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Karl-Birger Blomdahl / Bengt Emil Johnson

Alias:
Gender: Male
Country: Sweden
Description:
Karl-Birger Blomdahl (born October 19, 1916, Växjö, Sweden - died June 14, 1968, Kungsängen, Sweden) was a Swedish composer and conductor.  He first wanted to study biochemistry and therefore came to Stockholm. Soon his interest in music became predominant. In 1935 he started taking lessons in musical theory and composition from Hilding Rosenberg. Soon he became the informal leader among the circle of friends called the Monday Group (other composers included Claude Loyola Allgén, Sven-Erik Bäck, Sven-Eric Johanson, Hans Leygraf and Ingvar Lidholm) in which new music and new techniques of composition were put under the microscope. They took as their starting point the “neue Sachlichkeit“ of Hindemith’s Unterweisung im Tonsatz. His music later moved towards the Second Viennese School and further marching towards the more experimental domains. During the fifties and sixties, Blomdahl was one of the most influential Swedish composers and music administrators. Apart from his radical work as a composer, he was working as a private composition teacher towards the end of the 1940's, between 1960 and 1964 he was Professor of Composition at the Academy, he was Secretary of the Swedish Section of the ISCM 1947-1956 and Chairman of Fylkingen 1949-1954. After a few years as consultant, he became head of the Music Broadcasting Department of the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation in 1965.  His notable works include: Pastoralsvit (1948), Symphony No. 3 "Facettes", I Speglarnas Sal (1952), the ballets Sisyphos (1954) and Minotaurus (1957), and the operas Aniara (1959) and Herr von Hancken (1964).
 
Bengt Emil Johnson
Born on 12th December 1936 in Saxdalen, Sweden. He studied the piano 1956-1962 with Knut Wiggen, who also gave him his first lessons in composition. Johnson joined the concert organization Fylkingen circle in the early 1960s, appearing there himself as a pianist and composer and in happenings. He established co-operation with several other musicians and composers, including Lars-Gunnar Bodin. Johnson has been on the staff of Swedish Radio since 1966. Between 1968 and 1977 he was among other things editor of the journal Nutida Musik. In 1979 he was made director of the Music Department, where among other things he has been an enthusiastic initiator of the annual Electronic Music Festival in Stockholm (first arranged in September 1979). He became Programme Director at Swedish Radio, 1984. Johnson is also a practising poet, with fourteen collections published between 1963 and 1986. He is much in demand as a compere and author of programme notes at concerts.
As poet and composer, Bengt-Emil Johnson is greatly fascinated by materials. His poetic career began with collections in a concretist spirit, and his music was also inspired by the thought of coming to terms with different kinds of acoustic material. And yet he has seldom figured as a technically preoccupied composer. His works often have literary ramifications, sometimes relating to poems of his own, sometimes to those of other poets (Carl Jonas Love Almqvist). He is a pioneer of text-sound composition, an amalgam of poetry and musical composition which acquired especially powerful standing in Sweden during the 1960s. He has taken a close interest in improvisation and collective composition. A more refined technique of composition underlies Disappearances for piano and recorded tape, the ensemble piece Mimicry and Colloquium.
Experiences of nature, awareness of death, reflections on contemporary phenomena — these are some of the ideas recurring in his musical compositions, with Night Chants, to words from ceremonies of the Navaho Indians as something of a high-water mark. The singer Kerstin Ståhl has played an important part in inspiring and interpreting several of Johnson's works.
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