"I make one image, though "make" is not the right word; I let, perhaps, an image be made emotionally in me & then apply to it what intellectual and critical forces I possess; let it breed another; let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bred out of the other two, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict." (Dylan Thomas)
 
"Deaths and Entrances" for sopranosaxophone and ensemble begun with the first bar of Arnold Schönbergs "Sechs kleine Klavierstücke op.19". This bar was chosen, or rather: It manifested itself in my head, as startingpoint of a long compositional process. I heard this bar as a perfect micro-composition, and after a while it got fretilized by my own musical creativity. It started proliferating, mostly as writing excercises, in various attempts to  find out wether the material (and my imagination regarding it) had the stamina to carry a composition. The result was a short piece for 11 musicians. This piece was in turn the object of manipulations and condensations, and distilled to a trio. In new processes of distillations it was reduced, through three different readings, to a piece for solo saxophone. And at this point I felt that the material was beginning to take on an interesting form. This piece now exists as "Readings" for solo baritonesaxophone. Both the trio and the initial piece for 11 instruments was discarded as residue from the process of composing.

I wanted to carry on the work with this piece, and started to form an ensemble around the saxophone. It was clear that it was becoming a kind of concerto for sopranosaxophone and 12 musicians. The music was moulded into three movements, reflecting three different readings of the same basic structures, and in the end representing a very traditional concerto-form: An energtic first movement with improvised solocadenza, a lyrical second movement (pastorale!) and a concluding rondo as the last movement. This is of course the banal truths of this work, but the form nevertheles reveals attempts to find simple ways of grasping a complex material.

It should also be added that the saxophone player Torben Snekkestad, with his outstanding improvising abilities, has had a huge influence on the work with "Deaths and Entrances". The work is dedicated to him, and he manages to give it the expressiveness a work needs to travel the long way from composer to listener. It is indeed a long distance to cover, and the performer is a crucial part of it, giving an independent, subjective interpretation of the composition. And I believe this to be true of any compositional activity: The composer communicates with the music, the performer communicates with the listener.

During the composing of "Deaths and Entrances" I read the poetry of Dylan Thomas, and found much inspiration in his hermetic, yet colorfull poetry. I found a statement of his poetics in his "collected poems" (cited above), and it gave words to my own relationship to the compositional processes. This is why I borrowed the title from Thomas' poem and book by the name "Deaths and Entrances". And I hope that I have managed to get hold of some of the qualities of this poetry: The obviously significant statements that  at the same time are hermetic; the reader can sense a latent, high-tempered expressivity, a will to communicate, but is at the same time unable to grasp exactly what its all about.