Lisa Streich, born in 1985, is Swedish by birth but grew up in a small town in northern Germany. She was composer-in-residence at the Lucerne Festival 2024, has received commissions from the Berlin Philharmonic, the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, and Ensemble Intercontemporain, and was awarded the Composer Prize of the Ernst von Siemens Foundation in 2017.
This impressive résumé is accompanied by a lively sense of humor.
Thank you, Lisa, for your availability. This interview will focus on your relationship with the guitar, but my first curiosity is: how did your passion for music and composition begin?
I grew up in the countryside and there was really nothing else to do than playing the piano, so I basically didn’t do anything else. If it was out of passion or boredom I don’t know. But it became a passion. The problem was, I never really liked to play the piano on stage so to follow a career as a pianist wasn’t an option. I moved to Berlin when I was 18 wanting to become a doctor. But then I heard a musical piece by a female composer and I saw a sentence – If you can’t do what you want, you have to want what you can do. That was my solution for making music my whole life without being on stage. I didn’t know that you could become a composer as a woman, but now I know.
You live on Gotland, a Swedish island about an hour’s flight from Stockholm. How do you balance this isolated environment with your constant international presence at major European and American festivals? Does the atmosphere of Gotland influence your music, or are places not decisive for your musical and artistic aesthetics?
I am sure places influence you a lot but I believe I am less aware of it than the listener. One becomes home blind I believe, but it defines who you are of course.
Focusing now on the guitar, the classic question: what was your first approach to the instrument? Do you have an early memory connected to it?
I feel in a way very close to the guitar, it is a humble instrument, it is simple and pretty, likes to seduce haha and doesn’t make too much noise. My earliest memory is probably my brother playing the guitar. He hated it and said it was so uncomfortable. That was a mystery to me, that it could sound so loving and warm and be so uncomfortable to play (it really did when my brother played).
In your works, you’ve often used the classical guitar both in ensemble settings and as a solo instrument.
What intrigues me most is how the guitar in your music often has some kind of “extension” of its sound. In Zucker, for instance, the classical guitar used in the ensemble is motorized: it’s not the guitarist who plucks the strings, but rather a motor operated externally.
In Augenlider, your concerto for classical guitar and orchestra, and in Kind for solo guitar, there’s an egg slicer placed on the soundboard. How did the idea of the motor and the egg slicer come about, and why this necessity?
The motor in ZUCKER has not necessarily so much to do with the guitar but with string instruments in general. And the idea of what changes if an instrument is played by a machine versus a hand. The Egg Slicer in AUGENLIDER and KIND has a simple task, to be able to play very high notes, that the guitar on the one hand can’t reach or on the other without moving the left hand too much up all the time.
You’ve also written a piece for two electric guitars. Again, I notice a total transformation of the instrument: one guitar is used almost like an organ, producing massive chords of up to 13 or 15 notes, while the other guitarist plays tonal chords and sings melodies with lyrics written by you and Sylvan Cadars.
The guitar is present in so many genres, and it feels like a chameleon. It can be subtle, poetic and tender when played all natural and combined with the voice, the seducing character in that combination. And it can be wild, large, embracing when used with electronic amplification or effects. The guitar is capable to kind of create an inner voice and an outer world in this case. Or that was the idea.
When I write for instruments I always think about their historical context and connotation of the character that it brings into the music. Sometimes I try to amplify them like in this case and sometimes I want to work against them and put costumes of other instruments on them so to speak.
What kind of sound idea guides you when writing for this instrument, and what is your relationship with the electric guitar, for which you’ve written very little?
Instruments are characters and are changed by their players. I think in expressions of sounds/chords and characteristics and history an instrument brings. So there is never a “sound idea” really. It’s a conversation with or imagination of this instrument and all the interpretational factors it brings.
The electric guitar feels more distant to me, as I know it so little and there is a covered world behind that doesn’t necessarily come from the instrument itself – effects, amplification also. I find it harder to grasp for my own musical writing.
I’ve always thought of the guitar as the perfect medium for your poetic language, especially in your more recent works, where dynamics reach ppp, with a strong acoustic presence, delicacy, and a beautiful tone that, in my opinion, naturally belongs to the classical guitar.
Have you ever felt the desire to write more for this instrument, but perhaps been hesitant because it’s still not fully established or common in ensemble and orchestral contexts?
Yes, I believe it’s an instrument that fits my language and character very well. But on the other hand, I don’t play the instrument so it feels like a stranger at times. Walking in the dark when it comes to practical reasoning.
That it’s not as established or common in ensemble and orchestral context makes it more charming I believe.
At the same time it’s such a popular instrument. With these polarities it has a strong social context connotation and aura, I believe it’s very interesting.
In August 2025, there was the premiere of your new piece for four classical guitars, written for the Aleph Quartet. How did you approach the creative process of composing for this kind of chamber ensemble?
In this case I tried to think less of the guitars and their special expression but a whole instrument body or orchestra, a mega instruments that has 40 Fingers to play chords <3
If you think about this latest work and compare it with your earlier compositions, especially your first ones, how has your approach to writing—and to the instrument—changed over time?
I still don’t feel at home with this instrument but I know by now that guitarists are very flexible and solution oriented so I probably write a bit more daring, believing the guitarists will figure it out, find solutions, communicate. Guitarists never get angry.
And finally, the traditional closing question: what are you working on now, and what are your upcoming projects that include the guitar?
Right now I am working on a cello concerto with children’s choir on a text by Astrid Lindgren and my very first evening opera.
For 2027 I will write a little solo piece for guitar.
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