The world never stands still. A lot has happened since my last post back in May, much of which has been great! Some of it hasn’t been as good, to be fair, but at least this week I’d rather focus on all the good things.
Most excitingly, last week I challenged myself once more in a similar way as I did three years ago, when I composed “Skule Overture” for a competition organised by the renowned English brass band Grimethorpe Colliery Band. At that time, I only found out about the competition a short time before the deadline, but pushed myself to write a piece for the competition anyway – even though I had never composed for brass band before. My piece ended up in the top-five, which was quite exciting, even if it didn’t end up the winning piece.
This time around, a friend had already told me awhile back about this call for composers for an Italian conductors’ competition, the Guido Cantelli International Conducting Award. In the preliminary round, the competitors are conducting classics by Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Rossini, but in the semi-finals and final, the repertoire includes a brand-new piece which will be selected from the submissions to the competition’s call for composers.
Even though I knew about the call for composers more than a month before the deadline, which was last Friday June 12th, I saw in my schedule that the weeks before would be so packed with work that I would have little time to do any proper composing. Thus, I pre-scheduled two days – Monday and Tuesday last week – dedicated entirely for composing a piece.
Like with “Skule Overture” three years ago, I really didn’t know whether I would be able to complete a decent composition at all. But just like back then, I am really happy with how this new piece – “Ad pedem montium” – came out! I am especially happy with it, considering I only composed it in two days, but even disregarding that, entirely on its own merits so to speak, I feel quite proud of the piece.
The selected score will be announced around the end of this month, in other words in the next couple of weeks. I never expect to win in situations like these. In a roundabout way, I already feel like a winner simply for beating my self-imposed challenge. (Of course, being featured in a conductors’ competition and subsequently having my music played by the Symphony Orchestra of Milan wouldn’t be half bad either.)
Being forced to work under a tight deadline like this meant I needed to work more or less with whatever ideas came to me and not be too selective. (This is one occasion where having practiced spontaneous composition using, for example, my etude game was quite useful.) In a future post, I will describe in a little more detail how I went about composing the piece.
I have also been rather busy as a chorister in the Härnösand Cathedral Choir. Last week, the choir sang at both a wedding, a Vesper service, and an Ordination service. I’ve written a few times in the past about the joy I’ve felt working with the Cathedral Choir as their conductor. Those opportunities have become much rarer since my good friend Per was hired as the new cathedral organist back in December 2024. On the flip side, I really enjoy singing under Per’s direction. I would probably have felt frustrated and maybe even a little jealous under a lesser conductor, but as it is I am happy to just relax and enjoy my time in Per’s hands, so to speak.
The week before that, we performed Duke Ellington’s “Sacred Concert”. They were originally three different concerts with slightly different music, with which Ellington toured the United States and Europe between 1966 and 1974. Later, in 1993 material from all three programmes were compiled into one suite for mixed choir, big band and vocal soloist by two Danes: composer and choral conductor John Høybye, and band leader Peder Pedersen. This is the version we performed, together with the High Coast Jazz Orchestra and fantastic soloist Marta Parkman.
Marta and I both worked together on Kristina från Duvemåla last year, so this was a sort of happy reunion even though here she was the soloist and I a mere chorister, and back then we actually shared the stage to a much greater degree. The jazz orchestra was also excellent and a pleasure to perform with.
Before that, I wrapped up the month of May working on a livestreamed concert in Berwaldhallen: Alan Gilbert conducting the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra in Gustav Mahler’s ninth symphony. Originally, Herbert Blomstedt was scheduled to conduct the SRSO in Berwaldhallen, but two weeks before the concert in Stockholm, Blomstedt had some widely reported health issues in conjunction with another Mahler nine performance with the San Francisco Symphony.
Blomstedt, who turns 99 this July, has so far not ceased touring the world. In fact, only the week before the San Francisco event, he conducted the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in an acclaimed Mahler nine performance. Before that, he conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in Bruckner’s seventh symphony. Clearly, what happened in San Francisco was a sad and unexpected event.
Alan Gilbert rose to the occasion in magnificent fashion, leading the SRSO in a dynamic, often emotionally taut interpretation of the massive, hourlong symphony. Our livestream turned out really well, too, and if you’d like to watch it, it will be available on Berwaldhallen Play for another week and a half, until Sunday June 28th.
As if this all wasn’t enough, I also found the time within these past three weeks to write programme notes about three upcoming concerts in Berwaldhallen: One with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Barbara Hannigan, and two with the Swedish Radio Choir: one conducted by their choirmaster Marc Korovitch and one with their former music director Peter Dijkstra, respectively. (In April, I also wrote about another concert featuring Hannigan and the SRSO.)
I enjoyed reading up on and writing about all three concerts, but it was particularly fascinating to learn about American composer and musician John Zorn, whose song cycle “Jumalattaret” Hannigan will perform with the SRSO next season.
Besides the obvious reward of getting paid for my work, both writing programme notes and doing score supervising for livestreamed concerts give me the additional reward of discovering and learning more about music, broadening my perspective and hopefully also my understanding of it. In big ways and small, this feeds into all the other things I do, whether that is teaching, performing, composing or writing freeform, off-the-cuff texts like this.
It feels like a blessing to be able to make a living working with music. At the same time, I have to continuously remind myself that it’s also really hard, sometimes arduous, often financially insecure work. My life would be much more stable and predictable life if I did pretty much anything else. But I think a part of me (a somewhat masochistic part) would miss this work too much in the end, even taking all the issues that go with it into account.
No matter what, though, I never, ever take being able to do what I do for granted. Ironically, even though I have to remind myself of the struggle, it is probably also a reason why it would be hard for me to let go of this life. I have fought so hard and so long to get to where I am at the moment that it would feel like a shame, almost a kind of waste, to not keep on fighting. At least for as long as I enjoy the fight.