Author: Mattias

I have, along young composer Jacob Mühlrad, been awarded Musikföreningen i Stockholm’s annual scholarship awarded for contributions to Swedish classical music. Musikföreningen i Stockholm was founded in 1880 as an oratorio choir and was in 1928 reformed as a foundation, handing out one or two annual scholarships to composers, starting with Hugo Alfvén in 1936. I am much honored and humbled to accept this scholarship joining an impressive list of past recipients for whom I have great respect.

I was very happy to hear With Thy Saints Surrounded for Saxophone and Organ performed again, this time by Jörgen Pettersson and Bengt Tribukait in St Eskil’s Church. Last time I heard it was in Tyresö Church a couple of years ago, with Johannes Thorell and my brother.

Following the quickly approaching end of an unusually busy spring semester with teaching and PhD studies, I am beginning work on a new choir piece for Neuer Chor Berlin. I have worked with this fine choir before, resulting in the SATB piece, The Hornet. The header picture above on this site features a photo from the premiere performance of that piece with their former conductor, Maike Bühle.

Jörgen Pettersson told me the other day he and Bengt Tribukait are performing my piece for saxophone and organ in St Eskil’s Church in Handen, Haninge, Saturday 3 June at 3.00 pm.

He says their interpretation is both warm, and at times fiery/hasty. Regardless of my piece I recommend hearing these two musicians in action.

Wednesday 12 April 19:03 on national Swedish Radio P2, you can hear my St John Passion for tenor, choir, percussion quartet and synthesizer. It will likely end up in the online listening archive for the following 30 days on sr.se.

The recording is from the premiere performance from April 3, 2015 in Adolf Fredrik’s Church with Mikaeli Chamber Choir, Kroumata Percussion Ensemble, Love Enström as the tenor soloist, Magnus Sköld played the synthesizer part and conductor was Anders Eby in this which was our third large scale collaboration.

Information has been scarce lately on this page, so here’s an update:

The Royal College of Music in Stockholm (KMH), where I teach composition, has a new campus that was inaugurated January this year. The new purpuse-built electroacoustic studios are fantastic in terms of technology, room acoustics and sound quality. Our flagship concert hall, Lilla salen, with a 29-speaker dome brings wonderful new possibilities in terms of artistic projects and research.

Speaking of research, in the context of my appointment as Senior Lecturer at KMH, I am now part-time pursuing a PhD at the Media Technology and Interaction Design research group at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm (KTH).

I will continue to compose music within and outside of my research and will post here when there is something to listen to.

(also, I’m changing the site format to WordPress. So we’ll see how this turns out…)