Born in 1985, the Swedish composer Lisa Streich writes music of engrossing timbral and dramaturgical subtlety, often using traditional instruments prepared or modified by small, homemade, motorized devices. Listening to her pieces, I sometimes feel like I’ve been shrunk down to molecular size and placed inside a music box where noisy mechanics blend with pitched sounds of great fragility to create an unsettling, touching whole. (Full disclosure: Streich and I took ear training classes together at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, around 2008.) In 2017, Streich won Germany’s prestigious Ernst von Siemens music prize, and two years later, she received the RicordiLab award for young composers, which, despite her initial unwillingness to change the “thin, beautiful” look of her scores, gave her more time for concentrated work. She lives with her three children on the Swedish island of Gotland, where I reached her on a recent afternoon on video chat. We talked about the beauty of imperfection, the quirks of European audiences, and musical hate mail.
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