Jenny Hettne arbetar innovativt och gärna i nära samarbete med musiker där hon utforskar musikens klangliga möjligheter. Hon komponerar för såväl orkester som mindre besättningar, ibland i kombination med elektronik. Hennes akustiska musik är starkt influerad av elektroakustisk musik och vice versa. Stycket As they flutter about för basklarinett och elektronik är komponerat i nära samarbete med och tillägnat klarinettisten Robert Ek. Musiken startar i basklarinettens djupaste register, i ett statiskt ljudlandskap av knappt skönjbara variationer, lätt böljande eller försiktigt skorrande. I styckets andra del expanderar rörelserna; vibrerar, fladdrar och skimrar. Solisten och den elektroniska stämman fungerar som en duo där de ibland byter funktion med varandra: speciella tekniker på instrumentet skapar en närmast elektronisk klang medan obearbetade klarinettinspelningar hörs i den elektroniska stämman.

Citadel of Love is a work for chamber ensemble commissioned by and written for the Swedish chamber ensemble Norrbotten NEO, composed in 2019-20.

Sestina, av TCP/IP kvartett och Åsa Unander-Scharin är ett ca 40 minuter långt verk, där ny musik, som skapats genom en radikal omtolkning av Monteverdis partitur, omger varje sats av det ursprungliga verket. En central faktor är hur både en dansare och två musiker styr Studio Acusticums hyperorgel, och därigenom iscensätter en läsning av Monteverdi som stundtals går långt in i körverkets detaljer, och i andra delar söker ett fågelperspektiv och väver in körmusiken i en långt större form. 

In the Roman myth of Psyche and Cupid, it is told how the princess Psyche loses her lover after doing the forbidden: lighting the lamp and looking at the deity. In her efforts to find him, she is thwarted by her jealous mother-in-law, the goddess Venus, and is eventually forced across the River Styx, past the three-headed gatekeeper, and down to Persephone, ruler of the underworld. The Underworld is an audio game that travels inwards, downwards, to be swallowed up by the darkness and the unknown. It is a journey through ancient and contemporary fairy tales and myths and touches on the horror of realizing the limitations of existence, the horror of dissolution and the excruciating acceptance of one’s own mortality. The work is composed for an actor, clarinet, electric guitar, pre-recorded voices and electronic music

wolf explores the timbral similarities between bass clarinet and very low sub tones. The timbral variation is explored via notated choreography, where the movement of the clarinet changes the frequency of the modular, which sends two low oscillator tones into a pair of subwoofer speakers. The clarinet part sounds in and around the modular, which is controlled by the movement of the clarinet. This is facilitated by the Music in Motion system designed by Robert Ek. It features a 9DOF sensor equipped with onboard sensor fusion. Using a combination of different sensor data, such as accelerometer and gyroscope information combined with pitch readings, The Music in Motion sensor works in conjunction with software created by Ek. Further, a control voltage signal is sent from the iPad to control the envelope of the modularsound. All these elements – clarinet sound, movement and envelope are described on the animated score, which uses a combination of lines and shapes to notate these elements, rather than pitches.

Although born in Sweden, Klas Torstensson has spent most of his working life in the Netherlands following his studies in Utrecht in the early 1970s. Stylistically, he may call to mind Varèse, Xenakis and - perhaps more distantly - Stravinsky. First and foremost, however, Torstensson's music is personal and distinctive. It is often nourished by his experiences of nature: rough granite, the sea, ice in the frozen Baltic inlets, the polar ice cap. His Lantern Lectures were composed in the aftermath of his opera The Expedition, about an ill-fated journey to the North Pole. While occupied with the opera he had received commissions from several different ensembles, and he therefore decided to write a cycle of works for these ensembles - compositions to be performed separately or as 'movements' forming a greater whole. The four lectures portray fundamental elements and phenomena in Nordic nature: bedrock with stratified memories of it's violent origins (Solid Rocks I & II), traces of the Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis) and potholes, cylindrical holes drilled into the bedrock under glaciers (Giant's Cauldron). They all involve 12 to 15 players, and are connected by Brass Links, brief interludes for trumpet, horn and trombone. Lantern Lectures is here performed by Norrbotten NEO, an ensemble dedicated to the promotion of contemporary chamber music, conducted by Christian Karlsen.

The Global Hyperorgan is an intercontinental, creative space for acoustic musicking. Existing pipe organs around the world are networked for real-time, geographicallydistant performance, with performers utilizing instruments and other input devices to collaborate musically through the voices of the pipes in each location. A pilot study was carried out in January 2021, connecting two large pipe organs in Piteå, Sweden, and Amsterdam, the Netherlands. A quartet of performers tested the Global Hyperorgan’s capacities for telematic musicking through a series of pieces. The concept of modularity is useful when considering the artistic challenges and possibilities of the Global Hyperorgan. We observe how the modular system utilized in the pilot study afforded multiple experiences of shared instrumentality from which new, synthetic voices emerge. As a long-term technological, artistic and social research project, the Global Hyperorgan offers a platform for exploring technology, agency, voice, and intersubjectivity in hyper-acoustic telematic musicking.

Musical performance is a multimodal experience, for performers and listeners alike. This paper reports on a pilot study which constitutes the first step toward a comprehensive approach to the experience of music as performed. We aim at bridging the gap between qualitative and quantitative approaches, by combining methods for data collection. The purpose is to build a data corpus containing multimodal measures linked to high-level subjective observations. This will allow for a systematic inclusion of the knowledge of music professionals in an analytic framework, which synthesizes methods across established research disciplines. We outline the methods we are currently developing for the creation of a multimodal data corpus dedicated to the analysis and exploration of instrumental music performance from the perspective of embodied music cognition. This will enable the study of the multiple facets of instrumental music performance in great detail, as well as lead to the development of music creation techniques that take advantage of the cross-modal relationships and higher-level qualities emerging from the analysis of this multi-layered, multimodal corpus. The results of the pilot project suggest that qualitative analysis through stimulated recall is an efficient method for generating higher-level understandings of musical performance. Furthermore, the results indicate several directions for further development, regarding observational movement analysis, and computational analysis of coarticulation, chunking, and movement qualities in musical performance. We argue that the development of methods for combining qualitative and quantitative data are required to fully understand expressive musical performance, especially in a broader scenario in which arts, humanities, and science are increasingly entangled. The future work in the project will therefore entail an increasingly multimodal analysis, aiming to become as holistic as is music in performance.

Cathedra I-III är en komposition av tonsättaren Kent Olofsson, för solist och kammarensemble. Solisten styr en konserthusorgel med en MIDI chapman stick. Härigenom skapas ett hyperinstrument av orgel och elgitarr. Verket utarbetades i nära samarbete med solisten Stefan Östersjö och uruppfördes i en direktsänd konsert i Sveriges Radio P2.

Since 2009, Norrbotten NEO has annually produced concerts entitled New Sweden. Originally, New Sweden was a settlement along the Delaware River in North America, from 1638–55. Acknowledging the mindset of the first settlers, the New Sweden project strive to honor pioneers who break new musical grounds. In the project Norrbotten NEO pinpoint works and composers that has a unique and personal voice at the frontline of the Swedish contemporary music scene. The composers selected are working closely with the ensemble before there works meet the audience. A selection of those works have been recorded and this is a box to celebrate the 10th anniversary of this project.

Norrbotten NEO är en unik ensemble som med känslig radar ständigt utforskar den musikaliska samtiden och strömningarna bland de svenska tonsättarna. Genom att vara en de ensembler som beställer flest nya verk av svenska tonsättare är NEO själv en viktig del i utvecklingen av den samtida musiken.

Tonsättaren och cellisten Chrichan Larson är en välkänd profil inom den europeiska nutida musiken, både som cellist och tonsättare. Hans musik är elegant, ofta med impressionistiskt rikt färgade klanger och vackert spröda men intensiva melodier som kastar sig mellan de olika instrumenten. Här får vi höra det i hans Bodies in Motion, ett beställningsverk för Norrbotten NEO.

Serbisk-svenske tonsättaren Djuro Zivkovic har de senaste åren uppmärksammats både i Sverige och internationellt. Kärnan i musiken ligger i tron och inspirationen från den bysantinska musik han upplevde under uppväxten i Serbien. Som en kommentar till Ascend to the Citadel of Love, ett beställningsverk av Norrbotten NEO, citerar han den bysantinske teologen och mystikern Nikitas Stithatos som levde i början 1000-talet:”När du inser att berömmelse, nöje, överflöd och välstånd inget värde har, eftersom det endast betyder död och förfall, förstår du också det världsligas fåfänglighet och riktar i stället blicken mot det gudomliga. Då ska du också klara allt som verkligen existerar och höja dig över smärta och njutning. Omvandlad till ett heligt tabernakel uppgår du i kärlekens citadell."

Music for solo instrument and electronics creates a special challenge in the concrete and vivid character of the live performer versus the abstract and fixed character of the speakers with their invisible electrical signals. Composers have tried to bring the two worlds together by creating fields of contact between them; Kontakte by Stockhausen is a prime example of how timbral and gestural similarities connect the acoustic and electronic sound material.

Developments in the field of live electronics have made it possible to fuse the two worlds by using microphones and motion sensors together with machine learning and gesture recognition. New connections are created as the electronic sounds may be triggered by the motions of the musician and similarly the electronic part may be able to listen and react to its surrounding.

In plateau eleven in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari talk about how the movements, colours and calls of the bowerbirds forms an assemblage of heterogeneous components that together constitute a machinic statement. They also describe how matters of expression emerge from such components and give an example of how leaves of grass with the Australian grass finches become a component for passages between assemblages. Similarly, one may regard music for acoustic instruments together with electronic sounds as a special assemblage of enunciation. By utilising the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari and their concepts of heterogeneous components, rhizomatic connections, and machinic assemblage, one may reconsider the relation between the instrumental and electronic parts as a question of connections between components and passages between assemblages, rather than similarities and interactions between two worlds.