Born in Stockholm on 4th May 1961. He pursued basic piano and organ studies at the Municipal School of Music and has been a choral singer since the age of 14. He took advanced piano studies at the Swedish Radio School of Music, Edsberg, but while there his musical interest took a new turn, with the result that he came to specialise more and more in organ playing and composition. He studied composition privately with Sven-David Sandström and worked for one year as a programmer until, in 1981, he gained admission to Professor Gunnar Bucht’s composition class at the State Academy of Music in Stockholm. Until 1985 he also studied under Arne Mellnäs, Pär Lindgren and Brian Ferneyhough.

He worked together with Hans Lunell on a computer project at the State Academy of Music, where he also teaches computerised composition algorithms, as well as teaching contemporary music at the National College of Dance. He is a coach with the Stockholm Chamber Choir, and free lance organist with a wide repertoire of early, high-romantic and contemporary music. He has given several first performances.

Peter Bengtson grew up in a theatre family, which perhaps accounts for his predilection for music drama and vocal compositions. While only a boy he composed piano pieces, an opera and orchestral songs on the grand scale, but his real début took place at Young Nordic Composers’ Festival in Copenhagen in 1981, with the performance of his eight-voice choral piece Revir (1980). Experience of choral singing taught him what was feasible and pleasant-sounding in a choir, but he is not really looking for beautiful sound; if anything he is attracted by the grotesque, as is clearly apparent from his next composition, Turba (1982) for cello and bass clarinet. Ej blod i dina ådror strömmar (the title comes from a poem by E. J. Stagnelius) is the name of a tape composition a companion-piece to his breakthrough composition, the ballet Schakt, which follows exactly the same formal course — but there the similarity ends. The form is predetermined right down to the last detail, but other parameters are more flexible, setting up tensions. Schakt was created in close co-operation with the choreographer Per Jonsson. It is an integral performance in which the dancers also have musical parts to perform and the musicians are on stage. The instrumental combination is remarkable: 6 accordions, 3 double basses, harmonium, 3 steel sheets and percussion. And yet within a short space of time there have been three different productions of this ballet (at Cirkus in Stockholm, at the Stockholm Opera, and by the Cullberg Ballet, with whom it scored a great success in Paris, The Hague, New York and elsewhere.)

Together with Per Jonsson he has also created a couple of “performances“: the Walpurgis ritual Beltane was performed by actors and organ for four hours at Fylkingen, Lammas for solo dance, organ, choir and ensemble was presented in Skeppsholm Church during the Young Nordic Arts Festival. Both titles allude to prehistoric Druid rituals, and Bengtson is fascinated by ritual and by “technical Freemasonry“. His writing tends to be difficult, but the difficulties are always musically prompted, based on a highly practical attitude to music and on his own experience as a concert organist. In his experience, it has been immensely important to find a balance between creation and re-creation. Erinye (for organ and tape), a composition in three movements inspired by horror films, was first performed by Hans-Ola Ericsson in Stuttgart in January 1988.
Stig Jacobsson

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