I had a friend who raved about Pettersson for years, but I just couldn’t crack this composer, even through the “least-challenging” Symphony No. 7. But then I had a case of unrequited love and I was in quite a bad state, and Symphony No. 11 was on my iPod at the time. Then everything suddenly clicked and I could enjoy his entire body of work. I get the impression from the very small Allan Pettersson fandom scene that most of us are men who have been going through some things.
I’m annoyed that BIS has released a recording of the <i>Symphonic Movement</i> unavailable except here. I have tried to support the label for years by buying CD releases instead of waiting, as some thrifty people do, for a box set, and this is how the label repays me.
Really enjoying this series of posts, thanks for doing it.
Hi Christopher, thanks for your comment. The first thing to say is that both the Symfonisk Sats and Fuga in E hadn’t been recorded by BIS before, so both of those are new recordings evidently in order to ensure that the Complete Edition was actually complete! i take your point about them not being available separately, BUT Christian Lindberg and Norrköping are going to continue to record the remaining symphonies that Lindberg hasn’t done yet, so i wonder whether it might be included on one of those future releases. i’ll certainly pass that thought onto BIS, though, as it’s a good one.
Regarding your first point, yes i’m a man, but my engagement with his work had (and has) absolutely nothing to do with anything turbulent in my own life. And as i’ve commented previously in this series, my first reaction to his symphonies was NOT to regard it only as bleak, dark and forbidding, but full of colour and vibrancy and life and, at times, joy. Hence my keenness to write this series to try to provide a corrective of sorts to this doggedly persistent fallacy. That’s not to say his music can’t speak to people “going through some things”, of course it can. But, for example, you mentioned Symphony No. 11, and while it’s a work laden with struggle, it’s also a piece laden with enormous fun and elation, so i don’t come away from it feeling it’s music that tends toward something negative.
You and I have had email discussions about the blinkered, agenda-driven nature of commentaries such as Robert Layton’s, Simon; nevertheless, I still hear a lot of sadness and despair in Pettersson’s music, most nakedly in those trademark minor-key lyrical episodes. Where I think people like Layton get their appraisals utterly wrong, though, is believing that Pettersson regarded such feelings as something to be wallowed in; rather, I get the impression he saw them as something to be fought against tooth-and-nail. Sometimes that battle was won, sometimes it was lost (as in the 7th Symphony Christopher C. mentions)…and quite often the act of struggling sent the musical argument to a different place entirely. That’s my ha’peth’s worth, anyway…
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I had a friend who raved about Pettersson for years, but I just couldn’t crack this composer, even through the “least-challenging” Symphony No. 7. But then I had a case of unrequited love and I was in quite a bad state, and Symphony No. 11 was on my iPod at the time. Then everything suddenly clicked and I could enjoy his entire body of work. I get the impression from the very small Allan Pettersson fandom scene that most of us are men who have been going through some things.
I’m annoyed that BIS has released a recording of the <i>Symphonic Movement</i> unavailable except here. I have tried to support the label for years by buying CD releases instead of waiting, as some thrifty people do, for a box set, and this is how the label repays me.
Really enjoying this series of posts, thanks for doing it.
Hi Christopher, thanks for your comment. The first thing to say is that both the Symfonisk Sats and Fuga in E hadn’t been recorded by BIS before, so both of those are new recordings evidently in order to ensure that the Complete Edition was actually complete! i take your point about them not being available separately, BUT Christian Lindberg and Norrköping are going to continue to record the remaining symphonies that Lindberg hasn’t done yet, so i wonder whether it might be included on one of those future releases. i’ll certainly pass that thought onto BIS, though, as it’s a good one.
Regarding your first point, yes i’m a man, but my engagement with his work had (and has) absolutely nothing to do with anything turbulent in my own life. And as i’ve commented previously in this series, my first reaction to his symphonies was NOT to regard it only as bleak, dark and forbidding, but full of colour and vibrancy and life and, at times, joy. Hence my keenness to write this series to try to provide a corrective of sorts to this doggedly persistent fallacy. That’s not to say his music can’t speak to people “going through some things”, of course it can. But, for example, you mentioned Symphony No. 11, and while it’s a work laden with struggle, it’s also a piece laden with enormous fun and elation, so i don’t come away from it feeling it’s music that tends toward something negative.
You and I have had email discussions about the blinkered, agenda-driven nature of commentaries such as Robert Layton’s, Simon; nevertheless, I still hear a lot of sadness and despair in Pettersson’s music, most nakedly in those trademark minor-key lyrical episodes. Where I think people like Layton get their appraisals utterly wrong, though, is believing that Pettersson regarded such feelings as something to be wallowed in; rather, I get the impression he saw them as something to be fought against tooth-and-nail. Sometimes that battle was won, sometimes it was lost (as in the 7th Symphony Christopher C. mentions)…and quite often the act of struggling sent the musical argument to a different place entirely. That’s my ha’peth’s worth, anyway…