Gullan Bornemark dead at 98
Swedish children's song pioneer gave generations melodies their composers rarely get named for, son Dan says she was content and grateful for life
Images
Gullan Bornemark fotograferad 2017 vid pianot i sommarhuset i Falkenberg. Hon hade en skiva på gång till hösten och sommarpratade. Foto: Staffan Löwstedt/SvD/TT
Staffan Löwstedt/SvD/TT
Gullan Bornemark, the composer who gave generations of Swedish children their own songs to sing, has died at 98. She passed away on Wednesday evening at her care home in Bunkeflostrand, her son Dan Bornemark of Höganäs confirmed, saying she was content and grateful for the life she had lived.
Bornemark belongs to a category of cultural creator that Sweden rarely names even as it lives off the work: the writer of the preschool and family songs that parents and daycare staff sing on autopilot, decades after the tunes entered the national repertoire. Ask a Swedish parent to hum a Bornemark song and they can; ask them who wrote it and most cannot.
She kept working to the end. Bornemark, photographed in 2017 at the piano of her summer house in Falkenberg, had an album scheduled for release this autumn and was still giving summer talks — the Swedish radio institution where a single voice carries an hour of reflection to a nation on holiday.
Her death at 98 closes a working life that spanned nearly the entire postwar era of Swedish children's culture, when the country built a welfare state around its youngest and, almost as an afterthought, gave them a songbook. The songbook outlasted most of the state projects around it.
An album she finished before her death is still scheduled for autumn release.