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MAGNUS ANDERSSON

MAGNUS ANDERSSON: Extreme Guitarist

Photo #1 (no caption)

Photo: J. Schneider

Magnus Andersson has long been one of Europe`s leading contemporary guitarists and is
an artist who has been responsible for the creation of much of its modern repertoire. As
the founder of the Guitar Class at the ”Summer courses for New Music in Darmstadt” in
1984, he has introduced the instrument to a generation of some of the world’s most
forward-looking composers, and was himself the recipient of the coveted Kranischsteiner
Prize in Darmstadt in 1984. His dozen recordings have garnered two Swedish
Grammophone Prizes, and in 1992, he was nominated for a Swedish Grammy. During a
recent Swedish tour, John Schneider interviewed him for Pacifica Radio’s “Global
Village”.

Stockholm, Sweden
April 2009

JS: You are a truly global performer. I can’t imagine many countries where you haven’t
played…

MA: I’ve definitely played in many countries, though I haven’t played that much in Asia.
I’ve been to Japan, to Korea and I was recently in Vietnam and I also played in
Uzbekistan, but that’s about it as regards the East. Of course I’ve been playing in Turkey,
as well, but Turkey is starting to get into Europe. There is this discussion whether they
belong to Europe or whether they are part of Asia. And, of course, the country is part of
both.

JS: Is their musical taste also split in the middle?

MA: They have a small community for what we call “Western Art Music.” They have
orchestras, and they have composers trained in Europe. Some of the musicians actually
go to Europe and make a career. There are not that many of them, but if they want to
really make a career in that art form, they have to move – particularly if they are
interested in more contemporary music. The scene is not that large.

JS: Which is, of course, exactly what you’re known for.

MA: Yes, exactly.

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JS: Would you say that your international career began with Darmstadt? Was that your
beginning?

MA: Yes, I was asked by the Director, Freidrich Hummel. He heard me play and he
asked me, “I would like you to come to Darmstadt and found a guitar class, because the
guitar hasn’t been really that present in Darmstadt.”

JS: Of course it began back in 1948, and it took until 1984 to get a guitar there.

MA: Exactly. So when I came there, of course, I got many new connections. It made my
name known because all people involved in new music sooner or later pass through
Darmstadt. And the huge amount of students; when it started in ’48, I think it was a fairly
small, elitist activity. But when I came, there were several hundred people and at least
forty nations represented. So, if you were a kind of central figure among the staff, of
course, your name spreads because they would speak about those teachers. I was always
surprised that I would be known even in smaller countries like Bolivia or Chile – but the
New Music world is really quite small, too. It still focuses the idea of what goes on in the
margins is not really happening: it’s still the idea that there is somewhere where the real
thing is happening. So composers from what we would say are the margins, you know,
the smaller countries, they still pay attention to what goes on in Europe, I think, and
Darmstadt was a central place for that – and still is. And the Darmstadt courses still do a
good job, I think.

JS: What repertoire were you playing before you went to Darmstadt that made you
recognized as a new music performer?

MA: When I came there I was twenty-seven or twenty-eight, so I was still young for
being on the staff. Most of my colleagues were at least five to ten years older than me,
but I had still, by then, a good repertoire of pieces mainly by Swedish composers. But by
then I was already in touch with (Brian) Ferneyhough. He was already planning his
guitar piece that eventually came out as the Kurze Schatten II (Naïve CD 782169).
I had already been in touch with many of the more well known composers since part of
my professional career began in Italy, so I was already known in the Italian community of
New Music, which had also quite a big presence in Darmstadt.

JS: Did you go to Italy to train? Did you study there first?

MA: Actually, I went away quite early. I went first to Spain and then to England, and
then a bit in Germany with Siegfried Behrend, and then I came to Italy in ’76. I studied
with Angelo Gilardino and I was officially his student between ’76 and ’79.

JS: He is also very well known as a contemporary artist and someone who pushes
contemporary music.

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MA: Yes, he was very much like that. He was interested in what belonged to the 20th
century. He is a very cultivated man - he knows a lot about literature, as well, and has
connections with what we would say is “classical modernism,” but perhaps his focus or
his temperament was not that well-attuned to what we say is the “avant garde.” He was
really more interested in things that belong to tradition; his kinship with someone like
Castelnuovo-Tedesco is very deep, you know.

JS: So, Modern music rather than New music…interesting.

MA: Modern music, yes. And that was already in my studies in England and I think he
thought that I had a gift for more avant garde things, you know, for things that are more
experimental, so that is what he supported me to do and to look into.

JS: So, your connections in Darmstadt…what repertoire did that produce?

MA: It produced quite a few pieces. Of course the Ferneyhough pieces… I had already
asked Ferneyhough in ’79 about these pieces and I got to know him in ’79 because that is
where we met. But he actually really started to compose them in ’83, one year before I
came and I got the first three Movements in ’84 when I came there. He had all these
sketches and then it took four more years until the piece was finished. I think he found
this quite a difficult piece to write – but the reason for them being written and finished
was because of what happened in Darmstadt.
At the end of the courses, there are always these student concerts where student
performers and composers present their own work, things that have been prepared during
these two and a half weeks in Darmstadt. These concerts, at least in the ‘80s, were
normally very, very long because there was no real control over how much music was
presented. So in the end, they became four to five hours longer than they were supposed
to be. During one of these concerts, because Ferneyhough was always in the Jury
because, at the end of the courses there is a big, quite famous prize attached to the
courses called the Kranichstein Muzik Prize and the staff are supposed to sit in the Jury…
I did this, as well…

JS: A prize for composition?

MA: For composition and for performing. I think it has happened once that they gave the
whole prize to just one composer and that was Wolfgang Rihm, who is, by now, a big star
in German music. But otherwise, normally, it is divided between four to six people - they
take two or three composers and two or three performers that they think have done
exceptionally well during the courses. These concerts were sometimes very, very long
and myself, I normally didn’t have the stamina to go through everything. But
Ferneyhough was always very responsible, and so he sat through all these concerts
which, of course, becomes too much. During these concerts, he ended up writing what

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was to become the theme of the last movement of his suite for the Guitar, Kurze Schatten
II. He wrote this short piece hearing several pieces at the same time… It is a short piece
of thirty seconds – but that was the trigger to finish the piece and he used that short piece
in the last Movement.

Photo #2: Sketch for Ferneyhough’s Kurze Schatten II, #7

Photo: J. Schneider

So by 1988, it was finished and I did the first performance of the full piece in Geneva,
Switzerland in the beginning of ’89. I actually didn’t have that much time to learn the
whole piece, but of course I already knew the three first Movements.

JS: And what was his concept of re-tuning the strings? (Note: several strings are tuned a
quartertone sharp or flat, and retuned during the work)

MA: Actually, I think he got the idea from when we met the first time in Stockholm. He
was invited then in ’79 to do a course at the Stockholm Royal College of Music and I
showed him various pieces. I played a bit of my repertoire that I had by then, you know.
In ’79, I already had quite a good repertoire - I played him some of the Italian pieces: I
played Petrassi, I played Donatoni, and I played him also the Villa Lobos pieces. But I
realized that he was not really interested in that type of idiomatic writing. I also showed
him a piece that you recorded for your book [The Contemporary Guitar, UC Press, 1985]
which is by a Swedish composer, Sven David Sandström – called Surrounded, and this
piece uses quartertone re-tuning. He was very impressed by that piece, that way of
making the familiar sound unfamiliar, which is by just re-tuning the strings because the
open strings are, of course, what gives the instrument character. So, he wanted to make
something more out of that, and that is actually where he got the idea from.

But then he made something much more of it; you gradually re-tune the guitar back to its
normal tuning, and when you arrive at the final movement, you have one string left that is
out of tune, which is the second string. And that piece finishes with the last five or six
measures, only on that string, but you play articulations that have been typical for the
whole piece. So, in that way, he makes the world become even smaller – smaller and
smaller – but, at the same time, he tries to expand that small world to grasp the whole
universe of at least that piece. The idea was this type of ‘condensation’, to try to do
something with a guitar that was similar to what Beethoven does in some of his very last
piano sonatas.

JS: And he didn’t stop there either. There are now more guitar pieces…

MA: Yes, there are more guitar pieces and, at that time, when that was finished – and I
think he was quite pleased with the piece. Initially, it was not that appreciated, but it has

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become quite appreciated and other players have it in their repertoire, too. But I think he
was always sort of proud of it in a way. I think he feels quite well attuned to the type of
sound world that the guitar represents and he always said, “Eventually, I will write also a
small concerto for the guitar”, like he did the piece for clarinet and ensemble. Eventually
he wrote a concerto for the guitar, which is part of his opera Shadowtime (2004 – NMC
D123), called “Les froissements d'Ailes de Gabriel” which means “the noises or the
rattlings of the wings of the Angel Gabriel”.

This piece is connected to the Kurze Schatten, but it is not at all as difficult to play. I
played it three times, and the learning curve was – of course, I had the experience
already, but I would not say it was as difficult to play as Kurze Schatten. He said he will
never write anything as difficult again for the guitar, but that guitar concerto also has a
shadow of the solo guitar in the ensemble that, at times, mirrors what the solo instrument
does, and that one is tuned a quarter-tone apart from the solo guitar.

JS: He liked that sound?

MA: He liked that, yes, sure. I suggested to him after the first performance that perhaps
he could use this material to write a duo for the guitar. And, yes, it came eventually, and
was called No Time At All (2004), which is a very light, very entertaining piece, which
always goes down very well with audiences [youtube MH-sWVc90Qk].

The one who did the first performance was a Swiss guitarist, Mats Scheidegger, and then
a former student of mine – the Australian Geoffrey Morris.

JS: Did it take him ‘no time at all’ to write it? Is that where the title came from?

MA: I don’t think so, actually. The opera itself is built upon the world of a German
philosopher called Walter Benjamin, a German Jew who was partly associated with the
Frankfurt School of Theodor Adorno. Although Adorno was very interested in music, I
don’t know of anything that Walter Benjamin actually wrote on music. Benjamin had this
painting by Paul Klee called “Angelus Novus,” which was a great inspiration for him
when he constructed his theory of history. He always had the original picture, which was
his own possession, which he always took with him wherever he traveled. So when he
speaks about the angels, there’s a connection there, I think, in this Second Movement.
There is also this idea that comes from a Swedish theorist, religious thinker and scientist
called Emanuel Swedenborg, who wrote this enormous book on angels and what angels
are. He was very precise, like a scientist, because he knew exactly how angels think and
how they behave. He said that angels have one thing that marks them as very different
from human beings and that is that they are deaf to time. They cannot experience time.

JS: Deaf to time?

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MA: Yes, this is how he expresses it. Very enigmatic, but very beautiful at the same
time.

JS: Very poetic.

MA: Yes, yes. And this is where it comes from, “no time”. The guitar concerto is
constructed very ingeniously: I’d say it’s about twenty minutes, but it consists of
something like close to one hundred and fifty short pieces. So what happens is that you
don’t know that you have heard a piece until it is over, and this is constantly happening,
all the time. He has these extremely short pieces after one another, and that is also related
to this idea of how we experience time - and memory, and what it is.

JS: That’s interesting. How is it tied together - how do you know when one thing has
begun and one thing has ended?

MA: One doesn’t really, because the ideas are so extremely short. I think in the case of
Ferneyhough, this very fragmentary way of writing must be natural to his physiognomy.
He cannot make music in any other way; he always thinks in these kind of short, very
intensive moments all the time rather than investing the energy in large scale, narrative
forms, so things kind of jump in unexpected ways. Basically, it’s not that far away from
Benjamin who was also interested in the very, very small things, the things that history
seems to put in the margin. He tries to restore things, you know, to make them come alive
again.

JS: In history also, that’s the way things work. The small things. You only know
afterwards that this thing was important or not –

MA: Yes, yes, exactly.

JS: Intriguing, since we’re certainly in a strange transitional era when it comes to the
language of music. Ferneyhough, in particular, is coming after a time when mid-century
complexity started to move towards simplicity again. He has brought complexity back,
and yet he faces the same challenge that even Schoenberg or Webern did: how do you get
length with a new language? It’s very difficult. What is the new dialectic to make things
go forward? How do you develop ideas and continue forward when traditional narrative
and continuation are supposedly dead?

MA: It is at least very difficult nowadays, because if you tell these long stories as though
there is a meaning to life, today it almost seems ridiculous. It wasn’t before, you know.
Then, people had these grand ideas of what we can do with life. But one must also
remember that the criticisms of narrative forms were also a very important part of the
Romantic movement in Germany, when they started with the cult of the fragment. That

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was already happening then. Very often in the cult of the fragment of the past, they liked
the romanticism of the ruins.

JS: Exactly, when everything has fallen apart…

MA: Yes, but one must study that more in depth, which has been done by some people.
It’s not generally what people think of. It is actually also a kind of avant garde
movement because they didn’t consider the fragment as only something from the past
that we have lost, you know, like part of a kind of nostalgia. They actually regarded the
fragment as a kind of signal from the future, coming with a message that we cannot
completely yet understand, and our responsibility is to try to fit these fragments together.
Of course, some of the Romantic composers were part of this, particularly Robert
Schumann, who always worked with very small motifs. They were a kind of secret - like
he does in one of his piano pieces – he would even put in things that can only be thought,
that you cannot actually play in the part.

JS: And the further tradition of Satie – where he gives you messages that are not meant
to be heard by the audience, but only for the performer.

MA: Yes, and you have the same with a great visionary like Charles Ives, where there
were things in the “Concord Sonata” that cannot be played - we have to always have
imagination that is of another world.

JS: Extraordinary. You obviously have a deep relationship with Ferneyhough…what

other composers have also excited you?

MA: When I came to Darmstadt, the “Ferneyhough” movement was at its peak. So, of
course, that school also attracted other very gifted composers and I worked with two of
them. One is the Scottish composer, James Dillon, who wrote a very nice solo guitar
piece called Shrouded Mirrors (1988), and there is the other one called Richard Barrett.
Both of them wrote very complex scores – but Barrett, in particular, also worked very
much with a graphic element. He wrote scores that looked incredibly complex, and he
also wrote a very nice piece for the ten-string guitar, called Colloid.

JS: Was it written for you?

MA: Yes - then eventually he also wrote ensemble parts and made it into a piece for
guitar and ensemble.

JS: Are these recorded?

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MA: Yes. In the mid-seventies, Barrett was, as I was myself, quite inspired by the
particular energy that some of the improvisers at the time brought to music, the English
school of free improvisation…

JS: Lol Coxhill or Derek Bailey?

MA: Derek Bailey. Because I studied in England at the time, I used to go to these clubs
where they performed and there was the double-bass player Barry Guy, and the
saxophonist Evan Parker…the style and the ethics of Barrett’s music is also very inspired
by that school.

JS: Which brings up a huge question: this new complex repertoire - it scares most
people. It’s incredibly difficult…

MA: Yes.

JS: Is it because we have asked, for half a generation now, half a century almost, to be
recognized as an instrument that is as worthy of respect as any of the instruments – as
piano, as violin - and contemporary music has taken us seriously and said, “All right.
You want the responsibility? Here…”, and half the guitarists run in the other direction!

MA: In my case, I became interested in extreme expression because I think, in a way, in

Art we want to be on the border of something unknown…you’re always looking for
something that you have not heard before, or some experience that is actually enlarging
your contact with life. You want to have real life, and normally, real living comes close
to things that are unknown to you.

JS: Otherwise, the music is merely entertainment, rather than Art…

MA: Exactly, yes. And this goes for great virtuosity as well; you don’t want to hear a
performer playing safe, really. I mean, the excitement comes when you know that he’s
doing these things on the edge of something - I became interested in this through hearing
these English improvisers because I didn’t have that experience, or I didn’t know so
much new music when I was eighteen. So, I tried to keep that kind of feeling since, at the
time, there wasn’t really any repertoire for the guitar that really invested itself in these
kind of feelings: and this is how I came to Ferneyhough. But my interest in playing New
Music more actively was through my early connections with some good Swedish
composers. Eventually I did a record some of these pieces.

JS: Who are these names? Are they well known otherwise?

MA: One of them may be well known in the States because he was teaching for quite a
few years in Bloomington. Sven David Sandström, wrote a piece for me called Away

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From which uses these kinds of extreme things and this is a very hard piece to play
[Phono Suecia CD 19]. It was meant to be “over the top”, but it was not structurally as
complex as Ferneyhough. I also had a close relationship with Franco Donatoni who, by
now, is one of the great names of 20th Century music. I realized that music can be about
anything, basically. If you just look into a piece and let it work as a figure of thought,
there is nothing you cannot learn something about - from science to philosophy to
aesthetics - because it’s all there, and I got terribly excited about this.

So, when I approached Ferneyhough in ’79, I had heard his music and got terribly
interested in this man trying to do so much. And, I realized that this is basically
something that has not been part of the world of the guitar at all. Ferneyhough actually
wrote back to me that he didn’t know whether he could write for the guitar because he
thought that it’s an instrument known to destroy everyone who wants to compose for it -
it’s basically something that guitarists are involved in. If you want to write for it, you
have to play it yourself and then write pieces in order to play within the community. But I
think he kept at it because he thought, at one stage or another, it may be interesting to
investigate in order to try something which he really did not know. Then I also asked
James Dillon (he’s more my age, you know) and Richard Barrett to write pieces: both
pieces are very, very good, I think.

JS: Who else is writing today that excites you?

MA: For many years now I haven’t been as active in commissioning as I used to be, but I
still look very much for composers that do extreme things. One fairly recent thing is a
piece I did by the Mexican, Julio Estrada, who comes a little bit more from the sound
world of Xenakis. At the time, I was also in touch with Iannis Xenakis who wanted to
write a guitar piece very, very much because this was the instrument that he used to learn
music.

JS: Is that right?

MA: Yes. The problem was that when I got to know Xenakis, and I visited him in ‘79, he
was such a famous name by then that it was actually difficult for him because he had so
many requests to fit this in between. And the other thing with the guitar, which still is a
little bit of a problem, is that the institutions that could do these commissions normally
don’t commission for the guitar. That still happens, you know.

JS: Of course. We need new generation to take financial responsibility for new
repertoire.

MA: - Yes… I still have all the correspondence from his publisher, saying that Xenakis
wants to write this piece for the guitar, and we are planning it for the next five years. But
I could never get any institution really to take on the responsibility, which is probably my

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own fault because sometimes, when you are at that age, I suppose it’s a question of
confidence in how you approach those institutions that have that capability. But I’ve still
been quite lucky in that I’ve had some institutions helping me with two concertos by
Donatoni, for example, and one by Fabio Vacchi - all Italians! – and one by Luca
Francesoni. All these are well known composers and very nice pieces, but it’s the same in
the case of (Luigi) Nono, too. I never was quite able to make make the jump with those.
But I remember speaking with Harrison Birtwistle, who was in the book on Julian Bream.
There is this passage in the book where Bream says that he had commissioned a piece by
Birtwistle - and that means that he commissioned the piece himself, paying from his own
pocket, not going through institutions. Of course, in the end that never worked out…

JS: And we all suffer!

MA: Yes, it’s a pity. But for example, I did a piece with Julio Estrada who writes these
extreme, always very visionary pieces. But this piece turned out to be so complicated to
notate that it became just a guided kind of improvisation. He worked out all the
techniques with me, how he wanted it to sound, and then he wrote the narrative story of
what is actually happening in the piece.

JS: So, you sat with him and played him things?

MA: Yes, and he said, “I like this, and that…”. He was writing this opera Murmullos del
páramo (2006) at the time, that he had been planning for many, many years. He said to
me, “You know, I don’t really like the guitar, but I happen to have a guitar in an opera
that is extremely Mexican. It’s about Mexico…real Mexico. So, how can I have a guitar
in this that does not really sound like the guitar normally sounds?”
So we tried these things out and, you know, Mexico, in a way, is a very surrealistic
country. It has these connections with death and dreams and a, “…you don’t know what
is dead or alive…” kind of thing.
He said he would use a butoh dancer in this opera which he very – No, not butoh – one of
these other extremely violent dancing situations in Japan, I can’t remember the name now
- but never mind. He introduced a Japanese element into the opera, and I thought, “How
do you connect that?” But you connect it, of course, if you think of it all in a kind of
global but at the same time, very surrealistic tradition where anything can actually
happen.
So, I then borrowed the technique for the guitar from other more Asian traditions,
particularly Korean kayagum where you have all these glissandos, all these noises going
on all the time. At the end, I suggested that we tune the strings very, very low and didn’t
really use plucked sounds, but grinding the strings on the body of the guitar, so you just
get these very low glissando styles of playing…extremely violent at times.

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Photo #3: Magnus Andersson playing Estrada’s Caja con trenzas (2006)
Photo: J. Schneider

JS: So, it’s still a guitar, but it sounds nothing like a guitar. It’s just strings on a sound
box.

MA: Yes. I’m working now with another one of these very extreme composers –
Marcelo Toledo - an interesting Argentinian composer who is writing a piece right now.

JS: And what’s happening there? How are the edges being pushed?

MA: I don’t know yet – I’ve just seen some of the scores he did for cello, but it will
probably come out as more of a Picasso thing, I would think.

JS: And is this how you commission, when you hear a piece by someone, and you think,
“Ah!”

MA: Well, in this case, I knew about him – he was a student with Tristan Murail, but he
was very interested in Estrada’s music. So, he actually came to one of the performances
and heard me. He heard me play other things, too, so he was the one who suggested this
piece.

JS: So, it goes both ways.

MA: It goes both ways, yes.

JS: Tell me also about finding the techniques to perform all of these new sounds…you
certainly never learned any of this in college, because the repertoire didn’t yet exist for
any of these things.

MA: Exactly - the repertoire didn’t exist. Of course, now many young people are very
interested, and because youth today also have many things that are part of their culture,
like noise or laptop, they approach sounds completely differently. Normally they are very
interested in this because composition gives a way of actually structuring things in a
meaningful way…they feel very attuned.

Because Gilardino was a great thinker on technique, he actually devised a “school” of

technique for what he thought that the guitar should sound like. He wanted more varied
articulation, more colors – but fast colors, a sharper sound. Then he actually thought
about the mechanics of playing it and he gave you exercises. Simply, he focused on the
fundamentals of a mechanical way of training in order to make your fingers work in an

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extreme way. His idea was that, at the time, we had a kind of “Tarrega” School, followed
by a kind of re-interpretation in a Spanish way by the Segovia school.
He was, at the time when I met him, very much against that: he thought that he was re-
creating a more brilliant style of playing the guitar that had its roots in how the Italians
played…like Giuliani, or Legnani. What did it really sound like when they played? He
thought it was more articulated, more brilliant and more extreme, you know, from fast to
slow, more extreme in colors. So, he devised a kind of school for doing that.

JS: And what sort of exercises? Scales of color, that sort of thing?

MA: No, not so much. Things that related to coordination between the hands, and
exercises related to the speed of things, and the articulation. There was a focus on
mechanical problems in a very systematic way by doing very few exercises, but always
doing them as loops at various tempos - a lot of exercises in articulation or vibrato, for
example. But the basic thing he did, which is by now accepted, is that the wrist should be
more straight. Now, it is more or less straight. At the time, it was more the angled wrist,
you know.

JS: Because of Papa Segovia (laughing)…

MA: Yes, exactly. But now, everyone plays with a straight wrist. I mean, everyone
knows about how the tendons work and the strong muscle ends at the fingertip and you
have to be connected with that. But at the time when he started, it was different and, of
course, it gave a different way of articulating. He was also focusing very much on
rasqueado exercises, which still is sort of unusual, I think.
He thought that you should do a systematic way of practicing rasqueados for the simple
reason that the reason that the flamenco players have the speed they have and the
dynamics is because they play so much rasqueado. It exercises the passive part of the
muscle, and makes your finger move back faster than if you did not do this.
To me, it was the great thing that he actually made this a part of the daily exercise for
guitarists.

JS: All kinds of rasqueados? Because there are, of course, dozens of ways of doing it…

MA: Yes. Actually, he was not so much focused on the very sophisticated and varied
ways that flamenco players use this. He was more interested in it from the point of view
of exercising the muscles of the hand, you know, to make it stronger, making the support
of the hand more firm. He also emphasized that you have to exercise the small finger
because the small finger is of importance for the other fingers.

JS: Imagine a pianist with four fingers!

MA: Yes, yes, exactly. So, he used the small finger very much in the exercises, too.

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JS: Angelo Gilardino is well known as an editor, as a publisher and a composer. Has he
published his school of technique or is he still working on it?

MA: No, he has not. He gave me the exercises in lessons, but I had them more made as a
system from one of his students, a careful student. You sometimes have these, you know,
who actually sits down and writes what you say. But then Gilardino wrote an interesting
book on the mechanical foundations of guitar technique, it’s only in Italian, where he
actually speaks about these things, but it doesn’t go into the exercises themselves.

JS: So what’s in the future for you? Who would you like have to write for guitar? If
someone said, “Here are fifteen blank checks…go out and create repertoire……”

MA: I think there are many, many composers that we would still like for guitar, and I
think with a checkbook, we could probably perhaps get them to write something. But
we’re still pretty well covered; I mean even important names like Berio and Elliott Carter
wrote for the guitar, just speaking about the American ones. And the interest in writing
for the guitar - it’s not as problematic anymore. I think the problem is more perhaps with
many of the big festivals, those that have access to radio stations, that have access to
commission money… they could do a little bit more, I think, show a bit more interest.

JS: Guitar festivals or music festivals?

MA: No – Well, the guitar festivals could be more. They don’t do that many
commissions, but they could perhaps be more adventurous at times, you know, because I
think the guitar festivals will still commission another piece from Leo Brouwer if they
want a famous name, or a concerto from Leo Brouwer. It’s good for Leo Brouwer,
perhaps, but it would be nicer for him, I think, if he also could get something else from
‘normal’ festivals, so that his name was seen in other festivals of new music. Because
he’s the big name. So, they’re still a little bit like that: in the guitar world, it seems, the
guitarist composers get more work.

JS: Speaking of getting more work… you’ve made your name as a soloist, but you also
play a lot of chamber music. Is it a balancing act…? Should it be…?

MA: Yes, it should be. Definitely. Chamber music is very, very good for you to do. I
have a duo with Rohan de Saram, who is the former cellist with the Arditti Quartet and
we have some very interesting commissions by well-known names coming up. I have
also a trio with him, which is a strange combination, perhaps – with him and a bassoon
player in the Ensemble InterContemporain, Pascal Galowa, but we’re also getting what
may become very good pieces.
But then, I’ve had also this quite unusual combination with which I actually did the
recording of the Barrett Concerto, but that was a kind of strange combination because

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there’s a saxophone, guitar, trombone, and percussion, but it has worked out very well
[Ensemble SON - Caprice, CD 21713]. The reason I played with these people is simply
because they were the most dedicated musicians to new music that we have in Sweden.
So, it’s a question more of temperament, getting these musicians, but we have also done a
quite good repertoire, actually. Then, like for the Barrett Project, Barry Guy played with
us and we invite other musicians that we needed.

JS: Which immediately brings up the question of amplification…

MA: Yes. Sometimes you get pieces for amplified guitar playing with the saxophone,
even where you don’t need it. It depends very much on the writing. I had a piece where
there was a trombone, acoustic guitar, and vibraphone that worked very, very well. But
sometimes I’m playing the electric guitar, then it’s not a problem. Of course, sometimes
you have to be amplified, you know.

JS: In your own personal repertoire, how often do you use a solid body electric guitar?
Do you have many pieces where you need it?

MA: I haven’t focused on that writing because electric guitar is, in many ways, an
instrument of its own. Normally, classical guitarists trained like that do play it in new
music because you need to be able to read music and understand how it connects up. But
if you really are going to develop the electric guitar, you have to do it with dedication
because some of it is so much like an instrument in another instrument…the
amplification, perhaps also the boxes of effects. There are some pieces written for the
ensemble that use electric guitar and I try to do it well…

JS: Is that for someone else or for another generation?

MA: Who knows? Two years ago, I was in the Jury for the Gaudeamus competition in
Amsterdam, the big competition for interpreters of new music which they do every
second year, and they were making a particular focus on electric guitar. I have students of
mine at the Royal College in Stockholm that formed a group called “Crash” or rather in
Swedish “Krok” which consists of only electric guitars. The basic group is four to six
players, but they also enlarge that. They have commissioned a lot of pieces, like a violin
concerto for violin, percussion and eight electric guitars which is played quite a lot.

JS: Here in your house, you have a Theorbo and a Baroque guitar on the wall. Do these
instruments take part in your new music repertoire as well?

Photo #4: Magnus Andersson with Theorbo & guitar

Photo: J. Schneider

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MAGNUS ANDERSSON

MA: No, I never use them in new music: I had them from my student years in London. I
always had this interest for early music.

JS: Is it important for a young guitarist to learn the entire repertoire on the appropriate
instrument?

MA: It is definitely very, very different. To produce a good sound on the theorbo, and to
produce a good sound on the Baroque guitar makes you think, really, what is sound?
And how closely related music actually is to the production of sound, too, like it is in new
music. You have to be careful with the articulation because sound is part of articulating
the acoustic material. Although I do play the Baroque guitar and theorbo professionally, I
don’t do it that much. I mean, I have some musicians that I’m involved with. For
example, the reason I do play the theorbo is because I have a duo with Nicholas
Isherwood who is very famous as a new music singer. But, he is also quite well known
and active in Early music. So, we do these programs where I accompany him in the early
Carissimi, and then we do Schubert songs with guitar. We do contemporary music, and
even do things like Led Zeppelin or Grateful Dead: then I play electric guitar, but though
I play all of them decently, of course, I play the ‘normal’ guitar best.

Photo #5: Magnus Andersson with Baroque Guitar

Photo: J. Schneider

JS: So, again, because you’re touching strings, and because of how the body responds,
your hands have to ask, “…what the string is made of…? Is it steel..? Is it gut..? Is it
plastic..??” And then you have to learn to habituate to the situation the way you do in a
piece of music. You look at any piece of new music and say, “What does this piece have
to tell me?”

MA: Yes, yes, exactly. Basically, when you play it, any music is New music because
you always have to have a fresh approach to it. Even playing Early music, it still has to
feel as fresh as it if is new.

JS: On the edge..?

MA: Yes, on the edge.

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Magnus Andersson is currently lecturing at the Royal Conservatory of Stockholm and at

Vaxjo University. He curated Stockholm New Music Festival in 2006 and 2008 to great
critical acclaim. In 2008 he was artist-in-residance at Buffalo University, USA. In early
2009 Magnus Andersson gave a series of lectures and masterclasses at the Cherubini
Conservatory in Florence and also taught at the Saigon Conservatory in Vietnam as part
of large Norwegian project called “Transposition”, installed to support the building up of
a solid musical life in Vietnam and which will continue until 2012.

John Schneider is a Grammy® nominated guitarist, author and broadcaster whose The
Contemporary Guitar (expanded 2nd edition) will be published by Scarecrow Press in
2014. His weekly Pacifica radio program “The Global Village” can be heard worldwide
at www.kpfk.org.

This interview was transcribed by Donna Walker.

© 2013 John Schneider