The name Reine Jönsson always makes me think of this wild guy who entitles his compositions “A Button in the Pocket”, “Nail That Scratches in the Mouth”, “Gun Smoke in Utopia”, “On Biking” and so forth; really hot-head branding, one might think. Sure enough Reine Jönsson is a composer with many surprises up his sleeve, or many rabbits in his hat – and probably many soaring ideas in his mind… However, he is a skilled artisan of the audio too, and his compositions have much more interest than just the original titles, right there in his musical expression. The naming of the compositions maybe serve to take some of the graveness off of the compositional act, weighed as it is by tradition, making us realize that we can just burst right into this creative flow and soar along.

He has studied with “traditional” composers of modern art music like Daniel Börtz, Sven-David Sandström and the guru-like Anders Eliasson, but also with composers of electroacoustics such as Bill Brunson (Stockholm-based American) and Pär Lindgren (who started a whole electroacoustic tradition with his composition “Rummet”).

In the booklet – or simply through some educated listening – one might find traces of Chinese influences in Jönsson’s music, for instance in his utilization of a pentatonic structure as well as by detecting individual instruments in his orchestration. For me, as a passionate dilettante in these areas, there is a presence of a Zen-like flair in the atmosphere of Reine Jönsson’s oeuvre as a whole – at least in my layman appreciation of that sphere of life, of philosophy, of… attitude!
True to his uncomplicated and humble view of himself Jönsson downplays this aspect of his art. He refers to a part of a biography on the Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf, in which Ekelöf stated that he harbored some sort of misconception of India, which he played with. Similarly, Jönsson claims to have adopted some kind of misconception of Chinese philosophy, which he tampers with…
He says, in the context of T’ai Chi Ch’uan and his music: “The shortest distance is the circular movement. Very little is needed to alter the opponent’s force. Water is by virtue of its softness and flexibility the strongest.”

Reine Jönsson’s first piece on his new CD is “Liv och död” (“Life and Death”) (1994); a chamber piece for chamber ensemble. It arrives in clear-cut blocks of music, in a slow pulsation, three breathes long – until a rattling bamboo forest sways in the wind. Soon a “Trolltider” (a famous Swedish so-called Christmas calendar TV series by Maria & Camilla Gripe of 1979) spray of metal drops opens for the enchantedness of a fairytale… but right away the whole entourage topples over into a semi-romantic, 1940’s archipelago sail-and-shine Scandinavian traditionalism, which in turn tilts into an American Charles Ives kind of festival music – and even if Jönsson worked hard (I don’t know!) it’s all seemingly achieved in the corner of the eye, effortlessly, on the fly… so fluently!
The colors are bright, the chords clear, painted with a modified John Adams brush on a Chinese-American canvas of tradition and modernism in a close embrace, in which you cannot tell where the one ends, the other starts.
I am startled by this richness, in which a world of music merges into the score of this one Swedish composer; Reine Jönsson. In my wide frame of references, evolved through a life of listening, “Liv och död” comes entangled in a many-colored tapestry, in which you can find passages of Terry Rileyish string quartet atmospheres (“Salome Dances for Peace”) and Baltic minimalistic affinities with repetitious chamber games by Osvaldas Balakauskas and Peteris Vasks.
All these nuances in Jönsson’s music never reach the state of sampling or plagiarism, or even imitation. Instead they reveal the musical fingertip sensitivity of a very knowledgeable composer, who is catching the wind and putting it in the score – from where the result rises in radiant vibrancy in the beauty of the musical moment.
Jönsson says, in connection with “Liv och död”: “During a certain period I was pondering what would occur if one places the morphemes of musical events in the manner and style of a Chinese landscape painting. Distances and proportions become different than in the central perspective. In some ways it came very close to a regular ‘romantic’ act of composing; to listen and follow.”
This work is indeed divided into smaller sections, which follow each other with very short pauses or no pauses at all – but Jönsson could as well have expressed this in the presentation of the piece by giving each of those sections a title and an indication… but he chose not to.

The second work is “En knapp i fickan” (A Button in the Pocket”) (1990), for string quartet. This is quite a short piece, only 3:57. It’s one out of four small string quartets which were the contents of a commission for a lyrical-musical soirée at a restaurant in Stockholm during Stockholm New Music 1990. Jönsson: “A button [in the pocket!] is like an idea that you constantly dwell on. It might not be a great and important idea, but it is still decisive, since everything is connected.”
It’s a lively, yet introspective, piece, wherein the instruments divide their attention between staccato cuts and lyrical dreams. Evidently there is a flavor of rock n’ roll in here somewhere, and some lustful reminiscences of preceding centuries; a masterwork in the small format!
The man walks the bridges and the lanes of this old city of Stockholm, while shadowy shapes of figures out of many centuries show up and recede into the shadows again. The piece is over almost before it starts…

“Efter midnatt” (“After Midnight”) (1989) for accordion and wind quintet was composed with the old Swedish accordion (dragspel) in mind, and to understand the meaning of this you’d probably have to have grown up in Sweden in the 20th century, preferably the early and middle part of it, when accordion clubs flourished all over the rural country. As Sweden, like other countries, speedily became urbanized while the countryside got more barren and empty, the guitar relieved the accordion of its prime position. A tone of the old accordion, none the less, hovers in a resounding tone of remembrance over the meadows and forests of this country, so blessed with lush nature, great forests, high mountains and meandering rivers, where the countryside distance between the souls is vast, too vast…
Lyrical, almost pastoral, flowerings of sparse tenderness open the piece, wherein the accordion is blended into the wind like a fawn into the brush curtain at the edge a plowed field in fall. The wind provides the colors of fall very naturally, and a certain melancholy can be detected in the gestures of the golden instruments carrying the accordion towards the mists of tomorrow…
Suddenly brutally marked orchestral chords pile up to relentless advances on an elusive future at the rainbow’s end, bringing home comments on Luciano Berio’s powerful and notoriously stubborn “Eindrücke”… but sometimes the music comes to a standstill, a halt on prolonged tones of the wind, attentive; a music that listens with its instruments turned towards the inevitable…

“om Hjärnan” (“about the Brain”) (1999) is the concluding piece on this magnificent CD. This long work (37:02) indeed comes in sections, named “Urkraft” (“Primeval Force”), “Kunskapens kraft, Strid” (The Power of Knowledge, Battle”), “Tidens vändkrets, Sorg, Spindelväven, Den blinda flickan” (The Tropic of Time, Grief, The Spider web, The Blind Girl”), “Tron, Kaos, Humanismen, Den högsta sanningen” (“Faith, Chaos, Humanism, The Highest Truth”), “Sonat” (“Sonata”).
The concept of this peculiar work is derived from the novel “Den gröna teorin” (The Green Theory”) by Matti Bergström, which initially describes the human brain to the layman in poetic imagery. The titles above are directly imported from the titles of the chapters of the book. Jönsson, however, states: “The titles of the chapters remained with me, but the music took the lead. […] When I start playing [in the sense ‘playing a game’ or ‘playing like a child plays’] no constructions or sententious thoughts are submitted to.”
At first a dense rumble attacks your unsuspicious auditory organs, in a manner not unlike “Kraft” by Magnus Lindberg of the fortified Finnish 1980s or “Mavac” by Israeli/Swedish brainstormer Dror Feiler. Jönsson says that the chord, the rhythm and the melody that the whole work is based upon are introduced here, and I can feel that this work is laid out on a grander scale than the preceding entries. There is a graveness present here that no doubt reflects some of the more exhaustive and straining strands of thought deep inside Jönsson’s philosophical and/or religious introspections.
Jönsson lightens the weight of these forceful inner visions with a mimicry of birds chirping in the flute section, evoking old Greek tales inside my mind.

The fabric of the music is intricate, yet transparent, complicated, yet clear, dense, yet evolving in light dance figures across the horizons of my perception… like mirages out at sea on a calm day when you hear the seals and the Oldsquaws (Clángula hyemális) of the outer archipelago.
A lone cello talks to itself like Beethoven in his late string quartets or Benjamin Britten in his solo cello suites.
I feel insignificant on trying to convey this music through language, since the multitude of expressive gestures and introspective impulses is immense, and I can but marvel at this artistic temperament, hitherto basically unknown to me, but amply revealed to me through this multi-layered game around a game, which eventually spirals way into the inner space of self, touching on the very basis of perception, in a peripheral sense of rising through the ages at warp speed, while simultaneously remaining at rest in this steady flow of prismic splendor of Reine Jönsson’s music.