magnus lindberg
page three

And again, harmony itself does not take precedence over other parameters.

Well hierarchy is a very complicated issue. On this point, one of the very beautiful examples is Ligeti, who is the composer who very cleverly avoided harmony in a sense, with the wonderful works like Atmospheres and Apparitions. Of course it sounds a bit contradictory, but in producing those clouds of pitches, harmony was, very elegantly, avoided.  

It was a byproduct.

Absolutely. Ultimately, even Ligeti had to resurface, with the Horn Trio, for example. Over the last few years harmony has regained its importance in my music as well as a crucial expressive device. For me it is usually determined precompositionally, and working within a harmonic framework has enabled me to treat other aspects of expression very freely.

Yet again, we are at the notion of imbalance, a slightly contradictory way of working with music: more and more, I like to fix harmony, as a sort of identification of a certain work; in spite of its prominent role in composition, it is mainly there to free me up to attend to other aspects that might be even more interesting. So there you go: I’m deeply concerned with harmony, and yet it is the aspect of composition that is the most predetermined methodically.  

It’s less intuitive?  

In some ways, yes, in the sense that it usually plays the role of the abstract model with which I begin conceiving of a piece.  

And yet it is expressive, in that it’s formal and even functional.  

Yes. I’ve been thinking very much about functional harmonies in an essentially atonal world. I’m jealous of composers like Wagner and—why not?—Mahler, where the building blocks of harmony are grammatical as well as simply lexical. It’s obviously quite a difficulty to create your own functional syntax in the post-tonal era. But this is the subject of an entire seminar.