Magnus Lindberg Biography

	Born: 1958-06-27 Field: Composer
Field: Composer

Magnus Lindberg (born June 27, 1958) is a Finnish composer.

Lindberg was born in Helsinki. He studied at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki under Einojuhani Rautavaara and Paavo Heininen, beginning with piano.

He attended summer courses in Siena (with Franco Donatoni) and Darmstadt (with Brian Ferneyhough). After graduating from the Sibelius Academy in 1981 he travelled widely in Europe, attending private studies with Vinko Globokar and Gérard Grisey in Paris, and observing Japanese drumming and punk rock in Berlin.

While at 16 Lindberg wrote a large orchestral work called Donor, this was considered impossible to perform. Quintetto dell’Estate (1979) is generally held to be Lindberg's first opus. His first piece performed by a professional orchestra was Sculpture II in 1982, the second part of a trilogy whose first and third sections were never written. His first great success came with "Action-Situation-Signification" (1982), the first work in explored musique concrète. This piece was written for and premiered by the new-music ensemble Toimii ("It Works" in the Finnish language), which Lindberg founded during the summer of 1980. Lindberg is a trained pianist and has performed several of his works as part of Toimii.

Kraft (1983-85), another piece written for Toimii, was Lindberg's largest work to date, with over 70 harmonies and a meter-high score. It uses not only traditional instrumentation, but percussion on scrap metal and spoken word. Lindberg found this large work difficult to follow, and with the exception of 1986's "Ur", he entered an extensive creative hiatus which was the last for over two years.

Kraft made use of a chaconne-type structure where the progression of the piece is based on a repeated chain of chords. It was this idea that served as the basis for Lindberg's next style. He returned with an orchestral trilogy consisting of Kinetics (1988), Marea (1989-90) and Joy (1990). Though Lindberg became less interested in electronic manipulation of sound, he still explored the possibilities of compositional software, and Engine displays complex counterpoint generated by computer.

Among the many prizes his music has won are the Prix Italia (1986), the UNESCO Rostrum (1986), the Nordic Music Prize (1988) for Kraft, and the Royal Philharmonic Society Prize for large-scale composition (1992).