My earliest memory of a musical moment is when I was six years old and I discovered an album in my parents’ LP collection – Mozartmania recorded by an orchestra conducted by Waldo de los Ríos. As a child of young parents in the early 70s, most of the music played in my home was the music of the hippie generation: Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Joan Baez, etc. I really did appreciate those artists and still do, but hearing the Symphony No. 40 by Mozart, in this fairly unconventional arrangement criticised by many at the time (of which I was happily very unaware), was a life changing moment. I felt I had never heard anything so beautiful, with all due respect to rock and roll and American folk music – something else, something from a different dimension! This experience lit my antennae for classical music, but there would still be seven more years before I even thought of the possibility of learning to play an instrument myself. And funnily enough, it was Mozart’s turn again to throw the dice. I saw the movie Amadeus in the theatre and there was no turning back, I became convinced I had to learn to play the oboe! At this time my best friend had started playing in the school band and I followed her to a rehearsal, extremely shy but still having found this new purpose in life I had to face my fears and ask the band leader for a position as an oboe player. Unfortunately, or fortunately, there were no oboes in this band at the time but there was a vacancy in the trombone section. Back at home playing this new horn I was kind of disappointed, it sounded much more like a vacuum cleaner to my ears than the beautiful oboe! But I decided to stick at the trombone, at least for a while, and try simply to make it sound better. Later I realise how much this sound ideal of the lyrical oboe has shaped my own playing. There would be more listening revelation moments to come: hearing Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition was a thrilling experience, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Bach’s Brandenburg concertos and Schumann’s lieder just to name a few. Writing my own music, as with playing an instrument, came to me pretty late in life. In my studies at the music conservatory of Gothenburg, Sweden (1995–2000) I had a theory teacher who encouraged us to write short examples of music to different harmonic structures, and this opened up a creativity I had never explored before. And again there would be several years before I dared explore this new path further; in 2006 a song to a poem by my grandmother came out of nowhere in my head and haunted me until I wrote it down. It soon led to more songs to her poetry as well as that of other poets. I was fascinated, and always have been, with poetry, and some poems seem almost to sing music back to me while reading. To me poetry and music come from the same source, from another world which still contains all our human existence; it still feels like the fi rst time I heard Mozart’s music – something from a different dimension.
