Games Without End (2018)

"In this way, our game never ended, and it never got boring either, since every time we found new atoms it seemed that even the game itself was new, as if we were playing it before the first time.”

The quote is taken from the Italian writer Italo Calvino's short story "Games Without End". It can, I think, be used as a picture of how it is to compose music: the music arises anew every time a new combination of notes is found.

The short story is part of "Cosmicomics", a collection of 12 short stories that all revolve around evolution as a theme. Calvino starts from different (sometimes outdated) scientific facts and builds totally unscientific stories around these. "Games Without End" takes place in one expanding universe (an alternative to "Big Bang"), where two comrades, Pfwfp and Qfwfq, are playing ball with hydrogen atoms. Some atoms disappear into space; Qfwfq gradually begins to get lack of atoms, while Pfwfp always seems to have a new one in the pocket...

My use of Calvino's title has several reasons. I have previously written a violin concerto called "Games For Souls", where the characters refer to the fact that in my music I play with other composers’ music. This is also the case here: in the horn concert there are traces of Bach's double concert for two violins, the the Swedish folk song "Lille Lasse sitter och gräter" and Donna Summers "State of Independence". Why just this music? it is not the result of an over-considered selection, but it's about music that I came into contact with in different ways during the composition process and which more or less by chance found its way into the score. In addition I sometimes use the Danish composer Per Nørgård's compositional technique "infinity series" – a system which means that every tone gives birth to new tones in infinity – and this is also a kind of musical "Games Without End".

The French horn is a very versatile but also a somewhat mysterious instrument: the slightly veiled timbre, the fact that the bell piece is directed backwards... as I choose the instrument as a soloist instrument, I found myself beginning to think of the soloist as the one telling the truth - an nonconformist, who sometimes gets the support of those around him (the orchestra), but sometimes speaks to deaf ears.

Being able to write this horn concerto for Radovan Vlatkovic, with his very special, heartfelt tone and outstanding virtuosity, was for me as a composer a dream come true.