In the run up to New Music Dublin, a major new festival of contemporary music running from 1 to 3 March at the National Concert Hall, a number of podcasts have been released featuring interviews with artists involved in the festival. To date, the podcasts, produced by Ben Eshmade, have included the composer Brian Irvine, Kate Ellis of Crash Ensemble, the composer Ronan Guilfoyle and ex-Sparklehorse musician Adam Wiltzie.

Today, the festival has released a fifth podcast, featuring an interview with Christian Lindberg, the Swedish composer, trombonist and conductor who will feature with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra on Friday, 1 March. He tells Eshmade about balancing his career as a composer and performing musician.

‘Composing is the most natural thing for me to do,’ says Lindberg. ‘I decided to either become a lawyer and have it has a hobby, or go for it, and I worked very hard for many, many years.’ Lindberg says he had to encourage new works for the trombone repertoire in order to succeed, and adds that his ability to memorise compositions was a factor in his attractiveness to composers.

Composition begins from a blank sheet, says Lindberg, who observed in composers that he has worked with as a performer (such as Iannis Xenakis and Arvo Pärt) that ‘they were like children, absolutely open… anything could happen’. In his own composition Lindberg says he starts a piece with about twenty-four ‘embryos’, which he then whittles down to four or five ideas.

newmusicdublin.ie