Magnus Blondal Johannsson works of a lesser scale were published, but Icelandic music still lived outside the sphere of the international music publ- ishers. It was almost impossible for an Icelandic composer to get his works distributed. There was no journal of music that could be a forum for information or debates, and no institute of musicology that could research the country’s musical history. There was hardly any Icelandic classical music on records, and it was left to the then single channel of the State Radio to see to it that Icelandic music was disseminated outside the concert hall. Magnus Blondal Johannsson (born 1925) has perhaps been the most restless of the post-war composers in his thirst for knowledge and inspiration from abroad. Before and during the war he studied at the Reykjavik College of Music. There- after in 1947 he travelled to the Juilliard School of Music where his teachers included Bernard Wagenaar and Marion Eugenie Bauer. He also came into a certain amount of contact with Edgard Varese. In 1951 he composed Four Abstractions for piano, the earliest known example of twelve-tone tech- nique in Icelandic music. They are composed with extreme asceticism, and only occasionally reach real two-part move- ment. During the 1950’s he visited the electronic studios of Cologne, Warsaw and Paris, where he came into contact with a completely new medium. He was appointed repetiteur and conductor at the National Theatre, and also worked as a programme producer at the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service, where he could use the rather limited equipment (mostly tape recorder and sine-wave generators) for elec- tronic music. During this period he only wrote a few works for instruments and they did not attract much attention. But from about 1960 - during the first years of Musica Nova - he stood as the leader of the Icelandic avant-garde. He was the first to compose electro-acoustic music in Iceland. The pioneer work was the previously mentioned Electronic Study for tape, wind quintet and piano, first per- formed at a Musica Nova concert in 1960. In the same year he composed a pure tape composition. It was entitled Sam- stirni (iConstellations) and contained both concrete sounds and sine-wave material. Samstirni afterwards appeared in a 80

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