Shortlisted Composers 2026

The six composers nominated by ISCM Sweden for the 2026 World New Music Days are:

Ylva Q Arkvik

Ylva Q. Arkvik, born 1961, has written pieces for most settings, including electroacoustic music, chamber and orchestral music, opera and theatre music. Her music is often harsh, even passionately intense at times, but is mostly mournfully restrained and steeped in a kind of fantastical, abrasive melodic tincture. Unlike many of her generation, Arkvik does not imbue her music with stylistic fusions, but remains firmly rooted in the modernist tradition with an intensely concentrated mode of expression.

Website

Nebula

Nebula is the fourth movement in Ylva Q Arkvik’s first violin concerto Auspicium and although deeply connected with the concerto also in itself an independent work. In ancient Rome, auspices were the signs believed to be sent by the gods. Not as predictions, but rather as approvals or disapprovals of upcoming actions. In particular, the behavior of birds and thunder and lightning were studied and interpreted. The work is characterized by an equally ominous and passionate tone. The music is strenuous and tension-filled like a thriller, but at the same time dreamily fluid and gentle.

Nebula was premiered 13/3-2025 in Örebro Concert Hall and is recorded on CD.

Tony Blomdahl

Tony Blomdahl, born in Stockholm 1972. Background as a musician in various experimental and more conventional ensembles since 1987. Studies at Gotlands Tonsättarskola for Sven-David Sandström 1995-97 and the composition department at Gothenburg University for Ole Lützow-Holm and Åke Parmerud among others 1999-2003. Blomdahl has worked as a composer, and in the artistic field since graduating in 2003. Composes mostly chamber music, not seldom with electronic parts but has also made music for theater. Member of FST (Swedish Composers' Association) since 2004. Active and working in Gothenburg and there based at Elementstudion and the GEIGER society, but lives in southern Sweden. The music of Tony Blomdahl is released on both CD, vinyl and cassette by various ensembles

Website

Uno dei tanti

When I do not compose on commission for a specific event, theater music or whatever, my ideas often comes from a need of experimenting with sounds. It could be found sounds, electronically generated or processed sounds or different acoustic instruments. One of the ideas with this piece was to merge the creak sounds from some of my doors I recorded, with the string instruments by using a scratch effect on the string instruments, produced by a very exaggerated bow pressure. Also I wanted to experiment with non-octave-repeating scales.

The piece was commissioned by Ensemble Neo in 2015 and was first premiered at Studio Acusticum, Piteå on March 26 2015.

Lina Järnegard

Born 1979 in Borkhult, Sweden. Lina Järnegard is educated at Gotland School of Composition (Visby, Sweden) and at the Academy of Music and Drama (Gothenburg, Sweden). Her main teachers has been Per Mårtensson, Henrik Strindberg, Ole Lützow-Holm and Ming Tsao. 2011 she also studied at the Royal Scottish Academy for Music and Drama in Glasgow with composer David Fennessy. Since 2010 Lina is artistic director of Dråpera, an ensemble of performing art in Gothenburg. The ensemble explores and develops methods and ideas for new experimental opera and music theatre. Lina is collaborating with soloists and chamber ensembles over the world and has been represented at Huddersfield New Music Festival, Festival Mixtur, Sound of Stockholm, Unehörte musik, Frontside festival, Festival Contemporaneus and others.

Website

Inside Voices

The work is part of an ongoing series of works I call “Voices”, whose main focus is to experiment with method and material by linking the works together at different levels. Within the series, a cyclical process takes place where the musical material in each work is transformed and given a new shape into the next work. The creation of one work is dependent on another work and together the series of works creates a kind of musical ecosystem of its own. New instrument combinations are an important part of the series’ development.

The first piece in the series, Voices, is written for solo violin in 2023. Inside Voices from 2025 for clarinet and electronics is work number two. The third, Voices II, is written for violin and clarinet and will be premiered in 2026. The electronic part in Inside Voices consists of recordings of playing techniques from inside a Piano and is composed in such a way that with minor adjustments it could be performed by a pianist.

Anne Pajunen

Anne Pajunen is a composer-performer based in Stockholm. An interdisciplinary practice, using voice, viola, custom made live electronic instruments, found objects, video and site-specific concepts, is paired with a special interest in languages, aspects of improvisation and audience relations. The works range from music/theatre pieces, performance art, videos, electroacoustic music to hybrid forms of live- and installation art. Improvisations in detailed set-ups are mixed with fully scored works. The improv aspect of her work is a characteristic not only of the musical elements but all parts, including set design. Artistic director of the ensemble S.M.O.K and the series CALMSLEEP CHAMBERS, producing staged projects and international collaborations. Her works are presented on the music and art scene in Sweden and internationally. Commissions include works for the Swedish Radio, and festivals such as San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, and international contemporary ensembles. Member of the conceptual string quartet NRQ.

Website

Nightmares in November

First presented at the GIOfest XIII in 2020 which took place in Glasgow and online. The work was made as a reaction to the unsettling times when the world was not only in the midst of a raging pandemic but also followed the US elections with great concern. Today we are facing even worse nightmares than we had imagined at the time. Nightmares in November is now more than ever a lament over the world's open wounds and severe loss of sanity.

The soundtrack was played on a live-electronic instrument (SensorBox) created in collaboration with Fredrik Olofsson, using dynamic pressure sensors in a Supercollider system. The sounds heard are recordings of objects from historical collections in a museum, such as a wooden office chair, a spring scale, a raffle drum, etc. These are combined with voice, fog horns, flute, violin and music boxes.

Jonatan Sersam

Jonatan Sersam studied at the Malmö Academy of Music (Luca Francesconi), the Conservatory of Bologna and the Künstuniversität in Graz (Beat Furrer). His voyage starts in the encounter between rapid, ruthless transformation and acoustic situations that in various ways questions the idea of progression or process. Concerned with narration, but not in a programmatic or dramaturgical sense, but the ongoing internal narration within the musical medium. He experiments with narrative structures, creating interconnections between contemporary dramatic thinking and the purely abstract flow and musical transformation of sound. His setting of a poem by A. Pizarnik - “Presencia de Sombra” was awarded with Saltöstifelsten’s Järnåker Prize in 2023. Sersam has worked with several symphony orchestras, chamber groups and soloists, and received several grants and scholarships (Swedish Arts Grants Commitee, Swedish Society of Composers, Swedish Arts Council, Carin Malmlöf-Forsslings tonsättarpris, Järnåkerstipendiet etc) and his music is reaching a continuously growing audience around the world.

Website

Ein straum av ord

This setting of Eldrid Lundens first fragment from “Gjenkjennelsen” is part of a 9 piece - work with poems from this collection. This first one “eit ope susande rom” departs from what I interpret as the absence of knowing, the feeling of collective solitude. “An empty howling space is all that remains of your longing”. I wanted to enter that empty space, and explore the howling, or the murmuring, depending on how you translate it. I place the voices in there, and I try to make the poem sounding from within that room. I found a multitude of expressions, both calm and desperate, collective and individual. I also found the emptiness, absence of language. The longing for language where there is only an empty howling space. I found itbpth hopeful and frightening, and the tension and duality of these states were used as the main emotional force throughout the nine pieces.

Henrik Strindberg

Henrik Strindberg's music is focusing on rhythm and sound. He has had commissions for several international ensembles and has collaborated with excellent Swedish soloists, ensembles and orchestras. A number of works have been recorded and performed internationally. Strindberg received the big Christ Johnson Prize 2007 for Neptune's Field for orchestra, the Rosenberg Prize 2008 and a shared Swedish Grammy award 2010 for Timeline.
Born in 1954 in Kalmar, Sweden, as a young man Strindberg was a founding member of the progressive rock group Ragnarök who’s debut album from 1976 has been re-released much later in South Korea and Japan and is considered to be a classic album from that genre of Swedish instrumental music from the seventies.
Strindberg studied composition at the Royal University College of Music in Stockholm. He studied with Iannis Xenakis and at Ircam, Paris.
For more than twenty years Strindberg was teaching at the Gotland School of Music Composition. He is a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Music. Strindberg co-founded the Sound of Stockholm festival and is a member of the team that produces the artist driven festival Svensk Musikvår.

Website

RESA

RESA is light music composed during a time characterised by my wife's cancer. I ask myself how I could compose such light music during our last autumn together? I do not know. Maybe the music is a portrait of my wife? Ragna made a bright impression on people. She was funny, creative, knowledgeable and mentally strong. We travelled together. In the last year we travelled to cancer clinics abroad. We lived in a mixture of uncertainty and determination, but also a desire to explore and experience nature. One late summer day we hiked through a beech forest and along a lake in southern Germany and had lunch in the sun. On an autumn day in Latvia, we walked across the long sandy beach of Jurmala at dusk. It was chilly and windy, but a lovely dinner awaited us at the small hotel. We did everything we could, as long as we could. Memories of traveling with Ragna are bright.

RESA was commissioned by the Hetta Music Days Festival
Dedicated to Tapio Tuomela
Premiered by The Arctic Philharmonic sinfonietta, dir. Tim Weiss, Enontekiö, Finland, 2025-04-11