the musical development of a work by fairly mechanical means. Snorri Birgisson is without doubt an experimentalist, a composer who chooses the most unexpected starting points for his compositions. Despite the Icelandic tale of Prince Hlini, Snorri is an internationally, or rather universally orientated artist. After first studying the piano with Jon Nordal and Arni Kristjans- son and composition with Forked Sigurbjomsson, he trav- elled to the U.S.A where he continued his piano studies at the Eastman School of Music. He has also studied composition with Finn Mortensen and Lasse Thoresen in Oslo, thus being one of the very few contemporary Icelandic composers to have studied composition in Scandinavia, and with Ton de Leeuw in Amsterdam. He has also spent considerable periods in Paris and London, but since 1980 he has lived and worked as a composer, pianist and teacher in Iceland. Reading is of great significance for his creative work. In 1979, while in Oslo, he composed a beautiful electro-acoustic piece, rich in associations, “after reading stories about trees that have their roots in heaven and bear fruit on earth, on which birds and stones grow and fire is kindled.” Since he was convinced that technique should not be allowed to control us, he attempted in this work “to come behind the machine in order to make it produce living sounds.” The title of the work suggests an interest in expanding our limited western way of thinking. He has also shown much interest in the psychology of Karl Gustav Jung, who tried to integrate ideas from other areas such as the philosophy of the East and the alchemy of the Middle Ages. This study of Jung’s ideas also resulted in a composition, Rotundum for solo clarinet. Snorri Birgisson wrote this work in 1978 for the excellent clarinettist Oskar Ingolfsson. Rotundum is a soliloquy lasting about twenty minutes, its character largely being that of a brilliant whirling tornado. The title is taken from the terminology of alchemy and refers to the process of clarifying in a test-tube. Thus he has taken as his starting point Jung’s idea that the alchemists did not merely wish to make gold - they also wished to discover purifying psychological processes. In the large-scale piano suite AEfingar (Studies) (1980-81), one finds another way, just as consistent and imaginative, of

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