Abstract
This dissertation examines Swedish composer Sven-David Sandström’s Requiem (2010–2011) as a late-style culmination within a catalogue of more than 500 works. Composed near the
end of his career and premiered in 2013, the piece consolidates decades of practice into a unified,
text-driven design in which the traditional Latin Requiem text is structurally generative, shaping
formal, motivic, harmonic, rhythmic, and timbral decisions throughout the entire an hour-long
sacred work. The study addresses these musical aspects with particular attention to motive and
pitch organization, and to a distinctive device for motivic repetition, the Triangular Structure
technique, further cataloged and analyzed in Homophonic Triangular Structure and Polyphonic
Triangular Structure variants. It also examines his harmonic language that combined with
chromaticism, motivic development, and accumulative musical build-ups, which together create
the work’s distinctive expressions for the Requiem text.