and thus somehow absorbing traits from another culture, it can change by very gentle alteration and it can change by more radical dissolution of the structures defining a culture.

The success of these changes of the jazz-tradition the trio stands for is perhaps questionable. My aim though, as you understand from the above, is not to make some kind of improvement but to explore the ideas set in a musical context. This, as I would call it, conceptual approach leads to the piece being some kind of sequence of musical ideas (or ideas set to musical context) – rather like a sound collage (which as you may know is in no way foreign from my usual output).

The piece will be premiered by Magnus Hjorth Trio in Lund the 29th of September.

The piece is called Green Future? And is, as you might guessed from the title, about our concerns for the future in light of global warming. Read more details and listen to Bo’s and the quartet’s excellent performance in my work list.

Since then I have done several attempts, but I never have been totally pleased with the result. But now on my third version it actually seems that I’ve done something that I can put out without doubts. The piece will be dedicated to Y.T.Lee who as you can see commented here on the original post.

“TheMusArt” stands for Theater, Music and Art, and the piece constitutes of 36 sections whereof less than half of them is short passages of actual notated music, the rest is written instructions.

Apart from the immediate experience of unpredictability, I also think that the piece raises some interesting questions, mainly about the nature of different art forms. In our time the differences between the performing arts are blurred. Can you actually separate them? Is it a piece of music, because it involves musicians? Is it dance because it includes motion? Is it theater with actors with musical instruments? Maybe it is an inter-artistic collage!? Or could it all be summarized as live art?

I think this combination of instruments (although not quite so novel today as it was then) is very attractive.

So, my idea for the instrumentation is this:

alto flute xylophone vibraphone percussion (frame drum, 2 high tom-toms, bongos (1 pair), maracas (1 pair), agago, large susp. cymbal) guitar alto (voice) viola