Johan Kvandal was one of Norway’s most highly esteemed 20th-century composers. He wrote a substantial body of works, notably orchestral, vocal and instrumental, that was popular with musicians and audiences alike. Initially encouraged by his father, the composer David Monrad Johansen, when he followed the predominantly nationalist trends of the 1920s and 1930s, Kvandal went on to study in Paris and Vienna, absorbing some of the infuences of composers such as Bartók, Stravinsky and Messiaen. From the 1970s onwards, a return to Norwegian folk-music as the very building bricks of his compositions, combined with the musical currents of the time, led to the development of an attractive and sometimes daring musical language described by Kvandal himself as “modern tonality”.