Bo Nilsson’s Trilogy “Brief an Gösta Oswald” in the Context of the Artistic Search ofthe Avant-garde of the 1950s and 1960s
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Abstract
The article examines one of the best vocal compositions of Swedish avant-garde composer Bo Nilsson – the trilogy “Brief an Gösta Oswald.” The author analyzes the texts of Gösta Oswald, as well as the type of vocal writing, bringing in parallels between this composition and such works and Pierre Boulez’s “Le Marteau sans maître” and Luigi Non’s “Il canto sospeso.”
The main traits of the texts are associativity, semantic ambiguity, predominance of free verse and absence of punctuation. Already the very titles reveal the technique of allusions, typical for Oswald, based on associative contamination. For Nilsson both the semantic-poetic side of the text and the phonic qualities of the Swedish language turn out to be equally important.
The vocal style demonstrates the diversity of means of intonating: syllabic singing, melismatics, vibration, speech-like sounds on fixed and not-fixed pitches. The rejection of sound within the pitch continuum and verbal meaning at the conclusion of “Mädchentotenlieder” and “En irrande son” is interpreted by the author of the article in symbolic light as the metaphor of death. The trilogy is comparable to Boulez’s cycle by its instrumentation (the significant role of the alto flute), the finesse of the sound color, the style of vocal writing, the poetics of death and, finally, texts permeatived with surrealist images and visions. In his cantata “Och visaren i hans…” Nilsson makes use of methods of phonetic analysis, and the method of work reveals the influence of the vocal technique of Nono. Basing himself on the technique of phonic “highlighting” and without destroying the semantic level of the text, the composer achieves a special kind of musical-semantic stereophonism.
Keywords: Bo Nilsson, musical avant-garde, Swedish music, contemporary vocal music, Bo Nilsson’s “Brief an Gösta Oswald”
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