Henrik Strindberg (1954, Sweden) As a young man during the the 1970s, Henrik Strindberg was a multi-instrumentalist and played in a group called Ragnarök. Henrik Strindberg studied composition at the Royal University College of Music in Stockholm with Gunnar Bucht, Sven-David Sandström and the visiting professor Brian Ferneyhough 1980-87 and attended a summer course with Iannis Xenakis in Delphi 1985. Ten years later he studied at IRCAM in Paris. Henrik Strindberg is teaching composition at the Gotland School of Music Composition. Ever since he was young he has been actively engaged in cultural politics and has been a member of the Board of the Society of Swedish Composers, the Swedish Performing Rights Society, the Swedish Arts Grants Committee and the University College of Dance.

Timeline (2008)
With subtle means, apparently homogenous material can be changed. When the tonal colour in the first part of Henrik Strindberg’s Timeline wanders between the string groups, the two woodwinds and the vibraphone and piano, such subtle shifts continually occur. It is a music that works from the repetitive, but where the repetitive is ruled by the law of change.

There is a sort of interlude between the three parts of the work—where tone is changed into non-tone—that breaks the line that otherwise goes through the work: here, the laws are also changed. New patterns are formed. In the second part, Strindberg works with tempo modulations, where patterns of accents vary the ba­sic meter. In the third section, the picture is complicated by the layering of dif­ferent patterns.

The title speaks of a timeline, but it is not one line. While the quick tones ra­ce there exists another time, a counter time consisting of slow movements. A sort of counterpoint is created here, not tone against tone, nor rhythmically, but in the flow of time. This is of course precisely the way we experience time: not one sort, but several continually ongoing torrents. –  Erik Wallurp