Ingvar Lidholm
By age twelve, he was writing songs in a tonal and romantic idiom, which led gradually to exercises of larger proportions, including music for full orchestra.
As a gymnasium student, he played viola and contrabass in the school orchestra, and studied violin from the German master Hermann Gramss.
He remained active in composition throughout his school years and completed what may be considered his final student work early in 1940: the Elegisk svit (“Elegiac Suite”) for string quartet.
In 1940, Lidholm completed his studies at the gymnasium and passed the Studentexamen, the standard prerequisite test for higher education in Sweden.
Over the following decades, these three men were to hold similar, and influential, posts at Swedish Radio (the state broadcasting organization) and the Musikhögskola.
As students with common interests, Lidhom, Bäck and Blomdahl began to meet together, eventually more regularly, and it came about that their gatherings fell on Mondays.
Hilding Rosenberg, who was to be Lidholm's composition teacher for two years, was especially important in leading studies into Hindemith, Stravinsky and other modern composers.
Under Rosenberg, Lidholm began to achieve a higher compositional output than previously, including: incidental music to a play of Georg Büchner, Leonce och Lena, from which the song Rosettas visa was published separately; Madonnas vaggvisa (“The Madonna’s Cradle Song”) for voice and piano; and På kungens slott (“At the King’s Castle”), a collection of children's piano pieces.
Lidholm spent the academic year 1946/47 abroad as the recipient of a governmental Jenny Lind scholarship, during which he broadened his artistic experiences, meeting people, discussing ideas, and planning compositions.
In 1949, he attended seminars on music held at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse in Germany (including lectures by Leibowitz on twelve-tone technique, and talks by Messiaen and Fortner).
In Ritornell, for example, extraneous pitches are freely integrated into row order, and there is no deliberate effort to maintain an atonal orientation.
In 1956, Lidholm left his conducting post in Örebro to assume the head of the Chamber Music Department at Swedish Radio.
Skaldens natt (The Poet's Night) from 1957 was not a commissioned work, receiving its premier in Hamburg in 1959 as part of the West German new music series, Das neue Werk.
A distinctly new era begins in 1963, when Lidholm abandoned serial principles of pitch organization in his two works from that year: Nausikaa ensam (“Nausicaa Alone”) and Poesis.
In writing Nausikaa, Lidholm had to take into consideration of the performance abilities of the commissioning body, the orchestra of the music high school of Ingesund, Sweden.
In 1964, Lidholm decided to leave his post at Swedish Radio and succeed Karl-Birger Blomdahl as professor of composition (a ten-year, non-renewable appointment) at the Musikhogskola.
In 1973, he completed a commission from the governmental arts board of Sweden, Rikskonserter, for an a cappella choral work, …a riveder le stelle, in which rhythm is subordinated to allow for maximal exposure of the harmony and melody, using whole-tone and pentatonic as well as diatonic pitch organization.
The “old world” of the title is brought into play through the use of Heinrich Isaac's tune, Innsbruck, Ich muss dich lassen.
[12] In 1978, Lidholm completed a commission for another choral work, Perserna (“The Persians”), adapted from Aeschylus’ play of the same name, and set for a cappella male choir and three soloists.
