Magnus Granberg, clarinet, composition. Anna Lindal, violin. Erik Carlsson, percussion. Kristine Scholz, prepared piano. Leo Svensson Sander, cello. Recorded in Stockholm in April 2014.
“What pushed me towards composition at the time was rather a certain inconvenience with how composition worked in most cases, and a similar inconvenience with how free improvisation worked. And also a certain inability or reluctance to submit to the division between these practices as well as the different unspoken, stylistic rules that governed them. That at least was the way I perceived the situation when I started thinking of a solution to the problems as I saw them, rightly or wrongly. I think I very much perceived it being presented as an either/or situation, while I felt uneasy with this division between the coherency of composition and the individual and collective freedoms of improvisation. So, the question as I saw it was something like this: how do I create a music which satisfies certain needs and interests of mine while still maintaining a great deal of individual and collective freedom for all participants that would, paradoxically enough, be coherent and unpredictable at the same time without separating the practices of composition and improvisation? And my answer to that was quite simply to compose materials with certain characteristics that the musicians could choose freely from, treating them in different ways, improvising with them according to certain guidelines. And tonality, or rather modality (and modal harmony) to be correct, was at least one aspect of that coherency (including ideas of intervallic coherence within and between harmonic and melodic materials), while aspects of unpredictability would include how all these different materials are combined and treated differently, individually and collectively in a semi-improvised heterophonic situation.” Magnus Granberg.