Jan W. Morthenson (1940–2024)

Jan W. Morthenson (1940–2024) was a Swedish composer and writer on music. His Neutron Star (1967), made with the engineer Göran Sundqvist on a computer that ran hydroelectric dams, is one of the first pieces of Swedish music produced by a computer.^1, 2

Non-figurative music

Morthenson was born in Örnsköldsvik and studied composition with Ingvar Lidholm and aesthetics in Uppsala.^1, 2 From 1962 he wrote what he called non-figurative music: standing fields of sound that change very slowly, written to remove every "demagogic" expression from music, in his word. His book Non-figurative Musik came out in 1966 with a preface by the German theorist Heinz-Klaus Metzger, his teacher.^1, 3

Neutron Star, 1967

In 1967 the Society of Swedish Composers turned fifty and commissioned works for a record. For his piece Morthenson worked with Göran Sundqvist on a Datasaab D21 owned by the power company Skandinaviska Elverk. Its everyday job was to regulate the gates of dams in central and northern Sweden according to how much electricity was being used.¹

Sundqvist describes the program as simple. He wrote it in assembler: a random generator and a short loop that played for a set time, one voice at a time. Morthenson wanted short pulses of sound in different frequency ranges and asked for them to sound dry; Sundqvist told him they sounded wet, "like splashing". Morthenson took the material to the Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) in Stockholm and mixed it into the piece there.⁴

Each tone stands for an atom or an electron. The piece starts with single, sparse tones and grows denser until the sound forms a compact body, like the pressure in a neutron star. The hard sounds are square waves. Only the computer plays; Morthenson says an orchestra could not reach that density.¹ Lars-Gunnar Bodin, who used it in his teaching, calls it the first work of art music made directly by a computer.⁵

Neither composer could program, Bodin says; the computer work depended on Sundqvist.⁵

Pictures on an oscilloscope

Sundqvist also made pictures for Morthenson's television work for Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne, among them Supersonics (1969). Morthenson drew a storyboard; Sundqvist produced the images on an oscilloscope, and they were filmed off the screen. Most of the pictures in the programme were analogue studio images. In Morthenson's words: "sound does not take much computing power, not nearly as much as images".¹ The same imbalance is one reason why computer music came before computer pictures in Sweden, as told in Computer Art in Sweden.

Later

Morthenson sat on the board of EMS from 1973 to 1975 and chaired Fylkingen in 1975–76.² He kept using the density of Neutron Star in orchestral music, writing registers and playing instructions instead of single notes so that musicians could produce masses of tones as fast as possible.¹