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The Composers Society of Singapore (CSS) kickstarts 2020 with a new monthly series for our Musings section called Composer of the Month<\/strong>! The second composer to be featured is PerMagnus LINDBORG<\/strong>, a Sweden-born Singapore composer now based in Hong Kong! He is currently an associate professor at the School of Creative Media in City University of Hong Kong.<\/p>\n PerMagnus LINDBORG<\/strong><\/p>\n Interviewer: Emily KOH<\/strong><\/p>\n How did you get started composing with computers, and how did that journey bring you to Singapore?, Seoul and now Hong Kong? (Basically, a quick intro to your creative life\/career.)<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n As a child I received piano and trombone lessons. Then at twelve I couldn\u2019t do any more Beethoven, and started playing in brass orchestras and jazz big bands. As a teenager, I played synth keyboards in various bands, experimented with an analog four-track recording machine and recorded voice tracks to songs over two telephones at home.<\/p>\n At school, I loved maths and computer programming, learning Basic, Fortran, and Pascal. So I went to university to pursue maths, but found that music exerted an unstoppable force on me. I returned to playing the classics, practiced ferociously for several months and auditioned for conservatory first as a pianist, then doing more theory, studio engineering, and eventually majoring in composition. During this period my output was mainly acoustic, inspired by composers such as Sibelius, Scriabin, Bartok, but also Holdsworth and Partch.<\/p>\n In 1992, I heard Torstensson\u2019s Licks & Brains 2 live in Oslo, and it opened up my ears and transformed my understanding of rhythm, timbre and texture. I explored a repertoire of mainly French and Dutch contemporary music, and I knew I had to go abroad. I spent a year in Amsterdam studying with Torstensson, followed by another year in Montreal and Tokyo, then arriving in Paris. I had only planned a stopover to play jazz, write some obscure music, and go to GRM [Groupe de recherche musicale, at Radio France] concerts, but happened to meet a wonderful and beautiful young composer from Singapore at Royaumont. Joyce Koh and I stayed in France, married, had a child, before eventually moving to Singapore in 2005.<\/p>\n What is sound design and how is it different from composition?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n The term “sound design” was originally about building instruments, first with electronic equipment in a research studio, eventually all-digital on a laptop in the kitchen. I prefer to think about \u2018designing sound as the act of selecting and shaping the means by which we then express a musical composition. There is an intermediary step \u2013 let\u2019s call it \u2018collage\u2019 \u2013 which is the act of scripting the temporal and physical location of designed sonic elements. Labelling something a composition only makes sense, for me at least, if one considers its relationship to certain specific techniques, each with a history, such as counterpoint, multimodality, drama, rhetorics.<\/p>\n What is SOUNDISLANDS and how did the SOUNDISLANDS festivals start?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n SOUNDISLANDS is an idea of connecting different ways of listening. It is a sound design company, and a festival of music creation and research. I had always wanted to create a meeting-place between acoustic and electronic music, between science and art, between music and mathematics – to bring people from various backgrounds together, and have serious fun.<\/p>\n When I was working at NTU in Singapore, there was initially support for my ambitions, and I did Si13. Then, Si15 and Si17 followed. It was not possible to do Si19, but there might be Si21. I have the energy to do a biennial event, and am looking for collaborators.<\/p>\n Do you approach composing music for a commission, and sonic design for a SOUNDISLANDS project differently?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n These are difficult questions. A commissioned project is dependent on whom one is working for. It is wonderful to work with the same people over time, in several projects, because the creative work is much deepened. People change, the circumstances differ, one\u2019s own predilections evolve. Pragmatically, and at technical or organisational levels, the differences between composition and sound design aren\u2019t that important, but there is a shift in attitude from thinking of oneself as an individual creator \u2013 a composer, author, director \u2013 or as a team member.<\/p>\n SOUNDISLANDS as a company offers a more comfortable working situation, when we as composers or designers collaborate with public institutions or artist-teams such as architects, film-makers, dance companies, or music ensembles – they organise in similar ways.<\/p>\n