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Programme Note

Magnus Lindberg’s catalogue demonstrates the difficulty this composer of rhythm and harmony has in writing for the voice. When the Swedish national concert association Rikskonserter awarded him a commission for a work for the Stockholm New Music festival, where he was one of three invited composers, along with Xenakis and Gubaidulina, he attempted to produce a piece for solo voice and ensemble. In spite of melodic sketches for baritone, the end result is once again an instrumental work. But the genesis of the work includes enough elements for us to get a sense of the spirit of Coyote Blues, with its plaintive expressions, its melismatic writing, its short, stuttering phrases, its pastoral melodies, and its glissandi. Lindberg himself provided the key to understanding the piece in his contribution to the programme accompanying the work, where he reveals that during the project’s conception he carried out an analysis of the three different versions of Stravinsky’s Les Noces, and apparently allowed the work to influence his own composition.

© Risto Nieminen

In: Magnus Lindberg, Edition Ircam – Centre Georges-Pompidou, 1993.