Twine

Rolf Wallin
Composer and avant-garde performance artist Rolf Wallin has established a reputation as one of the leading Scandinavian composers of his generation. Much of Wallin’s music combines an intuitive freedom with a rigorous mathematical approach, such as use of fractal algorithms to construct melody and harmony, resulting in a music that often hints at the influence of Ligeti, Xenakis and Berio. But far from being abstract, Wallin’s music often connects directly with the world around him, most notably in works such as Act (2004), a celebration of the power of cooperation, Concerning King(2006), based on speech patterns from Martin Luther King, and Strange News (2007), which tells the story of the rehabilitation of child soldiers in Africa.

An idea that has proven especially fruitful for Wallin is the use of so-called “fractal” algorithms to generate a musical raw material, which he refines further by means of a continuous dialectic between systematic calculations and his own musical intuition. Among Wallin’s most important fractal-based compositions, we find the works for chamber orchestra Onda di ghiaccio (1989) and Boyl (1995) and the chamber works Stonewave (1990), ning (1991), and Solve et coagula (1992). Several of these works have received international acclaim and are regularly performed both in Norway and abroad – most notably the percussion work Stonewave , which received the Best Work Award at the 1992 ISCM World Music Days in Warsaw.