An afterimage is a phenomenon created when the eye is exposed to a sudden and strong burst of light. The image of the shapes of light lingers on the retina, slowly dissolving into an increasingly diffuse weave of drifting lightspots. Analogous to this phenomenon, the concept of the composition "Efterbild" (Afterimage) is a kind of lingering, decomposed image of hundred years of music history exposed in a sudden "flash" of sound. You might think that the form of such a composition would be similar to the evolvement of this process through an explosive and chaotic opening followed by a slow development towards stillness and silence. Instead I have chosen to distribute the initial energy as a number of dense spots in the piece, each reflecting relatively clear "snapshots" of the concept. A typical romantic cliché, a likewise typical scattering of opposed blocks of sounds in a modernistic spirit, extended impressionistic weaves of chords etc... Between these points of relative clarity, the fracture dissolves into sliding transitions where different musical styles takes a musical-lingustic doubleposition, creating a kind of stylistic polyphony. This should however not be understood as an attempt to achieve the kind of polystilism represented by composers like for instance Alfred Schnittke, but rather as another link in a series of works where I am trying to deal with a music historical communication process not necessarily leading to any kind of neo-tradition. The electro-acoustic elements in the piece thus serves the double intention of both expanding the timbral palette and at the same time creating a "verfremdungs"-effect that effectively decomposes the historical hegemony of meaning in the image of orchestral sounds.
Efterbild is published through SMIC (Swedish Music Information Center) All material needed to perform the piece is delievered on a CD-ROM. Efterbild has been performed in Sweden at four occasions by The Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra and in Mexico at one occasion by The Guanajuato Symphony Orchestra during 1998. Conductors: Hans Graaf Manfred Honeck José Luis Castillo Rodriguez The piece has been recorded live by the Swedish Radio.