On the most basic level, music is the expression of feelings. As a composer I want to convey a vision of the artistic life through emotions. I want to move people, not necessarily by conveying only pleasant feelings, but also by challenging the audience. Today, as well as throughout most of my career, I work with a wide variety of modes of expression to achieve this goal: excessive beauty, naïve music, modernist techniques, and most lately, techniques that draw upon all my previous experiences as a composer. In my music, stylistic diversity serves a higher end. I can be naïve as well as complex, if the mood of expression or the dramatic unfolding of a piece so demands.

I have deliberately tried to create interest and debate about my works; they have sparked first-page debates in newspapers several times and a number of academic papers and theses have addressed my works and their reception. My aim is to compose music that is truly new, to make a foot print in the artistic cement. I have composed for so many years now, producing altogether almost 200 works, in virtually all genres of the Western art music tradition, that I feel confident about how my music works in a live context. But my aspiration is still to continue to develop, to constantly improve and transform my musical style. As a composer and human being, I have to perpetually grow.

The path to achieving the confidence that I feel now was relatively straight. In my earlier compositions, I worked very hard with form and parameter organization using serialist principles. I had an idea about how a piece should develop, and then I just had to write it down. Coming up with the idea itself was the main creative part in my mode of composing at the time. Composing like this was not particularly joyful or artistically interesting. Although I am very pleased with the result in many cases, the works became immediately coherent and convincing. The rows and the structures ruled me, instead of the other way around. I had no way to change the way a composition developed once I had made up my mind.

Some pieces could almost compose themselves and had a mind of their own. My major works from that period were successful orchestral works. My breakthrough came with Through and Through, a large, dense work in the Central European tradition performed with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in 1974, which generated an intense international interest in my works and resulted in a number of commissions, among others Utmost from the BBC Symphony and Pierre Boulez.

The 1980s were a turning point, when I discovered an approach to composition that combined some of my earlier methods but also allowed me to achieve the joy of composing using a less modernist tonal language. High Mass, for example, is far from my works from the 1970s. But it is similar in that it is a highly structured piece. In fact, I feel that I have never before worked so hard structurally. But contrary to my works from the 1970s, the foreground structures are themselves interesting, I would say even beautiful, as for example in the highly organized Benedictus movement, or my solo concertos for Cello and Piano.

My music has thus changed quite a bit during my career, and I want to keep changing. I want to widen my artistic scope continuously. My latest work, for example, the opera Jeppe: The Cruel Comedy (after Holberg’s Jeppe of the Hill, which will be premiered in Stockholm this fall), is an opera buffa, leaning towards a musical. This is a thread I will partly pursue in the future. Benny Andersson (composer and former member of ABBA) and I have for some time now discussed a large-scale collaborative project.

Composition is more than self-expression, it is also self-purging. I remember the relief and the new openness I felt after having completed Requiem. It was almost like a religious redemption after years of work. Honesty was the keyword. I felt that I had been completely honest to the text and that the result reflected that honesty. If there is something I want my students to understand, it would be artistic honesty. Style and technique are of lesser importance, as long as the work is truthful to the artistic belief of the student.

I frequently talk about life in my teaching—I talk about my own life and the lives of my mentors, and I talk with the students about their lives. I want the student to draw upon his or her own experiences when composing. That means that we talk a lot during a lesson, about things other than compositional techniques. We talk about poetry too. I share my experiences of meeting with poets and authors. I have written nine operas and a number of ballet works in different formats, as well as numerous choral works. I take any chance to get involved in vocal and dramatic music, as a composer or pedagogue. For example, I taught a seminar in choral composition during the summer semester of 2001 and I have been invited to teach at the “Essentially Choral” workshop with the Plymouth Music Series and Philip Brunelle, sponsored by American Composers Forum, in Minneapolis March 22–23, 2002). Previously I was also involved as a singer (I was a member of the professional-level Hägersten Motet Choir in Stockholm for many years).

Since I started to compose vocal and dramatic works, my way of composing instrumental music has changed. I have written so much vocal music now that everything I write is dramatic—my some seventy chamber pieces as well as my some forty orchestral works. The form itself is dramatic, and I let different instrumental groups act like characters against each other. More and more I came to realize that having a vocal approach to composition is essential in other respects as well: It constitutes the entire foundation of composition—articulation, phrasing, breathing, and how music relates to life itself. In other words, how the musical foreground obtains its own spirit. I have found that my vocal and dramatic approach and repertoire is enormously stimulating for the students at Indiana University, most of whom have been composing and thinking mostly in an instrumental idiom.

I do talk about technique, of course. We study the works of prominent composers of the twentieth century, as well as of historical composers. We do not make pastiche exercises, though. The purpose of studying other composers’ works is to assist the student in solving a particular compositional problem. My primary job as a pedagogue is to help the students find their own style, not to teach them to compose like me or any other composer. From these analyses I want the students to develop their own techniques, to take methodological ideas and make their own conclusions.

I think my own search has made me well-suited to guide the student through this compositional soul-finding process. I do believe I can provide a view of music making as essential—a view I think is deeply rooted in my European upbringing. Composition, for me, is very serious and very important. In fact, it is about the very essence of life and death. I think a student has a greater chance of succeeding when considering composition as a indispensable part of life.

The student, at least the graduate student, must own an artistic vision of his or her own, and it is my duty to help him or her find it and to develop it. I try to be the first audience for my students’ music. I try to use my experience to explain or suggest how a certain passage or an entire composition will resonate for an audience. All compositions have to be aimed at a performance and an audience. But the intermediary, the performer, is also extremely important. In my teaching, I emphasize the important relationship between the composer and the musicians.

In my earlier career, composition was simply composition—the realization of a work was something completely different, and not closely related to my work. It was interesting to hear my works, but it was not my primary interest. This attitude was damaging to the profession in the long run. Today I see things differently. Now I work closely with musicians and conductors. I want to become a role model for the students—to show them how I think as a composer, and what the every-day life of a composer could look like. My method does not give the impression that becoming a composer is an easy path.