Born in Västervik on 10th December 1919, died on 29th September 1997. He grew up in free-church surroundings. Both parents were musical and played several instruments. The family moved house a good deal and in Mohed, Hälsingland, the eleven-year-old became interested in music. Piano, violin and composition entered the picture simultaneously, and for the nine years he lived at Forshaga, Värmland, he was a member of the Missionary Congregation’s brass band, playing the E-flat cornet. Also at this time he received his first “proper“ music instruction at the Ingesund Popular School of Music, in 1938. Further studies at the State Academy of Music in Stockholm followed graduating as a music teacher in 1943 and organist and choir master in 1946. Between 1944 and 1950 he was organist and choir master at Uppsala Missionary Church. He studied composition with Melcher Melchers, and subsequently with Fartein Valen in 1951 and Luigi Dallapiccola in Florence in 1957. He was a founder member of the Monday Group in the 1940s. Moving to Gothenburg in 1952, he was organist of Älvsborg Church until 1977. He has been closely involved in all aspects of musical activity in Gothenburg, at the State Academy of Music and at the City Theatre. A superb improviser on the organ and piano, he became a Member of the Royal Academy of Music in 1971.

It is doubtful whether Swedish music has ever produced such a polymath as Sven-Eric Johanson. He was exploring new paths and producing music of every kind, from the popular to the electro acoustic. Already as a teenager he was fascinated by twelve-tone techniques and pointillist music, a good, strict schooling further intensified by his studies with Valen and Dallapiccola, resulting in a personal style without any of the dogmas of Viennese scholasticism — his only dogma being the Johansonian. His first “approved“ opus was the concerto for organ and strings composed in 1946 and first performed in Uppsala Missionary Church that year with the composer as soloist. His 500 or so listed compositions include, above all, nine symphonies, among them No. 5 (Etemenanki — the four elements), No. 8 Frödingsymfonin for soloists, choir and orchestra, No. 9 Sinfonia d’estate.

His many stage works include the operas Bortbytingarna, Kunskapens vin, Tjuvens pekfinger, and Pojken med flöjten, the ballet Slottet and other scenic and incidental compositions. His chamber music is dominated by the eight string quartets and four piano sonatas. His electro-acoustic music includes Hommaggio a Boccaccio and Rotas tenet. Choral music occupies a prominent position in Johanson’s output, and has in many cases proved to be something in the way of contact music. He saw himself as a missionary for new music, which can seem inaccessible to “ordinary people“ and amateurs. Hence the more straight forward texture, for example, of his choral songs, in which he employed the inspired and educationally insistent attraction of clusters, improvisation, twelve-tone and choral speech.... His choral compositions, both the simpler and more “difficult“ ones, are settings of words by such authors as Rainer Maria Rilke, Gustaf Fröding, Lars Forssell and Atle Burman. Johanson was the Swedish composer to have most choral works recorded in 1987.

He lived very much in the present and was not above writing choral variations on Helan går (a drinking song), concertos for balalaika or keyed fiddle, or cantatas for festive occasions on catering courses, with saucepans and saucepan lids among the instruments of the orchestra. He was manifoldly burlesque and fond of parody and experiment as a relaxation from his serious achievement. SJ