“An ideological icebox in which sado-modernism reigned supreme.” This is Anders Hillborg’s definition of the musical scene, and he knows what he is talking about. Hillborg is one of Scandinavia’s most successful composers, one of the few whose music is played by the leading symphony orchestras in continental Europe, Britain and the US and released on Deutsche Grammophon’s prestigious yellow label, and the only Scandinavian to be published by the venerable Edition Peters.

Anders Hillborg is referring to the cultural environment that flourished when he was a young composer, at the time he first appeared on the concert scene. Today, a generation later, the refrigerator door is wide open, with much of its ideological content rotting away. Hard-core modernism in the tradition of Arnold Schönberg and Theodor Adorno has lost its omnipotence.

And yet. Anyone with a penchant for “sado-modernist” music can still have their needs met, at least on the continent or in an American academic setting. That means the type of composition rooted in the serial technique which in turn developed from the twelve-tone principle, the “discovery” of atonal Arnold in the 1920s. This was comparable to the cubist technique of the era, which paved the way for nonfigurative, “abstract” painting. It is here that both the ear and the eye lost the safe fixedness of established keys and one-point perspective. In the fully regulated democracy of the twelve-tone scale, every tone has an equal value. It obeys neither King Major nor Queen Minor, only egalitarian but rigid laws.

Arnold Schönberg’s marketing slogan is renowned: “The method of composing with twelve tones will ensure the hegemony of German music for the next hundred years.” Let us say it lasted half a century, with a historic interruption under the Third Reich. Nazi German hegemony banished the twelve-tone principle; Stalinist cultural policy did the same in the Soviet Union as well – a method of composing with totalitarian pretensions that could not be tolerated by totalitarian regimes; a dissonant music that came to see itself as dissident music relative to the “people’s music” imposed by dictators.

But does this resistance explain why post-war art music has to be so ugly and hostile? In principle, it serves as the background to the music that developed in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1950s, where the country’s numerous radio stations constituted important creative centres and distributers. After having served as Goebbels’ megaphone, radio became a medium of the avant-garde. Here, composers could also liberate themselves from the heavy apparatus of the symphony orchestra and instead work with new-fangled electronics, experiencing how their work spread into the ether, out to distant homes.

Like to the home of the self-taught teenager Bo Nilsson up in Lappland, soon a composer whose name was on the lips of the avant-garde and who closer to home was nicknamed “the genius from Malmberget”. The intricate, mathematically calculated scores of this autodidact prodigy impressed continental giants like Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez and – Theodor Adorno. Hard to play, hard to listen to, in just the right way. But the meteoric career of this young Swede quickly faded. Ten years later, Nilsson turned up as a composer for TV series and explained with great animation that the mathematical notations in the brilliant works of his youth were simply a bluff …

The modernist ideal of the era was “absolute”, “objective”, often even “scientific” music in a white coat. The result was esoteric compositions and intricate scores to be tackled by highly specialised musicians. Nowadays they are lumped together – right or wrong – under the label “Darmstadt”. The place in question was the centre for summer courses in serial, experimental composition. But perhaps more importantly: a hub for the development and sustenance of an international brotherhood.

The phenomenon itself is not unique. We are familiar with this building of shrines, of a Mount Parnassus, in every form of art. What is striking in this case is that music that spurned the general public to such an extent could influence the structures of the musical world for such a long time.

In Sweden, we had the Monday Group, a welfare-state version of the German-inspired avant-garde. The most well-known work from this circle is the opera Aniara (1959) by Karl-Birger Blomdahl, the group’s leading figure. The Monday Group composers were, otherwise, not hard-core modernists of a continental sort. Rather, like many Nordic composers of that era, they were more representatives of a kind of musical functionalism, preferably with references to the structures of nature. Today, barely more than a handful of works by Ingvar Lidholm live on in the Swedish repertoire.

The aesthetics of the Monday Group influenced the Swedish art music scene up until the 1980s, when a younger generation of pop-influenced composers took over. But more important than their influence on style were the positions of power in music institutions conquered by Blomdahl & Co. As a result, not only could they launch their own works and disciples but also keep unwanted competitors at bay.

Among those who were silenced either directly or indirectly were the circle connected with the popular Lars-Erik Larsson. And Allan Pettersson. However, he got belated but massive revenge for his 1950s proletariat symphonies in the 1970s. Like a Beethovenesque titan, this severely tested composer, who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, emerged as a result of unrivalled media coverage. Pettersson’s numerous symphonies were performed frequently and released as recordings – a privilege accorded no other Swedish composer.

But Allan Pettersson was old and sickly, his work a unique symphonic counterpart to Swedish working-class literature of the 1930s. It was not music for the yuppie era. No younger composer had as yet succeeded in making an impression in the media.

The breakthrough came in 1982, straight to the headlines of the evening tabloid Aftonbladet. Sven-David Sandström’s requiem, De ur alla minnen fallna [‘Mute the Bereaved Memories Speak’], generated a tremendous commotion even prior to the performance, which took place in Stockholm’s Berwaldhallen, which had been threatened by the LaRouchian EAP party. The reason was actually Tobias Berggren’s charged libretto, featuring four-letters words and emotional references to the murder of children in the Holocaust. But the music also led to an extensive debate in newspaper culture review sections.

It was the at times direct appeal in Sandström’s emotional tone language that agitated commentators faithful to Adorno. Even though the requiem’s musical veneer was no different from other traditional modernist works of this genre, a Romantically-tinged longing for beauty was noted in the languorous phrasing and dissonant-free harmonics of the big choral movements. Gone was the feeling of atonal sprawl so comforting to modernists. What did this man mean?

After all, Sven-David Sandström belonged to the young establishment, schooled in the Monday Group and nurtured ten years earlier by Pierre Boulez in his first major opus. He also shared a background as religious dissident with the Monday Group: a widespread feeling of solidarity that has long been integral to the contemporary music world in Sweden – nothing he ever tried to conceal or excuse; on the contrary, he referred to the Baptist church of his childhood, with its naïve appeal, with growing frequency.

When Sandström later collaborated with the young choreographer Per Jonsson, a clear kind of gesturing entered his music – ringing statements that did not “mean” anything, but provided movement and especially decoration to the musical score. Naughty naughty! Ornamentation was anathema both to the functional style of Swedish architecture and to art music. Hadn’t the pre-modern composer Wilhelm Stenhammar launched a “sober, honest music without flourish” as the Nordic ideal?

At that time, glasnost led the West to start incorporating an Eastern mystique – in the form of meditative, religiously tinged music produced by an Arvo Pärt, a Henryk Gorecki, a Sofia Gubaidulina. Sandström also sought out Christian publishers while persistently retreating from the established ideal of art music. However, he is no mystic: his increasingly softer and more heartfelt tonal language instead echoes with direct references to Bach.

At the same time, Sven-David Sandström’s younger colleagues – composers of the pop and rock age – chose another way out of modernism. Jan Sandström, Anders Hillborg and Karin Rehnqvist are the most prominent of those born in the 1950s. They all, like Sven-David Sandström, have that typical Swedish grounding in choral singing.

Karin Rehnqvist has connected to Swedish folk music, something that has always generated a fear of contamination among “serious” composers ever since Hugo Alfvén – a repudiation that stems from the fear of folk music kitsch, of Swedish blue-and-yellow National Romanticism, of accusations of stolen glory. But Rehnqvist was inspired by an as yet unexploited source from the traditions of Dalarna in central Sweden – the powerful technique of women’s herding calls. Her original reverse reel Davids Nimm for three female herd callers, using trained singers, was a breakthrough, which typically had to wait more than ten years for a CD release…

Typically, not simply because of extremely tenacious male structures in the world of Swedish art music, but also because they were deeply rooted institutionally. Any success with audiences or critics is of minimal importance in terms of a composer’s opportunities to be played and given exposure. Rather, it is the composers’ guild itself – the Society of Swedish Composers – that determines which member should be given important commissions and in what order.

Otherwise, the tried and tested way is for conductors and soloists to pave the way for their composer contemporaries. Not to mention the most natural strategy: composers perform the work themselves – or soloists play their own compositions. This sharp distinction between creating and performing is also a result of post-war sectarian modernism.

In Sweden, the important interplay between musicians and composers really only worked within the Monday Group. Otherwise, the Swedish music scene long lacked the distinguished influential conductors and soloists that provide the backing required by composers. Only when Esa-Pekka Salonen debuted as chief conductor for the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra did the situation begin to open up for the younger generation of composers.

Because Salonen is himself a composer, it was natural for him to socialise with Swedes his age like Jan Sandström and Anders Hillborg – composers who, through him, gained valuable insight into the intricate structures of symphony orchestras. Also coming from the same generation were the noted percussion group Kroumata and virtuoso brass musicians like the trombonist Christian Lindberg and the trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger, and later the clarinettist Martin Fröst. They all needed soloist repertoires, which has led to the creation of a number of solo concertos, a genre that was almost nonexistent in Sweden up until 1985.

The best known is the strikingly theatrical Motorbike Concerto by Jan Sandström, which Christian Lindberg played across the globe – according to one estimate more than 700 times. Martin Fröst is happy to tour with the choreographically designed clarinet concerto Peacock Tales by Anders Hillborg, and has now expanded his guest artist repertoire this year with Viktoria Borisova-Olla’s extravagant Golden Dances of Pharaohs. This composer, raised and trained in Russia, is the most recent representative of modern orchestra art, a genre in which Swedish composers are holding their own rather well against international competition, especially given that they are not being helped along by conductor compatriots elsewhere in the world, as the Finns Kaija Saariaho and Magnus Lindberg are.

These two are the Nordic composers most oriented toward continental modernism, like that evinced at Pierre Boulez’s “science centre”, IRCAM. Finland’s delayed modernism – Sibelius’s legacy cast a long shadow – brought with it a lively interest in intellectual and experimental aspects of music. This Finnish avant-garde never showed an interest in pop music, unlike their colleagues from the other side of the Baltic. It was more important to head to Paris, to IRCAM and the “spectralism” going on there.

Composing based on what is called a spectral analysis produces at its best moments entirely new, fascinating sounds with the traditional instruments of classical music. Combined with a genuine desire for communication both with performing musicians and the listening public, this late-modernist technique still has a great deal to give. But the question is whether the “pure” musical work an sich – a legacy of Romanticism that is still nurtured by orthodox modernists – can make itself heard in the 21st century.

The great symphonies have always had an underlying narrative, a hidden story, And the most beloved orchestral works from the 20th century are ballets: The Rite of Spring, Bolero, Romeo and Julia …