Born in Stockholm on 15th February 1952. He took piano lessons from Märta Söderberg in early years, played rock-’n ’roll in a local basement band and sang in the Swedish Radio Boys' Choir. Since then he has, educationally, gone his own way, with regular, intensive composition lessons from Stig Gustav Schönberg 1981-83 and organ studies with Tore Nilsson. He has been on the staff of the Swedish Performing Rights Society since 1981. He is also a concert organist.

Thomas Åberg began composing in the mid-1970s, and his début came in 1978 with a performance of music by the keen young enthusiasts of the Skeppsholm Group which was then active. Åberg played his own composition, Tre korta fantasistycken for organ, which was thus written before he started his composition lessons with Schönberg. The organ has remained his instrument ever since, and the subject of his entire output, which now comprises upwards of forty works. He readily admits that he is not interested, for example, in writing music for choir, piano and orchestra, and so he has consistently declined all such invitations.

He is a pre-eminently occasional composer whose music has achieved widespread currency and come to be played as frequently in concert programmes (all over Sweden, but in various European countries and Japan as well) and in the liturgical context, where his short, single-movement organ pieces, for example, have been found to make excellent voluntaries. He has been encouraged by remarks overhead, after concerts, expressing surprise at new music being so beautiful and accessible. Audience support is the mainspring of his creativity, but there are of course both listeners and reviewers who disapprove of such ostensibly anachronistic music. Humour is another of his vital creative forces. Music must bring enjoyment, without any abandonment of reverence.

Åberg has chosen to explore his own paths, heedless of trends and fashions. He aims to write music that is straight and unartificial, and within the capabilities of large numbers of organists. But this has not prevented several of our leading organists, ever since 1981, from incorporating numerous works of his in their repertoires. His principles have also borne fruit in the form of good publishing contracts and notable successes, but this is not to say that his music lacks technical difficulty. His Second Suite for Organ, for example, and his Fourth Toccata (with sex-tuplets in the pedal) make heavy demands on the performer and typify the wide span of Åberg's music.
Stig Jacobsson. Photo Lars Torndahl

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