Childhood and education

According to the birth records for the Jeanson family, Gunnar Jeanson was born in Gothenburg on 10 October 1898 and grew up in a middle class home, first in Gothenburg and, after the family’s move, in Stockholm. He began his music studies at Stockholm’s Musikkonservatoriet (the Royal Conservatory of Music) in 1913 where he studied with piano pedagogue Lennart Lundberg until 1918 and counterpoint with Andreas Hallén and Ernst Ellberg during the years 1917 to 1920. Jeanson’s few extant works, mostly chamber pieces, were written largely during his conservatory years. In the spring of 1917 Jeanson finished his studies at Whitlockska School and in autumn of the same year he began at Uppsala University. On 15 December 1921 he completed a Bachelor of Arts degree in music history and music theory, along with other subjects.

Musicologist

Musicological interests took Jeanson to the European continent where, during 1921 and 1922, he continued his studies with musicologists Egon Wellesz in Vienna, who belonged to the Arnold Schoenberg circle, and Peter Wagner in Freiburg. He returned to Sweden and worked as a music writer for the Stockholms Dagblad, a job that he felt was as a good learning experience but hard work. He took the licentiate’s examination in 1925 at Stockholm’s College, and defended his dissertation for Tobias Norlind in 1926, writing about the romantic composer August Söderman. At the same college, in July of the same year, he received a lectureship in music history together with music theory. On 21 May 1927, he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree. Jeanson’s work clearly contributed to the vitalisation of musicology within the Swedish academic arena.

Jeanson’s scholarly publications were not particularly extensive. The second half of the 1920s was his most vital period as a musicologist. It was during this time that he published his two most significant works, the biography of August Söderman and a study about the composer and poet Gunnar Wennerberg. He was also editor of the Svensk tidskrift för musikforskning (Swedish journal for music research) during 1927−30 and a contributor from 1927 to 1938. Together with the music critic and radio programme leader Julius Rabe during 1927−1931, Jeanson wrote the music handbook Musiken genom tiderna (Music through the ages) in two volumes. It would come to have a huge impact on the teaching of musicology, as well as at folk high schools offering a music orientation. Jeanson also made significant contributions within research on the poet and composer Carl Michael Bellman with the musicological observations he made in connection with the publication of Bellman’s collected writings issued during the years 1922−1938.

An advocate for new music

Jeanson was among the music journalists who sought to draw attention to the new, radical music. As he expressed it in a 1923 letter to his friend, composer Moses Pergament, he wanted to ‘raise a riot for the emergence of new music’. During the 1920s Jeanson published a number of articles in the daily press and in periodicals about Arnold Schoenberg, Carl Nielsen, Franz Schreker and others, as well as general articles on modern music. He also initiated the founding of the Swedish section of the ISCM − the International Society for Contemporary Music −, acting as its president from 1923 to 1932. The ISCM was the most important forum for the performance of new music. Through Jeanson’s work with Stockholm’s Konsertförening (Stockholm Concert Society) − first as its secretary during the years 1925−30, and then from 1933 as its managing director − he zealously supported new music’s place in the group’s repertoire.

Public educator

Through his music journalism, authorship and lecturers, Jeanson made important contributions as an educator. During his tenure as secretary of Stockholm’s Konsertförening he held a number of lectures combined with concerts for school children. In 1930 he moved to Gothenburg in order to work as a music reviewer, this time with the newspaper Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfarts-Tidning, where he remained until 1932. He continued to write occasionally for the newspaper and was one of few Swedish music journalists to attack the music politics of the Nazis, which he did in a long article in August 1933.

During the last half of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, Jeanson also gave a number of radio lectures, often preceding concert broadcasts. His work in radio also included collaborations on educational programmes about music such as ‘Att lyssna till musik’ (Listening to music) and ‘Musikens mästare’ (The masters of music). His appointment as director of the Konsertföreningen guaranteed, with excellent collaboration with the conductor Václav Talich, an innovative, but also controversial, repertoire policy.

Jeanson became ill with a nerve disease at the end of the 1930s and died in Stockholm on 20 January 1939 at only 40 years of age.

Henrik Rosengren © 2015
Trans. Jill Ann Johnson