Love Mang’s Viken is originally a piece for guitar, banjo and electronics. The composer started out his work, not by writing music but by writing a haiku-poem which served as a metaphorical lantern for the piece. There is no formal connection between the guitar piece and the two poems that share the title Viken. Initially, the composer wanted to derive the musical structure from the poems, but eventually the music took its own course. However, the poems served as a kind of ‘regulative’ text, not at all in the sense of being a kind of notation or set of instructions for the music, but as a point of reference in the unfolding of the musical material, in order to retain the original impulse to the piece. Viken is not program music but draws impulses and general characteristics from these texts. The transcription for trio was made by The Six Tones without the composer’s participation.
Viken (The Bay)
Bright foggy days
I break the mirror in half
with heavy strokes of the oar
Echo of the ripples
Unveil in the green mist
The shoal’s silver rain
Further reading (download pdf of a chapter from Östersjö’s dissertation Shut Up ‘N’ Play!): Love Mangs, Östersjö 2008 Chapter 3