Conference Agenda

The tradition of Western "classical" music reached Iceland remarkably late; the first performance there by a symphony orchestra was in 1926. Little more than two decades later, the Juilliard-trained Magnús Blöndal (1925–2005) composed the first Icelandic serial work, "Four Abstractions" for piano. In the following years, the merits of musical modernism were debated in Iceland with unusual ferocity, as most audiences were unprepared for such a radical turn.

At the same time, the Cold War reached new heights of intensity, and Iceland’s geographical location prompted a new kind of attention by the two superpowers. This had musical repercussions, as the USA and the USSR sent their leading musicians there with the specific intention of promoting the culture and ideologies of their respective countries. This period saw, for the first time in Iceland, a steady stream of performances of contemporary music by leading foreign composers, often sponsored by government agencies in the USA and USSR. Among these were US performers such as Gunther Schuller, William Strickland, and Paul Zukofsky, who introduced works by Webern, Ives, and others to local audiences, while the Polish conductor Bohdan Wodiczko led local premieres of works by Lutosławski and others.

In this paper, I will examine the struggle for introducing musical modernism in Iceland, as well as the role played by Cold War politics in introducing new music to local audiences. Among the key moments in the debate on the merits of modern music were premieres of new works by Blöndal as well as Atli Heimir Sveinsson (1938–2019), who had studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Günther Raphael in Cologne. No less controversial was a local new music group, Musica Nova, whose sponsorship of performance art by Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman in 1965 caused an uproar. Through a close examination of concert reviews, archival documents, and key works, I present a case study of a culture in which all periods of music history were being introduced to a nation’s population at more or less the same time.

In 1944, the compositional team of George Forrest and Robert Wright introduced a new operetta entitled Song of Norway. After a highly successful premiere in Los Angeles, the work moved to Broadway, where it enjoyed enormous popularity. Critics admired the audacity of the score, which managed to transform many of Edvard Grieg’s most famous instrumental compositions into musical numbers, and the striking set designs. The sparse plot, loosely based on events from Grieg’s own life, was judged banal at best and ridiculous at worst. The dances, however, surpassed everyone’s expectations. These were choreographed by George Balanchine and performed by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo.

Discussions of Balanchine’s commercial work have tended to focus on his unique synthesis of ballet and contemporary dance idioms (Genné 2018; Steichen 2019; Homans 2022). Song of Norway, in contrast to his other Broadway and Hollywood works, was praised for the “purity of its classic style” (Denby 1945). But Song of Norway was a synthesis, although critics, audiences, and even the dancers themselves did not recognize its points of reference. Drawing on archival sources from the Balanchine Trust, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and the St Petersburg State Academic Theatre Library, this paper explores the relationship between Song of Norway and the 1920s Soviet avant-garde. These materials demonstrate that Balanchine’s choreography borrowed from the work of several Soviet dancers and choreographers and, in particular, from the 1922 ballet Solveig (also set to Grieg’s music).

Balanchine’s relationship with this Soviet milieu was complex. As scholars have noted (Kendall 2013; Lobenthal 2016), he would return to their ideas throughout his career. Yet he rarely acknowledged their influence and his uncompromising anti-communist attitude, coupled with the suppression and/or isolation of most of his early contemporaries, obscured their role in his development. Song of Norway thus reveals not only Balanchine’s contributions to the place of ballet in musical theater but also the materials with which he constructed and refined his own distinct aesthetic. Ultimately, it captures his remarkable ability to transform disparate sources—whether from ballet, popular dance, or experimental theater—into a coherent whole.

The 1869 world premiere of Elfrida Andrée’s (1841-1929) Symphony No. 1 in Stockholm was a disaster. The composer herself described the performance as a “musical delight” sabotaged by members of the all-male orchestra. Nevertheless, comments by Wilhelm Bauck, one of Sweden’s most influential critics, haunted Andrée for years afterwards. He derided Andrée for fighting “for her sex a cheap expansion of their social rights” and dismissed the symphony as “below imperfection.”

If anything, the reception of this symphony galvanized Andrée’s desire to break new ground for women. She had already become the first woman in Sweden to focus on composing multi-movement orchestral works and the first woman in Europe to become a cathedral organist. Her Symphony No. 1 was even the earliest symphony by a Swedish woman. In the years that followed, she scoffed at the idea of becoming “one of those little ladies writing piano fantasies and nice songs with kingly lyrics” and instead became the first Swedish woman to compose a grand opera and conduct orchestras while remaining active in the suffrage movement. Her letters would regularly link her musicianship with her feminist leanings. In 1870 she wrote: “It would be easier to tear a piece from a rock than to tear me away from my ideal: the elevation of womankind!”

Although Swedish scholars like Öhrstrom (1999) have explained the historical context of Andrée’s Symphony No. 1 and considered her feminist philosophy, none have fully explored how her musical style reflected these values. I analyze surviving manuscripts and primary sources to argue that Andrée developed an approach to composing abstract instrumental music that consciously rejects expectations conventionally applied to female musicians. In doing so, I relate Andrée’s symphony and other works to the composer’s philosophical context, including the writings of Swedish pioneer Fredrika Bremer and Englishman John Stuart Mill, an early male advocate for gender equality whom Andrée’s admired. Considering the philosophical implications Andrée’s instrumental music not only provides insight into how composition can be a feminist act, but also provides a framework to help scholars analyze how women of Andrée’s era confronted gender norms through their music.