Karin Rehnqvist was born in 1957 in Stockholm and grew up in the town of Nybro in southeast Sweden. At the Royal College of Music in Stockholm she studied music education from 1976, and then composition from 1980 to 1984. Her teachers included Gunnar Bucht, Pär Lindgren and Brian Ferneyhough. From 1976 to 1991 she was artistic director and conductor of the Stans Kör chorus. Between 2000 and 2004 she was composer-in-residence in a collaboration between the Scottish and Swedish Chamber Orchestras. In 2009 she co-founded KVAST, the Swedish Association of Women Composers, and from 2009 to 2021 she was professor of composition at the Royal College of Music, the first woman to be appointed to this position.
Rehnqvist’s music sits at the intersection between folk and contemporary classical traditions. Particularly important to her musical style is the Swedish vocal practice of ‘kulning’, a type of shepherd’s herding song that has become emblematic of her music. Kulning is a penetrating vocal call, sung mainly by women, to call livestock down from high mountain pastures. Sung using the resonant head voice, kulning calls can travel long distances in the open air. As well as this piercing quality, they have a melancholy air due to their use of flattened tones (similar to the ‘blue notes’ of African American music).
Rehnqvist first drew on the kulning style in Puksånger-lockrop (‘Tympanum song–herding calls’) for two sopranos and percussion (1989). She was inspired by the emergence of two singers – Lena Willemark and Susanne Rosenberg – who were comfortable in the worlds of both Swedish traditional music and contemporary notation, and she has since written many works with the voices of one or both of these women in mind. Puksånger-lockrop allied the feminine expressivity inherent in herding calls with the concrete and corporeal. Since then, Rehnqvist has used kulning both explicitly and implicitly to explore the fundamental states of existence: the primordial facts of life in Sun Song for female voice, two narrators and chamber orchestra (1994); the joy of innocence in Light of Light for children’s chorus and orchestra (2003, rev. 2023); isolation and communication in the outdoor happening Was Someone Calling? for two singers, horn, trumpet and trombone, and street vendors (2006); women’s resilience in the face of sexual violence in the monodrama Bloodhoof (2019); and the peace of death in To the Angel with the Fiery Hands for oboe and chorus (2000).
The poet and composer Bengt Emil Johnson has noted that Rehnqvist’s allusions to kulning contain with them ‘nursery rhyme and psalm, hymn and incantation, invocation and desecration, the lament of the professional weeper and the comfort of the lullaby’. Often Rehnqvist sets these themes within a natural framework – the rhythms of the sun (Sun Song), the sublimity of the Arctic ice cap (Arktis Arktis! for orchestra, 2000–01) or the concentrated seasons of the North (Songs Between Light and Darkness for soprano, two reciters, clarinet, alto saxophone and piano, 2021). In her recent music, this has been allied to a turn towards explicitly ecological themes, most notably in two major works composed in collaboration with the poet Kerstin Perski: Silent Earth for chorus and orchestra (2020) and the opera Drifted (2007–15).
Rehnqvist’s music has been commissioned by many of the world’s leading contemporary ensembles, including the London Sinfonietta (Embrace Me, 2005–08), the Kronos Quartet (All Those Strings!, 2013–14; The Riddle, 2017), Ensemble Recherche (Bloodhoof) and Norbotten Neo (Night Chant, 2020). She has won the Prix Italia (2014), the Järnåker Prize (2020) and the Nordic Council Music Prize (2022). But, expanding on her natural affinity for vocal and choral music, she is equally comfortable writing for young and amateur musicians, as in the children’s opera Beauty School (1999) and many works for children’s and girls’ choruses. In 2018 a book-length biography of Rehnqvist, written by Per F. Broman, was published by the Royal Swedish Academy of Music.
Tim Rutherford-Johnson, 2024