Arne Nordheim

b. 20 June 1931, Larvik, Norway. ‘I possess only one small little little bit of music. That’s all might work,’ composer Arne Nordheim mentioned, ‘I rewrite it over and over. It’s an obsession in ways.’ Out of this ‘small little little bit of music,’ Nordheim has generated many forms and explored unusual channels, merging instrumental, vocal and digital resources in uncommon, dramatic and interesting ways. The youthful Nordheim was learning organ in the Oslo Conservatory of Music when hearing a overall performance of Gustav Mahler’s second symphony seduced him to the thought of learning to be a composer (although he was to keep the conservatory minus the trained in compositional workmanship that he wanted). He started creating songs at the same time when many had been hostile to such experimentation (the Trinity Chapel in Oslo proceeded to go so far as to ban functions by Györgi Ligeti) and vociferous within their dislike from the music he made up. He became energetic within composers’ organisations, notably chairing the Norwegian Culture of Composers and the business New Music. Recognized mainly because an iconoclastic and questionable physique, he was asked to write approximately music for Dagbladet, the main paper in Norway, via which he ridiculed people from the Norwegian music community who refused to discover the worthiness of songs. Rejecting Norway’s folklorist background, Nordheim was inextricably associated with the appearance of musical modernism in his house country. Dealing with a Steinway piano, a little synthesizer and ‘electrical pencil sharpener,’ his function carries a piece incorporating poems in German by Rilke and Biblical text message in Hebrew and have scored for soprano, cello, blended chorus and orchestra (Wirklicher Wald). He had written for saxophonist, pianist, drummer, as well as for jazz vocalist Karin Krog and taped noises offering German machine weapons along with a Norwegian bathroom (Solar Plexus). Nordheim place Italian poems by Salvatore Quasimodo to music have scored for orchestra and magnetic tape (Epitaffio), constructed music for trombone and tape motivated by Lewis Carroll, and built a bit for violin with digital delay created for an exhibition of paintings by Paul Klee. Solitaire highlighted Nordheim’s transformations of the human tone of voice reading phrases by 19th hundred years French poet Charles Baudelaire, while for the Lillehammer Wintertime Olympics in 1994 he envisaged a worldwide concert broadcast to and from five continents via satellite television. Such procedures and methodologies enticed younger Norwegian music artists such as for example Helge Sten (aka Deathprod) and Geir Jenssen (aka Biosphere), who reworked materials from Electric powered for the remix record Nordheim Transformed, in honour of his 70th birthday. Provided his subversive musical background, it will need to have been with great irony that Nordheim received his house – the Grotten or Grotto – from Norway’s federal government in reputation of his exceptional artistic achievements.