Born in Norway on 9th July 1938, died in Stockholm on 5th October 2009. He began studying composition at the Oslo Conservatory in the early 1950s. For a time he was a pupil of Bjarne Brustad, and studied harmony, counter point and twelve-tone technique with Finn Mortensen. Coming to Stockholm in 1962, he studied at the State Academy of Music with Karl-Birger Blomdahl, Bo Wallner and Ingvar Lidholm. He became a Swedish citizen in 1968. He has held appointments as teacher at the National College of Musical Drama.
Björn Wilho Hallberg made his début as a composer in Oslo in 1960, when his Abstrakt Komposition for piano, later withdrawn, was performed at a subscription concert given by Ny Musikk. He immediately made a name for himself as a radical avant-gardist, deeply influenced by international trends, as was confirmed when his Felder for Flute and Percussion was presented at the 1961 ISCM in Vienna. (It was later also performed at the Nordic Music Days in Copenhagen in 1962) — an aleatory textural music after the manner of Boulez. But his studies in Stockholm brought a radical reappraisal. He discovered that he was living in an ivory tower and events such as the Cuban Crisis and the murder of Kennedy meant “that I must explore my way to compositions as an expression of today, of the topical filtered through my eyes and feelings.“ He started from scratch with music in which he wrestled with powerlessness: an enthralling, splendidly textured, emotionally powerful and rhythmically vigorous music. His hour-long Missa Pro Defunctis to three poems by Dag Hammarskjöld, introduced by the percussion piece Ur Dagboken, made him once more a debated name in 1967. The orchestral work Aspiration (1971) is based on the final movement of the Mass, in which hopelessness, paradoxically, is turned into hope and belief in survival. In Noveletter, commissioned by the Århus Symphony Orchestra in Denmark, all twenty instrumentalists are soloists. Micro-melodic cells whirl round until the piece is slowed down and brought to an end by a solitary violin. Chords have merged with and been extracted from one another in long-drawn-out movements. Aforismer for string quartet and wind quintet was written for the Philharmonic Soloists.
Hallberg has also shown a great deal of interest in opera. Evakueringen (1969) describes how the people of Stockholm are forced by environmental disaster to leave their homes. The Nordic Opera Houses commissioned Joseph (1976), an opera in the late Romantic operatic tradition which puts Joseph, deceived, in the focus of attention as the truly Christian man who, out of love for Mary, acknowledges her child as his own - an opera which also reflects, partly through quotations from Hitler and the Psalms, how the Church has at all times sided with the established powers. SJ