he came into contact with electronic music. In the fall of 1957, he made a visit to the Studio di Fonologia Musicale in Milan, and by 1959 he had produced his first electronic composition, as an accompaniment to his ballet, Riter; its electronic tape segments were somewhat akin to Blomdahl's opera Aniara of the same year. The tapes served to augment and accompany the orchestral forces. Riter was written for Birgit Åkesson (who also choreographed Bäck's A Game Around a Game in 1959). Later, he aided in establishing an independent electronic music laboratory for the Musikhögskola. Skaldens natt (The Poet's Night) from 1957 was not a commissioned work, receiving its premier in Hamburg in 1959 as part of the West German new music series, Das neue Werk. The piece won first prize in the ISCM international composition competition at Rome. He contributed a good deal toward an original and important a cappella choir literature during the second half of the 1950s. The first of these works was Canto LXXXI in 1956, whose text is an excerpt of the canto of the same name by Ezra Pound. The twelve-tone series used for Canto LXXXI was later used in a series of other choral works from 1959 to form an A cappella-bok (A Cappella Book) collection. The first part of 1960 was devoted to the composition of Motus-colores for orchestra, commissioned by the Südwestfunk Orchestra of Baden-Baden, for large chamber orchestra with dominating percussion. The pitch content was organized serially, but with just nine, not twelve, pitches to the row, plus the inversion of that row. Following Motus-colores, Lidholm did not produce any compositions for the next two years. Moving away from serial music: 1963 and beyond A distinctly new era begins in 1963, when Lidholm abandoned serial principles of pitch organization in his two works from that year: Nausikaa ensam (“Nausicaa Alone”) and Poesis. In writing Nausikaa, Lidholm had to take into consideration of the performance abilities of the commissioning body, the orchestra of the music high school of Ingesund, Sweden. Poesis, on the other hand, was commissioned for the fiftieth anniversary of the Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra. Lidholm's inaugural lecture at the Musikhogskola describes the process of writing Poesis. One of the distinguishing characteristics of Poesis is its graphic notation, due to Lidholm's abandonment of even loose pitch serialization. In keeping with the works of other composers who introduce new graphical