Etymology

Between 1987 and 1989 I took a deep dive into computer programming. This meant daily reading in my C language reference manual and the five (by then) volumes of Inside Macintosh. As I was living in Paris at the time, I was surrounded by foreign languages. The simple words of everyday English which are used to symbolize instructions to the computer, those words started to have lives of their own. Their meaning became elusive as my interest focused more on the human mind and less on memory allocation, garbage collection and error checking.

Etymology was commissioned by the Swedish Radio but the initiative came from the late Ansgar Krook, a promising conductor who died all too young. He knew of my background and wanted me to do something inspired by rock music. I did not care much about "rock expression" but rather the way a rock album is made up by a number of songs which can be played individually or even in a random order.

There are seven movements: Switch, While, Shift, Pointers, Seed, Define NIL and Strings.

HS