Norwegian composer Arne NORDHEIM dies
OSLO - Last Saturday Norwegian composer Arne NORDHEIM (1931-2010) died.
Arne Nordheim was born on June 20, 1931 in the town of Larvik on the Oslo Fjord.
At the then Oslo Conservatory of Music (now the Norwegian Academy of Music), where Nordheim studied from 1948 to 1952, he started out as a theory and organ student, but changed to composition on hearing a performance of Mahler's Second Symphony. In 1955 he studied with Vagn Holmboe in Copenhagen, and studied musique concrète in Paris. Later he studied electronic music at the Stichting Gaudeamus studio in Bilthoven (1959), and paid many visits to the Studio Eksperymentalne of Polish Radio (1967-1972), where many of his early electronic works were realised.
His earliest works are clearly influenced by Bartók, but via free tonality, he has developed into a more avant-garde direction since around 1960, eliminating almost all rhythmic and melodic elements in his music, leaving a highly sensitive and sophisticated concentration of sound, where timbre is the keyword. In many of his works from the late sixties Nordheim integrates this with the medium of electronics. The use of modernism in his music is never a revolutuonary break with the past. Even though his mode of expression sounds quite radical most of the time, his music is deeply rooted in the western European music tradition. The composer on composing: "Musical composition does not consist merely of writing down notes. Living a creative life involves expressing the restlessness in one’s soul. Composing is not only making sound. It is philosophy, silence, speed, rhythm, everything".
Nordheim is regarded as the contemporary Norwegian composer who has achieved the greatest recognition beyond the borders of his own country. The musicologist Kjell Skyllstad thus describes Nordheim as "the great reformer and restorer of Norwegian music after the Second World War". Hallgjerd Aksnes, and expert on Nordheim’s music, calls him "a romantic and lyrical modernist, a literary oriented composer who likes to express his musical stance in extra-musical terms". Finally, Nordheim’s Danish colleague, Per Nørgård, has hailed Nordheim as “the innovator of not only Norwegian music, but also of Scandinavian music as such”.
The following works by Nordheim have been performed by ensembles of the Netherlands Radio: Spur (1975; perf. 1978), Music to two fragments of music by Shelley (1985, perf. 1994) and Epitaffio (version 1977, perf. 1999).
Arne Nordheim died two weeks before what would have been his 79th birthday.
Principal source: Publisher Edition Wilhelm Hansen
LINKS:
• Watch a performance of Silver Key (from Music to two fragments of music by Shelley)
• Official website
Laatste aanpassing op Monday 7 June 2010
