Early music career

Nothing is known about Gunnar Malmström’s childhood. In 1913 his name appeared on the enrollment list of Uppsala University’s medical faculty, but the following year he was missing from the university’s catalogue. It is possible that he completed an advanced music education, however, not at the Kungliga Musikkonservatoriet (the Royal Conservatory of Music) where he is not listed among the matriculated students. He may have studied privately or outside of Sweden. According to one source, he was a restaurant musician for a period of time.

His earliest published arrangements and compositions appeared around 1922 when he was some thirty years old. He seems to have left Uppsala for the capital city by 1918, according to the population register. In Stockholm he then worked until the beginning of the 1940s as a versatile musician and composer – the latter within art music, film music and popular music.

Gunnar Malmström arrived early on the theatre and silent film music scene. During the 1920s Malmström worked mainly at different cinema theatres in Stockholm. From 1926 until at least 1929 he was conductor of the Mikloskaensemblen (The Mikloska ensemble) at the Rialto cinema where, according to an advertisement in the newspaper, Dagens Nyheter (21/2 1926), this ‘popular conductor’, after a detailed study of Hawaiian music literature, reinforced the cinema orchestra with ‘Hawaiian guitars’. Afterward he had a similar job at the cinema Metropol-Palais (renamed Lyran in 1932), which opened in 1927 on Sveavägen, the same street in Stockholm as the Rialto. Here he led a nine-person orchestra – Mikloskakapellet (Mikloska orchestra). (According to unconfirmed sources both the Mikloskaensemblen and Mikloskakapellet were named after his musician wife, Sefa Mikloska-Schneider.) Around 1930 Malmström was the orchestra conductor for the cinema Ritz. Parallel to this he was engaged in other musical activities. In 1929 he recorded some twenty-five 78-rpm discs for the Edison Bell Radio company using both his own arrangements of Swedish folk songs and others’ compositions. For these recordings he was predominantly a conductor but also a performer – it was the phonogram ensemble, National orchestra, that mainly played on these records.

Silent film arranger and cinema musician

During the silent film era that ended around 1930, film music was performed live either by individual musicians, a small band or a larger orchestra, depending on the cinema’s finances and location. For example, Stockholm’s leading cinema, the Röda Kvarn had a permanent twenty-person orchestra. The music could be written in detail but there was also often room for both variation and improvisation. It was common practice that the orchestra conductor at the cinema where the film premiered – often a major cinema in Stockholm such as the Röda Kvarn or the Palladium – put together a detailed musical program that specified the music for each scene, including where the changes to the next musical work would occur. Then, with larger or smaller variations, this program would be performed wherever the film played in cinemas around the country. The music was often based on ready-made proposals of appropriate, previously composed music – a sort of film music prescription that was sent out by the film agency to the cinemas but that could be changed at will.

At the beginning of his career as an orchestra conductor and arranger, Gunnar Malmström was very much engaged in putting together such music programs, often for American films. There are at least five preserved programs by Malmström from 1926, in which he compiled and arranged music for major foreign films. He was greatly impressed by American film music arrangers who (according to film studies professor Ann-Kristin Wallengren) often worked with four or five musical themes, sometimes in the form of a leitmotif that recurred in three to seven places in a film. For the music program to John W. Brunius’s cinematic staging of Johan Ludvig Runeberg’s poems, Fänrik Ståls sägner (1926), Malmström had the Finnish conductor Armas Järnefelt as a musical adviser.

Soundtrack composer and debater                                          

From around 1928, Malmström seems to have been given greater responsibility for arranging and composing film music. He became more of an arranger and composer than a compiler of music with early examples such as the spectacular Gustav Wasa (parts one and two) and The Case of Lena Smith (1929). In The Case of Lena Smith Malmström used a form of leitmotif technique with four alternating themes. He supposedly composed all of the music for the film Never the Twain Shall Meet directed by Maurice Tourneur in 1925. However, according to Ann-Kristin Wallengren, this has been put into question by the fact that the film toured the country with a music program put together by another orchestra conductor.

At about the same time, Gunnar Malmström began to take an active part in the contemporary debate on film music, becoming a frequent commentator in the trade journals. In 1927 in the journal Musikern, Malmström initiated a debate on the aesthetics of music – in retrospect a very animated one – about the value of leitmotif technique in the composition of film music. He argued that cinema orchestra conductors should have opera, and especially Wagner’s dramatic music as a model for creating a memorable leitmotif. The debate in the Musikern ended after ten issues, but continued further in a couple of film journals, as well as the newspaper Stockholms-Tidningen, continuing up to 1928. According to Ann-Kristin Wallengren, the debate revealed that film music was seen to be hugely important to the film experience and that it was regarded as a special form of art that was in symbiosis with the moving pictures. The debate also showed that film music had not yet established obvious conventions, and instead was very dependent on other music: opera, incidental and popular music.

Gunnar Malmström was an elegant debater. He took an active part in the grounding of the Swedish formulation and establishment of film music conventions both in its theoretical aspects – by introducing new literature – and in practice as an arranger and composer. He was also later important in establishing a film’s musical language. He converted theory into compositional practice: in his own film composing he used a leitmotif technique that was inspired by both Richard Wagner and American film composers. He was also very interested in discussing the premises of sound in films. ‘Imitations of sounds’, sound effects and illustrative sound and sometimes also spoken utterances that were performed by the orchestra in real time, strongly influenced the balance in the aesthetic architecture of silent films. Malmström believed that the orchestra conductor – especially when it comes to more serious films – should sparingly use only those sounds that are meaningful for the narration of the film’s story. He was against seeking out effects for effects’ sake.

After a few years without any significant contributions to film music, a period during which sound films became established, Malmström returned to the film music world. He composed successful music for the sound films Bombi Bitt och jag (1936), Bleka greven (1937), Ett brott (1940) and Med dig i mina armar (1940). To Bleka greven and Ett brott he also contributed arrangements from other composers.

Composer of chamber music and melodramas

Gunnar Malmström also composed more typical art music works, mainly chamber music and music for melodramas. He composed and published the melodramas Vet du (1933), De båda danserskorna (1933−34) and Kvarnsången (1935) in a short, intense period during 1933−35. He utilized the texts from such disparate authors as Sweden’s Prince Wilhelm and the writer Dan Andersson. Most of the well known art music pieces that came from Malmström’s pen were written during the first half of the 1930s, which seems to show that he left film work during this period and tried a career as a freelance composer – returning in the middle of the 1930s to work in the new medium of sound films with Bombi Bitt och jag as the first production in 1936.

After these substantial contributions to the early development of Swedish sound films nothing is known of any further published compositions by Gunnar Malmström. Just like his childhood, the last twenty years of his life lack clear contours, as the sources remain strangely silent.

Toivo Burlin © 2016
Trans. Jill Ann Johnson