Ulf Björlin - dirigenten, kompositören, arrangören

Sammanfattning: This dissertation deals with the Swedish conductor, composer and arranger Ulf Björlin (1933-1993). As no systematic inventory of Björlin’s work has previously been made, a comprehensive collection of his compositions, arrangements, recordings, concerts and work as a producer has been undertaken here. The accomplishment of such an inventory is the first aim of the thesis. The gathered data has been collected in five appendices with lists of his: 1) musical works, 2) arrangements, 3) phonograms, 4) concerts, and 5) work as a producer. The second aim is to make an examination and description of various aspects of Björlin’s compositions, arrangements, and his work as a conductor.Each of Björlin’s activities is covered in a separate chapter (ch. 2-4), each including documentation of what he achieved in that particular area. A biography of Björlin is given in chapter 1. Chapter 5 takes up questions about Björlin’s position in Swedish musical life. The dissertation is based on qualitative and quantitative research with a hermeneutic method of analysis.The results of the gathering show that Björlin wrote about 110 works and arranged a large amount of music for orchestra. Björlin’s original domain was art music, but lighter forms of music became also a part of his identity. In Björlin’s most successful concerts, in which music with different styles was played, one can see some similarities to the concerts that Leonard Bernstein held in the US and André Previn in the UK. There are tendencies to a modernist style in Björlin’s orchestral music from the 1960s, but the pluralism of styles found in Björlin’s music for film and the stage in the 1960s would in the 1970s characterise his whole way of writing music. The indistinct dividing line between composition and arrangement places Björlin in a historical tradition of composers such as Mozart, Liszt, Satie and Stravinsky.