Johan Stenstrøm

en

Johan Stenström is professor of Comparative and Swedish Literature at Lund University. Until recently, he was also the leader of Lund University’s School of Creative Writing. Many of his works deal with questions about literature and its relation to other arts, especially the relationship between literature and music. In his dissertation Aniara – från versepos till opera (1994) he analysed the transformation of Harry Martinson’s verse epic Aniara into an opera by Karl-Birger Blomdahl including, for instance, how genre-specific operatic features have affected the transformation of the text.

 

His latest monograph is about the reception of Carl Michael Bellman, poet and singer-songwriter of the 18th century. Building on the idea that memory is a social and cultural phenomenon, he examines the different manifestations of a cultural memory connected with Bellman. Stenström is currently leading a project that includes scholars from several disciplines within the humanities. The project focuses on Jacob Jonas Björnståhl, orientalist and traveller during the second half of the 18th century.

research

research expositions

  • The Significance of Electro-acoustic Music in the Space Opera Aniara (2014) author(s): Johan Stenstrøm published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
    In 1956 the Swedish poet Harry Martinson published Aniara, a poetic narrative set in a distant future and based on the idea that the Earth has been contaminated with nuclear fallout from atomic bombs and has become uninhabitable. A fleet of spacecraft ferry people to Mars and Venus, where the population of the Earth must be evacuated. One of these spaceships is called Aniara. Soon after take-off, she is involved in a collision that renders her steering gear nonfunctional. Consequently, she veers off course, setting out on a journey into space with no possibility of ever reaching her destination. The reader follows the fate of the passengers and crew during the next 24 years as they try to adapt to life in the spaceship. In 1959 the opera Aniara by Karl-Birger Blomdahl premiered at the Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm. One of the features that attracted widespread attention was the Mima tapes – that is, taped electro-acoustic music and musique concrète used to represent the sound sequences emanating from a computer-like machine called the mima on board the spaceship Aniara. To create the Mima tapes, the composer and the librettist used key phrases from different songs in Martinson’s epic. By using this device in an opera about mankind set in a remote future, Blomdahl was able to create an affinity between music and subject matter.
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