On 31 May 1926, a ship carrying the entire Hamburg Philharmonic Orchestra docked in Reykjavík. The musicians stayed in Iceland for 17 days, giving 14 concerts of music by Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert at venues including a tuberculosis sanatorium. Local critic Árni Thorsteinson described the visit as “the greatest event in the history of the arts in this country.” While the rest of Europe was falling for cinema, Icelanders were getting their first taste of a full-size live symphony orchestra.
Organised instrumental music making came late to Iceland, hardly surprising in a country that still has to import everything except electricity and fish. Today, the nation’s musical life has to be seen – and preferably heard – to be believed. Increasingly, Iceland’s genre-blind musicians channel the challenges of living on a forbidding chunk of volcanic rock into the creation of progressive music that gives the impression of having resounded for ever. Icelanders cleave to homegrown acts, with a quarter of Top 10-charting music on Spotify made domestically, but the rest of the world appears to love those acts too. Björk, Sigur Rós and Ólafur Arnalds are some of the best-known names to have found global success with highly distinctive music; every month, more than 19 times Iceland’s entire population streams a track by the Reykjavík band Of Monsters and Men.
In 1950, Reykjavík got a full-time symphony orchestra of its own. These days it occupies Harpa, a brand new glass concert hall that dominates the capital from its perch on the harbourside, a triumph of civic aspiration that appears to have been designed for a far bigger town. When the Iceland Symphony Orchestra tours the UK later this month, it will combine a programme of Tchaikovsky and Beethoven with the new Icelandic classical music the world is clamouring to hear.
Specifically, that of Anna Thorvaldsdóttir – an Icelandic composer even the Berlin Philharmonic appeared smug to secure a shared commission from recently. Thorvaldsdóttir’s natural instrument is the symphony orchestra, but in her hands it is reborn as a natural organism. Time, as we understand it, barely exists in her works. Instead, a sense of glacial movement underpins musical transformations that, as in the changeable Icelandic sky, you tend not to notice coming until it’s too late.
In 2017, a series of ISO recordings began chronicling the music of an outstanding new generation of local composers, many of them women. It’s clear that Thorvaldsdóttir takes her place among a wider school of Icelandic composition. For all its individuality, much of the music by María Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir, Thurídur Jónsdóttir, Bára Gísladóttir, Veronique Vaka, Páll Ragnar Pálsson, Daníel Bjarnason and others is tantalisingly slow and vaporous, with a tendency to oscillate between unnerving darkness and piercing luminosity. In the third decade of the 21st century, no country on Earth has reinvented the language of the symphony orchestra on such distinctive and locally relevant terms as Iceland has.
Perhaps we have the country’s sluggish cultural development to thank for that. While the rest of the world was busy erecting barriers between music genres last century – roping off classical music, in particular – Iceland was simply trying to get things going. There was no time wasted deciding who was allowed to listen to what. For much of the second half of the 20th century, classical orchestral music felt new in Iceland. Here, the symphony orchestra was a postwar institution, not a 19th-century one.
For better or worse, things have always happened quickly in nimble Iceland, a result of the huge concentration of activity in the capital and the country’s forward-looking ideas on social interaction. “The good thing about Iceland,” I was once told by the exceptional pianist Víkingur Ólafsson, “is that anything is possible.”
If the nation’s particularly catastrophic financial meltdown of 2008 was the result of deals done in libraries, on planes and even at church, the same social proximity has only increased the fertility and distinction of its music scene. The provision of musical tuition is enshrined in Icelandic law and organised via a network of 80 music schools, and countless Reykjavík musicians grew up singing in the Hamrahlid Choir under its visionary conductor Þorgerður Ingólfsdóttir who inspired generations of young people to explore their own musicianship. Among them Björk Guðmundsdóttir, who once sang Schoenberg at classical music’s most patrician fixture, the Salzburg festival.
If Björk isn’t on stage performing with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, she might be sitting next to you at the concert hall listening to it. Her albums are littered with many of the same techniques we hear in Thorvaldsdóttir’s orchestral scores – even, in fact, with locally distinctive devices used by Iceland’s musical godfather, the composer Jón Leifs (1899-1968). Leifs harnessed the power of Icelandic folk song as he set out – in his own words – to “let the cool, strong gale of the Icelandic weather rush into the world’s music.”
Student musicians in Iceland often find themselves crossing genre boundaries by necessity. There’s only one institution in the capital where you can study music to degree level, thrusting students of varied outlooks together. This eroding of musical silos has produced countless indefinable artists, including Hildur Guðnadóttir who became the first female composer to win an Oscar, Bafta and Golden Globe in the same season. It was for her score to the film Joker – a cello concerto in disguise. A cellist, singer, producer and composer, Guðnadóttir works across metal, electronica, classical and film music.
Go to Iceland, and all this theorising will feel very real. You might spot an Iceland Symphony Orchestra musician playing in a metal band after a concert, still sporting eveningwear. You can drop in on record store 12 Tónar, where proprietor Lárus Jóhannesson will sit you on his blue sofa, make you a coffee, and happily talk about Beethoven, Bach, Leifs, Björk, múm, Vök, Low Roar or Janus Rasmussen.
You’ll certainly experience a place in which music exists as rather more than the product of a music “industry”: where even DJ sets can apparently tap something of the unfathomable geological timescales that in this place, confront you from every angle. It took a while, but in musical terms, Iceland is certainly having a moment.