Sounds Icelandic - Essays on Icelandic Music in the 20th and 21st Centuries - Þorbjörg Daphne Hall

Sounds Icelandic - Essays on Icelandic Music in the 20th and 21st Centuries - Þorbjörg Daphne Hall

Jón Leifs and the Origins of an Icelandic Style

Sounds Icelandic - Essays on Icelandic Music in the 20th and 21st Centuries - Þorbjörg Daphne Hall

Árni Heimir Ingólfsson [+-]
Árni Magnússon Institute
Árni Heimir Ingólfsson holds a research position at the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies and is Artistic Advisor to the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. He founded the Carmina Chamber Choir, whose recordings of music from Icelandic manuscripts have received awards and outstanding reviews.

Description

Jón Leifs (1899–1968) has in recent decades been recognized as one of Iceland’s leading composers in the twentieth century. His works are heard with increasing frequency on the international concert scene, and much of his oeuvre has now been released on CD—the Swedish label BIS has a complete series in progress. Leifs was a pivotal figure in Icelandic music history. He was the first composer to fashion a specifically ‘Icelandic’ sound derived from the elements of Icelandic folk songs, and he also drew inspiration from the country’s landscape, literature, and history. His music was met with skepticism in a local music scene still dominated by 19th-century Romanticism, and his abrasive personality won him few friends. His music remained largely neglected during his lifetime and some of his largest works remained unperformed. Research on Leifs and his works has also been scarce: a biography by the Swedish Carl-Gunnar Åhlén was published in 1999, and another by the present author in 2009 (an English version of which is forthcoming); prior to this, the only serious work on Leifs was Hjálmar H. Ragnarsson’s 1980 MFA-thesis, and even shorter articles on Leifs are scarce (the most perceptive ones are Pickard 1999 and Rickards 1992). The aim of this article is to elucidate how Leifs, at the very beginning of his career, developed his musical idiom from his exposure to the Icelandic folk traditions, and how this music drew a partly negative response from leading Icelandic composers and critics.

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Citation

Ingólfsson , Árni . Jón Leifs and the Origins of an Icelandic Style. Sounds Icelandic - Essays on Icelandic Music in the 20th and 21st Centuries. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 57-73 Apr 2019. ISBN 9781781791455. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=24102. Date accessed: 19 Mar 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.24102. Apr 2019

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