Performers & composers

Lars Petter Hagen

Lars Petter Hagen (b.1975) studied composition at the Norwegian State Academy of Music. His list of works includes instrumental and electroacoustic music as well as sound installations and music for stage and film.

Hagen has been represented at such events as the Donaueschinger Musiktage, Maerzmusik, Gaudeamus Music Week, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Warzaw Autumn, ISCM and the Ultima festival. Performers include Peter Eötvös, Heinrich-Strobel-Stiftung des SWR, Christian Eggen, Hilversum Chamber Orchestra, Crash ensemble, The Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, Cikada and Poing. His music is recorded on Col Legno and Aurora, among other labels. Hagen has been awarded the Norwegian Edvard Prize and Arne Nordheims Composers prize.

From writing in a post-serial, complex style he has in recent years turned to working more and more with documentary material. His work is often dealing with themes as memory and identity and is characterized by collected material, presented untreated or in its most reduced form.

He is currently working on a new piece for SWR Symphony Orchestra for Donaueshinger Musiktage 2008, a new piece for ensemble Collegum-Novum Zürich, and a dance performance based on deconstructions of Wagner preludes played through megaphones.

He is the artistic director of Happy Days Sound Festival in Oslo, and Ny Musikk in Norway, and he was the first editor of the Norwegian contemporary music magazine; Parergon.

Concepts of Sorrows and Dangers (13')

On Improvised Transitions – a very personal programme note.

One day a few years ago I was talking to Rolf-Erik in the cantina at the Music Academy. He had just been to audition for the diploma post-graduate course, and he told me about the repertoire he had chosen. He explained that between each piece he had tried to make a gradual change, improvising stylistic modulations so that the otherwise brutal transitions between Bach, Thommessen and Chailleux would sound as logical as possible to the otherwise blasé jury. My initial reaction was scepticism and nervous laughter at what sounded a rather strange idea, with many apparent problems and pitfalls. As the years passed and the idea sank in I found it increasingly fascinating, and it put Rolf-Erik's artistic agenda in a different, if not clearer, light.

Before I began to write this piece I asked to see all available documentation of his musical activity up to that time. This request resulted in over one hundred recordings of anything from Satanist techno to advert jingles, from ethno to neo-classicism and mountain jazz. Much of this was documented thanks to the good old tape cassette, a fantastic innovation that found its way into practically every home and has preserved for posterity a large portion of my generation's auditive upbringing and ability to sing 'Baa Baa, Black Sheep'.

After having listened through these many hours of music which I had barely known existed, I was left with an impression of chaos. At the same time I was touched to realise that the common element in all this madness was not the usual (and often forced) social coupling of diverse cultures and historical eras typical of the crossover genre, but the fact that one and the same person had initiated or accepted every single project, relying solely on his musical intuition. As I see it, Rolf-Erik's pluralistic approach is not about breaking the cultural code of each genre at a technical level, but rather it is about crossing boundaries to find new areas of resonance for his own voice. This results in a strange style of music - "personal pluralism" - in which the main theme in this case is Rolf-Erik himself, modulating and improvising gradual transitions between the extremes of his own musicianship.

At the bottom of all this lies a fundamental and genuine disregard for convention, combined with a high degree of curiosity and respect for the inherent possibilities of the various music genres. A desire to approach problematic areas of music; to concern oneself with that which is unclarified. In my opinion this is a prerequisite of any successful artistic venture.

Our identity is a result of the impressions we are subjected to in the course of our lives, and the way in which our memory filters them. In this work I hope to reproduce some of the impressions I have had while working with such a unique performer. Filtered through my own memory and preferences, these fragments together comprise a musical object which some may call pluralistic. To me they represent all that is assimilated and indefinable in a performer's unique, individual, and therefore universal voice.

Lars Petter Hagen.