Fantasia over "Lilja" is based on a very old Icelandic folk song, so old it's almost gregorian. There is a saying in Iceland that everybody wanted to have written "Lilja" (actually meaning the words rather than the music, but who cares). This is my share to the fulfillment of that saying, an enjoyable share, especially considering that I have never before been involved in anything "folk" or "national" before.

The work consists of several linked computer generated variations, where the computer has been fed the original song and plays it back in original order, reverse order, or simply back and forth, in its entirety or in looping bits and pieces, a technique mostly used by "techno" dance musicians. Every single note heard is therefore taken from the original song, and then the material is further developed in register, speed, dynamics, articulation and spatialisation.

Technically this is a variation of granular synthesis where many "grains" played fast form a variably dense sound mass. Usually the individual grain frequency is random within some limits, but in this case the grains consist of variably long bits of the "Lilja" song, always giving the results some character of the original song and its strange "pseudo-dorian but not dorian at all" mode.

All the grains come from a single FM bell sound that goes through many transformations of dynamics and articulation, some of which result in "surprise" side effects that are used construcively or destructively as (sp)icing on the aural "cake".

Fantasia over "Lilja" was composed in the summer of 1998 at the Kopavogur Computer Music Center, Iceland. Final processing and four-track mixdown was done at DIEM, Aarhus, Denmark in October 1998. It was commissioned by the bi-annual "Erkitid" music festival in Reykjavik.

A short excerpt from Fantasia over "Lilja" (1:58 min - 1,9 MB)