But I'm a bit nuts about how things are put together. I can't really call this kind of listening recreational, any more than reading Thomas Mann or Tolstoy or Celan or Kinnell or Hall is as much fun as a Brazilian samba. It is, however, compelling listening. Because of the span of much of Pettersson's work, many people have compared him to Mahler, but that' s not quite right. The composer that keeps coming to my mind is Beethoven, mainly for the sense you get of the composer's intense focus and attention on whatever is musically going on with the piece and how much goes on at any moment.
Textures are spare and rhythmically charged.
You sense that either something big is happening or about to happen. Also like middle-period Beethoven, Pettersson rarely takes his time. His length does not arise from a gradual unfolding but from an obsessional variation and recombination of material. Pettersson's music seems to me as vibrant and intense as the singing of insects. At the time, Swedish music was, for the most part, stuck in Romantic, nationalist nostalgia or with thin-blooded effigies of Stravinsky and Hindemith.