A Finnish composer born in 1958 in Helsinki, Magnus Lindberg started playing piano at the age of eleven and began attending the Sibelius academy at the age of fifteen, where he studied music theory composition, and electroacoustic music with Risto Väisänen, Einojuhani Rautavaara, Paavo Heininen, and Osmo Lindeman. Lindberg met Brian Ferneyhough and Helmut Lachenmann in Darmstadt, and Franco Donatoni in Siena. In 1981, he became the student of Vinko Globokar and Gérard Grisey in Paris. He worked at the EMS studio in Stockholm in the late 1970s, and at the experimental studio of the Finnish Broadcasting Company, as well as at the IRCAM, in 1985.

As a pianist, Lindberg has performed the works of Berio, Boulez, Stockhausen, and Zimmermann. In 1977, he and a group that included Kaija Saariaho and Esa-Pekka Salonen, founded Korvat auki (the Ears Open Society). In 1980, he founded the Toimii Ensemble (“It Works!” in Finnish), that would become a laboratory for many of his own compositional experiments.

Lindberg was a frequent guest of the IRCAM in the late 1980s, where he composed UR (1986) and Joy (1989-1990). He was a winner of the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers in 1982 for …de Tartuffe, je crois (1981), and in 1986 for Kraft (1983-1985), which also won the Nordic Council Music Prize in 1988. Lindberg won the Prix Italia in 1986 for Faust (1986), and was awarded the Koussevitsky Prize in 1988. He was appointed professor of composition at the Royal Conservatory of Sweden in 1996.

During the time he spent in Paris from 1981 to 1993, Lindberg’s music opened up to a variety of influences, which he took on in a highly personal way, maintaining his distance from the post-modern aesthetic. While it is possible to perceive traces of Sibelius, free jazz, the energy of post-punk bands, American minimalism, and traditional music, particularly that of Southeast Asia (gamelan) in his music, in parallel, Lindberg’s composing adopted the legacy of Babbitt‘s American serialism - which in his early works he pushed to the very highest degree of formality - as well as the principle of harmonic classification of Allen Forte’s Set Theory. Zona (1983) for solo cello and seven instruments, is the product of a pre-compositional rhythmic systemization, as is the case for Kraft (1983-1985) for orchestra and ensemble. By the same token, French spectralism was an influence on the creation of its harmonic structure, inspired by that of the chaconne – a repeated chain of chords that cycles through the work: Kinetics (1988-1989) for symphony orchestra, Marea (1989-1990) for chamber orchestra, and Joy (1989-1990) for large ensemble all bear witness to a refined sonic sensibility and a self-assured dramatic sense.

Beginning with Duo concertante, Corrente, and concerto pour piano (1990-1994), Lindberg sought a greater purity of sound, and a lightness in ornamentation, that were absent in the stark bluntness of Kraft. It was at this time that Lindberg discovered his predilection for composing for large orchestras: after Corrente II (1992), an orchestral version of Corrente, Aura (In memoriam Witold Lutoslawski, 1993-94) emerged as a kind of synthesis of his previous creative angles. The piece, which shows careful attention to the large-scale form, is a 1990s parallel to the monumental character of Kraft, composed a decade prior. Not a symphony, and not an orchestral concerto, Aura attempted to let loose the virtosic individuality from the orchestral whole, while at the same time maintaining the broader textural effects of the formation. With Arena (1994-1995) and Feria (1995-1997), Lindberg once again cultivated the kaleidoscopic possibilities of the orchestra, drawing it even further out in the writing of Fresco (1997-1998), Cantigas (1997-1999), and Parada (2001), which together make up what he calls his “symphonic triptych,” an echo of the “trilogy” formed by Kinetics, Marea, and Joy. Cantigas updates the formal principle of the chaconne, bolstered here by the organization of different tempos.

Today, Lindberg is considered to be a major composer of orchestral music. More recent pieces, such as Sculpture (2005) or Seht die Sonne (2007), Scoring (2009), Al largo (2010), or Era, written for prestigious orchestras, have added to his stature in the field.

From 2009 to 2012, he was composer in residence with the New York Philharmonic, and from 2011 to 2012 with the SWR Radio Symphony Orchestra of Stuttgart. From 2014 to 2017, he was in residence with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, working on several commissions, including a new work for the Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan. In 2016-2017, he was composer in residence with the Orchestre Philarmonique de Radio France.