Edvin Østergaard

Picture: MIC/Lisbeth Risnes

Edvin Østergaard was born in 1959 in St. Louis, Missouri, of Norwegian parents. After having obtained a Masters degree in horticulture he studied composition at the Norwegian State Academy of Music in Oslo and with Jan W. Morthenson in Stockholm. In 1998 he completed his PhD at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, and since 1999 he is employed as an associate professor in science education at the same university. As both a composer and scientist he has worked for several years with the kinship of art and science.
At present Østergaard holds a position as a visiting scholar at Harvard University, Boston. Here, one of his fields of interest is “The Two Moons: A project on science and music” with the aim of elaborating on the role of music and science in education and formation of knowledge.

The Two Moons

This piece for mixed choir a cappella is a reflection on different comprehensions of the moon, using three different text sources: In a physics text book, descriptions of the moon are fact oriented, related to the moon as a physical object in time and space. In contrast, the poem by Denise Levertov (1923-1997) reveals a personal impression and relation to the moon, - a moon which one can turn to. In these texts we find articulations of the scientific and the artistic access to the world: Whereas science insists on objective knowledge about the world, art insists on the personal access to the world. In the astronomical texts of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), we find both dimensions - the artistic and the scientific - united. The human expression of a choir is especially suited for articulating these insisting and uniting voices. I have dedicated “The Two Moons” to the complementarity of scientific and artistic modes of comprehending man’s relation to the world.