Pär Lindgren

Pär Lindgren (born in Gothenburg on 16 January, 1952) is a Swedish composer.

He studied composition with Gunnar Bucht and Lars-Gunnar Bodin at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, where he himself has been a member of the teaching staff since 1980. In 1998 he was appointed professor of composition. Initially his composing was mainly directed towards electronic music. Works such as Electric Music and the triptych The Room, The Second Room and Houdini attracted attention at an early stage.

Over the years Lindgren’s interest has increasingly focused on instrumental music. Lindgren plays the guitar and the lute, which partly explains the background to the fantasy on a song by Dowland, Shadowes That in Darknesse Dwell. Otherwise, in Pär Lindgren’s output as a whole, one can see how groups of works are united by certain extra-musical themes which provide a platform for his creativity. A number of works are based on visual forms. These include Meander, which was inspired by the sometimes strict, sometimes flowing patterns of so-called "meandering spirals". Fragments of a circle in its turn was inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings. In a similar way Arabic patterns have had an influence on the distinctive sonority and interplay of melodic lines in Oaijé, a work which has attracted considerable attention and been frequently performed in international music circles (chosen as selected work at UNESCO’s Composers Rostrum, 1996).

Oaijé also belongs to the group of works where the inspiration has been provided by "ethno music"—in this particular case African music. Bowijaw also takes African music as its starting point, and in both cases the inspiration is timbral rather than rhythmic. In Wing Lindgren has worked with ideas borrowed from Swedish folk music.

A third group of works has found inspiration in nature, though not for descriptive purposes but as abstracted patterns. These include Secrets and the trombone concerto Islands. On a secondary plane Fragments of a circle also belongs to this group, since it was inspired by da Vinci’s studies of the patterns of water in motion.

Lindgren prefers to write for orchestra or for larger chamber music combinations, and the music can be characterised as an investigation of the body of sound – it can be described more clearly with the help of physical metaphors: the works take on sculptural features, the movements are refined and well choreographed within a clearly defined harmonic framework. But behind this slender-limbed and controlled first impression, the fine motor coordination appears on closer examination to quiver and vibrate. Although he varies his compositional method from one work to the next, something of this Lindgrenian profile still remains.

Pär Lindgren was awarded the Christ Johnson Music Prize in 1987 for Shadowes that in Darknesse Dwell, and for Oaijé in 1996.