state living quarters. He began writing his seventeenth symphony, but died, age 68, in Stockholm's Maria Magdalena parish before finishing it. He is buried in the Högalid Church columbarium. Music Pettersson's music can be compared to Mahler's symphonic output, especially in the magnificent design and the passion and dynamism. The symphonic eccentric Pettersson is not an avant-gardist. His kinetic and organic development of musical matter uses traditional means of expression. Basic motifs are constantly being changed and developed. Pettersson's writing is very strenuous and often has many simultaneous polyphonic lines. His symphonies end on common major or minor chords—but tonality, which depends on some sense, however attenuated, of tonal progression, is found mostly in slower sections. This can be shown at the openings and endings of his 6th and 7th symphonies, and the end of his 9th. Overwhelmingly serious in tone, often dissonant, his music rises to ferocious climaxes, relieved, especially in his later works, by lyrical oases (""). Pettersson's music has a very distinctive sound and can hardly be confused with that of any other 20th-century composer. His symphonies, which range from 22 to 70 minutes long, are typically one-movement works. Pettersson's music is demanding on performers and listeners. Pettersson quoted songs from his own 24 Barefoot Songs in several of his compositions. Ivanka Stoïanova designed a theory of musical space about Pettersson's music. Most of his music has now been recorded at least once and much of it is now available in published scores. Works Pettersson began composing songs and smaller chamber works in the 1930s. His production from the 1940s includes the song cycle twenty-four Barefoot Songs (1943–1945) based on his poems and a dissonant concerto for violin and string quartet (1949), which is influenced by Béla Bartók and Paul Hindemith. Pettersson soon found his compositional style. In 1951, he created the experimental Seven Sonatas for two Violins. At the same time, he composed the first of his seventeen symphonies, which he left unfinished. This work has been recorded in a performing version prepared by trombonist and conductor Christian Lindberg in 2011. Pettersson about the symphonic output of the 1950s: It took four years to write the conceptual and style-defining Symphony No. 6 (1963–1966). His Symphony No. 7 and Symphony No. 8 (1968–1969) have been recorded more than his other works and are probably his best-known. In the 1970s, he composed two related works about social protest