For years, I have been mesmerized by a space inside the great medieval Sankt Petri Kyrka,  Malmö. In recent months, I have begun discussing a project responding to this, with the church and with an extraordinary group of Swedish composers. When you walk into the west end of the this great medieval church, you will be struck as you will be, if you walk into the cathedral at Aarhus, as with so many post-reformation churches in Northern Europe, by the almost over whelming WHITE. This is very beautiful, and of course, reflects the spiritul objects of Luther, of Calvin, and the iconoclasts, who burnt heaps of relics, tore down altars and whitewashed the lavishly painted walls and ceiling, which, of course were the story-telling tools of a church which read, spoke and sung in Latin – the knowledge of which marked a cleric.

Here it was the decoration of the church came under attack during the  Danish Reformation  in 1529, when the radival reforming priest Claus Mortensen destroyed 59 of the 60 sixty pre-Reformation altarpieces. And the whitewashing took place in the next wave of zealotry in 1555.  Whilst this might seem pure vandalism, like the work of the Taliban or Pol Pot (and of course it was), a few days spent (as a Northerner) in the encrusted excess, of, say, Santa Mari delle Vigne (next too which I spent a week just recently) in Genova, will help to understand the demand, the energy behind the hammers and fire. Ironically, of course it was modelled on the ‘bonfires of the vanities’ – the burning of art works and treasures in the 1490s spearheader by Girolamo Savonarola.

And towards the end of the 1500s, the destruction of the Northern European Reformation, which had had its extreme English outcomes in the reigns of Henry VIII and his young son, Edward VI, was mirrored in the Mediterranean, when the Ottoman Empire took over the island of Cyprus, a treasure house of French Gothic architecture and art, and set upon removing every face, every saint, every non-animal/plant decoration from the churches and palaces of that one-time Lusignan realm.

However, for reasons which I will clarify later, at the Petri Kyrka, in Mamlo one space was spared such destruction. It you turn hard left, and left again, as you enter (North and then West), you will step into the  ‘Krämarkapellet’, you will be overwhelmed by a riot of late 15th century wall painting, a glimpse of how the whole church would have looked. It took my breath away the first time that I visited, and still does, even at a distance. Look up and this is what you see.

I will come back to the detail of the chapel later, but I am so excited to report that an extraordinary group of composers are gathering to write and curate pieces inspired by this space. My plan, which is very simple is to put build a programme of miniatures inspired by the place – and also to film/record the pieces in situ. Right now, a conversation is building with the composers, about what they are imagining, and what they will respond to.  At the bottom of this blog, I will include elements of that conversation.

Composers involved! This list is growing, and I will be announcing the non-Nordic composers imminently!

Staffan: I went to the chapel and took some pictures of the paintings. For now the piece could go in different ways. Either focus on one painting or making short movements contemplating for example three of them. But today I had another idea with the violinist as a spectator of the whole, so to say musically turning the head around, taking in all impressions.

Peter : I am so excited, that you are as inspired by Kraemerekapellet as I am – and thankyou so much for sending the fascinating set of pictures – the Tetragraphois with the Holy Spirit and the Agnus Dei, St Goran and the Dragon, Christ and the Wine Press,  and the two knights duelling with broad swords. I loved both approachest that you suggest – the first like a tableau of images, impressions, seen/heard from the inside out, the second of the viewing violinist – with  a touch of Mussorgsk-ean viewing, turning, promenade.

I love the layers of language and symbolism: are you aware that there is a direct, and proved link between the four animals of the tetragraph, and the animal-headed gods of ancient Egypt? When you think about the stylite and anchorite early Christian zealots in the sands of north Africa, this is not so surprising!